Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

Green Party Taps Hip-Hop Activist Rosa Clemente For VP

Signaling it is serious about courting the hip-hop vote, Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney has tapped respected hip-hop activist Rosa Clemente as her Vice Presidential pick.

If the Green Party accepts McKinney’s nomination this weekend at its convention, Clemente will make history as the first hip-hop generation candidate on a presidential ticket, and together with McKinney make up the first all-female of color ticket in U.S. history. McKinney is African American. Clemente identifies herself as Puerto Rican of African descent.

Clemente joins Brooklyn Congressional candidate Brooklyn Congressional candidate Kevin Powell as another prominent hip-hop writer/activist competing in the 2008 elections. Maryland hip-hop activist and scholar Jared Ball also competed for the Green Party presidential nomination, ending his run this past January.

“This campaign is the opportunity the Hip-Hop generation has been working for,” Clemente wrote in an email to supporters this morning. “This is our time to address the issues affecting our communities – rising unemployment, the high cost of food and housing, a lack of quality public education and access to higher education, the prison-industrial complex, and unaccountable corporate media. These issues are not being addressed by either the Republican or Democratic nominee.”

Clemente has been one of the most prominent national hip-hop activists for nearly a decade. She was one of the co-founders of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention and of REACHip-Hop, a New York City-based coalition that launched a boycott of Hot 97 for greater accountability and balance on the airwaves. Affiliated with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Clemente has been a prominent national organizer around securing aid to Gulf Coast victims of Katrina, and against the verdicts in the Sean Bell case.

Clemente’s potential VP run was welcomed by many in the hip-hop community.

“I’ve never voted in the Presidential election; I’ve never felt strongly enough about a candidate to, said rapper M1 of Dead Prez. “I feel that now is the greatest opportunity for the Hip-Hop community to put our collective strength and power to the test and vote for someone who represents who we are and what we stand for.”

“It’s a good sign of political maturity for hip-hop,” Troy Nkrumah, 2008 Chair of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention, said of Clemente’s run. “There are issues we’ve been screaming about to the candidates and they’ve ignored them–whether police accountability, the prison system, or the war in Iraq. They touch the issues on the surface, they talk about change, but their policies are in line with Bush. A lot of us were turned off.”

“But Rosa is one of the people that knows we need systemic change, especially the youth community,” he added. “She has a history of speaking her mind, not holding her tongue, and telling the truth.”

posted by @ 9:26 am | 9 Comments

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

McCain :: My Crew, My Dogs

Late-breaking polls show that Obama is deeply in trouble with one key demographic.

If the election were held today, the AP-Yahoo poll all but guarantees McCain would stomp Obama among–angry rednecks? white women? retired army generals?–no, dog-owners.

Said one voter, “I think a person who owns a pet is a more compassionate person – caring, giving, trustworthy. I like pet owners.”

McCain owns 2 dogs, an English springer spaniel and a mutt.

While currently petless, Obama has announced he is buying his girls a dog when the election is over, win or lose.

Big Boi, holla at your candidate. The future of the nation could depend on it.

posted by @ 10:24 am | 0 Comments

Friday, July 4th, 2008

Rinku Sen on Immigration and The Meaning of July 4th

A great piece here by Rinku, publisher of Colorlines and the president of ARC::

On this Fourth of July, I will be eating hot dogs. While I was trying to fit in as an Indian immigrant child throughout the 1970’s, they represented the quintessential American food. I begged my mother to let me have them for dinner every night instead of chicken curry and rice. She nixed the hotdogs but sometimes allowed spaghetti and meatballs — straight from a can. Hotdogs were “invented” by German immigrants serving their traditional sausages in the hustling streets of the new world, and spaghetti, everyone knows, came from Italy. If I had been celebrating Independence Day 150 years ago, however, neither would have been on the menu. In those days, Germans and Italians weren’t considered Americans, or even white. When they fought over the most lucrative street corner for food vendors in the 1880’s, the press reported these incidents as “race riots.”

