Friday, May 18th, 2007

Me On Betty Davis


They Said She Was Different…

Here’s a piece I did in today’s Chron on the great Betty Davis. (MP3s included at the link!) Hers is an amazing and still mysterious story.

There’s more here, here and here, plus here is an interview with my non-alter ego O-Dub, whose brilliant liner notes by rights ought to win him an ASCAP award. Of course, if you haven’t seen the latest Wax Poetics, with its cover story by John Ballon, it’s great stuff.

Bay Area music producer Greg Errico knows something about artist buzz. He used to drum for a band called Sly and the Family Stone. But he can’t believe the hum he’s hearing now about an artist he produced decades ago: the mysterious funk queen and rocker Betty Mabry Davis.

“She never had big commercial success. We did this 35 years ago. And she’s been a recluse for large parts of that,” he says. But at a recent National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences function, he adds, veteran musicians were buzzing about her as if she were a brand-new sensation.

“I’ve got a half-dozen interview requests,” he says. “We’ve got the Sly and the Family Stone reissues that just came out. But there’s about a notch more interest in Betty.”

This month, the Afroed beauty, circa ’73, graces the cover of hipster music journal Wax Poetics magazine, and today, indie label Light in the Attic Records re-releases lovingly packaged versions of her first two albums, “Betty Davis” and “They Say I’m Different,” both cut in San Francisco in the early ’70s.

The woman once known mainly for being the former Mrs. Miles Davis is belatedly being acknowledged as one of the most influential artists of the funk era. Carlos Santana, Joi, Talib Kweli and Ice Cube have declared their fandom. Her sway over Macy Gray, Erykah Badu and Amy Winehouse is clear.

On the cover of her 1973 debut, she tilts coquettishly and flashes a million-dollar smile. Her thigh-high silver space boots seem to go on forever. But when her music begins — written and arranged by her during a time when few black women were given such artistic license — she shreds any idea that she is just another pretty face.

In the course of a single verse, she teases, pouts, snarls, taunts and rages. “It’s like she’s here in the room with you right now and she’s basically caressing you and slapping you,” says Chris Estey of Light in the Attic. “She is really confronting you with her womanhood, with her desires, with her complications, with ideas.”

“All you lady haters don’t be cruel to me,” she sings on the opener, “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up.” “Oh, don’t you crush my velvet, don’t you ruffle my feathers neither! Said I’m crazy, I’m wild. I said I’m nasty.” …

posted by @ 8:02 am | 1 Comment

Friday, May 18th, 2007

Is KRS-One Dissing You?

I’ve been getting a steady stream of emails from fam this past week over this new song by KRS and Marley Marl called “I Was There” in which he knocks “so-called objective rap historians”. They’re concerned KRS-One is dissing me.

Nah, don’t worry! Even if he was, I got a strong ego to try to step on anyway.

I really do think that the event at Stanford that gathered hip-hop scholars, journalists, and at least one agitated rapper last year has something to do with him doing this track. (I wasn’t there. Had a niece’s first birthday to go to back home.)

The beef that opened up there has been squashed so there is no need to go over that again. But apparently Kris is still mad about the ways rap history is being written. Note that he didn’t say “hip-hop history” or “hip-hop generation history”.

Anyway, given that history, it’s amazing that he’s teamed up with his former nemesis Marley Marl, and although I don’t think “I Was There” is that great, I think “Hip-Hop Lives” could be the best work both have done in years.

Honestly, I’m a little jealous of this video. It’s just really well done, and might save you the work of having to read 800+ pages (even though it shouldn’t!)

So no fam, it’s all love out here in the Yay…

posted by @ 8:01 am | 5 Comments

Friday, May 18th, 2007

New Times/VVM Sells East Bay Express

A former employee tipped me to this article:

The change could benefit readers by marginally increasing competition in a Bay Area print marketplace that has seen much recent ownership consolidation. Last year, the Denver-based MediaNews Group purchased the San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times from the McClatchy Co., giving the conglomerate control of virtually every Bay Area daily newspaper other than The Chronicle.

Village Voice Media, which was purchased by New Times Media in 2005, owns SF Weekly and controls roughly a quarter of the circulation among the nation’s alternative weeklies. Other than using some of the same Village Voice Media movie reviewers and twice using the same cover story, the San Francisco and East Bay corporate siblings generally stuck to their respective sides of the bay.

Now, there will be no ties.

