Saturday, September 12th, 2009

RIP Sundance, Zulu King and 9/11 Hero

amd_heyward
RIP MC Sundance, hip-hop pioneer and 9/11 hero

The front page of the New York Times today features the sad story of Leon “MC Sundance” Heyward, a Zulu King, rapper for the Jazzy Five, and 9/11 hero.

From the article:

Leon Heyward emerged from the subway just as the second plane struck, piercing the south tower. As others fled, he helped evacuate disabled employees from 42 Broadway, where he worked for the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs, and when the first tower fell, he was caught in the churning plume of contaminated dust and smoke.

Within months he started to feel sick…

Last October, after developing lymphoma, Mr. Heyward died at age 45 in the Bronx, where he was born and had formed one of the earliest rap groups. He became, officially, the latest casualty of the Sept. 11 terror attack, and just after 10 on a gusty, dreary Friday morning, the name Leon Bernard Heyward was read for the first time at ground zero as the nation paused again to remember its losses.

Read it all here.

Peace to his surviving family and to all the pioneers.

posted by @ 9:35 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

The New Shape Of The Culture War :: Glenn Beck, Yosi Sergant, Van Jones, and Hip-Hop

progress001
Progress? Yosi Sergant helped launch the arts movement that got Obama elected. Now Glenn Beck is putting everything in reverse.

Are you mad yet? You should be. Glenn Beck has now taken down Yosi Sergant, the second hip-hop activist to be targeted in the Obama administration in a week.

Last night the 34-year old communications director at the National Endowment For The Arts was asked to resign. Why? Because he was trying to organize artists to support President Obama’s national service program, United We Serve. If your next question is: so what? That was ours too. But Glenn Beck compared the effort to “Nazi propaganda”.

(Just sick–especially since Sergant, a Jewish American, has worked as an activist for peace in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.)

This was the same logic paleocons used to batter Obama’s school speech. If he does it, it’s indoctrination. If they do it, it’s “journalism”. But there’s much more to this story… (more…)

posted by @ 11:15 am | 49 Comments

Sunday, September 6th, 2009

Time To Knuckle Up :: On Van Jones’ Resignation

van_jones-1
Painting by Robert Shetterly, from his Americans Who Tell The Truth series

So let’s get into another media controversy, this time one that has serious national and generational implications, shall we?

Last night, Bay Area organizer/activist and White House green jobs advisor Van Jones resigned from his post in the Obama Administration after a high-tech Fox News lynching led by Glenn Beck, he of the “Obama Is A Racist” fame.

Beck had Van in his sights before he made those comments, which referred to Obama’s initial reactions to the Skip Gates incident. Blowhard Beck said it proved Obama “had a deep-seated hatred of white people”. But the success of a Color Of Change petition calling on advertisers to drop Beck’s show kicked the attacks into high gear. After tens of thousands of signatures were gathered, major advertisers left the show. Color Of Change, those of you who have been following this blog will remember, was founded after Hurricane Katrina to become the Black online equivalent of MoveOn.org, and is best known for helping mobilize the demonstrations around the Jena 6. Van was one of its founders.

By this morning, one Fox News commentator was crowing that “(t)he Van Jones affair could be an important turning point in the Obama administration if we use it as a window to understand the structure of the left and to stop the huge power-grab now taking place in the name of green jobs…The Van Jones affair is, as President Obama likes to say, a ‘teachable moment,’ and we need to put not just him but the whole corrupt ‘green jobs’ concept outside the bounds of the political mainstream.”

It’s an unusually frank statement of what Beck and Fox were up to–an effort to derail the progressive green agenda, one that Van had helped to shape with his best-selling book, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, a bold, important hip-hop generation approach to thinking about race, the environment, and the economy. It’s an agenda that even many in business support.

But the right is not interested in having any real discussion over ideas. They want to demonize and dissemble and play the politics of fear. In the process, they are developing a whole new set of ways to mix fears of race, youth, and left politics together for political advantage in a new era. (more…)

posted by @ 12:20 pm | 25 Comments

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Who Gotcha? :: The Story Behind The Story Behind The Roxanne Shante Story

By Wayne Marshall and Jeff Chang

X-Posted at Wayne and Wax…

If a rapper claims to be a killer, no one cares. If she says she has an education, they send in an investigative reporter, or at least someone who purports to be.

Oh don’t we love gotcha journalism. But who’s really getting got here?

Two weeks ago, the New York Daily News ran a story in which legendary rapper Roxanne Shante says she forced Warner Bros through a contractual clause to pay for her education, earning degrees from Marymount Manhattan College and Cornell University.

Yesterday, lawyer and “pro-copyright” blogger Ben Sheffner published his piece of gotcha journalism, claiming that not only did Warner not have direct contracts with Shante, but that she hadn’t finished her coursework at Marymount Manhattan and never enrolled in Cornell.

Perhaps most annoying to Sheffner was that “the story was endlessly blogged and tweeted, heralded as an example of a heroic triumph by a girl from the projects over her evil record label.”

Commenters around the web have praised the Slate piece as a fine bit of investigative reporting by a disinterested journalist. Here’s our gotcha: he’s not disinterested, and the investigative reporting wasn’t all that investigative. (more…)

posted by @ 11:30 am | 64 Comments

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

Art Works :: Landesman Time Begins

landesman

Yesterday the Senate confirmed Rocco Landesman as new chair of the NEA and Jim Leach as the new head of the NEH. Arts advocates have been especially interested in what Landesman would have to say about his agenda for the NEA.

In an interview with the New York Times, he seemed to capture their restlessness. “Art Works” is his new brand for the agency, a step up from ““A Great Nation Deserves Great Art”, the old one. Of that, Landesman said, “We might as well just apologize right off the bat.”

Fire. That’s what many arts advocates want now: a national arts leader who won’t tiptoe through the three-decade wreckage of the culture wars, but one who will stand up and call for a new era. Landesman speaks like he’s ready to fill that role.

Here’s how he came out swinging yesterday–not without a little barbed wit and bare knuckling:

In American politics generally, he added: “The arts are a little bit of a target. The subtext is that it is elitist, left wing, maybe even a little gay.”…

On the subject of the endowment’s budget, too, Mr. Landesman did not hold back. Though he would not put a dollar figure on his own fiscal goals, he called the current appropriation of $155 million “pathetic” and “embarrassing.” And he seemed to imply dissatisfaction with increases proposed by Congress and by the president, which both fall short of the agency’s 1992 budget of $176 million.

“We’re going to be looking for funding increases that are more than incremental,” he said. …

“I wouldn’t have come to the N.E.A. if it was just about padding around in the agency,” he said, and worrying about which nonprofits deserve more funds. “We need to have a seat at the big table with the grown-ups. Art should be part of the plans to come out of this recession.”

“If we’re going to have any traction at all,” he added, “there has to be a place for us in domestic policy.”

To start, he proposed a new program called “Our Town” which might help artists finance moves into downtown centers. This idea seems to draw from the popular boom-era notion of “The Creative Class” being the key to urban revitalization.

But what about a “creative communities” approach that is less tied to issues of gentrification and boom-and-bust development? Why not identify and spur the development of arts organizations who are building stronger communities in the inner cities of places like Detroit or East Oakland? If the NEA wants to make the case for a creativity stimulus, then it should also be promoting examples of success on the ground.

Landesman also suggested that arts grants needed to be more carefully linked to “merit”. This idea may prove controversial with many arts organizations, especially given the way Landesman, a Broadway theater producer, put it:

“I don’t know if there’s a theater in Peoria, but I would bet that it’s not as good as Steppenwolf or the Goodman,” he said, referring to two of Chicago’s most prominent theater companies. “There is going to be some push-back from me about democratizing arts grants to the point where you really have to answer some questions about artistic merit.”

(For those who didn’t live through the culture wars, the aesthetic debates over the words “quality” and “democracy” became a way to talk about just how much representation artists of color should or shouldn’t have without talking about race explicitly. Not unlike that Obama/Sotomayor “empathy” thing. Hmmm, there’s a book in that… oh yeah, I’m writing it.)

Many will be happy that Landesman seems willing to use his bully pulpit to reframe the importance of the arts for the country. But in the coming weeks, he may need to more closely engage with the people on the ground who can build the massive support he’s going to need to make his case.

posted by @ 10:52 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Free Band Names! :: The California Budget Disaster Edition

cabudget
How funky is your budget compromise? How loose is your accounting?

Instead of killing myself over how f-ed up this Cali budget “compromise” is going to be for me and most everyone I care about, I figured I’d devote my energy to coming up with something everyone really needs: a list of band names inspired by this disaster.

Because who knows better than The Big 5 that this is as good a time as any to start a band or a crew?

So here we go. Free. Just shout us out when you blow up on Myspace. And please add more. The budget you save may be your own.

The Worthless Bonds
The Mandatory Furloughs
The I-O-Meez
The No Solution
The Terminated
Proposition Xed
Eff The Children
Cancel My Future
Long Summer Shortfall
I Moved To California And All I Got Was This Lousy Prison
Corrections Killed The Biology Star
And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of The Idiots…
Cut Me Asshole
Fire Me Asshole
Pay Me Asshole
The Simple Majority
Masterrace Supermajority
Two-Thirds Of Death
The Oily Severants
Santa Barbara Oil Slick
Roll Over Pat Brown
The Michael Jackson Stimulus
The Gray Davis Revival

posted by @ 8:59 am | 3 Comments

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

On Hip-Hop, the New Depression, and the Creativity Stimulus

cover10

Here’s an interview I just did that focuses largely on the role of the arts and culture in the current economic crisis. Huge thanks to Jasmine Mahmoud, editor of the fantastic new magazine and webzine The Arts Politic.

The inaugural issue features work from and interviews with other people who were at the White House briefing in May, such as Judy Baca, Dudley Cocke, and the great Arlene Goldbard. Bonus: Mayda Del Valle!

Check out and if you dig, support them.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview w/your boy:

The inclusion of you and Davey D, among other arts activists, seems to be a big step forward from the 1990s when political wars waged on hip-hop, and culture wars waged on the arts. Would you call this progress?…

Yes, I do think this is progress. At certain points in history, change seems to accelerate and I think we’re in the flux of that kind of moment right now. We witnessed an outpouring of art, culture, and creativity around last year’s elections. People like Tom Brokaw compared it to the Velvet Revolution. In other words, politics and creativity seemed to converge to bring about a societal leap. Into what, I’m still not sure. But we all have a hand in guiding where we will land.

I work among artists and community organizers daily, and the thing we’ve all noticed is that we have a great urge to convene, to share, to talk, to try to puzzle out the moment. Liz Lerman likes to joke that “artists aren’t afraid of living in Depression-like conditions because that’s our lived reality.” Right now, there’s a sense among everyone that there isn’t much to lose, and that’s liberating. What I think many of us are coming around to understand is that creativity is at the heart of community sustainability and renewal. Hip-hop is the perfect example—here’s the picture of forgotten, abandoned kids hard at work defining how to play amidst chaos. Out of nothing, they literally forge the conditions for their own breakthroughs. They created a new language for a new global generation.

In this country, the debates over the arts are still haunted by questions of individual freedom raised in the culture wars. These are rooted in President Kennedy’s founding Cold War-era charge for the NEA (articulated best here) in which artists were positioned as the social outsiders an enlightened U.S. democracy was happy to bring into the fold. Communists in Russia and China, by comparison, were oppressing dissident artists. (This logic ran its course by the end of the 1980s, when anti-arts neocons took up—quite seriously—the role of Kennedy’s cartoon communists. The irony escaped them, apparently.)

But what if we looked at arts and creativity as society’s key to collective survival? In this re-imagining, artists and creatives—like community organizers—are not outsiders, so much as those who experiment and test and prod, but within the heart of the community. Their risk is indispensable not because it comes from the fringe, but from the center. When they succeed, they strengthen community and move it forward…

Catch the entire interview here.

posted by @ 2:37 pm | 0 Comments

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

The Death of Vibe And The Future Of Magazines :: A Roundtable with Alan Light and Raymond Roker

alan

Vibe’s death yesterday sparked conversations across the blogosphere about the future of magazines, especially the kind many of us most care about–urban culture and music magazines. I wanted to surface one of them here.

It began with a Twitter post that reposted to my Facebook account. Here was that original post (re-rendered into something resembling proper english).

