Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

More Beef Protests In Korea

Seoul in motion.

Speaking to a group of businessmen at his office, Mr. Lee gave his first comment on the massive rally against his four-month-old government that brought at least 100,000 people into the streets of Seoul on Tuesday and prompted his entire cabinet to offer to resign.

The beef protests have dealt a sharp blow to Mr. Lee, who was elected in December championing a new “pragmatic” approach to ties with Washington.

He made rebuilding South Korea’s political and economic alliance with the United States his top priority, while taking a much harder line on North Korea than his predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun.

Bush administration officials have expressed hopes that Mr. Lee’s firm stance on North Korea’s nuclear program, which reversed South Korea’s previous policy to embrace its neighbor, could persuade the North to end its nuclear program. North Korea promised to dismantle its nuclear weapons facilities under an international accord that has yet to achieve lasting results.

Both Mr. Lee and President Bush also hoped that Mr. Lee’s decision in April to end the five-year ban on American beef would help win support in Congress for a free-trade agreement struck between the governments last year, thus improving relations while helping to revive the sluggish South Korean economy.

But some South Korean analysts say Mr. Lee may now come under pressure to take a less accommodating line with Washington.

Mr. Lee was himself a former student activist imprisoned by the country’s then military regime. During the current protests, many student protesters called Mr. Lee “authoritarian” and in his comments Wednesday the president appeared to have understood the irony.

“As a former participant in a pro-democracy student movement myself, I had many thoughts watching yesterday’s demonstration,” Mr. Lee was quoted as saying by his office. “My government intends to have a new beginning with a new resolution.”

…

Seoul reverberated with antigovernment slogans until well past midnight. While people marched by candlelight, loudspeakers blared the songs South Koreans used to sing during their struggle against the military dictators of the 1970s and 1980s.

The protests Tuesday took place on the 21st anniversary of the huge pro-democracy demonstrations that helped end authoritarian rule. Overhead, balloons carried banners that said “Judgment day for Lee Myung-bak” and “Renegotiate the beef deal.” One widely distributed leaflet said, “Mad cow drives our people mad!”

The agriculture minister, Chung Won-chun, visited the protest site to offer an apology in a speech, but protesters quickly surrounded him, chanting “Traitor!” and he was forced to leave.

Mr. Lee urged the police and protesters to avoid clashes. He promised to be “humble before the people’s voices” and called for national unity to overcome an economic crisis spawned by stagnant growth and surging prices for oil and other raw materials.

posted by Jeff Chang @ 6:44 am | 0 Comments

Monday, June 9th, 2008

Robots Take Credit For Clinton Defeat

The robots declare victory over the Clintons.

Really, what’s not to love about robots, especially if they live to avenge hip-hop or if they look like Grace Park?

posted by Jeff Chang @ 1:27 pm | 0 Comments

Friday, June 6th, 2008

Into The Mind Of Ned Sublette

Credits:: Ned Sublette, Jennifer Kotter and Bomb Magazine

Bomb Magazine’s website features an interview with Ned Sublette by the great Jamaican-American journalist Garnette Cadogan. It’s an amazing read, offering Ned’s bracing worldview via the history of New Orleans.

It’s a taster of the complete argument he lays out in The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, a red pill of a book that reframes the entirety of American history and music. Fuck what you know about John Adams or Bob Dylan. (Understand: no disrespect intended at all, but I believe with a convert’s zeal that Ned’s works ought to be as widely known and debated as Greil Marcus’s.) In fact, forget even the notion that America is defined by what Chuck D has called the “48 state box”. Ned’s outside-the-box thinking begins with an expansive definition of “America” that points directly to a post-George W. Bush world.

Ned has been one of the most influential intellectuals on me over the past few years, transforming the way I understand hip-hop’s music, its history, and its future. If I had written CSWS after digesting Ned’s works, it likely would have been a much different book.

So devour this interview with Garnette, and then run to get his two masterpieces, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, and The World That Made New Orleans:

Garnette …New Orleans is both a place and idea. Moreover, as place and idea, people like to think of it as difference. You, however, insist that it’s both a peculiar and representative American spot.

Ned Not merely a peculiar spot, but the logical outcome of competing international forces.

GC Your argument, then, is that New Orleans is at the crux of America’s…

NS At the absolute crossroads of American history! Over and over again. Including now.

GC New Orleans—distinctly American and singularly un-American!

