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Shuffled! is a weekly column appearing every Thursday here on BPRLive. Each week, we welcome a person from the APA community to share some thoughts about the music they listen to. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past articles.

Today’s Shuffler: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer mixed Sri Lankan high femme powerhouse. The author of Consensual Genocide, she’s toured North America and Sri Lanka multiple times on a shoestring. Her writing is published in (inhale) Colonize This, We Don’t Need Another Wave, Homelands, Without a Net, Femme, Brazen Femme, Dangerous Famillies and A Girls’ Guide to Taking Over the World (basically if you took Intro to Women of Color Studies you’ve read her), and she writes for Bitch, Colorlines, Hyphen, Make/Shift and a bunch of other magazines.

She is the co-founder of the Mangos With Chili annual queer and trans people of color roving performance art roadshow and Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School. Her one woman show, Grown Woman Show, just had its Bay Area debut at the 2008 National Queer Arts Festival and will be produced by the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center at SomArts for 2009. She is also the cofounder of The Femme Sharks, a bunch of loud femme queer girls of color who like to eat, scream loud, come hard and defend our communities. She is currently busy enjoying Oakland after running away from America, specifically Worcester, Mass, for a decade, and trying to finish her next two books despite the distractions of her new scraper trike with the speaker in the back.

Her websites are brownstargirl.com and myspace.com/leahlakshmi

And she shuffled this up…

“Just Fine”
Mary J. Blige
This song is like Oxycontin. It’s probably why queer people of color play it over and over again, we need some fucking Oxycontin in our lives most days. Sad but true, it’s also the only good song MJB has done in like five years. After a recent breakup, I went to the East Bay Church of Religious Science - imagine a queer Black Unitarian church in Oakland and you pretty much have it, I also call it “the church people go to before Butta,” Butta being the giant screaming Oakland QTPOC dance party with five hundred folks and 15 year old baby studs and one bathroom. Anyway, no shit, the choir was singing “Just Fine” as a hymn. My BFF got a girl’s number from bumping hips with her in the pew and I didn’t feel so sad anymore after singing along with other QPOC, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah, OOOOH!”

“Pussy Control”
Prince
I hit refresh on the Songs Recently Played three times, this still came up. Guess this says something about me.

“Paper Planes”
MIA
The ultimate Lankan homegirl single. Even better than shouting out mango pickle in a song or representing Colombo (the first time this has ever happened in the history of hiphop) in the first album. *All I wanna do is (bang bang bang) and (ka-ching, ka-ching) and take your money. Go anywhere I want, I got visas in my name.* Yep. Sums it all up. I hope she didn’t really quit the music business like it said on the Livejournal Pull Up the People community last week, or if she did that her and Jean Grae, my other wife, are on Secret Indie Brown Lady Rapper Island making plans to destroy America.

“No Easy Answers”
Invincible
“LOVE!” One of the best MCs to come out of the original all female Anomolies crew of the late 90s and early Zeros, holy shit is she talented. Holy shit is she lyrically tight, like in that way where you go to the show and your jaw is just dropped open the entire time from how she puts words together. Also, she is the person that straight girls and other studs go, “I’m not really into studs, but whoa, Ilana…” about. (I probably could’ve gotten on the list except that I almost accidentally hit her in the face while gesturing loudly at the club. Who knows, maybe she found that endearing.) Also, provided the soundtrack for the “Lebanon 911″ PSA Suheir Hammad, Danny Hoch and other folks did in 2006. Also, has an obviously huge heart, and is an anti-zionist Jewish genderqueer rapper from Detroit who works with Detroit Summit, and Talib loves her, and she remembers and worked with J Dilla, and okay, awesome name. Go get it already: myspace.com/invinciblena.

“Welcome to the Terrordome”
Pharoah Monche
The day Sean Bell’s killers got off, I drove really slow through Oakland playing this on Beena’s car’s CD player. Horrible day, great song. Very loud, angry and perfect to be blasting through the streets.. Great album, in fact. Every single cut is a banger and it actually works as a whole album, not a collection of singles. A remake of PE for the Zeros with Sean Bell, Al Queda and Lebanon references. “I got so much trouble on my mind…. refuse to lose!”

“No Label”
Gabriel Teodros
This song got me through a bad moment midway through my first semester of grad school. I’d go to the student lounge on class breaks and watch the video on YouTube to stop myself from wanting to strangle white women named Emily and feeling totally discombobulated amidst the conference tables, green trees and huge razor wire fence dividing the same from the rest of East Oakland. The video is a bunch of brown folks in Seattle bouncing in front of a fucked-up house. There is one camera, and Gabriel is wearing a hoodie that says, “I heart my melanin.”. This helped me remember who my people actually are and reminded me of the simple joys of Resistance = Life, and Brown Folks Bouncing Up and Down. Nerdy emo Seattle hiphop boys of color rock my world! PS: mixed kid props to Gabriel for writing “East Africa” and including a killer, ultimate mixed kid moment where intro when he’s like, “You Ethiopian man? Yeah, me too,” and the dude is like, “You are? No you’re not!” and then some words in the mothertongue are exchanged and there is hugging. We’ve all been there, except sometimes the hugging doesn’t happen.

Last 5 posts by shuffled

• Shuffled! Eugenius - August 21st, 2008
• Shuffled! Delia - August 14th, 2008
• Shuffled! Giles Li - August 7th, 2008
• Shuffled! Alexander Chee - July 31st, 2008
• Shuffled! Terry Park - July 24th, 2008

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