Saturday, January 11th, 2003

An article from today’s Chicago Tribune on Governor Ryan’s commuting of all death row sentences. Sometimes the right thing gets done.

‘The system has failed’

Ryan condemns injustice, pardons 6; paves the way for sweeping clemency

By Steve Mills and Christi Parsons

Tribune staff reporters

January 11, 2003, 9:20 AM CST

Update: Gov. George Ryan will issue a blanket clemency to all inmates on Illinois’ Death Row, a spokesman for the governor confirmed today.

Saying he wanted to correct a “manifest injustice,” Gov. George Ryan on Friday pardoned four Death Row inmates and laid the groundwork for an unprecedented act of clemency by a U.S. governor.

Although aides said Ryan continued to struggle late Friday with whether to commute the sentences of all remaining 156 Death Row inmates, sources said he ordered that letters be delivered overnight notifying victims’ families that Ryan would in fact grant a blanket commutation.

In the two-page letter, Ryan told family members how difficult it had been to reach the decision to grant blanket commutations, but he said it was the only way to prevent an innocent person from being executed–his greatest concern. Ryan closed the letter with the words, “May God bless you.”

Ryan, who leaves office Monday, loaded his Friday announcement of the pardons with indications he would commute the death sentences to life in prison without parole. He pointed out in a speech that the state Constitution provides a governor broad powers. He noted as well that life in prison is a stark existence and that inmates “have no freedom.”

The majority of Ryan’s speech, though, focused on the pardons–based on innocence–to four men who together have spent nearly 60 years on Death Row and whose cases are linked by allegations of torture by Chicago police. He said the cases “cry out to be fixed.”

“Today, I shall be a friend to Madison Hobley, Stanley Howard, Aaron Patterson and Leroy Orange,” Ryan said, naming the four prisoners, in his address at DePaul University law school in Chicago. “Today, I am pardoning them of crimes for which they were wrongfully prosecuted and sentenced to die.”

“The system has failed for all four men,” he said. “And it has failed the people of this state.”

Ryan also pardoned Gary Dotson, who was convicted of a 1979 rape but later exonerated by DNA testing, and Miguel Castillo, who was released two years ago after spending more than 11 years in prison for murder when jail records showed he was in custody when the crime was committed.

The words brought tears of joy to the families of the inmates and strong condemnation from prosecutors across the state and the victims’ families.

Sitting in the DePaul audience and waiting for Ryan to arrive, Hobley’s sister Robin read a prepared copy of the governor’s speech and began to cry as she discovered her brother would be set free.

“I’ve read so many horrible [court] transcripts over 16 years. I don’t believe what I’m reading,” she said. “Oh, Gov. Ryan, thank you. … It seems just like Christmas and New Year’s and a birthday all wrapped up into one.”

Patterson’s mother, Joanne, searched a copy of Ryan’s speech for words about her son and began to shake as she found them. She said the speech confirmed what she had hoped and prayed for over the last week as Patterson’s name was floated as a likely candidate for a pardon.

“Now that I read this,” she said, “everything is really just fine.”

Cook County State’s Atty. Richard Devine called the pardons “outrageous and unconscionable.”

“All of these cases would have been best left for consideration by the courts which have the experience, the training and the wisdom to decide innocence or guilt,” Devine said at a Friday night news conference. “Instead, they were ripped away from the justice system by a man who is a pharmacist by training and a politician by trade.”

Devine said Ryan “jumped into bed with the defense bar,” accusing him of not seeking information from prosecutors to get their side of the cases. He refused to say whether he believed the four had been tortured by police.

Devine also said he would have to review the governor’s action before deciding whether to consider the four cases closed or to reopen the investigations.

“By his actions today the governor has breached faith with the memory of the dead victims, their families and the people he was elected to serve,” he said.

Ollie Dodds, whose daughter was one of seven victims of a 1987 arson fire that sent Hobley to Death Row, said the pardons left her tired and heartbroken.

“It’s put me in a painful spirit,” said Dodds, who still believes that Hobley set the fire that killed Johnnie Mae Dodds. “I just couldn’t believe what he was saying. If he had lost a daughter or a son in that fire, I bet he wouldn’t have done it.”

Gayla Ridgell Redmond, whose father was murdered in 1984 in the case that sent Howard to Death Row, said she was struggling with her emotions.

“I guess I have mixed feelings about it,” she said. “I’m not an advocate of the death penalty, so I wasn’t looking for him to be executed,” she said. “But for him to be totally pardoned of the crime–I can’t say I’m too happy.”

Redmond, who lives on Chicago’s Far South Side, said she was comforted that Howard has to serve another 18 years for other convictions–cases that Ryan said also are tainted.

Still, Redmond said nothing would “bring my dad back.”

Paul Dengel, Howard’s attorney on his death penalty case, said he would begin to investigate that case as well in the hopes of obtaining Howard’s release.

Gov.-elect Rod Blagojevich, who said he backs the death penalty in “clear-cut and extreme cases,” urged Ryan not to grant the blanket clemency Saturday.

“The goal here is to serve justice, and I oppose blanket clemencies and blanket pardons,” Blagojevich said. “I hope he reviewed all those cases carefully and he reached his conclusions based on each individual fact pattern in each case. If he did that and he made a judgment that justice will be served by that, then I have no quarrel with that.”

