Other Music from a... Different Kitchen

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Zion I – Family Business, the mixtape (Live Up)



I got put up on the popularity of underground crew Zion I in the Bay area by Paris when I interviewed him for Rapstation.com. Since getting a review copy of their recently-released Family Business mixtape I've been playing it daily. This interlude between official Zion I albums is a preview of the hip hop heat we can expect from their forthcoming third LP, True & Livin’, due next Spring.

Family Business blends hot beats and a return to the old school art of real MCing. The members of Zion I - Zion, Amp Live, Deuce Eclipse, and Big Cleesy - are joined by featured guests like Vast Aire, A-plus, Pep Love, Encore, C Rayz Walz, Raashan Ahmad of Crown City Rockers, an impressive new female MC named Miss Marianna as well as Blackalicious who make a special appearance shout out at the end of "Radius (feat. Deuce Eclpise)" and Lyrics Born on the “Silly Puddy” remix. Amp Live, Zion I's in-house track master, holds down the production throughout especially on stand-out tracks like “Oxygen” and "Killa Cali," the aforementioned "Radius," and "Family Business."

Unlike the “bling pimp bullsh-t” we normally hear on the radio, this collection of tracks are socially poignant and have beats hard enough to resonate at any party. Even a hip hop head like me from the BX, the birthplace of this culture and movement, felt like the Zion I crew represented the Left Coast admirably on this release and look forward to hearing more from them in the future.

For more info on Zion I click their website: www.zionicrew.com. Family Buinsess is available to buy at hiphopsite.com.

-- Marielle V. Turner is Virtual A&R for Slamjamz.com and contributing writer for Rapstation.com.
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Last month's U.S. assault on the insurgent-held city of Fallujah may have been a success, but the aftermath has been a disaster. On the highway to Baghdad's main airport, suicide bombings have gotten so frequent that last week the American Embassy officially declared the road off-limits to its personnel. Now, U.S. diplomatic staffers need helicopters to get to the airport from the Green Zone. Mosul, six times Fallujah's size, is now almost as much of a no-go zone as Fallujah ever was.

[S]enior officers insist the boost [in U.S. troop strength in Iraq by 12,000 to 150,000, more than it took to invade Iraq in the first place] is only temporary. Otherwise the Army is in for a desperate scramble. The brass is convinced that reneging on the "365 days" pledge would send re-enlistments plunging. And there simply are no remaining units stateside to replace those troops who are sent home.

[W]ho designed the Oil-for-Food Program? The United States and Britain [emphasis added]. They wrote the rules that allowed Saddam Hussein to choose his trading partners, banks and consultants. They vetted every one of the 30,000 contracts that passed through the program. They held up 5,000 over concerns about materials that could be used for weapons of mass destruction, but not one over concerns about corruption. Saddam's major revenues actually came from smuggling, which was an activity the United Nations was not mandated to stop. The only ones who could have stopped it were the ones with military force in the region—the United States and Britain. The truth is that Washington—during both the Clinton and the Bush years—cared little about Iraq's corruption. It cared only about its weapons.

[S]some detainees were arrested because targets were not at home when homes were raided. A family member was instead captured and then released when the target turned himself in -- a practice that, Herrington wrote, "has a 'hostage' feel to it."

A separate report by the Center for Army Lessons Learned, issued this past May and intended for internal use, gave the sense that some Army tactics served to "alienate common Iraqis who initially supported the coalition."

"It is a practice in some U.S. units to detain family members of anti-coalition suspects in an effort to induce the suspects to turn themselves in, in exchange for the release of their family members," the report stated. The CALL report also was critical of the delays in notifying family members about the status of detainees held in U.S. custody, reminding family members of Hussein's tactics.