The Garrickys Annual best of the year awards

I wanted to get through the year before I posted the my best of the year awards. I will be doing best hip-hop album, best mixtape of the year, best television show, best movie, and athlete of the year. Okay let's get to it.

Best Hip-Hop Album:

This one was hard because it was so much good music. I wanted to pick Jay Z for his stellar album, Magna Carter Holy Grail. However Drake's Nothing Was the Same edges Jay Z only because we are used to Jay performing at a high level. Drake's album felt like a movie, and it didn't reek of Cash Money it was all his style on display. 

Best Mix tape Artist:

This one was easy, no one else is talking about the truly ugly side of Chicago's youth that are caught in the industrial prison complex better than Keith Cozart also known as Chief Keef. Just listen to Jet Li or 12 Bars and hear the potential in this rhyme sayer don't let your cultural bias stop you from embracing Sosa.

Best Televison show:

The best show was hard this year and I wanted to pick something that wasn't mainstream but should be, the best television show is Arrow. CW Televison superhero drama is one part Batman, one part Lost, and one part Gossip Girl. Add those together and you get to see how Warner Brother is crafting their characters for the new century. Arrow has a rich boy who was trapped on an island for five years as returns a machine for justice. He recently stopped killing the bad guy and we always get answers as to what happen to him on the island. 

Best Movie of the Year:

When I finished watching Elysium it made me confidant that we will have the technology to cure people and yet the price will be so astronomical you'd have to have enough money to live in space. Don't see that happening in our lifetime?Maybe it will maybe it won't be like that in our lifetimes but they way in which the characters were fighting for a place a the financial elite was memorizing. 

Athelete of theYear:

This was an easy pick Lebron James is the best athlete on the planet. His game is fierce and he looks a tad bored. He has a championship last year and looks to get another. There is no one that provides those jump out of your seats moments as Lebron does.

That's my best of list, should be a great year. -thegqlife

Deeming things Ratchet, Hood, or Ghetto has America's nose stuck in the air for no good reason

Here I am I am out with this really beautiful sister. I mean she was bad(bad meaning dope)in everyway, great job. She was perfect on paper and our conversation was great. Until we got to the issues that surround young people that live in the neighborhoods of Chicago. I was a youth worker at the time in the Southside area for High School after school programs. I had the schools that had probation courts in the building so if teens who violated their parole they could be sent right back to juvenile or even prison. So I knew what they were going through. The aforementioned woman being from the suburbs and raised forty miles outside of Chicago didn't. What made me know she didn't was a statement that still bothers me to this day. She said, "why care about these animals". Suffice it to say girly and I didn't work out after that comment. Shocking as her comment was it wasn't the first time I heard people talk like that about Chicago's young people. So when I was too turned up when students from the High Schools I worked started getting signed to major rap labels and making their families money that they truly needed. It was also a wake up call that these young people had a voice and a story to tell, a story that America didn't want to hear and hates to look at.

Sasha Go Hard, along with Chief Keef, Katie Got Bandz pictured above are leading a new

movement of music in Chicago and the nation called "drilling music" some like to say it's ratchet. I strongly disagree

Seeing their success was like the big last laugh for the young people who many said they wouldn't become wealthy and successful. I am not saying that is why they blew up. I am saying that they are normal kids that have compelling circumstances which is tough for most adults to navigate let alone a 15 year old that has to watch over 4 brothers and sisters until their mother comes home from work. Looking at them as ratchet is not cool. People seem to think that because people like to twerk, dance, be in a gang, hustle that is so horrible. This the same way racism prevailed in the south. This attitude of looking at those different for you regarding them as sub-human is too uptight. W.E.B Dubois stated that he wanted talented African American men and women to return to the ghettoes to educate young people and uplift the people as a whole. This did happen for a time, however beginning in the early 1990s people started to lose their connection to the ghetto, they lost what it was like to have nothing in the house but your phone and how you would prank call people. They lost what is was like to be young and just being plan silly and creative because you have no money, now in the social media age people think they have an unique voice when they are mere followers of mainstream media. Mainstream media never indulges in things that are considered ghetto or ratchet until they can make money of it. That's when you get finally get Snoop Dog on Martha Stewart's show after he has been rapping for years!

The problem with deeming things ratchet is you miss out on what may eventually become mainstream, trying to be uppity or stuck up leaves you limited and lacking true knowledge. We are all connected good or bad, trying to separate yourself creates a socio-economic divide that is wide enough. -thegqlife