But Ryan said it was the system–from prosecutors and police to judges and defense attorneys–that had failed.

He said Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge and detectives working for him in the former Burnside Area headquarters on the South Side routinely tortured suspects as they sought to obtain murder confessions.

He said justice is too often subverted by prosecutors hiding behind procedural rules to keep judges or juries from hearing all the facts in a case.

And he said defense lawyers often made colossal failures. In the case of Orange, Ryan said his attorney never raised his claim that police electric-shocked him.

Most of the cases, he said, relied heavily on dubious confessions.

“In some way I can see how rogue cops, 20 years ago, could run wild. I can see how, in a different time, they perhaps were able to manipulate the system. What I can’t understand is why the courts can’t find a way to act in the interest of justice,” Ryan said as the crowd of students and family members broke into applause.

Ryan even cited little-known evidence in some cases, such as a sworn affidavit obtained by Northwestern University journalism students from a man who said another man confessed to being involved in the murders for which Patterson was found guilty and condemned.

Police Supt. Terry Hillard, while not directly laying blame for the pardons on Burge, nevertheless made clear that Burge’s actions had “disgraced the integrity and honor” of the Chicago Police Department and led to his firing. He noted the department was cooperating with a special prosecutor’s investigation into the torture allegations.

Flint Taylor, who represented Patterson and has worked for years to prove the allegations against Burge, said the pardons supported the charges of misconduct against Burge as well as against county prosecutors. He said the pardons should fuel the inquiry by the special prosecutor, not slow it.

“It would be shocking if people say this takes care of it,” Taylor said. “There’s still a tremendous amount of unfinished business. There are people who haven’t been released. … And what about the people who put them there.”

Burge, reached at his home in Florida, declined to comment.

Ryan said his office’s three years of study of the death penalty and its review of the cases of the state’s 160 Death Row inmates had convinced him that Hobley, Patterson, Howard and Orange were innocent.

He was equally convinced, he said, the legislature had failed in its duty to pass reforms recommended by the blue-ribbon commission of prosecutors, defense attorneys, former judges and other experts he appointed to study the death penalty when declaring a moratorium on executions in January 2000.

“What does it take?” he said. “Now we can say the number of wrongfully convicted men is not 13 but 17. And I would ask, will that be enough?”

Some lawmakers said the governor’s actions, particularly if he grants a blanket commutation, could hurt chances for reform.

“If the governor decides to commute all of them, I think reform is dead in its tracks,” said state Sen. Peter Roskam (R-Wheaton), the architect of one conservative reform package. “If he does that, the dynamic changes.”

DuPage County State’s Atty. Joe Birkett also predicted the chances for reform would die because the public would react angrily to any mass commutation.

“A lot of people will be outraged, especially after they look at the facts of these cases,” Birkett said Friday. “Most of these cases are not close. In the overwhelming majority, there was no question of guilt.”

Ryan singled out Birkett’s office for particular criticism. He noted angrily that although former Death Row prisoners Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez have been exonerated of the rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico, DuPage prosecutors have “to this day, to this minute” failed to charge Brian Dugan in connection with the case.

Dugan has offered his confession in exchange for being spared the death penalty, and his prosecutors say his DNA connects him Jeanine’s murder.

“The governor is obviously not a lawyer, but a pharmacist, not aware of the rules of law,” said Birkett. “When I am satisfied that there is enough evidence [against the suspect], I will seek an indictment.”

Hours after the speech, Hobley and then Patterson walked out of Pontiac Correctional Center.

Hobley was met by his wife, Kim, a law school graduate who married him while he was on Death Row and had only shared a kiss each time he arrived in the prison visiting room and a kiss when leaving.

She said she knew Hobley had not set the fire that killed seven people, including his wife and infant son.

“When you meet, you know right away this man is innocent,” she said. “I believed that God didn’t save him from that fire just to kill him.”

The release of Orange, convicted in the 1985 stabbing deaths of four people and a fire set to cover up the murders, was delayed two hours in Cook County Jail. He walked into the arms of family shortly after 5 p.m.

Orange’s lawyers had faxed the governor’s pardon early in the afternoon to the jail, but officials in the sheriff’s office said prosecutors had demanded the lawyers produce an original letter with an original signature. Orange was being held in the jail to attend a court hearing on his case.

Patterson, convicted of a 1986 double murder in the South Chicago neighborhood, left prison to cheers from the other men on Death Row and requests that he help bring their cases to the governor’s attention.

But before he was free, he was told he would be on supervised release for three years and might even have to spend part of it on home-monitoring.

“They dropped the bombshell on me right before I came out,” he said.

Taylor, Patterson’s attorney, said he believed Patterson had served his time while on Death Row and should be free and clear of any crimes committed in the past.

Riding in a car with Appolon Beaudouin Jr., an investigator with the State Appellate Defender’s Office who has worked on the Patterson case for several years, Patterson said he was stunned that hours earlier he had been on Death Row.

“For the first time,” said Patterson, “I think I’m speechless.”

Tribune staff reporters Art Barnum, Mickey Ciokajlo, Jeff Coen, Shia Kapos, Maurice Possley, David Mendell and David Heinzmann contributed to this report.