NS I use the word “American” in its larger sense, always, so I think it’s extremely American. It’s the most American city in a lot of ways.

GC Other cities can justifiably make that claim. Your fellow New Yorkers, among others, will surely take you to task. How is New Orleans the most American?

NS The most fully realized, in that it participated in all of the waves of culture that rolled across the hemisphere, practically. The French, the Spanish, the Anglo-American, each of which was associated with a different black wave: the Bambara, the Bakongo, the Baptists. From 1769 to 1803—that was a transcendental moment in history, the last third of the 18th century—Spain held Louisiana during the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, three events of maximum impact on world history, and each of which affected Louisiana vitally. During the Spanish period, New Orleans became a city. It became a port of importance. I think that there are a variety of reasons, which I discuss in the book, why the Spanish years in New Orleans have been so consistently underplayed in importance, but I see them as absolutely crucial to understanding the town.

GC And New Orleans itself is crucial to understanding America. After all, its history is replete with the perennial American themes and struggles: self-making, liberty, equality, immigration, pluralism, religion, the tension between Europe and America, the influence of the South, and so on. And, of course: frontier.

NS New Orleans was the Wild West! In many ways, it never stopped being the Wild West. A place where you might see a gunfight on a main street. You still might see that. It had that image from very early on. When Thomas Jefferson annexed it, it went from being El Norte, the northernmost edge of the Saints and Festivals Belt, to being the West. We often think of it as the South, but you have to think of the Civil War in terms of both the South and the West, because a primary determinant in forcing the issue of civil was whether or not slave traders could expand their markets into the new western territories, the ones beyond New Orleans. DeBow’s Review, the Fortune magazine of the slaveowning South, published in New Orleans, was DeBow’s Review of the South and the West. New Orleans was the South and West.

Garnette: Picking up on your idea of perception…there are few ideas as central to the American character as renewal and transformation—as Ted Widmer brilliantly shows in Ark of the Liberties: America and the World, “[W]hat idea has been more powerful in [America’s] history than the hope that something wonderful…waits over the next horizon?”—and what is New Orleans if not a place of renewal and transformation? (Though I can already hear a host of people objecting that this Babylon of a place is anything but!) In your book you emphasize how music is crucial to the city’s formation and renewal; for you, music is a skeleton key that unlocks New Orleans’s history and reveals its character.

Ned: Absolutely. I look at music as a key to understanding history. In my books I use music as a tool for reading history, and vice versa…

Read the whole interview here.

posted by Jeff Chang @ 9:03 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

R16 2008 Hi-Res Video Of Finals & Semis

For hi-res videos from the entire contest + interviews, go to the Imeem R16 homepage.

posted by Jeff Chang @ 3:02 pm | 1 Comment

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Obama, The New Majority, And The Race (Card) Ahead

Last night Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination with grace and poise, a history-making achievement that neither John McCain or Hillary Clinton could bring themselves to recognize.

One hundred thirty six years after Frederick Douglass became the first African American on a presidential ticket (as vice presidential candidate for the Equal Rights Party) and 36 years after Shirley Chisholm’s path-breaking Democratic presidential run, Obama attained the necessary number of delegates to become the first African American presidential candidate for the Democratic Party.

He dedicated the night to his grandmother. He has described her as a white woman not immune to the prejudices of an earlier era but who now lives comfortably with multiracial brood in Hawai’i. Surely she would understand the historical significance of her grandson’s victory.

On the other hand, Hillary dedicated her night to her 18 million voters, many of whom chanted “Denver!” as if they wanted to fight on until the Democratic Convention in August. If Hillary’s speech was meant to be a tribute to those who helped her in a hard-fought campaign, the images of her rabidly desperate followers reduced it to something like a shocking display of vanity.

Obama won only after one of the most racially divisive election seasons in history. Despite his desire to remain Jackie Robinson-like, his opponents raised race as soon as he began to rack up a series of surprising wins.

Progressive feminists like Gloria Steinem suggested–without much evidence–that the wave of support for Obama’s candidacy was a sign that gender discrimination remained more immovable than racial discrimination.

Later, former President Bill Clinton dismissed Obama’s win in South Carolina by comparing it to failed presidential candidate Jesse Jackson’s wins in 1984 and 1988. Black voters vote for black candidates, after all, he suggested.

And in the last two months, as the contest shifted to states where Appalachian voters play a key role, Hillary Clinton suggested that she was the candidate of white working-class voters.

