the cool zone is a black cultural product in cmc which is designed to interactively involve folks with artifacts of various types. these artifacts whether visual, textual or aural will, if everything works properly, provide a basis for what i beleive is a new art form. this art form puts the flavor of blackness - the expository cultural components of african-american life - into the technology of the 90s.the cool zone is extensible but begins as an evocation of what i consider the essential components of the cultural climate of my coming of age in the 70s. (plantation lullabies - track 2) back in the day, we had within the ghetto homelands of america, a kind of well wrapped culture which was on the verge of expansion. coming up in that environment was a very optimistic experience, and the important themes of that time have left impressions upon me and my generation which i beleive america does not recognize nor appreciate. we know ourselves pretty well, so i want to capture some of that flavor before we all forget. the zone moves forward and backward encompassing the 60s and the 80s and wraps it all into hiphop aesthetics which is everything we need it to be, as you'll soon see.
all artworks on portals to the zone are mine and original. i collided the idea from graffitti i saw at the 7th avenue flatbush d train station in brooklyn and the sun theme of charles kuralt's sunday show.
i direct and dedicate my efforts in the cool zone to my contemporaries in the post-soul black culture, in the post-civil rights generation; to those of us who always took the content of our character seriously despite the fact that we were so often judged by the color of our skin. this is for all of those whose parents looked at us strange when we talked about sir nose. for those who remember being the first black something. for those who struggle strongly or sweetly to bring forth all that character and flavor - for those who find truth on the way to shoving off racial lies - and for all those who watch and listen to this generation and truly desire to share.
the cool zone is a repository of flavor, a moving history, a confessional and a touchstone. it is a reason to look and the voice that won't shut up. it's a refining and defining, authentic black collaborative creation. it's the colored museum in cyberspace, it's yo mtv raps without mtv's assistance, it's the realization of fanon's desires without the borrowed tongue, it's the beginning of the rainbow when the mainstream is tired, it's bootzilla with a phd, it's recursively redundant and full of itself, it's a hiphop homeboy's hermaneutics. so you can get with this, or you can get with that. starting to get the feel?
mb, september 1994