Copyright ? 2003, Chicago Tribune

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Monday, December 30th, 2002

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IN THIS END-O-THE-YEAR ISSUE of the highly irregular

“CAN’T STOP” NEWSLETTER:

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-> THE POLITICS OF “CONSCIOUS RAP” AND “NEOSOUL”

-> A TRIBUTE TO JOE STRUMMER

-> BEST OF 2002

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‘STAKES IS HIGH’: “Conscious rap”, “neosoul” and the hip-hop generation

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[in the January 13, 2003 issue of The Nation]

You can grab it here. Check out the entire Power of Music Issue while you’re there.

Fifteen years ago, rappers like Public Enemy, KRS-One and Queen Latifah were received as heralds of a new movement. Musicians–who, like all artists, always tend to handle the question “What’s going on?” much better than “What is to be done?”–had never been called upon to do so much for their generation; Thelonious Monk, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder were never asked to stand in for Thurgood Marshall, Fannie Lou Hamer or Stokely Carmichael. But the gains of the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s were being rolled back. Youths were as fed up with black leadership as they were with white supremacy. Politics had failed. Culture was to become the hip-hop generation’s battlefield, and “political rap” was to be its weapon.

Today, the most cursory glance at the Billboard charts or video shows on Viacom-owned MTV and BET suggests rap has been given over to cocaine-cooking, cartoon-watching, Rakim-quoting, gold-rims-coveting, death-worshiping young ‘uns. One might even ask whether rap has abandoned the revolution.

Indeed, as the central marker of urban youth of color style and authenticity, rap music has become the key to the niching of youth culture. The “hip-hop lifestyle” is now available for purchase in every suburban mall. “Political rap” has been repackaged by record companies as merely “conscious,” retooled for a smaller niche as an alternative. Instead of drinking Alizé, you drink Sprite. Instead of Versace, you wear Ecko. Instead of Jay-Z, you listen to the Roots. Teen rap, party rap, gangsta rap, political rap–tags that were once a mere music critic’s game–are literally serious business.

“Once you put a prefix on an MC’s name, that’s a death trap,” says Talib Kweli, the gifted Brooklyn-born rapper who disdains being called “conscious.” Clearly his music expresses a well-defined politics; his rhymes draw from the same well of protest that nourished the Last Poets, the Watts Prophets and the Black Arts stalwarts he cites as influences. But he argues that marketing labels close his audience’s minds to the possibilities of his art. When Kweli unveiled a song called “Gun Music,” some fans grumbled. (No “conscious” rapper would stoop to rapping about guns, they reasoned, closing their ears even as Kweli delivered a complicated critique of street-arms fetishism.) At the same time, Kweli worries that being pigeonholed as political will prevent him from being promoted to mass audiences. Indeed, to be a “political rapper” in the music industry these days is to be condemned to preach to a very small choir.

“Political rap” was actually something of an invention. The Bronx community-center dances and block parties where hip-hop began in the early 1970s were not demonstrations for justice, they were celebrations of survival. Hip-hop culture simply reflected what the people wanted and needed–escape. Rappers bragged about living the brand-name high life because they didn’t; they boasted about getting headlines in the New York Post because they couldn’t. Then, during the burning summer of the first Reagan recession, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released “The Message,” a dirge (by the standards of the day) that seethed against the everyday violence of disinvestment. Flash was certain the record, which was actually an A&R-pushed concoction by Duke Bootee and Melle Mel, would flop; it was too slow and too depressing to rock a party. But Sugar Hill Records released the song as a single over his objections, and “The Message” struck the zeitgeist like a bull’s-eye. Liberal soul and rock critics, who had been waiting for exactly this kind of statement from urban America, championed it. Millions of listeners made it the third platinum rap single.

Through the mid-1980s, Melle Mel, Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force, Run-DMC and others took up the role of the young black lumpenrapper opposition, weighing in on topics like racism, nuclear proliferation and apartheid. And just as the first Bush stepped into office, a new generation began to articulate a distinctly post-civil rights stance. Led by Public Enemy, rappers like Paris, Ice-T, X-Clan, Poor Righteous Teachers and Brand Nubian displayed the Black Panther Party’s media savvy and the Minister Louis Farrakhan’s nationalist rage. Politics were as explicit as Tipper Gore’s advisory stickers. As the Gulf War progressed, Paris’s “Bush Killa” imagined a Black Power assassination of Bush the Elder while rapping, “Iraq never called me ‘nigger.'” (Last year, he returned to cut an MP3-only critique of the war on Afghanistan, “What Would You Do?”) Rappers’ growing confidence with word, sound and power was reflected in more slippery and subtle music, buttered with Afrodiasporic and polycultural flavor.

Many of these artists had emerged from vibrant protest movements–New York City’s resurgent Black Power movement; the swelling campus antiapartheid/multiculturalism/ affirmative action movement; local anti-police brutality movements. In each of these, representation was the cry and the media were a target. Rap “edutainment” came out of the convergence of two very different desires: the need for political empowerment and the need to be empowered by images of truth. On 1990’s “Can I Kick It?,” A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife Dawg captured the mood of his audience sweetly and precisely: “Mr. Dinkins, will you please be our mayor?” But while Mayor Dinkins’s career quickly hit a tailspin, hip-hop rose by making blackness–even radical blackness–the worldwide trading currency of cultural cool.