Newsweek’s cover story, “Memo to Senator Obama”, cites surveys showing 45% of white voters hold unfavorable views of Obama, as opposed to 35% for McCain. (Non-whites’ unfavorable numbers for Obama are half as much.)

So author Ethan Thomas gives Obama a primer on how to win back white voters. He writes that despite Internet lies–Obama is Muslim, he believes the national anthem conveys a warlike message, he’s sympathetic to terrorists, etc.–Obama should play it soft on race:

It’s hard to think of what would turn off whites quicker than playing the thin-skinned victim.

Thomas seems to have already forgotten that, in the middle of a racialized firestorm not of his own making, Obama delivered one of the most nuanced and sensible speeches on race in decades.

Thomas also urges Obama to take a position “that plays against prejudice or typecasting”: to oppose affirmative action as “a powerful signal” to white working-class voters allegedly enraged at black privilege. For his part, Obama has said he is for affirmative action, but has expressed doubts about whether his own daughters should benefit from such policies.

Thomas may be correct that white, working-class voters will remain a key battleground in the general election. Polls have shown that as much as one-third of Hillary’s base may desert Obama in the general election by voting for McCain or staying home.

But Obama may only need to win a portion of those voters, some are lost to him in any case, and it’s not clear that reversing himself on the wedge issues of the 80s and 90s gains anything for him as much it loses his base.

Much of the mainstream media’s attention has been on the “ignored” white working-class voters of the heartland. They may be the most documented “ignored” demographic in history. You might remember this media-homogenized group as the Silent Majority, the Reagan Democrats, the NASCAR electorate, the Kansas voters, etc.

But Obama’s candidacy rests on a new electoral landscape.

Obama has reaped the benefits of demographic shifts that Jackson foresaw over two decades ago in plotting his own campaign–the emergence of sizable communities of color and a progressive, multicultural generation of voters. In 2050, more than half the U.S. will be of color. But 2008 may be the year that this electorate arrives.

Urban gentrification in the West has led to an African American exodus back to the South, forming emerging majorities of long-time residents and new urban migrants. Obama’s stunning primary victories may portend part of the South’s swing back to blue.

Although Latinos voted largely for Clinton in the primaries, and Asian Americans appeared split, there are still few indications that they may shift to McCain. To his credit, McCain recognizes that we are a country that remains pro-immigrant. But after years of race-baiting campaigns, McCain’s party has thoroughly alienated Latinos and Asian Americans. At the same time, the war, the environment and the domestic politics of abandonment and containment have made young voters the most Democratic-leaning in generations.

McCain clearly faces a tougher time making his case than Obama, whose own story parallels the immigrant story and whose energy has inspired the young. With an uninspired Republican base, it seems McCain needs the race card more than Hillary ever did, yet he plays it only at his–and his party’s–future peril. Over the next four decades, the demographics are hardly with them.

As much as the Clintons depended on an old majority, Obama could be handing Democrats the new majority. But the Democrats aren’t much different than the record industry: give them a sure thing and they’ll always figure out how to screw it up.

As Marjorie Valbrun of TheRoot.com wrote in the same issue of Newsweek this week:

A woman educated at Yale and Wellesley who can afford to lend her campaign $20 million becomes the standard-bearer for working-class white people? She’s clearly not a coal miner’s daughter. So how did she do this? She appealed to their most base racial fears and resentments. It’s worth remembering that Clinton started the race with a large base of black support. Then she made it easy for black women to abandon her.

Obama is the son of a white working-class family from Kansas, and a Black farming family from Kenya. Only in America, he has said, a new America.

If the Dems don’t want to be abandoned by the new America, they would do well in the coming weeks to bring closure to the divisive primary season not by pandering to old resentments, but by waking up to the future.

Also Worth Reading:

+ John Zogby on The End of Boomerism

posted by Jeff Chang @ 9:17 am | 1 Comment

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

R16 2008 Wrap

Top 9 Crew’s prize-winning show from night 1 of R16.

UPDATE: JUNE 5 :: Click here for the high-quality Imeem version of the Semis & Finals.