“This is a wonderful thing,” said Tracy Rosenberg, interim operations director of Media Alliance, a Bay Area media watchdog organization. “The potential for self-ownership and for journalists to enter ownership is terrific and exciting. It almost never happens.”

But, “A lot of questions remain unanswered,” said Yumi Wilson, assistant professor of journalism at San Francisco State University. While it is potentially exciting to have independent media ownership, “You want to see what new owners are going to do.”

Does this signal that New Times/VVM is interested in downsizing by selling off properties? Or is this a way for them to better compete in the Bay Area by minimizing their costs and focusing on the more lucrative SF Weekly? Will independent journalism benefit from a three-way competition in the Bay Area? It’s too early to tell.

One thing that’s almost certain–alt-journalist wages aren’t going up any time soon.

posted by @ 8:00 am | 1 Comment

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

Thank You Warriors

It was a great run. And nuff respect to D-Fish, you’ll always have love from the Town.

posted by @ 9:29 pm | 0 Comments

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

Eric Arnold On Why S.F. Rap Still Hasn’t Blown Up

The second great article in a few days on the Bay scene from a Bay writer. Yes, we still produce a lot of the best hip-hop journalists in the country–thoughtful, passionate, skilled to the teeth.

Here’s Eric Arnold’s piece on Messy Marv and why SF rap is still struggling:

while Oakland, Vallejo and Richmond have produced nationally known rappers like Too , E-40 and Master P, San Francisco’s track record has been marred by tragedy, violence and legal problems.

Known as Sucka Free City in the rap world, San Francisco has no shortage of rappers or independent labels. However, its artists’ close ties to the inner city — and, by extension, the tribulations of the ghetto — may be one reason it has produced a scant number of big-name acts.

“It’s so much pressure on somebody out here to blow up on a national scale,” says filmmaker Kevin Epps, director of “Rap Dreams” (2006), a documentary about rappers trying to break into the industry. “The city has had a sense of modest success in the bay, but when you think of national (success), it hasn’t really had that.”

It seems every time a San Francisco rapper is ready to break out of the regional niche, something bad happens. ..

Read the whole thang

posted by @ 7:31 am | 0 Comments

Saturday, May 12th, 2007

Air Baron


You got Kirilenkoed!

posted by @ 7:54 am | 0 Comments

Saturday, May 12th, 2007

Marian Liu :: Is Hyphy Over?

The Sunday Mercury News will be carrying Marian Liu’s article on the state of hyphy. Why didn’t it blow like it should have? Lots of Bay Area players weigh in. More multimedia and additional articles on the topic here.

Numerous interviews with industry insiders and the artists themselves have revealed strong agreement as to why the scene may soon be left for dead: bad business decisions.

When dealing with major record labels, artists missed important meetings, asked for too much money and were too entangled in previous independent deals to consider new opportunities…

One big problem, she explained, was that local artists were locked into messy independent deals that became a problem when the major labels came knocking.

There was one artist who signed up with three separate companies, Day says. “Majors were looking at him for different deals, but people kept surfacing and stopping the deal,” she says. This happens in other parts of the country too, she says, but the difference is the ability to strike a deal so that both sides profit. “Here,” she says, the smaller labels “are more interested in blocking than profiting.”…

posted by @ 7:52 am | 1 Comment

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

La Cucaracha & The Boondocks Vs. Don Imus!


This is like Marvel Team-Up!

Our boy Lalo Alcaraz is also a huge fan of Aaron McGruder. Enter The Beandocks!

posted by @ 8:43 am | 2 Comments

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

Jeff Yang on Angry Asian Men

My fellow journalistic Jeff _ang goes deep on the subject of Angry Asian Men. If Imus turned the table onto Black masculinity, Cho has turned the table onto Asian American masculinity. In this instance, pop culture and racial profiling and free speech issues are coming together in a much different way. Big props to Mr. Yang for exploring the subject in such a great way. A must-read. Here’s a taster:

One might say that it’s been an annus horribilis for the Asian American man. From the racist rantings of Kenneth Eng, to the conviction of Hmong American Chai Vang in the shooting of six fellow hunters, to last month’s horrific murder spree at Virginia Tech, events seem to have conspired to swing perceptions of Asian males to the point where any sign of aberration is being transformed into evidence that we represent a simmering danger, a repressed wellspring of vitriol and violence waiting only for the right trigger to burst forth.

