Trying to say something new about OFWGKTA

The niggerati still haven’t gotten fully up on the juvenile rambling of the LA black skater Archetypical macks. No doubt accusations of adolescents and immature masculine performative posturing will be leveled, and maybe it will be well deserved. But a couple of week ago I was having dinner with Kamau Patton and he came out with the first new real question I’ve heard about these cats in a while.

“You think they’re channeling that old school gravediggaz type shit?”


For those of you that don’t know gravediggaz was the nightmare side project of RZA (If you don’t know who RZA is GET OFF THIS PAGE NOW, FOR REAL!) ,Prince Paul, and two other cats. Fat team up, right? Exactly. It was dark, scary, not ok, mentally unbalanced type stuff that spoke to some of the psychological WTF! that black kids were enduring everywhere. Imagine the Geto boy’s My mind is playing tricks on me vibe for an entire album. Yeah. Like that.





So Kamau’s assertion was more than viable. It’s a question informed by Tyler’s lyrics. His “Therapist” is a reoccurring character on his racks. Mad references are made to fantasies of duck tape, butt rape, huffing glue, and mixtapes (Sorry just had to rhyme it) And Tyler does run shit in an early Rza sort of fashion.

But even then I couldn’t buy it. Peep the video below and remind yourself, this is a hip-hop show.




First off, Hodgy beats, the younger scrawnier one, is straight dominant off that shove! Love that kid. But peep that whole vibe. From the predominantly white crowd to the small bit of Tyler’s song that you could actually hear. It’s all more hardcore than horrorcore. It reminds me of one of the second all black hardcore show I ever went to. Other cats from L.A. n fact. I refer to Fishbone of course.




So I had to disagree with Kamau. And as we are both boisterous New York cats of some age and stature it got loud. But we grown and realized it’s not an either/or situation but a both/and. What I can say definitely is that I haven’t this excited for hip-hop for a while. I‘m glad everybody got over being gangsta, but I was scared cats were going to be taken that Kanye route for a while, or that backpack to the club type shit again. But when see kids at the mosh pit starting songs of like ”Got all the black bitches mad cause my man bitch Vanilla/She trying to get her groove back like Stella…When it comes to the perception of your shit I’m Helen Keller…” know the ascent of the I don’t give a fuck afrogeek as truly begun.

Wrote the above a while ago. Yesterday I read the New Yorker article about Earl. He’s the band’s lost member. The New Yorker found him. He wasn’t lost. But he did have some striking similarities to my generation, and so did Tyler. To wit, Hey, grown ass black men. IT’s not your fucking kids responsibility to find you and form a relationship with you. Whatever the hell happened between you and that woman there’s a young black male out there who has a target on his back. He shares your blood. That means you bear some of the responsibility of teaching him how to navigate this world. If you choose not to, I don’t give a fuck if you’re a poet or a convict, you don’t deserve the title Man. Yeah, it’s a title. Yeah I said it. Got a problem with that, come see me. It’s retarded how happy I get when I see a black man hanging out with his kids. And its retarded how few times I see it.