In the new global entertainment industry of the 1990s, rap became a hot commodity. But even as the marketing dollars flowed into youth of color communities, major labels searched for ways to capture the authenticity without the militancy. Stakes was high, as De La Soul famously put it in 1996, and labels were loath to accept such disruptions on their investments as those that greeted Ice-T and Body Count’s “Cop Killer” during the ’92 election season. Rhymers kicking sordid tales from the drug wars were no longer journalists or fictionists, ironists or moralists. They were purveyors of a new lifestyle, ghetto cool with all of the products but none of the risk or rage. After Dr. Dre’s pivotal 1992 album, The Chronic, in which a millennial, ghettocentric Phil Spector stormed the pop charts with a postrebellion gangsta party that brought together Crip-walking with Tanqueray-sipping, the roughnecks, hustlers and riders took the stage from the rap revolutionaries, backed by the substantial capital of a quickly consolidating music industry.

Rap music today reflects the paradoxical position of the hip-hop generation. If measured by the volume of products created by and sold to them, it may appear that youth of color have never been more central to global popular culture. Rap is now a $1.6 billion engine that drives the entire music industry and flexes its muscle across all entertainment platforms. Along with its music, Jay-Z’s not-so-ironically named Roc-A-Fella company peddles branded movies, clothing and vodka. Hip-hop, some academics assert, is hegemonic. But as the social turmoil described by many contemporary rappers demonstrates, this generation of youth of color is as alienated and downpressed as any ever has been. And the act of tying music to lifestyle–as synergy-seeking media companies have effectively done–has distorted what marketers call the “aspirational” aspects of hip-hop while marginalizing its powers of protest.

Yet the politics have not disappeared from popular rap. Some of the most stunning hits in recent years–DMX’s “Who We Be,” Trick Daddy’s “I’m a Thug,” Scarface’s “On My Block”–have found large audiences by making whole the hip-hop generation’s cliché of “keeping it real,” being true to one’s roots of struggle. The video for Nappy Roots’ brilliant “Po’ Folks” depicts an expansive vision of rural Kentucky–black and white, young and old together, living like “everything’s gon’ be OK.” Scarface’s ghettocentric “On My Block” discards any pretense at apology. “We’ve probably done it all, fa’ sheezy,” he raps. “I’ll never leave my block, my niggas need me.” For some critics, usually older and often black, such sentiments seem dangerously close to pathological, hymns to debauchery and justifications for thuggery. But the hip-hop generation recognizes them as anthems of purpose, manifestoes that describe their time and place the same way that Public Enemy’s did. Most of all, these songs and their audiences say, we are survivors and we will never forget that.

The “conscious rap” and “neosoul” genres take up where 1970s soul experimentalists like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield left off. At their best, they are black-to-the-future havens of experimentation that combine a grandiose view of pop music’s powers, an earnest hope for a better world and a jaded insider’s disdain for rote commercialism. Crews like Blackalicious, the Coup, Jurassic 5, Zion I and dead prez have attained modest success by offering visions of twenty-first-century blackness–hypertextual rhymes, stuttering rhythms and lush sounds rooted in a deep understanding of African-American cultural production and ready-made for a polycultural future. The Roots’ album Phrenology stretches hip-hop’s all-embracing method–the conviction that “every music is hip-hop” and ready to be absorbed–to draw from a palette as wide as Jill Scott, Bad Brains, James Blood Ulmer and the Cold Crush Brothers. Common’s Electric Circus takes cues from Prince and Sly Stone in reimagining the hip-hop concept album.

Tensions often spring from the compromises inherent in being given the budget to build a statement while being forced to negotiate the major label’s Pavlovian pop labyrinth, and others have left the system to, as Digital Underground once famously put it, do what they like, albeit for much smaller audiences. Public Enemy has gone to the Internet and to indies in order, they say, to “give the peeps what they need,” not what they think they want. After spending more than a decade in unsuccessful efforts with major labels, rapper Michael Franti now records on his own Boo Boo Wax imprint. It’s hard to imagine his latest effort, “Bomb Da World”–whose chorus goes, “You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb it into peace”–passing muster in the boardrooms. Berkeley-based rapper Mr. Lif cut two of the most funky and politically challenging records of the year, the Emergency Rations EP and I Phantom LP, for the indie Definitive Jux. The EP’s clever conceit–that the rapper has literally “gone underground” to escape angry Feds–is easily the wittiest, most danceable critique yet of the USA Patriot Act.

Hip-hop has been roundly condemned within and without for its sexist, misogynistic tendencies, but it has also created room for artists like Me’shell N’degeocello, Mystic, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Goapele and Angie Stone to mix up and transform both rap and r&b. “Neosoul” has been especially attractive to women and post-young ‘uns. Its hip-hop feminist critique came into sharp relief last year. After years of flying high, rap sales crashed by 15 percent, leading an industrywide plunge. But multiplatinum newcomers Alicia Keys and India.Arie were garlanded with a bevy of Grammy nominations. Keys and Arie celebrated “a woman’s worth” and were frankly critical of male irresponsibility. India.Arie’s breakout hit “Video”–in which she sang, “I’m not the average girl from your video”–stole the music that had once been sampled for a rap ode to oral sex called “Put It in Your Mouth.”