Actual aberration, or imaginary: One of the truly strange signatures of the media analysis around the Virginia Tech tragedy is how blurred the line became between reality and creativity. In the wake of the murders, pundits provided line-by-line critiques of a handful of plays that killer Seung-Hui Cho wrote, trying to find within them harbingers of the horror he would unleash. They compared movie stills to poses Cho struck in his video testament, hoping to identify cinematic inspiration for his violence, and reported breathlessly on Cho’s love of computer games, even suggesting that he used them for “training” purposes.

The art-as-evidence phenomenon quickly extended beyond Cho: In Cary, Ill., on April 23, high school student Allen Lee was arrested for “disorderly conduct” and removed from school after submitting an essay that his teacher said contained disturbingly violent content — despite telling students that the assignment was to write a creative work depicting strong emotions, on which there would be “no judgment and no censorship.”

Around the same time, in Fort Bend, Texas, another Chinese American student was arrested and expelled from Clements High School after parents of classmates informed authorities that he’d created gaming maps based on the school for the tactical combat game Counterstrike. A search of his bedroom revealed five decorative swords and a hammer, which was enough for the police to declare him a “level 3 terrorist threat.”

The hammer may have been what sent the police over the edge. After all, such a tool featured prominently in one of the most widely seen images from Cho’s video “manifesto,” a self-portrait in which he’s grimacing at the camera and holding a standard claw hammer over one shoulder.

But the height of absurdity was reached with the controversy around the April 22 episode of HBO’s mafia epic, “The Sopranos,” featuring Ken Leung as Carter Chong, a mentally unbalanced Asian American youth who erupts in a spasm of violence. Comparing it to the Virginia Tech massacre, pundits called it an “eerie,” “astoundingly awful coincidence.” Media blurbalists wrinkled their brows and tsked at the “torn from the headlines” parallels.

posted by @ 7:15 am | 1 Comment

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

Hip-Hop Generation Protests Sarkozy Election in France

At massive demonstrations by hip-hop generationers turned loose water cannons and fired tear gas yesterday. Sarkozy, you might remember, was the government official whom many African and Arab immigrants blame for creating a hostile environment for youth of color. This anger erupted into the riots of late 2005 when two project youths died in police custody.

CRS riot police charged several hundred anti-Sarkozy protesters on the Place de la Bastille where some had daubed “Sarkozy 2007 = Hitler 1933” on the column in the center of the square. Police tear-gassed protests in the southern cities of Marseille and Toulouse, and there were incidents in Lyon, Lille, Rennes, Bordeaux and Nancy, National Police spokesman Patrick Hamon said by telephone.

…Politicians including Azouz Begag, one of two Muslims in the French government until he quit last month, blamed Sarkozy for raising tensions by referring to youths who stoned his car as “rabble” shortly before the 2005 riots.

Earlier, Sarkozy said he’d clean out neighborhoods with a “Karcher,” a brand of high-pressure hose. Those comments followed policy decisions such as the abolition of community police forces and reinforcement of baton-wielding riot police.

“The worst thing he did was to get rid of community police,” Guy-Serge Pungumbu, 24, a brother of Yves Pungumbo, said. “It means our only contact with police is identity checks or riot police.”

Suburbs Quiet

At the Grande Borne, a housing project south of Paris where police were fired on during the 2005 riots, groups of youth gathered on the streets while vans filled with riot police slowly did their rounds.

Malik Amadu, 20, a semi-professional soccer player drove by, playing a hip hop song about how the suburbs will erupt with Sarkozy as president.

“With Sarkozy it means even more controls, more repression,” he said. “We’ll never be left alone. I hope it will be calm tonight but I can’t guarantee it.”

On Feb. 27, Segolene Royal, the Socialist whom Sarkozy defeated in the second and final round of voting yesterday, laid a wreath to the two boys, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore, in their home town of Clichy-sous-Bois and met with AC Le Feu, a community group formed after the riots.

Sarkozy, who crisscrossed France in his quest to be president, never campaigned in any of the suburbs that are largely populated with immigrants from North and sub- Saharan Africa. Rivals such as Royal and centrist Francois Bayrou mocked him for never going.

`Violence, Brutality’

“My responsibility today is to launch an alert about the risks of this candidacy and the violence and brutalities that will start in the country, everyone knows it but nobody says anything,” Royal told RTL radio May 4.

Sarkozy “ran a campaign based on the denigration of others,” said Mohamed Chirani, president of Votez Banlieue, a voter-registration drive founded after the riots, in a telephone interview.

posted by @ 7:00 am | 0 Comments



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