Raps and Cartoons: Bakshi and the Warrior

I don’t have many favorites. I don’t have a favorite rapper, I don’t have a favorite actor, I don’t have a favorite football team; I am not a Christian – I don’t have a favorite god. I do, however, have a favorite animator: Ralph Bakshi. The man chiefly responsible for such features as Fritz the Cat, Wizards, American Pop, Heavy Traffic, and Coonskin. While I was lying in bed, a few days ago, thinking about Bakshi, a thought went through my head: we are hella fucking similar. Check it:

An ordering of the similarities between Ralph Bakshi and Maasai "Warrior" Singleton:

-Both are frequently misunderstood 

Both convey messages that are commonly misunderstood by people who do not take the time to observe and understand their art. Conservative people find sex and profanity in Bakshi films over the top and have almost no chance of understanding while being offended. People with little exposure to Hip-Hop will associate Maasai Warrior with a detrimental culture they dislike and never hear my songs.

-Both have a love of comics that began in childhood

Bakshi has said that he originally had the dream of becoming a comic strip cartoonist. When he was a child growing up in Brooklyn, he would forage through garbage in search of comics. When I was a kid, I would routinely lock myself in the closet to read 80’s Marvel comics scored cheaply at garage sales, thinking the exposure would prepare me to be a better writer.

-Both grew up surrounded by cultures outside their own

When Bakshi was nine, he lived in an all Black neighborhood in Washington D.C.  and, attending the local school, was the only white child in a sea of brown faces. When I was nine I was the single Black child in my own school. Bakshi has been quoted as saying “All my friends were black, everyone we did business with was black, the school across the street was black. It was segregated, so everything was black. I went to see black movies; black girls sat on my lap. I went to black parties. I was another black kid on the block. No problem!"  The difference, of course, was that I had problems.

-Both are interested in social criticism

For Bakshi, examples would include the hypocrisy of Fritz the Cat, or the depiction of urban Black life in Coonskin(and everything else). For Maasai Warrior, it would be the three songs I've done relating to child abuse, or the ones I've written about bullying or perhaps even "Teddiursa", the song about the detrimental effects of mainstream ideas of female body image.

-Both make use of parody of pop culture characters

Bakshi is known to have short cameos for Disney characters in his features. A prime example would be Mickey, Daisy, and Daffy’s silhouettes which are seen atop a skyscraper cheering on the US Air Force as Harlem is bombed in Fritz the Cat. A Maasai Warrior example might be “Cartoon Hero’s” or “PedoBat” a song appearing on the album, which releases tomorrow, about combatting Batman having found him in the process of sexually abusing one of his Robbins. 

-Both speak up about real world problems through fantasy.

Bakshi’s Wizards, simply put, is a story about the destructive power of technology and the influence of propaganda. Maasai’s (upcoming) Moon Bitch is about low self esteem - looking at it through the eyes of a God’s avatar, seeing himself as merely a pawn.

-I can't describe this one

Bakshi has said, "Ghettos for other people are all prisons, places to escape from but that wasn't it for me so many beautiful things in Brownesville-freedom". During my four years of boarding school, the first order of business upon return to Los Angeles has always been a skate down the hill and around Crenshaw. Next year: The University of South Central.

-Both are indie artists

We enjoy what we do and a lot of people don’t know who the fuck we are. 

A Freed Mind and Creations Follow: Teamwork in Hip-Hop

I am exceedingly wealthy – in knowledge compared to many others my age; in friendships because I have friends I’ve grown to call brothers; and in hair because I haven’t cut mine since last August. So despite the fact that I am a poor, unemployed USC film student, I do have a few things going for me. One of those things that I am very grateful for is my freedom to create. You see, I only did decently in school because I enjoyed most of my courses, I’ve never felt the need to prove myself by cramming words and numbers into my head, reiterating them, and then forgetting and repeating the process. Most of my merit, I suppose, comes from my spirituality (Mother Earth guide me!) and my ability to write. This August I start at the University of Southern California as a major in Writing for the Screen and Television. Writing is my passion; I am also drawn to create comics (Somebody needs to do something about this Moon Knight problem), Video Games, and, as you probably know from reading this particular blog, raps.

