Friday Free-For-All

I think I'ma be keepin it light today. Never know, I might get inspired later on, but we'll see. At any rate, here's what's on my head. I just ran a post with some favorite books. Here are some favorite albums. I may do another iteration of this later, but I think these are my 10 favorite albums; whole albums, not just albums with records I like.

• Dare Iz A Darkside - Redman
• De La Soul Is Dead - De La Soul
• Songs In The Key of Life - Stevie Wonder
• Love Alive 1 - Walter Hawkins
• Resurrection - Common (Sense)
• Mama's Gun - Erykah Badu
• Amerikkka's Most Wanted - Ice Cube
• It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back - Public Enemy
• Black Star - Mos Def and Talib Kweli
• Benny Carter Meets Oscar Peterson - Benny Carter and Oscar Peterson

Man. That's 10 already. This will have to go through some refining, but I'm pretty sure most of these will stay. A few of 'em are mortal locks, though: Mama's Gun, SITKOL, and Nation of Millions. DLSID has competition for being my favorite De La album, let alone on my own personal top 10. We'll see if I ever get back to this and if I come up with anything else. **** What's Happening!! was a better sitcom than I had realized. I knew I liked it before, but there's some really solid characterization. Of course, most of the characters had already been kind of mapped out, since everybody except Rerun and Bill (the pop) are based on characters in Cooley High. Still, Dee as the precocious younger sibling is hard to beat. I'd take her over Michael every day of the week. The only thing I don't like is that there are too many fat jokes. Ex-girl pointed it out to me that Rerun really wasn't that fat, they just had him wear baggy clothes that made him look big. Shirley and Mabel were big, but there was no reason for that many fat jokes. (BTW, even though she's not in my weight class, Mabel King was a beautiful woman.) **** I forgot to mention earlier in the week, for my boy's birthday I got him two John McWhorter books. I tried to support the local Black bookstore, but you know they didn't have it. When I asked the dude, he looked like he didn't know who the devil I was talkin about. They didn't have but one book by a conservative author, though. Can I say I was sorely disappointed? I was about to fuss but then I saw this book highlighting all the Uncle Toms throughout history. I wasn't surprised to see the usual names, but they had Malcom X in there. I couldn't get past that one. Of course, it's easy to be brave when you're anonymous. The author(s) didn't put zer name(s) on the book.