Hip-hop feminism has been articulated by Joan Morgan as a kind of loyal but vocal, highly principled opposition to black (and brown and yellow) male übermasculinity. In the same way, neosoul dissects the attitudes and ideals projected in the hip-hop mainstream. Me’shell N’degeocello’s compelling Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape opens with the line, “You sell your soul like you sell a piece of ass.” The most commanding of the neosoul artists, Jill Scott, imagines reconciliation, no longer having to love hip-hop from a distance. On “Love Rain” she sings of meeting a new man: “Talked about Moses and Mumia, reparations, blue colors, memories of shell-top Adidas, he was fresh like summer peaches.” But the relationship ends badly, “All you did was make a mockery of somethin’ so incredibly beautiful. I honestly did love you so.”

Neosoul personalizes struggles, but the approach has its limitations. India.Arie’s Voyage to India, for instance, suffers from reducing black radical conviction to self-affirmation mantra. At the same time, the genre mirrors a deeply held conviction of the hip-hop generation: Revolution does not come first from mass organizations and marching in the streets, but through knowledge of self and personal transformation. “Back in the ’60s, there was a big push for black senators and politicians, and now we have more than we ever had before, but our communities are so much worse,” says Talib Kweli. “A lot of people died for us to vote, I’m aware of that history, but these politicians are not in touch with people at all. Politics is not the truth to me, it’s an illusion.” For a generation that has made a defensive virtue of keeping it real, the biggest obstacle to societal change may simply be the act of imagining it.

These are the kinds of paradoxes the silver-tongued Kweli grapples with on his second solo album, Quality, as masterful a summation of the hip-hop generation’s ambivalent rage as Morgan’s book, When Chickenheads Come to Roost. On one of his early songs, Kweli synthesized 1960s militancy and 1990s millenarianism in a phrase, rapping about the need for “knowledge of self-determination.” At one point on the Nina Simone-flavored “Get By,” he sees the distance his generation still needs to cover: “We’re survivalists turned to consumers.” Echoing Marvin Gaye’s “Right On,” he measures the breadth of his generation–from the crack-pushers to the hip-hop activists. “Even when the condition is critical, when the living is miserable, your position is pivotal,” he concludes, deciding that it’s time to clean up his own life.

Kweli never fails to deliver fresh, if often despairing, insights. On “The Proud,” he offers a sage reading of the impact of 9/11 on the ‘hood–“People broken down from years of oppression become patriots when their way of life is threatened.” Later in the song, he cites California’s Proposition 21–the culmination of nearly two decades of fears of gangs, violence and lawlessness–and ties it to the intensifying nationwide trend of profiling and brutality against youth of color. But he scoffs at a revolution coming at the ballot box. Of the 2000 Florida elections, he angrily concludes, “President is Bush, the Vice President is Dick, so a whole lotta fucking is what we get. They don’t want to raise the baby so the election is fixed. That’s why we don’t be fucking with politics!”

But politicians can’t stop fucking with rap and the hip-hop generation. Senator Joe Lieberman regularly rallies cultural conservatives against the music. Michael Powell’s corporate-friendly, laissez-faire FCC has censored only the white male rap star Eminem and the black feminist hip-hop poet Sarah Jones. Texas Republican John Cornyn overcame African-American Democrat Ron Kirk’s November Senate bid by linking him to police-hating (and, interestingly, ballot-punching) rappers. When Jam Master Jay, the well-respected, peace-making DJ of rap group Run-D.M.C., was murdered in October, police and federal investigators intensified their surveillance of rappers while talking heads and tabloids like the New York Post decried the music’s, and this generation’s, supposed propensity for violence and lawlessness.

Now a hip-hop parent, Kweli hopes to steel his young ‘uns for these kinds of assaults. “I give them the truth so they approach the situation with ammunition,” he raps. “Teach them the game so they know their position, so they can grow and make their decisions that change the world and break traditions.” While he critiques his elders for failing to save the children, he knows his generation’s defensive b-boy stance is not enough: “We gave the youth all the anger but yet we ain’t taught them how to express it. And so it’s dangerous.”

Here is the hip-hop generation in all its powder-keg glory and pain: enraged, empowered, endangered. The irony is not lost: A generation able to speak the truth like no other before is doing so to a world that still hasn’t gotten the message.

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OVERPOWERED BY FUNK

How Joe Strummer rocked the world.

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Coming this week in the San Francisco Bay Guardian

http://www.sfbg.com

He was born John Graham Mellor into a family that served the Crown. His grandfather was a functionary for the Indian Railway, and his father moved through posts in Turkey, Mexico, Malawi, and Iran. The boarding school boy left to the suburbs of London grew up to be Joe Strummer, and he spent his life purposefully undoing everything his forebears stood for.

Strummer would describe 1976 as his own personal year zero. Across the globe, the arc of the revolution was falling. The Baader-Meinhof gang and Patty Hearst were on trial. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party were in the final stages of violent implosion. The Khmer Rouge were filling their killing fields. Washington bullets were destabilizing Jamaica. In London, as in New York City, capitalism’s crisis had left entire blocks and buildings abandoned. Here Strummer came of age as a radical squatter and a spirited pub singer. In a welfare line, he met Mick Jones and Paul Simonon and they invited him into the intensely charged musical sect they would come to call The Clash.

Strummer fast affected his mates. Mick’s tune, “I’m So Bored With You” became “I’m So Bored With The USA”. While their punk contemporaries flirted with Nazi imagery and ideology, they romanticized the Jamaican roots reggae rebels. When Strummer, Simonon, and manager/advisor Bernie Rhodes—three white males—were drawn into Black Britain’s summer Notting Hill uprising against the police, the band found its footing. Rhodes had images to contextualize the band’s defiance. Strummer found an opening to explore radical whiteness. “White Riot” distilled his awakening into a 2-minute breakneck, ear-splitting call for England’s fair-skinned sons and daughters to join in striking back against the Empire: “Black people gotta lotta problems but they don’t mind throwing a brick. White people go to school, where they teach you how to be thick.”

