Chang Ch 7 and KRS One readings in Vibe & JoHH

wow... after the group project and the WebCT chat rooms and the quizzes, I feel like the Chang book is the last thing in the world I want to spend time talking about! If I haven't rehashed 3/4 of the sections of the chang reading in some form of assessment or another, then I don't know what...
The KRS One reading was interesting... I remember that I used to be really confused about KRS One, I thought he was a member of the band Sublime for the longest time because as their lead singer Brad Nowell sings (during a jam at the end of one of their albums my friends used to listen to all the time), "And I know... yeah I know because of KRS-One..." (That's the closest thing to an amusing KRS-One story I have!)
Anyhow, it was pretty cool to read about KRS One and how he was incorporating these ideals about pursuit of "knowledge", or our favorite "fifth element" of hip-hop, into the mores we had talked about in class-- the political skepticism and the insistence of pride (I guess I'm trying to say the competitive nature of hip hop, the importance of being the best)...
I wonder if street smart and popular image are inherently contrary to spiritual truths and more cross-cultural kinds of wisdom... it seems like "conscious hip-hop" is only given free reign to extend so far as vague political critiques but it's not allowed to go deeply into issues (Dru talked in class about younger generations not knowing Chuck D and how one young guy said he didn't want to "listen to that black power shit...") or take knowledge and consciousness into self-reflective modes and self-awareness (Like the discussion we had yesterday about Common's latest album being "smiley all the time"...)
Anyhow, rather than right off KRS One as hypocritical, why not do something more daring and insightful and actually hold a pop icon accountable for the things he says... how does someone named after Krishna (footnote: "Krishna of the Krishna religion"? Man the Vibe book is not edited by scholars.... how about "Krishna of the Vaishnava sect of Hinduism"?) who uses the self proclaimed epithet "Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone" bash college education (of which he has never experienced) and a medium as diverse as the written word, claiming that books are all lies?
I think maybe there's something here, something we might be able to make sense out of in one way or another, when conscious rappers are advocating not reading, not going to school... is it more to preserve their own coolness, that they aren't seeing everything as "smiley all the time"? I kind of think of this as a weak sense of character, if that's really what's happenning... if KRS One is not willing to go against the flow and speak his truth that people need some form of education, some form of scholarship to improve their own lives (and I don't necessarily mean getting a masters degree and working for a corporation) then how "conscious" is his message?

Reflection on Hip Hop for October 19th - White women and slam

I think slam is probably my favorite piece of Hip Hop culture. I love the variety of sound and style in slam, I love the wisdom in the poetry and I love the personality in the artists...
I've been getting hooked on Ruckus over the past week so I'm in the musical abundance that is always such an overwhelming awesome experience... I just got Amethyst Rock Star by Saul Williams which works a lot better for me than his second (self entitled) album which is so punk-rock / indie-rock that it's easy for me to lose out in his poems... it's still not the live act transferred to an album experience, but it's a great attempt at that...
I also came across a couple novel experiences... Nellie McKay which is some pretty far out stuff crosses a lot of styles on her first album, "Get Away From Me"-- I think I've passed over this album a billion times in record stores, mistaking it for a Jazz / Singer-Songwriter album (which it kind of is, kind of isn't) the cover is like something you might see on such an album, but when I looked closer, she’s posing in front of a wall of Graff, (reminding me of a story Simon & Garfunkel tell on a live performance of theirs I have—“We had just spent hundreds of dollars and many hours taking photos and picking just the right shot for the cover of our album Wednesday Morning, 3 AM and when we presented it to the executives of the record label, there, painted on the subway wall behind us…” (Laughter) “…was the usual suggestion… then we had to explain to them that that was just the one we wanted to use.”)

