Blankening

 To continue from where I left off in “Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking”, we have two NOI offshoots, the Nuwaubians and the Five Percenters, both of whom have mutated versions of the semi-occult doctrines of the Nation of Islam, and both of whom have semi-heavy followings among rappers and hip hop artists.

So… this leads me to wonder… in the heavily coded slang and jargon filled world of hip hop writing, are there “occulted” messages or symbolic references that the uninitiated listener isn’t aware of or picking up on? Now sure, there’s a degree of paranoia that can be seen to be involved in the idea… an echo of the craziness that lead people to believe there were satanic messages coded into backwards-playing tracks on albums, etc. BUT… at the same time, with comic book writers turned practicing magicians like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison both putting out coded magickal works in the form of comic books (Promethea and The Invisibles respectively), and then considers the long history of masonic symbols being used in the architecture and layout of major cities the Western World over, the notion of occult material being hidden right out in the open with the possible intention of creating effect in the world… it just isn’t that weird.

So… I thought about it… and thinking turned to looking… and lo and behold, I found just the thing I was looking for. I found The Black Dot. This guy is nothing short of amazing. He distills ideas out of all manner of contemporary black cultural esoterics, ditches a lot of what appear to be early 20th Century trappings of Islam that have been passed down from the time of the Moorish Science Temple, and goes on to try and dig the hidden meanings and subtext out of modern hip hop… especially the famous ones. Samples of his work are available on Google:Hip Hop Decoded and on his website:Matrix of Hip Hop.

Ugh, the tired hits again.

Tomorrow I’ll take a stab at explaining what I thought was cool about The Black Dot, how I got from him and his outlook to the Theosophists, and how I got from Theosophism to Krishnamurti and the possible “spiritual” benefits of neurological disorders.

But for now… it is half past four in the morning, and my ass needs to get to sleeping.

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