Culture Bully Interviews Alltruisms

Culture Bully has a feature called Influenza which allows artists to explain the inspirations behind some of their songs. For this edition, the Minneapolis based blog has interviewed Chicago rapper Alltruisms about what inspired him to write his track "Clusterbombs Laos/Me Mix”. Here's a sampling of what Alltruisms wrote:

I took a bus eight hours to a high plains town called Phonsavan. People go there to see an archaeological site called the Plain of Jars, which are fields with hundreds of giant stone jars, 1500-2000 years old, exact use unknown, possibly urns. The area also has a ton of unexploded ordinance (UXO’s), cluster bombs that the U.S. dropped in its “secret war” in Laos. We dropped the equivalent of one planeload of bombs on Laos every eight minutes for nine years, making Laos still the most-bombed country ever. Sometimes we targeted Viet Cong supply lines in Laos, sometimes bombing missions into Vietnam failed for whatever reason, and the pilots had to drop the bombs somewhere because it was too risky to land the planes with bombs on board. These cluster bombs, there were hundreds in each bombshell, and they’re supposed to drop out of the bombshell, spin in the air, and explode as they hit the ground. But about forty percent don’t explode, so they litter the fields, millions of them, and a kid will pick one up and get blown up, or a farmer will hit one while planting his land...

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(Jonathan Graef)
chicagoismildlyinteresting@gmail.com