ABOUT WHITEY ON THE MOON
I’m gonna write some things here about the album I made with my friend Alex Sheppard. This is gonna be some Rap Genius shit. I will probly get pedantic at times.
WHITEY ON THE MOON
The name of the album comes from the Gil Scott-Heron poem. The name of the band is just a pun on TV on the Radio, or something. I don’t remember.
1. EVERY MAN SHARPENS MAN
The sample at the beginning is from The Wire. I don’t know which episode.
The line “this planet will be just like all the other ones” was borrowed from a thing I read on Joseph Harrington’s blog. He’s like a professor I took a couple poetry classes from at the University of Kansas. On his blog, he says “Soon this planet will be like all the others.”
I took the line “every man sharpens man like steel sharpens steel” from the Brand Nubian song “Time’s Runnin’ Out.” I think it originally comes from Proverbs 27:17. The King James Bible gives “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.” The English Standard Version gives “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.” The only version I found that uses steel instead of iron is The Message Bible.
The Indian killer is Andrew Jackson, you know. That man is a monster.
Lee Harvey Oswald got shot by Jack Ruby while he was in police custody. Jack Ruby died of cancer like a month later.
“Even Homer nods off” is a thing from Horace’s Ars Poetica.
The line “‘fuck the world’ in the only [language] I know” comes from Sole’s “Drive By Detournement.”
“They wanna break your rice bowl” is from a scene in Glengarry Glen Ross. Rice bowl is like a Chinese term for like “job security” or “steady income.”
2. LOVE ME NO MORE
The beat and chorus are from the Jim Jones song.
Here’s Laurence Fishburne telling Neo to wake up in The Matrix.
Here’s Laurence Fishburne telling the people to wake up in School Daze.
3. TVOTI
The Heaven’s Gate UFO cult all wore new black-and-white Nike Windrunner shoes with matching shirts and sweatpants when they killed themselves. They took barbiturates and put plastic bags over their heads. The Jonestown people drank the Kool-Aid with cyanide and other shit in it.
“I want to quit my life like a job” is from a Tao Lin book. I don’t remember which one.
4. NEXT SHIT
“Still spending money from 88” is from Jay-Z’s “Dead Presidents II.”
“The hate that hate create” comes from the name of a documentary on Nation of Islam called The Hate That Hate Produced.
I’m thinking about the Eminem-Doseone battle at the 1997 Scribble Jame when I say “listenin to Eminem again / yeah, we over Dose.” (This battle seems like an important event in rap history.)
“Swag OD” is a Soulja Boy and Lil B song. (The video for that song is really good, by the way.)
On the chorus, Alex says “Gucci, Louie, Prada,” but he made it up before the Kreayshawn song came out.
5. WHITE BOY SWAG FREESTYLE
The beat is from Soulja Boy’s “Pretty Boy Swag.”
“Lil Melanin still livin in the Midwest / sometimes it feels like I’m Slowdeath in the Midwest” is a reference to my old band.
The reoccurring “black astronaut” trope probly comes from Busdriver’s “Unemployed Black Astronaut.” Arnaldo Tamayo Mendez was the first black person in space.
6. MY BODY IS A FACTORY
The sample at the beginning comes from a 1963 John Cage interview. The interviewer is reading a thing Norman Mailer wrote about a John Cage concert, or something.
The “I want my MTV” thing is similar to the thing in the Dire Stairs song “Money for Nothing.” (This is a song that was #1 on the U.S. Mainstream Rock chart for three weeks in 1985 containing the lyrics “The little faggot with the earring and the makeup / Yeah, buddy, that’s his own hair / That little faggot got his own jet airplane / That little faggot, he’s a millionaire.”)
“Writing down a word is physical but miniscule” is an Ariana Reines line. I don’t remember which book it’s from.
One line is pretty much just Ecclesiastes 1:7: “All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full” (KJV).
In Why?’s “These Hands,” he says “facing history with little to no irony.” I say “busy bucking history with no sense of irony.”
The “a god existing in name only” thing has to do with nominalism and the idea like “An epiphenomenal god is no god at all.”
In Pavement’s “Shoot the Singer (1 Sick Verse),” he says “somebody painted over paint.”
The “we’re all latecomers” thing comes from Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, I think. (You probly don’t want to read that book.)
