MolotovHalfEmpty

So much better than it probably should be. Some great dialogue sample choices too. Even the EQ/tracklisting video is slick.

A certified oddball banger.

More than 20 years ago British rap was giving way to an increasingly northern move that included J Cristie who, despite a shit line about China and a few dodgy refs, put out relentlessly anti-imperialist UK hip hop for his short, but very solid dominance of what remained of the backpack/conscious UK rap scene.

The next record (2006) brought a sequel to The Grip, written - in part, with some broader context - from the sympathetic perspective of a young auicede bomber. Naturally the UK paying attention shit itself and the rest happily ignored it.

So why is this back again (for fhe feed)? In the UK and online people have spent the whole week being bemused or insensed about Galloway winning an election and becoming a British MP. They reference some shameless performances or reality TV. People on the left rightly reference his chameleon status, socially conservative leanings, and recent TERF shit.

But you know why he won a protest by election? You know why he's not just sampled but distinctive contextual sample for one of the most important non-grime records in 2000s music? Because he was and is one of the only public personas in the UK who has been constant on this issue.

The fact that fucking Galloway was who got endlessly sampled then and is getting elected now is fucking shit, but an example of how much worse the UK was and is in general.

But no-ones reading this anyway on a post about 20+ year old BritHop. So why not ramble?

George Grosz was a fascinating and viceral painter, deeply scarred and influenced by his experience serving in the first world war, before he was discharged and left with psychiatric problems and a serious drinking problem. Many of his paintings from that period deal explictly with the horrors of war and the human cost juxtaposed against societal conflict.

His later work saw him fined by the German government and some of his collections ordered destroyed as they became more satrical and focused upon what he saw as the hypocracy of those that advocate for such violence - things like preachers vomiting grenades and Jesus being forced into conscription.

He also went to Russia in the 1920s, where he was initially detained as a spy, but released when proven not to be and even met Lenin. He lived in the US for most of his life after the '30s but eventually returned to Berlin, where he died falling down the stairs one night drunk.

Kim Philby was an MI6 agent who had been working for the KGB since college. The man looked like a young Noam Chomsky, but spent his career fucking over MI6, the CIA, and notably Stephen Bandera's fascist 'resistance' movement in Ukraine.

Despite some gross but typical ingrained excuses for Western fascism...

When his forces reached the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, they found thousands of political prisoners had been slaughtered by the Soviets.

In retaliation, they joined the Gestapo in murdering thousands of Jews and Poles in the Lviv Pogrom. It is estimated that around one and a half million Jews were killed in Ukraine during the Holocaust.

The article is pretty damn good and talks frankly about Bandera and the UK/US effectively working with Nazis and spin-off fash as well as that legacy being celebrated in modern Ukraine.

I don't think it's smuggling in positive propoganda by stealth though. Just an accurate account and that reality, especially then, had a Soviet bias.

Also, Kim Philby Soviet stamp emoji when?