Silence Trafficker (2024)
Inkjet, Watercolor and Masking Tape on Hanji Paper.
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The Alhambra shouldn't be as it is now. It's been restored, from the Peninsular War and an earthquake, and for what end? It's been restored to serve as a Disneyland for Instagram pictures. It exists as another orientalist tourism location, for Europeans who want to see Islamic culture without having to step foot in an Islamic nation with its dirty Arabs. And it's this novelty, that it exists on a hillside in the south of Spain, that is its draw. I think about Certified Copy again, and doubtlessly if this were to be rebuilt as an amusement park on another hillside in Spain and sold as authentic, people would go, and they'd take pictures.

They put a museum in the Alhambra. The works had to be carried up the hill.

While walking down the hill, I realize that xaviersobased uses the same flow in yh i knoo that A$AP Rocky uses in Ghetto Symphony. In the museum I thought about how biblical scenes that were painted repeatedly were like using the same beat. I thought about 50 Cent's Many Men and Xanman and Lil Dude's Many Men. I thought about how Veeze and Slimesito dropped songs that sampled the same Bone Thugs N Harmony song in the span of a month.

I text J pictures of the Alhambra and tell him about this. He says the pictures I took are good.

Last night I sent C a quote from Jon Jost's blog where he writes letters to his daughter that's been separated from him: "I checked into a cheap hotel near the train station, managed to see some friends, a bit of Roma, and moved along. I was somewhat taken aback how, like Lisbon, Roma – at least in the center and in Trastevere, where we lived – had become overwhelmed with tourists and had changed itself to serve them. Sad. When I left in 2002 I had thought to myself that it was too big to be destroyed, as Venice and Firenze had been, by mass tourism – but I was totally wrong. The Roma we had lived in no longer exists.”

I also sent him Youtube uploads of screen recordings of SlimeGoon9 IG lives from jail. The title of one, "slimegoon9 presses k2 smoker in prison for hanging pooped boxers on his rack", hits me like a madeleine when he replies and I remember smoking k2 in Lisbon with this Australian girl in 2017 and fixate on the memory while drinking my cafe con leche. In the Alhambra, there was a woman wearing a 2pacalypse Now shirt, and I thought about Ab-Soul's verse on Joe Budden's Cut From A Different Cloth, a song I left behind on a hard drive over a decade ago ("we got a new 2pacalypse now / when? before the apocalypse / wow how does he come up with this / if ur behind ab then maybe you can stomach this / who can fuck with this / i know you got a dick but use ur head bruh / they sleeping on me like a colony of bed bugs / cut from a different cloth and no one knows my thread count"). I text S about this because he's an Ab-Soul head.

T texts me an IG post that's a series of Paul Pierce clips from his recent appearance on Cam'Ron's talk show. It's so good I have to run the whole episode. He's really The Truth. Yesterday I watched a Lance Stephenson highlight reel and thought about how no one else has any shit even close to that.

Hopoutblick drops a new video. A couple of weeks ago, the video for I Miss Zomb dropped. It's a YBC Dul song that Hopoutblick features on with Merepablo and 9sideree, I'd been listening to the leak repeatedly on SoundCloud, well over a hundred times, the beat is incredible. The cover art on the SoundCloud upload is now the YBC Dul tape that it's on, but iMessage thumbnails preserved the original image, an IG live screenshot:

Presumably it's one of the rapper's IG stories, presumably Zomb is pictured, and 42 Dugg's Free Merey is overlaid. The thing about the comments section for "I Miss Zomb" is that everyone is talking about how crazy it is that HopOutBlick is dropping a video. Accounts saying: He should be in Mexico by now. He's on the run for murder. Check Philly Most Wanted. And I check Philly's Most Wanted and I see him, he's only 18, and he's wanted for a triple homicide that left a 14, 17, and 18 year old dead. In the following week, an interview drops, there are more comments about how he's crazy, and he doesn't speak on any of it in the interview, the mics are so bad and they're so far away from them that you can barely hear what's being said.

And now the latest song, Jump Out Boy with Mere Pablo and Hardy. A sample comes in, looping a voice singing "Mama I'm a Criminal" and I think of "So Many Names", a YBC Dul x Hopoutblick song that samples The Fairly Oddparents theme song as they trade bars referencing people they've killed, the first time I heard him, and about Torcher Party, where he raps about people him and the torchers have killed. In the new song, he raps “Me and my t’s on the run, they tryna book us all”. It's different than Tay-K, because Tay-K had been booked, he did The Race on house arrest. And Tay-K never allegedly killed anybody.

This is all happening in Philly. The same city where a shirtless white fan runs up on Quanny at the Wawa yelling "they told me presidents was smart how the fuck I'm getting stupid bands" at him fanning out before saying he should have another show even though he knows the last one got cancelled cuz someone threatened to shoot it up. The same city where Simone White teaches and presumably wrote about the ceaseless apocalpyse that never comes. The same city where Tovii's deconstructed the form and lost his face in a way that a street rapper never has. I'm reading the war poems, the inscriptions of death in the shadow of the Alhambra, from the shadow of History, thinking about Quanny's Arabic face tat, NR Boor talking about being Muslim in an interview, Tovii's use of arabic script in recent videos, and the idea that the western hemisphere is beyond "the West", a "meta-West", an idea that needs to be fleshed out further.