In a David Berman interview, he says “The songwriter is trapped in a careerlong bildungsroman from the audience perspective. In ‘New Orleans’ from Starlite Walker, with ‘I’m trapped inside the song,’ I was working this issue like a good postmodernist boy.”
“Eazy E died from the disease you don’t talk about” comes from a Doseone freestyle.
In the Game’s “Old English,” he says “every liquor store in Compton sold out the day Eazy dropped.”
“Don’t quote me, boy, cuz I ain’t said shit” is a misquote, I guess, of Eazy E’s “Don’t quote me, boy, cuz I ain’t sayin shit” on “Boyz n the Hood.”
“I’ve got nothing to say and I’m saying it” is from John Cage’s book Silence.
“Everything is empty” is a line Doseone has used in a few songs. It seems to be originally a Yoni Wolf/Why? line. The earliest instance I know of is on his early tape Part Time People Cage… or Part-Time Key?, where he says “everything is empty and it runneth over.” That’s a reference to Psalm 23, you know.
7. GUCCI MAN
The beat is from Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade.” Song is pretty self-explanatory.
8. GREAT SATAN
The beat is from Waka Flocka’s “Snakes in the Grass.”
“Nobody listens well, especially when I diss myself” is a Sage Francis line from “Message Sent.”
I sort of reference to the book The Rebel Sell. I haven’t read it, but I saw a video about it.
Bright Flight is a Silver Jews album.
“Catch us before we fall off” was an early Anticon slogan.
“Ziggin” is what “niggas” sounds like when it’s backmasked. Similar to “huff” and “fuck,” “ish” and “shit.”
9. CAN I LIVE FREESTYLE
The beat is from the Jay-Z song.
AZlyrics.com is my favorite lyrics site. They let you copy and paste from it and there aren’t any pop ups.
Malice says “the pioneer of the coke rap” on “Popular Demand.” The “coke rap”/”joke rap” thing is probly something Himanshu used in a Das Racist song.
The “who Kill Bill” part is like the “who shot Biggie Smalls” part on Dead Prez’s “Hip Hop.”
“Got my website shut down by the Bureau” is a Cage line from El-P’s “Accidents Don’t Happen.”
I mention that Ayn Rand book at the end.
10. FEVER DREAMS
The beginning is the 23rd Psalm again. The next part is like a Jay-Z line on Big L’s “Da Graveyard.” Jay-Z says “I step through your neighborhood armed with nothing but a rep.”
I say the “angels on the head of a pin” thing, but I say atoms instead of angels.
The “a printer reads the Bible for misprints” is from a GK Chesterton story or something called “The Sign of the Broken Sword,” as quoted in Slavoj Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes.
The line “don’t mistake asceticism for righteousness” is from a messageboard comment by icarus502. He says “Nah, you’re just a trendy who mistakes surveillance for knowledge and asceticism with righteousness. Get the fuck out my face.”
“For all the weed that I’ve smoked, yo, this blunt’s for you” is from Eminem’s “Still Don’t Give A Fuck.”
I remember reading “god is an 1/8 of mushrooms” somewhere on the internet, but I haven’t be able to find it again.
In Emerson’s essay “Illusions,” he says:
Like sick men in hospitals, we change only from bed to bed, from one folly to another, and it cannot signify much what becomes of such castaways,—wailing, stupid, comatose creatures,—lifted from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the nothing of death.
“All we see or seem is but a dream within a dream” is from a Poe poem.
“Even the meme is a meme” is paraphrased from a thing in Daniel Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained.
The “we don’t know what we don’t know” thing is from that Donald Rumsfeld thing.
“Heed the true things fools sing” comes from a thing the Pedestrian/JB Best posted on his Facebook here. I reproduced it in full below, for posterity.
11. FOUR LOKO FREESTYLE
Alex says there’s no Cherry Four Loko.
I say that line “yall don’t hear me though.”
“Luv Dem Gun Sounds” is a Waka Flocka song, you know.
I learned about the GATT from the Anti-Flag song “Mind the GATT.”
The 8 bars beginning “a man with a handgun in his hand” are sorta informed by an essay by the Pedestrian/James Brandon Best called “Black Like Me - John Walker Lindh’s hip-hop daze” (first published by the now-defunct East Bay Express in 2003) and the DJ Krush song “Song for John Walker” featuring people from Anticon. (Doseone says “he wanted Hammer pants / he joined the Taliban.”)
