ByronCrawford.com

Is there a gender gap in black tipping?

We know black women are to blame for Prop 8, but are they also to blame for black people being viewed as shitty tippers?

I know I've always tipped well, provided the level of service called for it - If I couldn't afford to leave a decent tip, I'd stay my black ass at home. But then I like to think of myself as being not your average black person. Word to Jeru the Damaja.

From the comments section of the post where I found that video of Sharece Thomas:

My next door neighbor's 20 year-old daughter waits tables at TGI Fridays and tells us black men tip well, but black woman tip very, very poorly and sometimes not all at all to her white girlfriends working there.

Not a social commentary, just passing on what's been told to me...

Hmm...

The one time I worked in a place where we got tips, there just weren't any black people around. I remember one time a black guy did come in, but he got carry out. The place was in a white trash area, so the tips were usually pretty shitty, but I'm willing to attribute that to more of a class issue.

For those of you who've worked for tips in an ethnically diverse area, would you say black women are worse tippers than black men? If so, why?

Sharece Thomas > Jay Smooth

via Undercover Black Man

The only rap album Pitchfork liked this year

Yesterday, I was checking out the bottom half of Pitchfork's list of the top 50 albums of 2008, and I noticed there was only one rap album - Wale's Mixtape About Nothing. I was surprised, but I figured they might have been saving the rap for the top half of the list. There were more rap songs in the top half of their list of the top 100 songs of 2008 than there were in the bottom half. And obviously Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III - one of, if not the best-selling album the year, and right up Pitchfork's LCD rap-praising alley - was gonna be on the list. It was just a matter of how high it would be. #1? #2?

Turns out, Carter III couldn't quite crack the top 10. It landed at #11, and it's one of only two rap albums on the list, along with the Wale mixtape at #36. Three, if you count Kanye West's 808 & Heartbreak, which came in #21. But as someone pointed out in the comments section the other day, that doesn't really qualify as rap.

Did Pitchfork really think there were hardly any good rap albums this year, or are they trying to tell us something? For what it's worth, I've been working on my list for the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop (an important poll of only the top 1500 music writers in the country, in which I've been invited to vote), i.e. listening to Bon Iver while I scour the Internets for free pr0n, and I'm thinking I could pretty easily put together a list of the top 10 albums of 2008 with hardly a rap album. It's not so much a matter of there not being very many good rap albums that came out this year (I came up with a list of them the other day), but a lot of them I'm just not as into as my favorite non-rap albums. Hmm...

Furthermore, I'll give Pitchfork credit for naming the Fleet Foxes' Sun Giant EP and self-titled album the number one album of 2008. Having read Pitchfork for literally a third of my life at this point (really?), it's been the rare occasion when I've found myself saying, "Shit yeah, Pitchfork!" like I did just now. But alas, you have to wonder if this isn't a matter of them trying to solidify their status as early boosters of a group that they think might have the potential to go on to be featured on the front page of the New York Times, and become friends with Bruce Springsteen, like they did with the Arcade Fire.

Checkit: The 50 Best Albums of 2008 [Pitchfork]

And after the jump is a new promo for American Drug War which makes use of that one song from Tha Carter III where he's going off on the Rev. Al "Mr. Do" Sharpton.

Peter Rosenberg fact sheet

FACT: Mahmoud Aquavelvajad is hardly distinguishable from any given Arab.

He doesn't look white in the least bit. If he wants to be called a Persian, fine, but lets dispense with the notion that it has to do with anything other than wanting to align himself with white people, not unlike how black people will claim to have "Indian in my family."

FACT: Some douche nozzle in Dubai is building a refrigerated beach.

There was a story about it yesterday in the Daily Mail. It's so the world's uber rich don't have to worry about burning their feet on the hot sand.

FACT: There was also a story in the New York Times about children in the West Bank who make their living, so to speak, digging through Israeli settlers' garbage in huge landfills.

Read 'em and weep.

FACT: Peter Rosenberg's father is a high-ranking official in the international zionist conspiracy.

That's a picture of him above, dictating to Barack Obama how to go about subverting this country's interests in favor of Israel.

Would Barack Obama, who took extra special care to not even be photographed on the same street as a mosque during the election, and who gave his first major address after winning the primaries to the Israel lobby, and who made his first official appointee after winning the election Rahm Emanuel, allow himself to be photographed with anyone involved with that issue who wasn't down with the program? Nigga please!

