Contrast Podcast 27 is up!

Who's America!? Who's America!? So goes the battlecry of Company Flow's "Patriotism," on which El-P seethes and spits at a bankrupt nation with unmissable fury. Over the flurry of Mr. Len's scratching, he hits target after target with a bomb's wide-range devastation. There's the prescience too (the song was released in 1999) of Guantanamo and secret military tribunals, of elevated levels of government surveillance and relaxed definitions of torture: "Dissension against CF ends in penetentiary residence/ Lock 'em up first, then ask questions/ Omniscient presence, my charm is the weapon/ With cameras, mics and satellites that leave privacy breathless/ You don't even know the chemicals you've ingested/ Urine tested, beat innocent man till he confesses." Thus, given my great love for Company Flow, I had no trouble picking what to supply for Contrast Podcast 27's theme, "Songs With A Political Message." I had my own prescient feeling that hip hop would be underrepresented, a shame given how inherently political the medium is. But even with rock rocking the Podcast, there's no denying how great a lot of the other bloggers' choices are (Fugazi! Phil Ochs!) or how badly we still need voices to call out all the bullshit and mediocrity swamping our governments. * MP3: "Patriotism" - Company Flow from Soundbombing 2 [Buy it] * Website: Contrast Podcast Tags: El-P, Company Flow, Patriotism, MP3