» Cage barked but the facts stayed quarantined in Kennelz
Last Monday I joined the shrinking audience of the hand-wringing, the outraged and the desperately-seeking-quality-programming in watching BBC1’s Panorama. In spite of the Corporation’s attempts to obliterate one of a hand-full of shows that justify the legalised extortion of the TV license – 27 minutes of surprisingly decent output still managed to find a voice. Seroxat – Glaxo Smith Kline’s answer to Prozac – was found to have some dramatically detrimental effects on the same young people it was supposed to help.
GSK’s own dangerous in-house clinical trials provided clear evidence that depressed teens faired worse on Seroxat than off it. Suicidal tendencies increased under its influence. The PR and marketing men were called in and quickly sold another slice of their soul in return for bodged articles full of fudged evidence in respected medical journals. Over-extended, over-stressed GPs saw the seals of approval and moved quickly to rid themselves of a growing body of patients fast.
“Come in and sit yourself on the examination table, Katie… and tell me what’s wrong… You’re not sleeping?… What are those cuts on your arms?… You feel like ending it all sometimes?… Take this 3 times a day and come back when you need another prescription”
Yet a similar story had been explained in painful detail by one of our very own. For years, Cage Kennelz told anyone who listened how his bi-polarity was forged in the white heat of the Prozac revolution. Check both “The Death of Chris Palko” and the final, eponymous, album track for nods to his story. He tells of being forcibly restrained for unlawful periods of time whilst drugs were trialled on him. Forgettables and disposables are used much like Nazi Germany used labour camp detainees. Echoes of CIA Project MKULTRA still fresh – I was presented with a question.
Why didn’t Cage’s story get more exposure? His most recent album, Hell’s Winter, is that rarest of things in hip-hop; an album to be listened to as a whole rather than a collection of singles and skits. It’s also rare because it is the work of an emcee dealing with concepts of fallibility and imperfection whilst “in character”. His flow is verbose and detailed enough to not be misunderstood or misinterpreted through ignorance of rap’s lexicon. Granted, his horror-core past could partly overshadow his newer lyrical content, but surely at least one Guardianista may have picked up on this story?
Sadly the chain of events follows a very familiar path:
Ignore rap where possible, distort its message where ignorance becomes unprofitable. Cage and the rest of his new label-mates remain ignored by the mainstream whilst NWA and the Wu remain hardcore or comic-book, the respective pattern adhered to.
Great musicians need a groundswell of popularity to survive – and another well of talent threatens to run as dry as the rest of the musical desert. Shove Hell’s Winter and the story of this exceptional talent’s tortured past down as many throats as you can gain access to.
Article by MF Hart
