julianne escobedo shepherd

dasracistilluminati:

SO, I usually never do this because I am both a music critic/journalist and dating one of the members of Das Racist—live with, actually, am practically married to—and Victor and Hima are both my very good friends and I want to put forth some kind of critical distance because you know, it’s a weird and not always pleasant position to be in, but you can’t help who you fall in love with NAHMEAN, and I don’t even know if there has ever been an instance of a critic and a musician dating on like a real level other than my cousin Tom Velazquez’s best friend Bart Bull, who wrote for Spin in the ’80s and married Michelle Shocked, but now they’re divorced. (Sidebar, my cousin Joe Velazquez, Tom’s brother, wrote for Spin in the ’80s, too. Here is his Devo feature.) So I don’t know if there’s any established PROTOCOL as to how to go about doing this right and above board, but TRUST that I’ve been trying to do this ethically and above board since day one, and also if you guys know of any other critics dating musicians please tell me who so we can form some sort of support group. SOYEAHBUTANYWAY, FUCK IT, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE: How you gonna call a record that was released by a non-profit community organization of primarily AZNs in QUEENS and features many of said organization’s members RAPPING IN PUNJABI, as not being political? And also, there is a track on Heems’ mixtape called Alien fucking Gonzalez?  I will tell you and your whole family all day, I don’t care if you like or dislike DR, it’s your prerogative, obviously if you like them I personally benefit by proxy because it means Ashok will get more money and go on more internet shopping sprees buying odd things like humidifiers and food processors. But like, I make a living having an opinion on things, and I consider myself a fairly progressive person, and I grew up in Wyoming where the state ethos is essentially libertarian, so DO YOU, feel how you feel. My mom doesn’t like Das Racist either. We all have different perspectives, the world is fucking beautiful. But like, shit like the above apolitical remark gets me because it touches on a thing that Hima and Victor and particularly Ashok and I all care about a lot, and that is the place where privilege and race intersect and make people say and do things that are stupid. Like, a lot of people called Relax apolitical, or at least less political than everybody’s fave Sit Down, Man (I liked that mixtape better than Relax, too, dudes). But what those people failed to realize is that with Heems in particular, they were RAPPING ABOUT BEING THE CHILDREN OF BROWN IMMIGRANTS IN A COUNTRY THAT OVERWHELMINGLY DISLIKES BROWN PPL, and where the lives of immigrant brown people are often LEGALLY DIFFICULT but also INVISIBLE. Anyway. As I said before, I’m not mad at anyone’s opinion of their shit, but it does “GET MY GUFF” as we say in Wyoming when people assume just because there’s not a track where specific world leaders are called out, that they’re not being political. 

OK, that is the first and last time I will ever do that, now I go back to being MRS. FRIDAY NIGHT. PEACE.