The record also captured the essence of the Strummer’s philosophy: “Are you taking over or are you taking orders? Are you going backward or are you going forwards?” These are the fundamental questions Strummer bequeathed his successors—followers like Bono, Chuck D, Ani DiFranco, and Manu Chao. Strummer epitomized the conviction that progressive politics ought to fire progressive music—neither flashy, indulgent prog-rock nor austere, didactic folk but progressive music of the most fevered imagination—big, risky rock that inspired less awe than love, more noise than silence, music that moved down the street with the people and knew when to toss a brick.

Triangulating the First and Third World across the Atlantic in the sunset of the Empire, London Calling was a perfect album, an endlessly mesmerizing reading of American and Jamaican music and myth through English eyes. It’s probably the last great record of the rock era. Many would have been happy if the Clash had stayed there forever and indeed, who knows how many more gems there were to mine. But unlike the generation of indie rockers (and now indie rappers) that followed, the diplomat’s son was not content to repeat “Train In Vain”, much less “Capital Radio”, over and over. Instead, he would turn his eye to the emerging world—the world after Empire, after America, after rock.

Perhaps Strummer’s background gave him a unique insight into the waves of change that were about to be unleashed on the world, or maybe he just had a good instinct for getting to the right place at the right time. Just as deftly as “Clampdown” had dissected the rise of the National Front, “Bankrobber” captured multiracial alienation inna Thatcherite time. Then “The Call Up” somberly reflected on the working classes’ prospects amidst rapidly militarizing geopolitics. (Now heard next to the Hitchens-esque hit “Rock The Casbah”, the tracks offer a dissonance, a clash, if you will, of anti-war and anti-fundamentalism ideals that seems unusually timely for today’s conflicted left.)

Where to go next? New York City. By 1981, hip-hop was pushing through the walls of resegregation erected in the previous decade. The band that once couldn’t see past 1977 would become the hinge between the rock and the hip-hop eras. When city officials tried to pre-emptively squash their seven-night stand, they unwittingly sparked a riot in Times Square. With permits in hand and seven gigs stretched to sixteen, they introduced Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five to their audiences and egged confused punkoids into their own cup-tossing mini-riot. Later they would frequent the downtown hip-hop club, Negril, as fans, soaking up vibes with Afrika Bambaataa, the graffiti elite, and the Rock Steady Crew. Now the Clash were pulling their audiences by their leather dog-collars out of their self-made ghettos into the real ones where the future was being made.

Over the years, *Sandinista* has taken its lumps. But in these days of routine double-CD releases, it’s hard to understand why. *Sandinista* sounds more like the 21st century than any rock made in the past two decades. Its incessant forward motion is a welcome contrast to the revival-minded micro-faddism that passes for most of today’s allegedly edgy rock. Alongside the dub and rap and rock, the Clash took on ambient noise, kiddie karaoke, twisted muzak, whistling carnival calypso (echoes of Notting Hill), roof-raising gospel, and the odd fiddle jig. Over it all, Strummer and colleagues tried to give voice to the people of Kingston, Havana, Hanoi, Tehran, and Managua. “The reign of the superpowers must be over”, they sang on “Charlie Don’t Surf”. “So many armies can’t free the earth.”

From the ashes of the sixties, Strummer and the Clash moved toward a kind of musical multilateralism, consensus by connecting-the-dots. *Sandinista* marks the point where they sketch a map of the new musical and political world, where rock myth topples into hip-hop’s corner soul, where the trumpets of polyculturalism collapse Jericho’s imperialism. And Strummer characteristically kept moving. In a short July 2001 guest DJ set with WFMU (http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/321), he revealed where his expansive curiousity and compassion was still taking him. He moved from a scintillating collaboration between Ernest Ranglin and Baaba Maal through Algerian rai, Sudanese soul, South African mbaqanga, and Colombian cumbia, ending with Cornershop’s Indofuturist pop. The prophetic stance he articulated in his life and music falls somewhere between Paul Wellstone and Jam Master Jay, a romantic, hopeful, inclusionary vision of progressivism and a cultural globalization that we’ve only just begun to see swelling in the streets at the turn of the century.

*******************

STEAL THESE RECORDS!

(Unless they’re indie!)

*******************

Best Albums of 2002

(All in Alphabetical Order)

Blackalicious-Blazing Arrow

DJ Shadow-Private Press

Talib Kweli-Quality

Mr. Lif-I Phantom

Nas-Lost Tapes

Orchestra Baobab-Specialist In All Styles

Sean Paul-Dutty Rock

Scarface-The Fix

Steinski-Nothing To Fear

Various Artists-Diwali

Next-Best Albums

Afel Bocoum, Daman Albarn, Toumani Diabate and friends-Mali Music

Chuck Brown-Put YOur Hands Up! Tribute Concert

Jason Moran-Modernistic

Nas-God’s Son

Meshell Ndegeocello-Cookie

Roots-Phrenology

Sizzla-Da Real Thing

Bruce Springsteen-The Rising

Steely and Clevie and friends-Old To The New: A Tribute to Joe Gibbs

Systemwide-Pure and Applied

Various Artists-Constant Elevation

Various Artists-Red Hot + Riot

Cassandra Wilson-Belly of the Sun

Singles and Spins

Bounty Killer-“Sufferer”

Camron-“Oh Boy”

Capleton-“Red Red Red”

The Clipse-“Grindin”

Elephant Man-“On Line”

Missy Elliot-“Work It”

Freddie McGregor-“Uncle Sam”

Norah Jones-“Don’t Know Why”

Lifesavas-“What If It’s True?”