Anyhow, Nellie’s album is really abrasive, really fun… I was totally impressed when the third track, “Sari” it’s really evident the hip hop influence that has come in…. the lyrics are great, as with her other songs, but she really is rapping them, which is a cool sound in the context of an anti-folk album, where her other songs sound as if they are somewhere between regina spektor and norah jones… it’s worth downloading that track from ruckus for some good fun :)

This leads into the next person I wanted to talk about, Alix Olson… a friend recommended me her stuff after a conversation about Ani DiFranco… that was actually several years ago, and I’d never come across Alix’s work… however, I’d heard her referenced as a great slam / spoken word poet recently, and so I thought to check for her on ruckus.. they have her full first album available which is totally amazing…

I’m very at home with Alix’s style—the common string on amazon that I’ve seen is that she just rips off Ani’s style, but being a dedicated Ani fan and basically coming of age listening to her music and poetry, I have to say that even when Alix’s sound is indistinguishable, having another artist doing that style is welcome…

However, the slam poet in me is so-so tempted to say that the rhymes are not slam… If anyone wants do grab some of these tracks on Ruckus and start a dialogue about them, I’d be happy as a pig in shit… (I can’t believe I said that)….

Blog Readings 3 & 4 -- Race and Class in the States

Plight deepens for Black Men

Some quotes and comments from the article:

“Especially in the country's inner cities, the studies show, finishing

high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and

prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks

even as urban crime rates have declined.”

This is strange, it’s really foreign to the experience of life in the suburbs, where it seems like all people have this erroneous perception that education is free and easy for all people everywhere and that drop outs are somehow “defective” “rebellious” or even “dangerous”…

"Many of these men grew up fatherless, and they never had good

role models," said Mr. Jones, who overcame addiction and prison

time. "No one around them knows how to navigate the mainstream

society." --

Even more remote to my experience! What does it mean to not know how to navigate the mainstream society? I think I’ve so much been steeped in “mainstream society” via media and middle class surroundings that I don’t directly experience what it is to be outside of that… one thought I had about what it means to not “know how to navigate…” would be a tendency / habit of returning to underground culture, and so I wonder if this statement isn’t a polished way of saying that Black men are time and again turning to drug dealing, gangs, and other kinds of criminalized “non-mainstream society.”

“The second special factor is related to an otherwise successful

policy: the stricter enforcement of child support. Improved

collection of money from absent fathers has been a pillar of welfare

overhaul. But the system can leave young men feeling overwhelmed

with debt and deter them from seeking legal work, since a large

share of any earnings could be seized.”

Another way that the author has packed up the same “non mainstream society” stuff? Hrm… this was definitely an interesting article!

As far as the “Minority population pattern changes” article is concerned, I felt it didn’t exactly speak to the discourse of racial hegemony and inner city experience that I was hoping it might elicit. While demographic are always interesting from a Sociological perspective, analysis of implications (and contributing factors) was a bit lacking in this article. I found the most interesting part of the article to be the last paragraph, though it seemed like an afterthought of the general article. I wondered why, as the article portrays, Washington has one of the highest rates of urban immigration across ethnic lines. The closing sentence aroused my curiosity: “Unlike many diverse areas, the Washington region gained enough whites to rank 10th for numerical increase.” This made me reflect on a conversation I had recently, someone was describing how the building of nice apartment buildings and shopping areas in otherwise ‘bad parts’ of DC was creating a renovation of many parts of the city, and encouraging middle class people to move back into the city, a contrast to the “white exodus” that many cities experienced when suburbs flourished under the influence of GI Bill in the 40s and 50s.

Talking Trash: bell hooks in dialogue on the movie "Crash"

I wanted to say something in class when the movie Crash was mentioned because I was aware of this article, but I kept my mouth shut since I hadn't read it yet...
Trash on Crash
Anyhow, I'm reading it now, I'll comment on this post with my thoughts...
I have to say though, I really loved the movie... I saw it a year ago when it was all the buzz in my Gender Representations in Popular Culture class... which is interesting, since that class owed a lot to the work of bell hooks, so I'm pretty ready to hear what she has to say about it!