Also, notice how Peter Rosenberg has apparently taken a back channel approach to having my post from yesterday censored - not unlike how Lyor Cohen once had Mos Def's The New Danger pulled from stores to remove the song "The Rape Over," i.e. the origin of the term tall Israeli.

FACT: Peter Rosenberg trivialized the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He invited the Palestinian equivalent of someone from World Star Hip Hop to represent the Arab community in his roundtable discussion re: Busta Rhymes' "Arab Money", then he joked that the two of them had solved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict beforehand out in the hallway. As if all those poor kids in the West Bank need is a hug, No, those kids need to not live under apartheid.

All of which begs the question...

If we know all of these things to be true, what could Peter Rosenberg have meant when he wrote yesterday, in his Twitter, "wow byron crawford just wrote some awesomely false and hateful shit about me AND my father?"

Could it be that there wasn't anything I wrote that was false, but Peter Rosenberg just figured he'd say there was, playing on most people's tendency to defer to perceived authority figures and the elite? What do you fruits think?

J-Zone & Chief Chinchilla "Boss Hog Egg Nog"

I was checking J-Zone's MySpace just now (I know...), and I see he's decided to retire from hip-hop altogether. You'll recall that he'd already been reduced to podcasting. Or rather, he quit rapping to focus on podcasting. (I wouldn't want to get that confused.) Well, now he's ditching the podcast, even, to focus on a career in "sports journalism." Also, he may or may not have produced that "Jizz in My Pants" song from Saturday Night Live.

After the jump is the new video of Zone and Chief Chinchilla's "Boss Hog Egg Nog," from the brilliant Live @ the Liqua Sto, a collection of malt liquor commercials a la those St. Ides radio spots from the early '90s, in which he rhymes from the perspective of a drunken chinchilla.

Checkit: J-Zone on MTV & Entertainment Weekly + New Chief Chinchilla video + moving on to other things.. [J-Zone's MySpace blog]

Barack Obama follows Eli Porter on Twitter

Click the picture above to enlarge (nhjic), for photographic evidence.

Someone started a Twitter account for retarded freestyle champ Eli Porter (sample tweet: "saw envy at wal-mart earlier still lookin lyk rosie o'donnell at a bi-sexual bridal shower"), and Barack Obama followed him.

Checkit: Eli Porter @ Twitter (via Hip Hop Is Read)

King mag racist? Pshaw!

Speaking of contentious race issues, it's been brought to my attention that someone has taken to the Internets in order to accuse Harris Publications, i.e. my semi-employer, of being racist.

It sounds like whoever it is (of course, this is being done anonymously) might be someone who tried and failed to get a job with Harris, and now she's accusing them of being racist.

I remember, a while back, I stumbled upon a similar complaint, where someone was talking about how a lot of the male staff of King magazine are black guys who are married to white chicks. And, presumably, not white chicks with grotesque figures like the black chicks featured in King. Which I of course found to be as sad as it is hilarious.

Also, the site where I found this new complaint I believe is owned by the same woman who was trying to start shit with my fantasy girlfriend, Julia Beverly, aka the $1.5 million woman, in the wake of this year's Ozone Awards. This new complaint was posted anonymously, and was also emailed to me that way. But I wonder if this isn't that same woman. At any rate, we know that same woman has allowed her site to be used as a forum to air this complaint. Coincidence?

Anyhoo, I'll just point out that I've dealt with a number of people from Harris over the years, including one of the women mentioned in this complaint, and I've found them all to be incredibly nice. Even Elliott Wilson, despite his public persona, is like Mr. Rogers. Granted, I'm sure a lot of that comes from having spent a significant amount of time in corporate America, and the attendant death of one's spirit, but still. Based on my own experience, I don't find this to be at all plausible.

Checkit: No Blacks Need Apply! [Word on the Streets]

And after the jump is a video of a Buffie the Body photo shoot. Note that you're gonna want to watch it all the way through. It gets especially good at around the 3:30 mark.

Quoted: Scarface on white people

On whether or not white people are capable of being effective hip-hop record execs:

How can a gang of white boys tell a n*gga what's hot? Quote that, I said that, I said it!

