loosie: words: Hand of God

Hand of God

Animals from the NYPD invade the Loosie Compound, Cuba gets busy in beisbol and Bush warns America about Snap Music.

by Staff | 2006.03.20

Thumbs down to the team of NYPD officers who invaded the Loosie Compound last week. Aggressive, belligerent and stupid, the filthy animals consecrated our stronghold by waving flashlights, demanding identification and issuing tickets for trespassing and open containers on our own property. That’ll hold up in court real well, you filthy swine.

Thumbs up to the first couple episodes of this season’s “Sopranos”. We were ready to lob the series into the steaming “overrated” cauldron (alongside Crash and the first Blackstar album), but the writing has been so mercilessly unpredictable and slyly referential that we’ve spun a 180-degree toe-loop and are now crowing that it’s the best thing not on Netflix. The surreal second episode not only allowed Carmella to wax poetically about how Tony used to get her “so hot down there” in a memorable bedside monologue, but it also deftly sets up a bloody Mob-land power struggle that a groggy Tony will wake up to in an week or two. 2006 to Kevinfinity.

Thumbs up to the protestors in Belarus who swarmed into the capital to challenge the outcome of a Presidential election described by a European agency as “severely flawed”. Maybe it’s the lingering impact of Rocky IV’s historic victory over Ivan Drago, but it appears that citizens of countries from the former USSR are more protective of their democracy than we are. People have taken to the streets in Minsk, Ukraine and Georgia – but in Columbus and Cleveland, they’re eating frozen burritos and watching The Littlest Bride while Diebold giggles malevolently.

Thumbs down to E-40’s “Tell Me When To Go” remix. While we respect 40 Juice’s opportunism and dexterity at finagling himself into a national spokesperson role for all things Hyphy, we’re disappointed that the rotund Yay Area icon unimaginatively tabbed Kanye West and Game to appear on the remix to his quasi-bubbling single. The most interesting element of Hyphy was that it was an organic “movement” that spouted from a region largely written off as salted and barren earth. And when people discovered the madness that was festering beneath the mainstream radar, the reaction was more or less the same: “I can’t believe these retards are rolling around on the hoods of driver-less cars – how flippin’ splendid!” 40 might view the inclusion of such interlopers as Kanyeezy and Game as a validation of his own contemporary relevance (and possibly that of Hyphy by extension), but we cynically regard it as the first mucousy symptom of the music and its energy being stripped of its regional uniqueness and, consequently, most of its appeal.

Thumbs up the combination of TI and Just Blaze. We’ve heard two collaborative tracks off T.I.P.’s forthcoming King LP, and, to no one on the planet’s surprise, they both bang. Even if you never pondered the mathematics too rigorously, you always knew the combination would work nicely – sort of like Thai whores and root beer floats.

Thumbs down to the recent legislation proposed by a couple Brooklyn politicians calling for the installation of video cameras outside of any establishment with a liquor license and the institution of off-duty police as bouncers. A girl gets murdered and now all of our most shameful moments involving urine-stained pants and swapping spit with obese one-eyed strangers are forever immortalized? This trend of naming laws after dead girls is more played out than Hype Williams’s redundant horizontal-split-screen letterbox bullshit.

Thumbs down to Bush’s recent spate of throwback speeches about Iraq. Maybe it’s all the 4-year anniversary nostalgia, but Bush is still roaming around the country telling anyone that will listen that it made sense to invade Iraq in the first place. Homie, that moldy-planked vessel has long since sunk gracelessly into the Persian Gulf. And the President has recently been muttering about those cute little roadside explosives that have been regularly turning our troops into shrapnel-spiked porcupines for, oh, about four years. In 2010, he’s going to announce to the American public that we should be wary of an encroaching danger called “snap music”. Go hard or go homeland security.

Thumbs up to how pissed off MLB must be at having a Cuba-Japan championship game in the World Baseball Classic. First the US team bungles a gift-wrapped pool placement (separated from the brutal DR-PR-Venezuela death squads) and proceeds to lose to everyone from NAFTA. Then the aforementioned three Latin American teams -- all packed with major league studs -- get eliminated by a Cuban delegation that no one even wanted in the tourney in the first place. And finally, the hero on the Japanese team is named Fukudome, which is also the name of a gay club in the meatpacking district. Go hard or go homo.