Now I’ve talked before about the Prejudice of music (and got trolled up the ass on Nerdcore Now), how one will consider the fact that a song has vocal percussion incorporated and immediately categorize the artist with ones they already know like 50 Cent who just did the Youporn theme song (Haven’t heard it yet; I always get sidetracked) or Souljaboy (Don’t beat me up. I have no grasp on what’s popular these days outside of One Direction -_- ). But when I write percussion, my music sounds nothing like theirs because our souls are very different. I – for one – accept women and men as equal beings and have never exploited steatopygous females in my music videos (Not just because I have yet to do one.) to distract from the lack of literacy apparent in my words.  I was surprised and disturbed when my  father told me he wouldn't have trouble with me writing songs about “Beat[ing] the pussy up up up up up up…”… you get the drift. The fact is I think ones music should be seen as art and an expression of oneself and the music of many artists shows me – quite frankly – that I don’t want them in my life or in the lives of my little sisters.

You see I am also vastly wealthy in ability to create because of my partner in geek, Keify K.

I met Keith Kilgore through Kilgore Gardner, a friend of a friend. Gardner had been showing me instrumentals of various hip-hop artist he had known and worked with and many didn’t fit (I heard a few of those so-gangster-it-can-only-be-popular-in-the-forgotten-and-abused-urban-neighborhood-it’s-from type beats and you know me; I don’t quite fit the gangster rap bill). But one of the beats he sent me caught my attention. It was smooth and funky and had a sample from the Hanna and Barbara cartoon the Jetsons (writing this now, I’m wondering why we never used that jam). I knew this couldn’t be your average beat junkie. And it wasn’t. This guy was cool. Like mad kool. He was fresh, had fun with the music, liked to experiment. (He took a break before doing the last two songs of Nerdgasm to play with crunk music and when he came back he’d learned something, “Hey Hey HEY!!) I told him about Nerdcore and gave him youtube links for some of my favorite artist. He said he really dug Megaran and so that meant he was studying K-murdock.

The short of it is that Keify-K is the other half of what makes Maasai Warrior possible. His programming has a rhythm that beats with my spirit and I have one hundred percent confidence going into a project that all I will have to worry about is my own part. And here’s the key: that’s why I can be me to the fullest extent. Keith’s beats fit the Warrior's style and his excellence leaves the Warrior to write, leaves the Shaman to conjure. In creating this next album, there were several songs that I put time in researching to create (I won’t give ALL the topics away here). 

Because I had no job this summer, I was freed up to watch Dateline and think about the murders and examine my philosophy. I saw the story of Etan Patz and was introduced to the idea of that change in American consciousness- you know how kids used to play in the streets and go to the mall alone at age ten but then that stopped because Americans were like “Oh shit, Pedophiles? They’re real”?  And they don’t all act like Humpert Humpert.

Well I wanted to do a song about that change in collective consciousness and I was told, by a more senior person that the case of Adam Walsh, son of the host of Americas Most Wanted, was more well known. I’ll tell you that the song came out in a way that made me proud but I won’t yet decipher for you the subtleties and the meaning behind it (You’ll have to download it in about a month. What? You don’t like free shit?). The point is I spent time researching that case; I saw the bio on Bio(that’s a channel right?) about Adams father, John Walsh, found out there was a 1983 made-for-tv-movie about the kidnapping, downloaded and watched it, read on the history of Pedophilia, read about it as a paraphilia, read about Ottis Toole the man who claimed to have been responsible (I’m still not sure.), found out that he was not, in fact, a pedophile and killed at LEAST one-hundred-and-seven other people in the company of his bearded lover whom he met in a Jacksonville soup kitchen and that, in prison, they admitted to a number of murders eventually exceeding six hundred. Then I wrote a song about it (Don’t worry there are happy songs and even some romance on “Shaman” too… oh shit did I just give out the name of the album?)

 The point is Keith is a dope producer and I’m a [Insert perceived level of skill here] writer and his taking over in his area of expertise frees me up to explore and be better at my own. So I have time to write more words than “Life sentence is enough nough nough nough nough...”

What we think of Pokemon Conquest.