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Like a parent to a child, “you better change your tone, young man” with bass as too harsh and treble as more accomadating.

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El-P takes on the persona of a fascist 1980-90s America in this song, mixing the rhetoric of the Reagan-Bush era with typical rap battle bravado. Following his analogy here, the Republican regime is just a bunch of crotch-grabbing thugged-out rappers claiming they tougher than everybody else, domestic critics and sovereign nations alike.

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Humans mass produced on assembly lines recalls Aldous Huxley’s dystopia of Brave New World in which just that nightmare has come true.

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El-P’s “charm” and wit on the mic here is compared to the ubiquitous surveillance technologies of a mobilizing police state.

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Conservative critiques of illicit lyrics, for example. They are prude in a sense and certainly not much of a turn on.

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The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful CIA operation to invade Cuba in 1960.

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America has long been considered a “promised land” for immigrants (and black migrants from the South).

Here that promise is phrased as a sales pitch, betraying the underlining capitalist, not necessarily democratic ideal of the nation.

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American welcomes immigration but then demands assimilation, including the not-so-separated church of that welcoming state.

A sonnet engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty reads:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus, 1883

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CoFlow here join a long history of poets that make claim to citizenship despite oppressions. A few samples below:

From “I, Too, Sing America”

by Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

From Allen Ginsberg, “America”

By Allen Ginsberg

I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

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Mackie is a brand of the United States-based company LOUD Technologies. The Mackie brand is used on professional music and recording equipment, such as mixing consoles, loudspeakers, studio monitors and DAW control surfaces, digital recording equipment and more. El-P may not be at peace with the modern world, but he can use its technologies for good.

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