V.E.R.A. Clique's Fresh Out The Box CD is available at Amoeba Music and other stores but you can also buy it on BART if you're lucky to run into one of its members selling the CD on a random BART (Bay Area Rapid Tranist) train.

The Oakland based group, whose album track "The Movement" is featured on the recent BOMB Hip-Hop Compilation Vol. 2 (also avail at Amoeba), are a talented hard-working hip-hop crew whose pre Oakland roots date back to 2002 to Bend, Oregon where the group's Anderson Ray and Mascen Apollo first crossed paths at a hip-hop event. Fast forward a few years and both hip-hoppers had moved south to Northern California to the Bay Area where they formed the group V.E.R.A. Clique with the name standing for Very Essence of Real Artists.

I first learned about V.E.R.A. Clique only recently and in a most unusual way when, while sitting on the Bay Point / Pittsburg to San Francisco BART, somewhere near the MacArthur stop Mascen Apollo of the group walked by dirt hustlin his crew's CD to BART passengers, all the while keeping a watchful eye out for the BART police who not only frown upon any business been conducted on BART but will arrest perpetrators for doing so. Over  the years I have seen Bay Area hip hop artists sell their  CDs or cassettes at various public places. In bygone years members of Hobo Junctoin or Mystik Journeymen and their extended Living Legends crew would often be found on Durant or Telegraph (outside Amoba) selling their cassettes. But selling on the BART train was a novel approach to hip-hop marketing or distribution that I had not witnessed before. Hence I was anxious to find out more about it so I recently caught up with the V.E.R.A. Clique member Mascen Apollo to ask him about slanging hip-hop on BART.

Madonna falling in Rio back in December got me to thinking, naturally enough, about Mulholland Dr.'s use of "Llorando," Rebekah Del Rio's Spanish cover of "Crying." There's a lot of gravitas to gravity -- with one slip, the reality of artifice can be exposed.  At the club Silencio, when the character of Del Rio (played by Del Rio) falls, but her singing continues, David Lynch is playing around with Bertolt Brecht's epic theater and his notion of estrangement. By having the work remind the audience of the layer of representation intervening between them and the emotions they're experiencing, Brecht hoped to create a more politico-rationally engaged experience -- that is, one of empathy, not sympathy (the former being of intellectual understanding, not the latter's identification).


However, Lynch turns estrangement on its ear by using lip-synching as the emotional crux of his film. If you'll remember, the scene occurs at the point where the fugue world of Betty is fracturing, and the reality of Diane is seeping in. Diane had killed her lover, Camilla, out of jealousy, replacing her in the dream with the amnesiac Rita. Of course Rita can't remember who she is, because she's a manifestation of Diane's oneiric state, a displacement of Camilla, with all the bad stuff repressed. As Rita, she's a ghost, pure desideratum, or Diane's objective (objectified) correlative of the real deal. (In fact, the same applies to Betty; she's Diane's idealized self.) Just as the illusion of the film's representational quality is most exposed (Lynch's "eye of the duck" scene), Betty and Rita begin sobbing -- and (provided the Silencio sequence works properly) the audience along with them.