The album is pretty indebted to Anticon in general and the John Walker Lindh saga in particular.
12. STRAIGHT OUTTA AFRICA FREESTYLE
The beat is from Lil B’s “Look Like Jesus.”
The beginning samples from Murs’s “And This Is For” (“I feel I should have the [Sound]Scans white rappers have”) and Eminem’s “Role Model” (“how the fuck can I be white, I don’t even exist”).
“My president is black and my Lambo’s blue” is from Jeezy’s “Black President,” you know. I read a comment that said “my president is half white” on a Myspace page.
“All black everything” is maybe originally a Jay-Z line.
The “I’mma ex-African, an ex-African” part is like the chorus on Dead Prez’s “I’m A African.”
“Rappinin is what’s happenin” is an ODB line from Wu-Tang’s “Da Mystery of Chess Boxin.”
13. WAX
The sample at the beginning is from a Mistah FAB freestyle after his car accident.
14. NO PROMO FREESTYLE (BONUS TRACK)
The “how am I not myself” thing comes from the movie I Heart Huckabees.
“Only faggot in these skinny jeans” is something Lil B has said a bunch of times.
The lines “tryna find bravery in my bravado / tryna drown my sorrow in that El Diablo” come from Kanye’s “Dark Fantasy,” I guess.
CONCLUSION
That’s everything, I guess. There’s an RA the Rugged Man song called “Lessons” where he says “I don’t want fans that don’t know who G Rap is.”
Here’s that Pedestrian Facebook post I mentioned above.
Friends,
In my thirty stupid years, I’ve picked up quite a few bits of sage council, and now I’d like to share some of them with you. These 21 (with two bonus) mantras are yours to keep, no hidden fees, no contracts, no credit, no problem!
21 Helpful hints, Careful Council, and Weight-Loss Apocrypha
1. When handling hair-trigger commitments, always keep your eye on an unlocked door or unlatched window.
2. Do not wander blindly into cul-de-sacs named after kings.
3. You don’t need brakes to leave, and you don’t need need to stay. Remember, “home” is nothing more than an old voice crawling from a cracked window and dragging along the name it gave you.
4. Never shadow the door of a saloon named The Predawn Wrong Turn.
5. Only when your hand is hot at the gambling spot should you pray with your eyes open.
6. Where the thieves are, there the heart is.
7. A natural predator, the bank will always call the loan.
8. Hope is to calloused as hangover is to resolution. Avoid all.
9. Upon breaking up, simply subpoena your ex’s therapist’s records and stage a show trial, complete with forced confessions and iron-eyed sentencing. Let the sentence read: “Absence.” Remember, however, that before your bathroom mirror, you must always plead the holy fifth.
10. You will always sound desperate on payphones.
11. If they call her “Sundown,” it’s not her real name. Additionally, stripper’s tattoos are peer-reviewed, authoritative, and generally trustworthy sources.
12. Your signature recalls a skimpy thorn bush; it will never be sufficient to hide yourself behind.
13. When in quicksand country, simplify! Spin off your noncore assets, reduce your name to initials, and rasp aloud only magic-making words.
14. Something is always lost in the passing from external ear to conscience.
15. Wedding rings have a pattern of aging very distinct from our own. At their youthful prime, they are but a tugging illusion, they reach maturity only upon pawning, and from there retire to a magpie’s jewelry chest, a round, shiny solidity dripping between his skinny talons.
16. It’s every liar and his lawyer for himself.
17. Depending on your neighborhood and ethnic profile, a classical Greek tragedy can be spun from a routine traffic stop.
18. Never title a song “Real Talk”; there is nothing less real than talk. However, do not fail to hear the true things fools sing.
19. When your home catches flame and is reduced to cinder, say to yourself, “Ah, at last, nothing obstructs the moon.”
20. Believe no black legend of back pain.
21. In your last wheezing seconds of life, if you’re so lucky to have even that meager allowance, all that will pass before your eyes is the way you walked to work.
Bonus!
22. Live by no oath of rotted rope; promises are as the steady lines of the old regiments, who fought in a stately forward march, a moronic and fatal lockstep.
23. Your body will one day accept the feeling of flies.