Lyrics Born-“Hello”/”One Session”

Mr. Lif-Emergency Rations EP

Ms. Thang-“Get That Money”/”Mi Nuh Know”

Nappy Roots-“Po’ Folk”

Nas-“Made You Look”

Public Enemy-“Give The People What They Need”

Radio 4-“Struggle”

RJD2-“The Horror”

Sizzla-“Solid As A Rock”

Erick Sermon feat. Redman-“React”

Tweet-“Oops (Oh My)”

Warrior King-“Power To Chant”

Reissues

Black Rio: Brazil Soul Power 1971-1980

Bullwackies reissues (check Wayne Jarrett “You and I” 10-inch)

Clint Eastwood & General Saint-Two Bad DJ (check “Can’t Take Another World War”)

Herbie Hancock Box

Keith Hudson-Rasta Communication and Too Expensive

Let’s Do Rocksteady: The Story of Rocksteady 1966-68

Mickey and The Soul Generation-Iron Leg

Randy Newman reissues (check Good Old Boys)

Prince Lincoln-Humanity

Augustus Pablo-East of The River Nile and Original Rockers

Scientist-Rids The World of the Curse of the Vampires and Wins The World Cup

The The reissues–esp. Mind Bomb (another eerily prophetic record)

************

If you want to be added to the e-letter list, please send an email to cantstopwontstop@mindspring.com with “gotta be down” in the subject header.

************

Wishing you and your fam peace with justice in 2003,

Jeff

posted by @ 2:11 pm | 0 Comments

Monday, December 23rd, 2002

RollingStone.com: News: Joe Strummer Dead at Fifty FUCK! RIP Joe. “1977 I hope I go to heaven…” See you when we get there.

posted by @ 11:26 am | 0 Comments

Friday, December 20th, 2002

A good piece on TIA in AlterNet: “Canary In a Data Mine”.

posted by @ 12:50 am | 0 Comments

Tuesday, December 17th, 2002

Fantastic article by the great by Chisun Lee here in the The Village Voice: “The NYPD Wants to Watch You”.

posted by @ 6:14 pm | 0 Comments

Tuesday, December 10th, 2002

This article on the front page of todays NY Times, “New Tools for Domestic Spying, and Qualms” drops some new stuff. Plans to combine all FBI databases with help from the Navy are already underway–the master database is set to debut next year. The Transportation Security Administration is apparently developing a more sophisticated travelers’ database. (There is no mention of the travel blacklist which has already affected a number of 60s antiwar activists and 90s antiglobalization activists.) Meanwhile, the security-industrial complex is revving up, led by corporations such as Acxiom Corp. in Little Rock, who are moving from consulting with private firms to helping government agencies.

posted by @ 12:29 pm | 0 Comments

Tuesday, December 3rd, 2002

The Total Information Awareness System is a program being developed by former Reaganite Admiral John Poindexter for the Pentagon. It’s an attempt to link computer databases to create a vast system of information that could be used supposedly to combat terrorism. What kind of data? Credit card purchases, car rentals, phone calls, bank deposits, you name it. The quotidian stuff you do everyday. Those of you who have been following the aftermath of the Patriot Act will recognize the convergence of technology, surveillance, and right-wing ideology that the war has enabled here. It’s about as close to a National ID system as the government can get without Congressional approval and a Presidential signature, and, in some respects, it’s much worse.

For background, you can go to the home page for the Information Awareness Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Remember that acronym, it could haunt us down the line.

The ACLU has a good overview here. And even Newsday is beginning to sound the alarm in this editorial. Finally, here’s Ted Rall’s take on AlterNet. Rall’s cartoons haven’t been that funny lately. But what’s to laugh at these days?

posted by @ 9:17 am | 0 Comments

Friday, November 8th, 2002

Good election analysis by Farai Chideya here. The real interesting thang to me is the study she cites which notes that, in fact, Democratic states are subsidizing Republican states. That’s pretty damn deep. In other words, all the states that claim to be most American in values–self-sufficient, thrifty, individualist–are really benefiting from an anti-egalitarian system of taxing. The study only goes to the 2000 elections, but it would be fascinating to see how this trend developed. It is a finding that actually really neatly dovetails with social ecology work being done on a more local and regional level, as Mike Davis’ new book “Dead Cities” neatly summarizes.

posted by @ 9:46 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, October 30th, 2002

IN THREES

That’s how death seems to roll. Radio is now reporting Jason Mizell, better known as Jam Master Jay, was shot in the head and killed in a Queens studio just a couple of hours ago.

I also got word this morning that a towering Asian American, Dr. Chang-Lin Tien, passed away. Dr. Tien was a shining role model for many of us. He fought many difficult battles for justice on behalf of Asian Americans and oppressed people with the greatest of integrity. He was always the embodiment of grace, style, and joy. He will be deeply missed.