And here he takes some shots at my fantasy girlfriend, Julia Beverly, aka the $1.5 million woman:

A white woman owns the biggest rap magazine in the South. Don't get me wrong I love her, but does she know more about Hip-Hop than you? Here I go! [Laughs]

It'll be interesting to see how she responds to this, or if she responds at all. Of course, she'd be justified in going off on 'Face. But her being anything other than deferential to the no talent ass clowns she covers could jeopardize her status as the the $1.5 million woman.

Checkit: Scarface - The Emeritus & Beyond [Yo! Raps via Miss Info]

Joey finds out about St. Louis the hard way

What would you do, if you were walking down the street minding your own business, and a group of middle school-age girls started beating up on you for their own personal amusement? That was the situation Joey from the blog Straight Bangin' found himself in last night.

This fall, he moved here to the STL from New York to attend law school. He got himself a place in the Central West End thinking shit was sweet. He must not have read my posts this summer about how n-bombs were running wild in the Loop and at the Galleria. If those worthless sacks of shit managed to fuck up the Loop, you had to know it was only a matter of time before that shit spread to the Central West End, which is actually a lot closer to some areas that are completely beyond redemption.

Last night, he was walking down on Lindell near Euclid and he saw a group of young girls "acting obstreperously." Because he's from New York, which is soft, he continued walking towards them. He may have even found it to be charming. Then, once he got up on them, one of them punched him in his side.

I'll let Joey himself take it from here:

Who punches a complete stranger? In a nice neighborhood awash in street light? As it happened, time slowed down, because I couldn't fully process what was happening. It was surreal. Once it had transpired, I took a brief moment to gather myself before turning around and just exclaiming, "Excuse me?" It was the only thing that I could muster.

In response, my assailant just started cackling and cursing at me as she cavorted with her friends, who were similarly amused and celebratory. Then they started yelling some more and called me a punk as I just kind of slinked away, beffudled and embarrassed and amused. I mean, WHAT?!

I tried to tell him...

I had my own incident this summer, in which I was forced to yield the center of the sidewalk to a roving pack of n-bombs. And I'm not gonna lie, it was downright emasculating. None of them were particularly bad-ass. Hence, them belonging to a gang. But there was a lot of them. Plus, what are the odds of killing someone in the Loop and getting away with it? They won't stop these assholes from menacing you, but I'm sure they'd find you with a quickness, if you did anything about it.

As far as a group of 13 year old girls - which, having met Joey, I know he could take - is concerned... well, it's hard to say. On the one hand, I know that sort of thing is frowned upon, even when it's a grown woman, let alone a little girl. But on the other hand, a case could be made that you'd be doing those girls a favor, beating the crap out of them like Ike beat Tina, if it teaches them that a man is not a toy to be played with.

Not all men are as enlightened as myself and Joey.

Checkit: St. Louis Keeps It Gully. Or, Last Night Was the Most Embarrassing of My Life [Straight Bangin']

Pitchfork's 10 favorite rap songs of 2008

What I've done here is take Pitchfork's top 100 tracks of '08 and remove all but the rap songs. I figured it'd be interesting to see if they're still up to their usual LCD rap ways.

As it turns out, they are - though I'll point out that I'm enjoying Pitchfork as much as ever these days. The fucked up economy has done wonders for their content. Tom Breihan and Ryan Dombal are back, after having been dropped like a bad habit from the new site they were working on. You may have heard, the other day, about how someone associated with the Clipse, or perhaps even the Clipse themselves, posted a response to Breihan's review of their new mixtape, Road to Till the Casket Drops.

If you're wondering why I've only included Pitchfork's 10 favorite rap songs of 2008, it's because only 10 rap songs have been deemed worthy of being included on their list of the top 100 tracks of 2008. Notice that it's exactly 10. Coincidence, or quota? Hmm...

1) Kanye West "Flashing Lights" (13)
2) Lil Wayne "A Milli" (14)
3) Wiley "Wearing My Rolex" (17)
4) T.I. "No Matter What" (27)
5) Big Boi ft. Raekwon and André 3000 "Royal Flush" (37)
6) Kanye West "Love Lockdown" (39)
7) T.I. ft. Rihanna "Live Your Life" (40)
8) Q-Tip "Gettin' Up" (61)
9) Young Jeezy ft. Kanye West "Put On" (67)
10 Wale "The Kramer" (74)

Checkit: The 100 Best Tracks of 2008 [Pitchfork]