Salt N Pepa – Whattaman
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
While I enjoy listening to the lyrics of songs like this, and like this Sir Mixalot: https://youtu.be/_JphDdGV2TU, all very creative and original. However the underlying commentary about how juvenial and unsophisticated this segment of our culture is and remains is disturbing to me in many ways.
This also translates to the tattoo phenomenon where it appears that the physical markings on the outside is suppose to be a replacement for actual personal substance and accomplishment. The lionizing of “Hookers” and strippers, violence against women, “Bling”, cars, “Baby Daddy’s” and the organized destruction of the American Black and White family models is not good from where I sit.
Is it a more honest interpretation of reality with no pretense? Maybe, but there is something very unsettling about it to me.
Cotour–
aahhh! earworm-alert! I hate that song! (but I did listen until the first refrain.) It’s an entirely overrated genre, very little of it is done well in my opinion, and like most “culture,” it’s highly mediated.
Rap, is just not my bag, although I used to listen to Eminem quite a bit, for work. (and my daughter was a teenager in the 90’s and my wife & I were big fans of pacific northwest grunge.)
The “baby daddy” thing really irked me to no end when I was working with 20-something clients who talked like that on a daily basis. But, it is about the most precise phrase for the situation. (Which is incredibly sad.)
These are the cultural models that are being promoted and endorsed and poured into the heads of the youth of America and the world. It concerns me.
Lets be hopeful that like Liberalism much of its core philosophies will ultimately be rejected by many of them. There will however always be those who will not be able to see past the vapid, surface, juveile materialism and will remain like that until they die.
Cotour–
–tangent-I’m seeing you folks in NYC are having major headaches with some of your commuter trains.
The “culture” concerns me tremendously. (There is a war on, for your mind.)
Concurrently, I’m a big believer in “more speech,” and acutely aware “they” told me comic books, movies, & television, would rot my mind.
-Don’t have an easy answer, it’s a multi-generational battle to take back the Culture.
Wayne, I don’t know that the culture necessarily needs to be “taken back”, but wherever it is going it does need to be based on something other than surface, external tribal symbolism and iconography and constant juvenial sexual references and materialism in the form of jewelry, cars, boats, Dom P etc. There is no there, there.
How much candy can a person eat before they sicken of the experience? How many babies does it take creating with no father figure or family structure before you come to understand the damage that has been done? It may take a while but eventually you must come to understand. Then where are we?
Cotour–
From my experience; some people will eat as much candy as they can acquire.
(On the upside, most of us don’t.)