Here’s the AP wire this morning on Dr. Tien’s passing.

HEADLINE: Former Berkeley chancellor dead at 67

BYLINE: By MICHELLE LOCKE, Associated Press Writer

DATELINE: BERKELEY, Calif.

BODY:

Chang-Lin Tien, who became the first Asian-American to head a major U.S. university in his seven years as chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, has died. He was 67.

Tien, who had a debilitating stroke after surgery for a brain tumor in fall 2000, died Tuesday at Kaiser Permanente hospital in Redwood City, Berkeley officials said in a statement released Wednesday.

An internationally known expert on heat transfer and thermal science – he helped developed the insulating tiles for the space shuttle – Tien was also famous for his support of social causes, speaking out in favor of affirmative action before and after UC’s governing board of regents dropped race-based admissions in 1995.

“His energy and optimism, his willingness to fight for the principles he cherished, and his loyalty and love for this campus made it stronger and better,” Berkeley chancellor Robert M. Berdahl said in a statement.

A small man with a big smile, Tien was well known on campus as an unabashed Cal booster. He was a cheerleading, fist-pumping fixture at Berkeley games and rallies and was apt to squeeze an ebullient “Go Bears!” – delivered with the Chinese accent that never left him despite decades in the United States – into speeches and conversations of every stripe.

The 5-foot-6 Tien, who for one year played semiprofessional basketball in Taiwan, used to joke that his one frustrated ambition was to play in the NBA. “I worked really hard but my height never changed in the upward direction,” he told Asian Week in 1997.

Born in Wuhan, China, on July 24, 1935, Tien’s family fled the Japanese to Shanghai during World War II. In 1949, after civil war put Chinese communists in control, they fled again, this time moving to Taiwan.

In 1956, Tien traveled to Kentucky to get his master’s degree at the University of Louisville. Living in the south in the 1950s, he felt discrimination firsthand, an experience he never forgot.

In a 1990 interview with The Associated Press he recalled standing in confusion before water fountains labeled “whites only” and “colored.”

Which one, he wondered, was for him?

A professor took to calling him “Chinaman.” Tien told him to stop.

Tien got his Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1959. He finished fast, 20 months. He had an incentive. His family had forbidden Tien and fiancee Di-Hwa to marry until the doctoral degree was his.

That same year, Tien joined the Berkeley faculty, where he would spend 38 of his 40-year teaching career, leaving briefly in 1988 to serve as executive vice chancellor of UC Irvine. In 1990, he was appointed Berkeley chancellor.

In his first year Tien dealt with a fraternity house fire that killed three students and a hostage taking at a hotel bar near campus in which a gunman killed one student and injured seven others before being fatally shot by police.

In 1992, a local activist with a history of mental illness broke into Tien’s campus residence wielding a machete. Police shot and killed the woman.

In one of his less serious crises, he also dealt with the Naked Guy, a student who briefly led a go-bare movement until Tien countered with a nudity ban.

One of the biggest challenges Tien faced was financial, as the California recession of the early 1990s shrank state education funding. Tien put his formidable fund-raising skills to work, helping bring in millions in donations.

In 1995, Berkeley and the rest of the UC system plunged into the national spotlight with the regents’ tense 14-10 vote to drop UC’s affirmative action programs. Tien argued for keeping race-based admissions and later publicly lamented the drop in the number of black and Hispanic students at Berkeley following the vote.

In 1996, Tien submitted his resignation as chancellor, saying he had accomplished his goals.

Later that year, he was in the running for Energy Secretary in President Clinton’s cabinet. But that did not materialize after it was reported he had helped relatives of Mochtar Riady, an Indonesian businessman at the heart of a controversy over Democratic campaign financing involving Asian money.

Riady asked Tien for help getting three relatives into Berkeley and also donated $200,000 to Cal. The donation, which was part of $8.5 million from several Asian philanthropists, was legal and Tien was never accused of any impropriety, but there was speculation the connection sank Tien’s chances.

Although he never held a cabinet office, Tien earned international recognition for his scientific work in radiative heat transfer. He worked on the Saturn rocket boosters developed in the 1960s to send machines and man into space, helping estimate how much the exhaust plume would heat the base of the rocket. In the 1970s, he worked on the problem of keeping the thousands of insulating tiles glued to the space shuttle to withstand the heat of reentering the Earth’s atmosphere.

Tien was a visionary in the field of thermal sciences, said Richard O. Buckius, a former Tien student and now head of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“He marked out new high-impact areas, he did seminal work in those areas, and then he led everybody to the next area,” Buckius said.

Tien became a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1976 and was elected in 1991 as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1999, the International Astronomical Union approved the naming of an asteroid after him.

Tien is survived by his wife; three children, Norman, Phyllis and Christine, and four grandchildren.

posted by @ 8:09 pm | 0 Comments

Friday, October 25th, 2002

This just in. Paul Wellstone is dead in a plane crash. He was in a hotly contested race for the Senate, which the Dems currently have a majority in. Wellstone was one of the most progressive, principled voices in the Senate. It’s a huge loss. If you ask me when I’m not thinking straight, I might tell you I think there’s something really fishy about all this. In any case, here’s a fine memorial and analysis from AlterNet’s Don Hazen.

posted by @ 1:17 pm | 0 Comments



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