MC Yogi “Grassroots Movement” Video
MC Yogi made a lot of noise a couple months back with Vote for Hope – a pretty tight hip-hop Obama anthem. Grassroots Movement is the theme song for Starbucks’ new campaign promoting local volunteerism in communities across the nation.
BeatRoot wrote:
Tight track and nice vid too. Being from a place outside the US with this new thing of corporate responsibility (see myspace doing something very similar) and helping the community is it too early to say the Obama effect has started.
Posted on 21-Jan-09 at 11:14 am | Permalink
303 b-boy wrote:
Yessir!
Posted on 21-Jan-09 at 11:23 am | Permalink
Jay-Izzle wrote:
Definitely sounds like a Starbucks type of song. I can dig it though.
Posted on 21-Jan-09 at 11:24 am | Permalink
Daniel wrote:
This actually reminds me a bit of a modern take on a cartoony community service ad like the schoolhouse rock ones from the 80s. Not bad at all.
Posted on 22-Jan-09 at 4:45 am | Permalink
East wrote:
Just more corporate cum for people to swallow, and my favorite culture and means of expression is wanking the dick.
Very disappointing.
You can’t have hope with capitalism.
Obama = Capitalist
Starbucks = Capitalist
You do the math.
Posted on 22-Jan-09 at 1:48 pm | Permalink
BeatRoot wrote:
Damn East.. Your game is all fucked up, how is that view on the world in anyway related to the track and what it’s message is…
I didn’t hear money, capitalism or Obama mentioned once.. Shit dude the idea of helping someone without being paid is about as far removed from your twisted view of capitalism is.
My comment relating to Obama is from an outsider looking in at his speaches during the election and the things I’ve read in his books.
End of the day, I respect the message and the ideas within the track, if it makes starbucks money so what, if it helps peoples lives that’s ultimatly what matters.
Posted on 23-Jan-09 at 7:21 am | Permalink
Nathaniel wrote:
I second that BeatRoot. This track is talking about doing something good. But haters won’t be able to see past the Starbucks logo.
Posted on 23-Jan-09 at 10:55 am | Permalink
ralph wrote:
Free coffee! I can dig it.
Posted on 23-Jan-09 at 1:12 pm | Permalink
East wrote:
Yep, you just keep swallowing that cum and licking that dick…non-consensually of course.
Get a library card. Challenge your perceptions. Think for your self. I’m not trying to shit on your parade. I’m trying to tell you that the parade isn’t real.
Posted on 26-Jan-09 at 1:44 am | Permalink
BeatRoot wrote:
East, maybe you should check the about section gent. Might give you an idea of what this site is about and what it’s mission is.
http://www.hiphoplinguistics.com/about/
Posted on 26-Jan-09 at 9:33 am | Permalink
East wrote:
Thank you, but I’m not criticizing the site, I’m criticizing the video, the artist and the subject matter, so don’t worry yourself. I love hiphop, as I’m sure most people who frequent this site do as well. But at the same time, I find it incredibly hypocritical for underground hiphop fans to criticize corporate pop culture, and at the same time excuse, and even applaud, something like this. Is this video not corporate? Is this video not being distributed by capitalists?
I’m an anti-capitalist. In fact, to be more accurate, I’m an anti-political, insurrectionary, post-leftist anarchist-communist. To you, this video is simply a lighthearted and celebratory theme song to what you perceive as a joyous time right now. That being the election of Barack Obama and the end of the Bush regime. On the other hand, I see it as simply capitalist propaganda. I see myself as completely opposed to capitalism, because capitalism is killing the human species. Do you really think a corporation like Starbucks gives a fuck about you and the conscious improvement of working peoples lives and well-being?
Do you even know how many lives Starbucks has ruined? How many families they’ve destroyed? Are you prepared to surrender your conscious, maybe even radical, feelings just because you like the “theme” and “message” of this song? Are you really that easily lulled and pacified into a state of submission? What about Oscar Grant? Did Starbucks do anything to help the people who revolted and rebelled against the Oakland pigs? Of course not. Starbucks isn’t your ally, they’re your enemy. They see you as just another consumer to sell their shit too. And they jump on the Obama bandwagon, because Obama is hottest commodity on the market right now, and his advertising power is incredible. You jump on with him, and you’re guaranteed to sell big. This is just another corporate advertising scheme, except it has words like “grassroots movement” and “change” added in. They feed you a commodified message with intent to sell. And sell they will, and more workers will be exploited and fucked over. So yeah, fuck this song, fuck Yogi, and fuck Starbucks. Change doesn’t come from the corporate adverts and theme songs, it comes from people attacking and actively opposing those who wish to exploit, alienate, manipulate, murder and exclude them from the means of existence. It’s time to start asking yourself hard questions.
“All I will say is this: We do indeed stand in opposition towards all authority, or rather, whatever authority we actively seek to recognize and are able to recognize within our own subjectivity. And we wish to abolish this authority as we see it as detrimental to, and against us, living free lives. Lives lacking any form of oppression and alienation. We stand in solidarity with the notion of a free existence, an existence that would allow us to forge our own paths instead of being coerced, manipulated and alienated into following a path that has been forged for us.