Back home from R16…

If you hadn’t heard already, here’s how it went down:

Best Show: Top 9 (Russia)
Battle Semifinal: Riverz (Korea) vs. Top 9 (Russia), Winner: Top 9

The video is here, but warning to the purists out there…it’s edited. (Not sure if it was edited for TV or by the Youtube poster.) This starts about 2-3 minutes into the battle right after Russian B-Boy Robin’s controversial chinky-eye taunt–he’s the b-boy with the cap and stripes–although it does get C-4’s response–he’s the b-boy in the black tee. The incident that preceded this included a little dustup between Korean b-boy Physics and Russian b-boy Flying Buddha. Physics entered the cypher before Flying Buddha was finished.

Battle Semifinal: Gamblerz (Korea) vs. Brasil All-Stars, Winner: Gamblerz

4th Place ($1000): Riverz
3rd Place ($4000): Brasil
(Check the battle here.)

2nd Place ($10,000): Top 9
Champs ($15,000): Gamblerz

UPDATE: JUNE 5 :: The semis and finals are here.

Gamblerz announced they will be going next to do some benefit performances in China and will be donating their winnings and a portion of their earnings this summer to the victims in Myanmar and China.

In other news, the success of Benson Lee’s indie “Planet B-Boy”–which opened last week in Canada on its continuing run–may have helped seal a $25 million Hollywood signing for the Young Films production company project, “Hype Nation”. Gamblerz, who played prominent roles in Planet B-Boy, will be featured as the chief dancefloor opponents of teen idol Omarion and his crew, B2K.

Check all the R16 video highlights here.

More soon from me in feature-length form…

posted by Jeff Chang @ 8:59 am | 0 Comments

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Feed Me!

Revolutions

DJ Nu-Mark :: Take Me With You
DJ Nu-Mark remixes the diaspora…party ensues!
El General + Various Artists :: Mish B3eed : Khalas Mixtape V. 1
The crew at Enough Gaddafi bring the most important mixtape of 2011–the street songs that launched the Tunisian & Egyptian Revolutions…
J. Period + Black Thought + John Legend :: Wake Up! Radio mixtape
Remixing the classic LP w/towering contributions from Rakim, Q-Tip + Mayda Del Valle
Lyrics Born :: As U Were
Bright production + winning rhymes in LB’s most accessible set ever
Model Minority :: The Model Minority Report
The SoCal Asian American rap scene that produced FM keeps surprising…
Mogwai :: Hardcore Won't Die But You Will
Dare we call it majestic?
Taura Love Presents :: Picki People Volume One
From LA via Paris with T-Love, the global post-Dilla generation goes for theirs…

Word

Cormac McCarthy :: Blood Meridian
Read this now before Hollywood f*#ks it up.
Dave Tompkins :: How To Wreck A Nice Beach
Book of the decade, nuff said.
Joe Flood :: The Fires
The definitive account of why the Bronx burned
Mark Fischer :: Capitalist Realism
K-Punk’s philosophical manifesto reads like his blog, snappy and compelling. Just replace pop music with post-post-Marxism. Pair with Josh Clover’s 1989 for the full hundred.
Nell Irvin Painter :: The History of White People
Well worth a Glenn Beck rant…and everyone’s scholarly attention
Robin D.G. Kelley :: Thelonious Monk : The Life And Times Of An American Original
Monk as he was meant to be written
Tim Wise :: Colorblind
Wise’s call for a color-conscious agenda in an era of “post-racial” politics is timely
Victor Lavalle :: Big Machine
Victor Lavalle does it again!

Fiyahlinks

++ Total Chaos
The acclaimed anthology on the hip-hop arts movement
ARC
Asian Law Caucus | Arc of 72
AWOL Inc Savannah
B+ | Coleman
Boggs Center
Center For Media Justice
Center For Third World Organzing
Chinese For Affirmative Action
Color of Change
ColorLines
Dan Charnas
Danyel Smith
Dave Zirin
Davey D
Disgrasian
DJ Shadow
Elizabeth Mendez Berry
Ferentz Lafargue
Giant Robot
Hip-Hop Theater Festival
Hua Hsu
Humanity Critic
Hyphen Magazine
Jalylah Burrell
Jay Smooth
Joe Schloss
Julianne Shepherd
League of Young Voters
Lyrics Born
Mark Anthony Neal
Nate Chinen
Nelson George
Okay Player
Oliver Wang + Junichi Semitsu :: Poplicks
Pop + Politics
Presente
Quannum
Raquel Cepeda
Raquel Rivera
Rob Kenner
Sasha Frere-Jones
The Assimilated Negro
Theme Magazine
Toure
Upper Playground
Wayne Marshall
Wiretap Magazine
Wooster Collective
Youth Speaks

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