SONG OF THE DAY: WudźTangClan

There’s a hidden dork process for accumulating these songs of the day, from actual ipod use over the course of my life, but I never reveal that process because it’s all hidden math that is layered into all my ridiculous convoluted ways. Occasionally I’ll have a song of the day that’s me having slowed down a 45 to a 33, and I’ll have to create a video for it, and there’s always the worry it’ll get flagged for copyright infringement because we live in a weird colonial intellectual property era also with digital age where people, generally companies not individual artists, think they own every goddamn thought they ever had. Usually you can find every song on youtube, but occasionally you can’t.

I couldn’t for today’s song, so I uploaded a video. The video was immediately flagged and blocked, which was odd, because even when flagged generally companies allow it to be used but hijack the minimal payouts for ad views attached to the video, which I guess is the only way people can still make money off of shit. But today’s song got flagged and blocked, which seems weird to me because it’s a Polish rap group doing a song about Wu Tang. There’s like 70 live performance videos of this song by this Polish rap group, but no studio versions. Well I didn’t listen to a live version a whole bunch, I listened to the studio version, and I kinda wanted to share that. It’s difficult exploring hip hop scenes in other parts of the world, but you’ll uncover gems (like this group) that come from pretty fucked places (Poland is super fucked, with giant tenements full of poor people, mostly what we in America would consider white, yet also there’s a far right lean to a lot of them, as seen expressed in their football hooligans).

My oldest kid is always sending me Malaysian hip hop links because she fell in love with Malaysia this past summer while there, and it always strikes me as weird that we have this internet level of pretend knowledge, but there’s no real deep digging for international hip hop, or a place where you can easily explore all these other little scenes that have blown up. Ozone magazine was a southern hip hop magazine that eventually became a parody of itself, but I always loved the early years of it because it gave local scene reports every issue similar to how Maximum Rock-n-roll did for punk music. I would absolutely love the fuck out of a global hip hop site like that.

Anyways, this video got blocked, but it’s still showing up for me, so I’m going to link it in the blurb here. The group is called O.S.T.R. and it’s the best Polish hip hop I’ve come across. My maternal grandfather was the child of Polish immigrants, so something in me maybe feels this shit at molecular level, or I could just be projecting that. Like I said, this is a strange era, with digital immersion, and it’s all very superficial, including our knowledge of everything, so half of reality is hidden shit we don’t even understand and the other half is performative bullshit.