I’ll be sharing this holiday with a group of restaurant workers, largely immigrants. Along with the hotdogs, we’ll have tacos, samosas, falafel. According to one side of immigration debate, we can keep our goodies to ourselves. America doesn’t want them, or us.

posted by @ 10:17 am | 1 Comment

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Young Jeezy & The Power of Words

No disrespect to Young Jeezy, but he’s been spinning like a Korean b-boy this past week after jumping in the presidential cypher in this month’s cover story.

Jeezy raised eyebrows when he told Benjamin Meadows-Ingram:

“No disrespect to my man Barack, but I f**ked with John McCain. He greeted me like a god.”

But by yesterday, the rapper had issued a press release and a video saying that no, he in fact supports Obama.

(You think I could have ever written something like I just did back when MC Eiht was first saying, “Geeeeeeeaaaahh”? When you have to show you’re gangsta by saying you vote and you vote Democratic and you vote Black and you quote Aristotle to support that, something big has just happened.)

Jeezy says that the whole episode taught him “the power of words.” I wish he had thought about that when he was writing his lyrics for “Love In This Club”.

But now that he’s moved beyond bagging groceries, he had some profound thoughts on the elections in his MTV interview:

“..my mama is about to have surgery that I gotta pay for out of my pocket because she can’t get insurance. I don’t really feel McCain. It ain’t just because Barack is Black; he can make change. Just like Bush equals recession, Barack equals progression. I really feel that, all bullsh– aside. He’s gotta come in and keep it right.”

Which goes to what many of us have been saying all along: if folks felt free to rap more about what they actually think, rather than what they think they need to in order to get money (to pay for health insurance and other sh*t), it’d be a different world right now.

Jeezy says he’ll be putting up a song called “My President Is Black” on his website the Monday after July 4th.

Me? My head is still spinning.

posted by @ 8:36 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

2G2K Circus :: Obama as Billy Beane?

Uh oh! Ferentz went there by comparing Barack Obama to Billy Beane. Here we go now.

While I love the equating the two people who probably most inspire in me the most intense mix of fanboy awe and bar-side cynicism, I’m not sure the analogy is perfect. You might say that the campaign is Billy Beane-like, and the candidate is much older-school.

I think Michael Lewis was trying to show how Billy Beane had rationalized the game for the 21st Century, removed it from the mystical realm of old scouts and false indicators. And I think he did it because Oakland is one of the poorest drawing teams in the league–we’re consistently in the bottom quarter, I mean, shit, we’re moving to freakin Fremont.

He’s the epitome of the restless Adam Smith-style capitalist, relentlessly destroying the team to remake it. He’s probably the least wedded to narrative of anyone in the game. Every die-hard A’s fan–of which I am beyond one–knows their heart will get broken in the fall.

Nick Swisher or Danny Haren or Tim Hudson or Miguel Tejada–Miguel Tejada! whom Beane found on the cheap in the DR and built up from a scrawny little, um, beanpole into one of the best in the game–all of these were heroes who conformed to Oakland’s sense of underdog love and bootstrap pride. None of them got the long-term contract, and all of them were traded before their time.

The story Billy Beane delivers every year is this one: we’ll have a new crop of underachivers, outcasts, past-their-prime stars, and hot young stars on the field. And then when the year’s over, we’ll lose half of them–some to bigger paychecks (the Hankees, the Gnats) and some to oblivion. But don’t get too attached.

That’s certainly the mentality of the permanent party operatives, especially Dems who have been mainly out of power for the last forty years. The candidate is the candidate, and next year there will be another. Obama is Mr. Field of Dreams, though, and that’s why I agree with your conclusion. The campaign may be underestimating the damage it is doing with the standard post-primary rightward swing thing.

I think the essential tug-of-war in the Democratic party is between its idealism and its pragmatism. Most long-time observers don’t want to go there–they correctly point to 1968 and 1972 as times when this intraparty fight ended in disaster.

But no one can get to a new majority without some leaps of imagination, and that’s where numbers, statistics, and damn lies can strand this presidential campaign like the last two.

posted by @ 8:27 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

Actually Don’t Read My Posts

Just read Humanity Critic. Man! I should just quit.

posted by @ 2:55 pm | 1 Comment

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

The Long Days Of Obama’s Summer

Ain’t no fun being Obama these days. Just ask the candidate, who cracked to the press corps the other day, “It’s not allowed.”

