borrow

The Tale of Brynild, and King Valdemar and his Sister
$3.65

Can I Borrow a Dollar?
$13.98
My take on this album is you HAVE to have been a true hip-hop head to understand how groundbreaking this album was when it first came out! When I was playing basketball, rollerskating with my boys and rapping in ciphers in the parks, on benches, in the grocery stores, in line at McDonald's, Common was the FIRST name who would come out of your mouth if you understood how influential this cat was in battle lyrics!

Now, mind you, there were loads of battle mc's but from Chi-Town? Neh eh....Common put them on the map period! And Common to me has never regained that magic that made people love him. Soul By The Pound is a hip-hop classic before I Used To Love Her, which really put Common in another category. He was hip-hop Hollywood when that was a hit and never turned back.

But this album is a must have because you can follow the process of what it means to sell out to the industry seeing how Common sounds now compared to then(what many call "survival", but it's really selling out)...and what you can always fall back on when you're tired of hearing rappers engrossed in Autotune and other studio tricks that make them sound better....or just plain sounding like Soulja Boy....some str8 garbage.

Let Me Borrow that Top [Explicit]
$0.89

Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life
$19.95
Michael Greenberg is a writer, one who has suffered the slings and arrows that only those long-suffering writers without big advances, fancy agents and movies made out of their books understand. And he has turned each and every one of his odd jobs --- and even odder experiences --- into a literary memoir called BEG, BORROW, STEAL, chronicling his rise to the higher altitudes of working authorship through equal parts dogged determination and that unquenchable need to record in a native language the many events that make up time on this planet.

Leaving home to make his way in the world as a teen, surviving early fatherhood, working on the street selling faux high fashion accoutrements, exploring Central Park, writing the memoirs (or pretending to) for an aging self-important heiress, Greenberg not only writes (and writes a lot) throughout his life, but manages to turn even the most embarrassing situations into fodder for his lively literary wiles.

That is not to say that if you aren't a writer, you won't be able to connect with the visceral pain of some of Greenberg's unfortunate positions in the world (the great projects that fell apart just at the moment of triumph, especially). His writing is about something very essentially human, the great question of existence in general: if you do something, and no one ever sees it or knows that you did it, does it exist at all? The answer, I think, is yes: the existence of a work of art or art for hire doesn't have to be validated by an audience --- it's just awfully nice when it is. And yet Greenberg keeps writing, working on his own stuff and the work requested by others with the same well-metered prose.

Greenberg's memoirs couldn't be classified as emotionally stunning or particularly disruptive. He has a way with snark, a little bit of annoyance running a vein through his direct and concise language. But the most redeeming quality of BEG, BORROW, STEAL is the inherent sense that art must be made, regardless of your station in life, if you have the wherewithal to create it. Using those artistic leanings for everyday commercial purposes is a mixed bag of horror and comedy, and Greenberg's recollections --- particularly of trying to write someone else's memoirs --- are funny and too honest to be considered anything but true.

With the recent spate of memoirs that people have written and embellished to make their stories as dramatic as possible in order to enhance their original station, it is a relief to read someone's life story and know that it is truly his own. BEG, BORROW, STEAL is that rare memoir that is actually a memoir. Like Frank McCourt or Mary Karr, Greenberg can do nothing more than tell us the truth with the real and tried tools of a storyteller at his disposal. Nice work if you can get it...or make it.

--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano