Tuesday, December 7th, 2004

Who Still Says Freestyle Is Wack?

Ciara, Nina Sky, and Destiny’s Child givin’ up the love to Full Force and the Latin Rascals and the most important, most influential of all–bet yall beatbloggers don’t know this one, not unless you were a DJ in the 80s and scratched with the breaks on Debbie Gibson remixes–The Beat Club’s “Security”. (On the real tho, Sweet Sensation kills em all.)

Meanwhile I’m So Sinsurr’s got the favela tribute to Stevie B, I meant Information Society’s “Running”. The sound of ’87 back in full effizect.

Diggers take note: Tommy Boy’s Freestyle Greatest Beats series is starting to look like Ultimate Breaks and Beats. Investors take note: hair-care products.

Quick, someone do an academic paper on the links between Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, Pilipino, and Brazilian scenes from the mid-80s to now–from the Funhouse to South Beach to City Nights to Florentine Gardens to the Funk Balls. Now how exactly did you do the Webo? Dulce Veran, holla!

posted by @ 3:42 pm | 1 Comment

Tuesday, December 7th, 2004

Soldier News: Loan Sharking GIs + More

Diana Henriques of the NY Times reports on payday loans, a form of legalized loan sharking–instant credit at rates up to 400%–whose reach has in the last few years has extended from ghetto corners to the entrances to military bases.

Hmm. Interesting connection, huh? Oceanside, CA meet Flatbush, NY. Fort Lewis, WA meet North Philly, PA.

A lot more info, especially if you’re caught up in this credit trap, here.

Meanwhile:

+ A challenge to don’t ask, don’t tell. Much more info here. Really interesting timing. Just at the moment many are demanding that the military honor its own rules and contracts, gays and lesbians are knocking on the door to be reinstated and serve proudly. If you’re familiar with the history of African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Latinos and the military, it kinda looks like World War II, doesn’t it?

+ Rummy says we’re out in 4 years. Just in time to secure his legacy, no doubt. If you believe this, I got some land in Mesopotamia to sell you.

posted by @ 9:50 am | 5 Comments

Tuesday, December 7th, 2004

Pro Homo

Check this incredibly provocative piece on DL culture by Juba Kalamka of the Deep Dickollective. It’s from another great issue–this one on Sex, Race, and Gender–from Tram and the crew at ColorLines, who scooped up mad awards this year (making me a very proud older brother figure). Recognize!

posted by @ 8:27 am | 0 Comments

Monday, December 6th, 2004

Soldier News: Fighting Stop-Loss Policy & A Victory

Monica Davey of the NY Times reports on a lawsuit filed to end the stop-loss policy. Here’s a quote from David W. Qualls, a National Guardsman who is the only man on the lawsuit using his real name–the 7 others fear retribution from the Army:

“You should know I’m not against the war. This isn’t about that. This is a matter of fairness. My job was to go over and perform my duties under the contract I signed. but my year is up and it’s been up. Now I believe that they should honor their end of the contract.”

In other news, there’s a victory in the case of five of the reservists who refused the “suicide mission”: they will not be court-martialed. The Army admits the soldiers “raised some valid concerns.” This case rang especially close to home, because the reservists duties were exactly the same as my cousin David’s–transport and supply.

posted by @ 9:55 am | 0 Comments

Sunday, December 5th, 2004

Ban The BCS and Dump The Bowls

Of course, I’m pissed about Cal not making the Rose Bowl. But every year it’s the same argument–what teams did and didn’t deserve to play, why they did, and then how do we fix this mathematical formula to get it more right. (A digression: since when should teams be punished for having the ethics and dignity not to run up the score? Cal and Auburn both could have done that last night and didn’t–and the numbers punish em for it. Don’t get me started.)

No one agrees that the system works. But all this annual outcry and subsequent “tweaking” of the system won’t help. The thing no one admits is that the BCS is a flawed system because it’s a compromise. Why not do away with the bowls and have a tournament? That would be real competition. But the reason we don’t have one and never will is that the Bowls and their corporate sponsors are the tail wagging this dog.

I bet most coaches wouldn’t mind a playoff system–certainly it could not be as big as the basketball tournament because you can’t have a football team adding 5 more games to their season–but it would be much fairer than living at the whims of 150 or so voters, ridiculously flawed algebra, a bunch of wealthy fairweather-fan bowl hustlers, and their corporate puppeteers. Sure there will be more arguing about who deserved to be in the tourney, just as there is with the basketball tourney every year, but there will be no doubt who the top team is at the end.

posted by @ 3:11 pm | 0 Comments

Sunday, December 5th, 2004

Writing The Book, Part 3 or 2.5: The Wait and The “Asian American” Question

This is the period that my editor Monique describes as “the quiet period”. As she describes it, it’s the time between the final filing of the book and the actual release when the hum of work drops to a whisper and you kind of sit on pins and needles wondering what’s gonna happen next. Like the ten minutes before a theater artist or a performer gets onstage. You kind of tighten out your tie and smooth out your shirt a few too many times, stare at the curtain and block out the audience behind it.

I’ve reacted the way I usually do to this. I either do too many things or suffer these ridiculous mood swings. If I’m not working on something, I’m thinking too hard about the book. I grab the galley and read it, trying to tell myself I’m the dopest writer in the world, can’t nobody can top my shit, moohoohoohaha! Or, much more often, I torture myself about how I could have structured a section better or fret over a sentence that wasn’t tight, and pray that, if the punditocracy even deems it worthy of comment or review, they won’t utterly destroy it and leave me to the discount bins. At the end of this exhausting cycle, I grab the Aiye-Keita album or the advance of this ridiculously hot Luaka Bop comp of West African funk, Love’s A Real Thing, and just try to clear my head.

No way is any of this rational, but welcome to The Wait.

In the meantime, I’m still learning to get used to being on the other side of mic. I’m not a stranger to being there, but I was much younger and hot-headed then, usually without sleep, with about 400 other friends chanting or chained together, and about to be arrested.

Todd was kind enough to suggest doing the Hyphen piece (that’s the part 2 of this irregular “Writing The Blog series, Part 1 is here.) as a collabo. Any chance to collab with Todd is OK in my book.

But then I’m still refining what I’m trying to say. Here’s an interview done by Sabrina Ford at Newswatch. Sabrina was a great, provocative interviewer, and I just went bananas. Sound-bitey I’m not, yet.

The interesting thing about interviews is that there are always a set of unspoken assumptions that proceed between interviewer and subject. The subject assumes the interviewer knows certain things, the interviewer assumes the subject knows certain things. This is just a fundamental truth about human interaction.

That’s why some interviewers get lots of stuff, and others get nothing. It was especially pronounced in hip-hop journalism at the beginning, where there was often a huge gap between what a mainstream news journalist might get and what a hip-hop journalist might get out of Rapper X. It’s also why the longer you’re in the interviewing game, the better you are. You begin to learn how to connect with your subject on an almost cellular level, and it shows up in everything from how you approach your subject to your body language to how and when you ask questions.

Being a journalist, your job is to tell the story to your audience. You learn to phrase questions or to poke and prod until you get the subject to say something that will be immediately transparent to your writing audience. As a subject, you never get told that this is what is going on in the interview, and in fact, the interviewer sometimes doesn’t want to let you know–for fear it will impede you from being you. I actually think this is the source of 95% of all misquotes, and the subsequent feeling of betrayal that a subject might feel. The interviewer may have a much better handle onthe assumptions you’re coming to the interview with, and if they are adept or unethical or just good (and who knows just where those boundaries fall sometimes), exploit those to the fullest.

I’m not saying Sabrina did any of that–quite the contrary, she’s already a kick-ass journalist and the world won’t be ready-and folks like me can’t wait-for her to take over!–but I realized in reading the interview back how uncomfortable the “Asian American in hip-hop” question makes me.

My stock answer is this–folks who know me, know I don’t play, and my resume proves it. It’s a real, honest, and incredibly defensive answer. I might as well be telling the interviewer, THE FUCK YOU KNOW ABOUT ME PUNK–WHAT! It’s probably right to be mad about lazy interviewers who don’t do their homework and try to drop this on me, but lots of folks I like a lot–take Todd and Sabrina–ask it, and I owe a decent answer.

So while I don’t think I’m going to come up with a good soundbite soon, here’s a shot at trying to be, uh, you know, nuanced and shit.

Politically, I’m a product of 80s anti-apartheid movement and Rainbow Coalition progressive politics. That meant that some black nationalists used to call me a Asian-white-hippie-wannabe sellout back in the day. These days I’ve been called a nationalist-wannabe sellout by some more-progressive-than-thou-type students (who should have better things to do with their time, like downloading or something), and a black-wannabe sellout by some more-Asian-than-thou activists. Funny what a difference a decade or so makes.

Those kinds of labels used to really rankle me, but in old age, I’ve gained a teflon coating. It’s best, I’ve decided, to take an independent, idiosyncratic, iconoclastic stance. Always tell the truth. Outside is a good place to be. That way you get to piss off both your foes and your friends. Eventually they all come back and want to party with you despite it all. So as opposed to remembering what you’re not supposed to say and holding your tongue, all you have to remember on any given day is who not to invite.

Back to the point, these questions about being an Asian American in hip-hop are funny to me. I can no longer relate to the fixed notions of identity that they assume. My writing in the early 90s criticized Asian Americans for being caught in old paradigms of race that prevented us from recognizing how in some blacks’ and Latinos’ eyes we had turned from ally to enemy. These days, as hip-hop has moved beyond the rhythms of the African diaspora into Asian sounds–this is why I’m so into Robin D.G. Kelley and Vijay Prashad’s idea of polyculturalism–it’s strange to me that we’d still be discussing the culture in terms of ’80s frames of identity. Multiculturalism is dead, long live multiculturalism, apparently.

This doesn’t answer the “Asian American in hip-hop” question for those concerned that hip-hop studies and new forms of scholarship around hip-hop will lead to a whitening of the story, an erasure of the African roots of the culture. In other words, is the inevitable result of hip-hop studies the access of more non-Black scholars to the culture? (For now, let’s dance around the Afro-Latino question, which actually puts a lot of this stuff to rest.) Does that mean we’ll eventually have some white, Asian, or even Latino revisionist history, a Richard Sudhalter-style take on hip-hop?

That’s the assumption of the question that makes me defensive.

And unnecessarily so. All my study of hip-hop has only led me into deeper into Afrodiasporic roots and rhythms and cultures and Black nationalist politics. And, at the same time, my study of hip-hop has only led me deeper into rejecting most fundamentalist notions about hip-hop culture as a whole. The deeper you study, the more questions you have to ask, the less certainty you have about anything, except for the beauty and survival of African cultures, the way they continue to transform and expand upon contact with non-African cultures, and the openings and transformations they create for those other cultures that come into contact with it.

That’s not a soundbite, and it still doesn’t really answer the question, and it opens up hella other questions, but it’s closer to how I feel.

posted by @ 2:04 pm | 5 Comments

Sunday, December 5th, 2004

More Reasons The Yankees Suck

“Performance-enhancing drugs are a disgrace when they don’t enhance performance.”

–Gwen Knapp in a brilliant essay on the hypocrisy of anti-Giambi Yankees. UPDATE: Murray Chass gives the sordid history, going back to Steve Howe in 1990.

posted by @ 9:44 am | 0 Comments

Friday, December 3rd, 2004

The Cleats Drop

Bonds.

Sheffield.

Giambi (Jason). Much as I love Bonds, this is the dude I feel for the most. Although he abandoned the A’s for the Bronx Chokers, the media has already sharpened their knives and the town lynching won’t be pretty.

posted by @ 8:04 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, December 2nd, 2004

The 974th Version of "Ikaw" + Blogreading Fun

Gotta big up Audrey’s post on the phenomenon of balikbayan stars.

More blog-reading heaven:

+ Tiny talks Nixon, Jabberjaw, and mid-sized dreams. (Bonus: midwestern ass!)

+ I’m late to the game again, but what a discussion: Julianne (and again here) and Lynne and Hashim and Catchdubs on sexism and hip-hop. It’s not all been said, and it needs to be read. As always, check the comments too…(Note to self: figure out a way to make it to Chicago again in April for this, and thank my homegirl again.)

+ Finally, on some stupid ignant shit, looks like some fools done put their hands in my man’s hive. Whoo-ee. Bad move, great blogging. Bonus: it all ends with a dope Q+A.

posted by @ 8:15 pm | 0 Comments

Thursday, December 2nd, 2004

Hooverism

The ACLU has filed suit to expose the FBI’s spying of activists under the guise of anti-terrorism work. More info here and here.

I’m still catching up yall–lots of music and politics, not to mention straight-up work–so here’s some more great reading here. If you can find the Big Ideas 2005 Issue on the newsstands, pick it up.

posted by @ 10:25 am | 0 Comments



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