Reflection on Hip Hop for October 12th

I was channel surfing while I ate lunch the other day and there was an astounding amount of "nothing on"... I got to VH1 and I was kind of surprised that they were airing rap-- VH1 was always the slightly weak rock and pop holdout when I was in high school, the last time I really had much time and access to cable for channel surfing (not to suggest I have lots of free time now, but I have cable since I moved in with my stepdad)
Anyhow, I was surprised by what they were showing-- not rap videos or anything but like reality shows about hip hop culture... kinda. One was a preview of an upcoming show: Ice Cube taking suburban middle school students around the Bronx and showing them that the hood was a positive place, the preview showed Cube trying to teach the kids to be emcees and the whole crew walking around the Bronx...
After the preview ended, the general programming was about "the ghetto pass", talking about honoring White people who were "keepin it real" and being "authentic" in living life in the hood-- they talked a bit about eminem and gave Vanilla Ice as a counter example, they talked about how no Black people in the interviews actually had any clue what the word "wigger" meant (they laughed, "Yeah, that was probably made up by white people...") and they talked a bit about a really interesting guy I'd never heard of -- Mr White Folks, a white pimp who commented "You can't just come into the ghetto and act a certain way-- people will laugh at you... you have to live here for years before you're accepted." I turned off the television.
When I got Dru's e-mail about this week's reading, the link was messed up for me... I tried to correct it by taking out some of the stray characters, and wound up with an article about Black people in the Indie Rock movement that was a quick and interesting read...
Indie rock article
Anyway, I'm not sure if we were supposed to read that, but combined with Mr White Folks... (hrm.. let me find a link, I'm sure this guy has a page...) Hrm... Maybe he is a real street pimp, I can't find his homepage! Anyway, he's featured in this documentary: Pimps up, Hos down (I'm not attesting to having looked at that site! It warns abt adult content and I'm not in the mood!)
All that combined with the Styles P article has me thinking more and more about race in hip hop the week... I don't know... I feel like white people are at times really full of it when they do the hip hop thing sometimes... it totally depends on the person though... so much of our social identities are just big inflated acts... that said, in the States especially people of our generation are so self obsessed... who really cares who "you are" who gives two shits about "your statement"? For real... go make a change in the world and quit being so self important... It's tricky as college students because our role is to study and write and all that, but still, people walk around like knowing the latest CDs is going to make a difference in anyone's lives... what crap. People talk about holier than though stuff because they listen to "conscious" hip hop or because they're too good for hip hop or something, but it's seems to me that the point of "conscious" anything is that you go out and spread that word, you make an impact...
I was interviewing a Mason faculty for my capstone class and he mentioned how one folk singer who sang all these conscious activism songs said in an interview "Yeah, I don't go and do anything in these global situations, my role is just to sing about them" And that's fine... I don't mind if the artists aren't out feeding the poor, but the people who are buying into their stuff as an identity should be doing something... spreading the word or doing some service... instead people just get off on themselves "Yeah, I know all about everything hip hop" or "everything punk" or "everything rock" (or "Everything classical") Who cares?
That's definitely not where I thought I was going with this blog, but hey, it's good for what it is... Yeah, race and hip hop... I guess I'll save that for another time :)

