Back in my childhood, there was this notorious question - can white man play the blues? I think that Janis Joplin gave the ultimative answer to that question: white women can sing the blues. As KRS1 has once put it, black people have created every muscial style in the USA in the 20th century or so. Obviously, he is not right in every respect with that statement, but one can observe that from blues to jazz to rhythm and blues to soul to funk to hiphop a load of musical styles created by African Americans has been taken over by whities sooner or later. I am sorry for using stereotypical expressions like "black" and "white" here, I know what they are, but the discourse I am writing about has had these categories at its very center. Be that as it may, the guy who called himself "MC 900 Ft Jesus" during his short career as a rapper, has reportedly chosen this name because he saw televangelist Oral Roberts on TV pretending to have had a vison of a 900 feet high Jesus or so. I own one of the three albums recorded by MC 900 Ft Jesus, the second one, and I still remember how the track "The City Sleeps" struck me when I first heard it. It is about a serial arsonist, and tells its story from within that man's mind. 20 years later, I still think that it is among the best tracks in the history of rap music. A sample from the song has been used by U2 on their Zooropa album....The video on this u-tube post is taken from the 2002 remake or so (for television use) of the 1976 Brian de Palma movie "Carrie" (Brian de Palma had nothing to do with that remake).
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