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DAYS_OF_OLD

                                                      July 26, 2020

There's a track by Paris that
I've always liked, off of his
"Sleeping with the Enemy"
release from 1992:                        Did you know there's
                                          a Paris in Oakland?

  Paris, "Days of Old" (1992):                                   I've quoted
                                                                 this before:
  Another sad case of the black-on-black.
  It's a fact, some of our people don't know how to act:           RACE_DOWN
  Can't go to the club, can't go to the store,
  Can't chill with your girl, can't go to the show,              That was back
  Can't do anything without some fool acting up                  in 2009.
  you start to believe that black folk are savage but
  before you do, allow me to say,
  that in the old days we didn't act that way...

  Kings and Queens were the names of the righteous
  but the sons of slaves are insane and we might just
  self-destruct and erupt without a chance to grow
  This ain't the days of old.

I bring this up again, because Ta-Nehisi Coates
in his "Eight Years in Power" (2017) completely
contradicts Paris' impression of history:
                                                   
Coates comments dismissively on the idea that          
there was a "glorious past" when black people           
were doing fine compared to now (he uses data on        
teen-pregnancy to estimate cultural well-being).        
                                                        
                                                       
But it would be hard to shrug off Paris as a
"black conservative".
   
Paris once asked the question: why is it that black        
people + guns doesn't = police dead in the streets?    
                                                   
He got booted from his record label and had to go
independent, after which the police wouldn't let
him perform at venues like the DNA Lounge in San
Francisco.

A recent interview calls him "The Black Panther of Hip-Hop".



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