Race in Hip-Hop

This article was pretty interesting-- I tend to like (what I think of as) conscious hip-hop and that was cited in the article as that "positive Black Sh**" that still used the word Black and discussed race. What I mean to say is that I really didn't notice that race *wasn't* being discussed in Hip-Hop, I had thought it was always one of the underlying ideas / socio-political views like we had talked about in class-- how African American communities were treated by and related with other communities.
Minister Farakhan's quote was really informative about the evolution of the usage of 'negro' (I could have used more info there), 'black', and 'African American'... that being said, as much as his words strengthen the article, and for all the great work Farakhan has done with branching out to more communities and being more inclusive of women of recent years (Re: Millions More March) I was a bit surprised and turned off that as recently as 2005 (when he was quoted) he was using the language of "the enemy" which, if I read that right, he means White people... that seems myopic to me. I think what isn't getting communicated here is that political-corporate regimes which have close ties with the media are the agents of power in our society. Absolutely, these regimes are in the power of white anglo saxon men in Western European countries and America, but as much as this is a "White" power, it's also a patriarchal, heteronormative power. It operates as the ruling class and the economic elites in nations all over the world. Social power and specifically social power that puts others into oppression can not be essentialized to be called "white", and that term "white" cannot then be given the epithet of "the enemy." Minister Farakhan seems to be burning bridges where he might have allies and I know there's a lot more history to Farakhan and the Nation of Islam than I am aware of, but I can't help but assert that this is simply not how I view the world and race dynamics. But maybe that's because at the end of the day, I can't take off my white skin and maybe I am handicapped by my racial lens. But why, I plead, is there no one who can help me understand positions like Farakhan's Black Nationalism when I'm doing all I can to understand?

Encounters of the Hip-Hop Kind

September 28, 2006
Log

Thursday, September 14th.
I was walking through the JC after exercising and doing some homework. Even though it was midnight, there was a small group of people break-dancing outside of the cinema. I was definitely impressed that they were going so late (and wondering why such ardent dancers weren’t going to a club?) I also saw people break-dancing there on Monday and once or twice more in the week.

Friday, September 15th.
In the late morning, I kind of wanted to procrastinate starting my day. I started watching the Boondocks TV Series that I had recently gotten. I had never seen the TV show before, but I loved the comic strip, even though it was over my head half the time. The TV show was a lot more accessible—I think I’ve now seen four more episodes in the past two weeks.

Saturday, September 16th.
While channel surfing in the morning, I came across the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which I honestly forgot existed. I must have seen like 75% of the episodes as they came out while I was growing up. I thought it was funny that I had forgotten something that was really an important example of hip hop in my life.
I went to DC that day and of course saw some graffiti in Northwest, where I was. It said “evolve,” and I definitely appreciated the positive message. My parents were also commenting on how someone had tagged our neighbors house before they had even moved in, (it was constructed over the summer) so I went across the street to see the tag. Interesting how graffiti was blatant vandalism and really stupid stuff in one incident and more like a work of art in another.

Sunday, September 17th.
I was driving in Rockville and saw a poster for the Wire’s new season at a bus-stop. I thought of this and remembered how you had mentioned that “If you really want to get a sense of Hip-Hop culture, you should watch the Wire.”
I listened to Matisyahu later that day. I was really curious to hear him because he’s been pumped up as the Yiddish Rapper. I was a little let down because the show I had was all reggae, no raps. A few days later I listened to Michael Franti and Spearhead and thought how they are hip-hop artists, or at least artists that are heavily influenced by hip-hop.

Monday, September 18th.
In my Queer Studies class, we watched a really powerful video called Tongues Untied. The video was about the urban homosexual African American male experience. They incorporated rhymes and protest chants and dance into a really powerful kind of performance art, and, as a documentary, it talked about the lives of the artists and other art projects they were involved in. I thought it was really amazing, and a nice step outside of the “Misogyny, Homophobia, Xenocentricism” part of Hip-Hop that you mentioned last class.

Thursday, September 21st.
I was surfing and came across a video on YouTube called “White Boy Steppin’.” I then linked up to a lot of different stepping videos. I don’t know much about this, and I think it’s the first time I really came across this as its own form of art. It seems very derivative of different African dances I’ve seen, and the videos I saw were all (except for “White Boy Steppin”) of young Black men and women. I was wondering if this would be considered part of Hip-Hop culture.

Saturday, September 23rd.
I listened to a whole lot of Democracy Now! Recordings as I drove today. I heard a Lebanese rapper in a segway during a show on Israel-Palestine. Another show featured a rap by Dr. Cornel West, and Dr. West spoke (in the interview) about the power of Hip-Hop as a tool of social change. The last show I listened to was on the Hip-Hop Convention, and they interviews with Michael Eric Dyson and Russell Simmons.