Jeff Chang: I could live with a smaller media landscape–but we need that middle between 1m+ circulation mags and circs of less-than-100,000 zines back.

And who should reply but Alan Light.

Alan was one of my first editors at Vibe. (He actually did me the favor of sinking a horrible Tribe Called Quest piece I did, easily the worst interview I ever did…a long story for another time.) Alan started at Rolling Stone and went on staff there from 1989 to 1993. He moved over to become Music Editor at Vibe in its inaugural year and took over as Editor-in-Chief the following year, where he worked until 1997. He edited Spin from 1999-2002, then broke out to start a new magazine called Tracks.

Tracks is a really interesting story. It launched with independent capital in November 2003 with a circulation of about 150,000. It targeted readers from 30-50, a bit of an older audience, more white than not. This group was thought to be the holy grail of the dying music industry–they were folks who actually still bought music. The writing got better, they started moving more urban (Prince was on the cover at the time of “Musicology”) and they built an audience, doubling their circulation.

But by April 2005, they folded. The magazine industry had shifted dramatically. The middle–as in all media and entertainment industries, hell, in American society–could not hold.

Let’s pick this up where Alan responded:

Alan Light at 1:00pm June 30
you have no idea how right you are…well, ok, you have some idea. but take it from one who’s been there – it has become almost impossible to make that model work. which is awful, because it’s obviously the most interesting place to be. (more…)

posted by @ 11:53 am | 37 Comments

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Vibe Is Gone

vibecover
History.

The void that the closing of Vibe leaves is immense. I don’t believe any other media is equipped or even remotely interested in taking up the space that Vibe has.

After speaking with my man Rob Kenner, and Twittering the hell out of my grief and anger over this, I’m coming to this realization:

The only upside of this depression is that many of us no longer have a side hustle to distract us from the incredible art we gotta make.

RIP VIBE. RIP “Urban Magazines”.

posted by @ 12:20 pm | 3 Comments

Friday, June 26th, 2009

Michael Jackson :: Morning’s End

mj
Home.

Long before anyone could read into Michael Jackson’s cubist, etiolated face a work of performance art, the wounds of internalized racism, or the excess of boredom and wealth, all those things that would make us either look away or gawk, there was his voice.

The thing that Berry Gordy heard from the 10-year old boy was “knowingness”, he said, “feeling, inspiration, and pain”. There was an early protest song, “The Young Folks”, that now seems telling. But as time went on, Gordy and his songwriters gave Michael songs in which loss loomed large, the better to exploit that glorious instrument of his. And for that voice, he lost his childhood.

Or more precisely, he gave it to us. Many of his most affecting performances were about distance and displacement, the desire to be somewhere else, the inability to return to a lost past. Think of the songs that the hip-hop generation adored so much: “I’ll Be There”, “I Wanna Be Where You Are”, “Who’s Loving You”, “Maybe Tomorrow”, “All I Do Is Think Of You”, “Ready Or Not”. On these songs, Michael’s “knowingness” sounds more like fragility. (On the other hand, but hardly balancing the scale, is the joyous Bronx summer break of “It’s Great To Be Here”.)

If you want to wonder how ambivalent this boy-dream, this incarnation of all our notions about youth and beauty, felt about the limelight and wanting to be “normal”, listen to him sing “Got To Be There”. When he sees the girl of his desire walk into the morning light, it’s as if he has transferred the shine away from himself to her, imagining a perfect love above the blood and grind of the daily celebrity-making machine. When he hits that high “me” (matched later by the word “home”), he has given all of it up to all of us.

But as an audience, we were insatiable and ruthless. Years later, after the satisfaction and ease of his 20s, after he had been broken by self-mutilation and bizarre scandal in his 30s, Michael Jackson would reveal a tragic, bathetic emptiness, pleading, “Have you seen my childhood?” By then, many of us had either turned away or turned on him. The transaction was done.

In the end, he lost even his voice, autotuned first by lawyers and other keepers of his dissipating wealth, consumed by Mickey Mouse-sounding paid-TV defenses and overproduced songs, before finally going silent forever. Time will restore the greatness of Michael Jackson’s artistry. May it also cause us some revulsion at our complicity in his fall as well.

posted by @ 12:34 am | 36 Comments



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