From my point of view: I want to live in a world where there is the possibility of infinite tales to be told. Currently, I live in a world that not only tells the tale for me, but the stories beginning, middle and end are either allowances handed to me or chained and shackled to me by the master author.
I want to be my own author. Don’t you?”
Posted on 26-Jan-09 at 5:08 pm | Permalink
East wrote:
Ya know what….I take that back, saying fuck Yogi. He probably has his heart in a good place. But his eyes are focused on the wrong picture. Everything else I said still stands. Fuck Starbucks, fuck the song, fuck the video, and fuck Obama.
Posted on 26-Jan-09 at 5:30 pm | Permalink
East wrote:
A nice quote from a friend of mine:
“I need to start off with a word of caution: I do not begrudge anyone contributing to or volunteering in a charity (though I will do my thing with them and poke and prod at their hopes and optimism and offer them some questions for their morality), I could think of much worse things to be doing with ones time in the context of this society as far as I am concerned (like trying to climb the corporate ladder or trying to be a major investor). Anywhere someone can get a meal and find some respite does have it’s benefits, that I will not deny. The same can be said of certain health care ideas that liberals hold and other such things: they are best we can hope for from the social context itself, from civilization itself. That being said charity is not my thing: this is because of what charity in fact is.
Charity is the clean up crew for societies casualties.
Familiar with the charity milieu as I am from my church days I can say that by and this is made up of “good” people, as in caring people who are genuinely concerned with the welfare of others (though some of these peoples social roles greatly contradict that concern when they invest in corporations, promote state programs, and even hold positions high on the corporate ladder). If we didn’t have civilized despotism there would be no need for charity. Where would the vast diasporas of the refugees of modern warfare be? How about the malnutrition we can thank the “structural adjustment” for? Where would the concept of poverty and it’s line be? Where would unemployment and not being able to make a wage to eat be, you know, if you could simply pull your food from the ground? Quite simply put by metaphor the issue could be looked at like this: the Christian saints clean up the messes left by Inquisitors of the same.
This function, of course, serves as the PR network for society as we know it. When you point out to people how fucked everything is, all the genocide, ecocide, slavery, the restrictions on our being cast upon us not by actual interpersonal conflict and it’s resolution but on high from the state, well, they will simply point to charity, look what so and so did with their money, see, the system works and people still care. Then, of course, they ride your ass for inconsistency and try to say that since you don’t do charity work you don’t really care.”
Just a little something to chew on. It’s time to stop investing your hope in the system, and start investing hope in yourselves. You are the hope and change. Not some capitalist scumbag like Obama, or some sinister corporation. The system is the anti-thesis of hope, and the only way you will ever be free from the pressures of your life, your worries and misery is to destroy the system. Liberation is a very real possibility, and it’s gonna come knocking on your door in the next couple of years, you just have to have to listen for it and answer it.
Posted on 26-Jan-09 at 5:53 pm | Permalink
Illumanati wrote:
East, with you 100%. I hate the fact that everyone is praising Obama like he’s some sort of prophet. A black person in the white house =/= equality or the voices of the helpless being heard. What’s sickening is when Obama is compared to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Who has he stood for? What has he done to improve the condition of his people? Why does he not care for the lives of people living in Africa and the innocent children killed by Israel?
He is this generation’s corporate icon, used to entice the youth and brainwash people in America and around the world with false hope.
Posted on 26-Jan-09 at 10:30 pm | Permalink
East wrote:
“Why does he not care for the lives of people living in Africa and the innocent children killed by Israel?”
Good to see you have some sense. But it isn’t just about people starving to death in Africa or the people in Palestine being murdered by the Israeli state and at the same time being manipulated and used by Hamas and Fatah. It’s all of us. All the consumers, all the homeless, all the refugees, all the workers etc. All of the excluded and exploited. The forgotten children of History, who have no worth to the capitalists, the fascists, the leninists and all of the states of the Earth. And worse than that, we have no worth to ourselves, we’re to busy trying to pay the goddamn bills and “get somewhere”. We work and work and work, and we get no where. We have to stop working. We have to start fighting with our desires and our dreams. WE NEED DREAMS. You can speak till you throat is hoarse, but what do you get? A fucking reform? A band aid on a cancerous growth? We are given the “rights” to *certain* things, but do we have the “right” to act, to fight back after having been kept down and spit on for so long? Do we have the “right” to liberate our desires? To wander whatever path we choose? No, we must walk the path we are given, and walk that path we will, because we are afraid of what will happen if we stop walking and jump off the path to find NEW paths.
Long live the spirit of Greece! Ya heard?
Posted on 26-Jan-09 at 11:14 pm | Permalink
Poirier wrote:
Thank you, East. Couldn’t have put it more eloquently myself.
Posted on 27-Jan-09 at 4:34 pm | Permalink
East wrote:
Thank you! Much love to you all.
Posted on 27-Jan-09 at 5:04 pm | Permalink
East wrote:
Haha….I wish I could speak that eloquently and passionately in real life. That would be dope! Damn introversion.
;p
Posted on 27-Jan-09 at 5:08 pm | Permalink