MY FIRST GUITAR
This isn't Lilith Fair strumming from Marnie Stern, Kill Rock Star’s latest rock star My first guitar was a foam green Dan Electro Japanese reissue. It was my first electric and I had saved up a few hundred dollars from my day job to buy it. I had heard that the girls from Sleater-Kinney played on Dan Electros and so the guitar store owner suggested the reissue because it was within my budget. I still use it. It’s twangy and tinny and the high treble works great for single plucked notes, which I use a lot in my songs. It reminds me of the first few years I spent learning how to play the guitar while sitting in my East Village apartment in NYC. I don’t clean my guitars very much and the other day I was thinking that the fingerprints left on the fretboard are the imprints of my very young hands. The pickups stopped working for a while so I read a manual on the internet and I opened it up and soddered the wires back together. It worked for a while, and I felt like a real badass. But when it broke again I had to take it into a shop. When the guy opened it up and looked at it he said: “Did a blind person work on this guitar?”
MY FIRST VOTE
Mr. Lif breaks his voter booth veto My fi rst time voting was in 2004. I felt it was so important to keep G.W. Bush from getting a second term that I shed my cynicism about the voting process and fi nally visited the polls. My theory about voting wasn’t much different than the typical cop out theory many people use (“Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.”). As has been evident in my music, I don’t agree with many of the ideals upon which our government is based. I didn’t feel like any politicians were worth anything, and really, my participation in the 2004 elections wasn’t indicative of a belief in John Kerry as much as it was a realization that America would continue to spin into oblivion under G.W. Bush’s leadership. As for this election, I am once again called into action to fight against the possibility of more Republican leadership. Barack Obama represents
a level of professionalism and power on the world stage that is not regularly associated with the black community. He is already projecting more positivity than I’ve witnessed from any politician just by demonstrating professionalism and the image of a strong black family to the public. All that being said, he is a politician, and I will never fully surrender my trust to any of them. Regardless of who is elected, my agenda will remain the same. Read, learn, study, spit fi re at the government, build with the people, remain raw.
URB.COM
156_MYFIRSTS_B.indd 73
| 73
11/7/08 12:45:16 PM