im broke

Thus I classify this as a disease, a sort of everyday Stockholm syndrome. Everyone shits at the country, even though it's more than fine to live here!

Nothing wrong with emigration, I'd consider it if it wasn't for this unfortunate disease that a good part of the Polish people have, aka. reliance on living in Poland no matter how shit things may get in the country or social life of the county.

"Dude, why are you working at that pizzeria? You should be out of the country with this kind of English skill, seriously, go out and earn some better cash out there".
I didn't know how to reply at all, it was a nice compliment for sure - but I didn't know how to even react.

speaking in broken Ukrainian with em haha. Some taxi driver from Ethiopia I think drove up to the spot and had a very hard time communicating with the employees, so I went ahead and translated everything he said and the other way around. One of the guys at the shop told me something interesting:

thagghbng you auncle

yeaj, i saw that max gilardi pitched a cartoon concept with this character to nickelodeon a while ago and i felt obliged to just sketch it

Michał "Joka" Marten passed away last year in may. That left only one of the original squad alive, Marcin "AbraDab" Marten.
Glad they lived long enough to share their creative efforts with the Polish people. It's something special.

in translation.

Either way, the entirety of the album felt like an actual art form, not just... singing for the sake of it and it sort of helped me to open up to what the genre had to offer, so I started listening and I really wasn't disappointed.

Another reoccurring theme was the mention of marijuana, usually as "Maria" - like St. Mary.

It's hard to put it into words, I made translations of two tracks from the album, and actually having it make sense in English was incredibly difficult. Still, a lot of what the tracks offer is simply lost-

the timeline of the now free III Polish Republic was definitely a shock to both sunday listeners and early diehard fans of the genre.

Hell, one of the singles that drove the hype for the album was "plus i minus +/-", a song about Magik battling his fear of learning the results of his HIV test.

The idea of a bunch of young guys actually referencing Polish literature (eg. the number 44 in the bands name being a reference to Adam Mickiewicz's "Dziady" series), their difficulty in upholding their faith, mentioning their reliance on drugs, their fears - considering that it was so early on-

-books and poems from the era of romanticism, mystical beliefs, and the freedom of expression.

To say that this was a breakthrough in Polish hip-hop would be an understatement, it was a complete change in directions for what the genre stood for so far, and to me it felt like actual art...

In 1996, the formerly mentioned Kaliber 44 album came out, and it was something completely different from what Paktofonika released, both of them sharing members. Kaliber 44's first album was deemed as the first "psycho-rap" genre, characterized by influences from drug induced visions and thoughts-

One of the band members, Piotr "Magik" Łuszcz, killed himself just a few days after the release of the album. This act partially boosted the popularity of the album, but also went against every idea presented on the disk (or cassette). It was unlike anything that happened in the hip-hop community...

The track wasn't just about some bullshit, it was rather lengthy, and about the process of creating and the motivation of self improvement behind it, which a lot of young people back in 2000, when the economy was barely pulling itself out of a dump, thus some could relate to in one way or another.

So, before I even knew of Kaliber 44, the band named Paktofonika was still making rounds on the radio and the internet, with one of the tracks; "Jestem Bogiem" - "I'm a God" instantly being deemed as a classic in the Polish hip-hop circle.