Although his lead in the polls seems to be holding steady, he’s been caught out there in the long days of summer. A lot of it is of his own making, as he moves his campaign to the right for the general election after a long primary season that was about motivating his base on the left.

Obama has riled them by refusing public financing after promising he would, reversing his position to back a law that allows the government to use telecom companies in warrantless wiretapping, and throwing Wesley Clark under a bus over his comments on McCain’s time in the military.

By yesterday, folks were scratching their heads.

To recap: Obama likes campaign finance reform but refuses spending limits. He opposes government spying and media consolidation, but if the two issues come together, he’ll reconsider. He says McCain’s war experience does not automatically make him the best presidential candidate, but if another military man voices the same thing, it’s wrong. What happened?

And on top of all that, Obama is also under fire for receiving campaign support from Chicago slumlord developers, who took advantage of weakened federal oversight and enforcement to secure federal funds to gentrify Chicago and leave affordable housing in shambles. Plus a quarter of Americans still think he’s unpatriotic, and a tenth believe he’s Muslim.

It’s getting hot in here.

No wonder he’s now begun making a point of his opposition to initiatives that would ban gay marriage. (It was the headline in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.)

One initative will be on the ballot in California-where Governor Schwarzenegger holds the same position and Obama is expected to win easily. The other is in Arizona, McCain’s home state, where the Republican candidate declared his support for the ban. The last will play out in Florida, and we all know about Florida.

Here’s the question many Obama supporters are raising now: is he simply doing the same thing the Republicans have been doing for their conservative base for years–playing up cultural issues while backsliding on some of the most important economic and political ones? Will issues like gay marriage, affirmative action, and green jobs simply become triangulation for the same old politics of big money and bad government?

That wouldn’t be change now, would it?

posted by @ 9:00 am | 1 Comment

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

A Final Farewell To Cody’s

Matt Richtel says one last goodbye to Cody’s. We’ll all miss it deeply.

posted by @ 7:26 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

How Korean B-Boys Took Over The World


Rivers Crew in the flow.
Photo by the incomparable magnificent Joe Conzo. Biters will be beheaded.

My piece on R16 and the evolution of Korean b-boying is finally done and up. Big big big up to the super-supreme Joy Yoon, the R16 lifers in Seoul and New York (you know who you is), my patient fixers/translators James, Erica, Anna, and Joe and all of the dancers, producers, and rappers, whom I met but couldn’t include, especially Sean II Slow who hosted us for an evening at his studio in Hongdae.

A teaser here:

This summer, the United States is reaching new heights of dance fever as TV shows like Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance” and MTV’s “Randy Jackson Presents: America’s Top Dance Crew” have returned to the airwaves. MTV’s runaway hit is considered especially cutting edge, showcasing hip-hop dance groups from across America. But if MTV really wants the best dance crew, it should be looking in South Korea.

“Of the top six or seven crews in the world, I’d say half of them are from Korea,” says Christopher “Cros One” Wright, 33, an American dance promoter and b-boy who was recently in Suwon, South Korea, to judge the second annual global invitational hip-hop dance competition, called R16, that was held at the end of May.

The development of South Koreans’ hip-hop dancing could be seen a cultural parallel to their sharp global ascendance in electronics and automaking. A decade ago, Koreans were struggling to imitate the Bronx-style b-boy and West Coast funk styles that are the backbone of the genre. Now, a handful of these crews are the safest bets to win any competition anywhere.

Certainly no country takes its hip-hop dance more seriously. The Korean government — through its tourism board and the city of Suwon — invested nearly $2 million in this year’s competition. Two of the most successful teams, Gamblers and Rivers, have been designated official ambassadors of Korean culture. Once considered outcasts, the b-boys now seem to embody precisely the kind of dynamic, dexterous and youthful excellence that the government wants to project.

Although hip-hop dance goes back at least 35 years, the top Korean b-boys trace their histories back just 11 years, to 1997, the Year Zero of Korean breaking. By 2001, the first year that a Korean crew entered the Battle of the Year — the world’s biggest b-boy contest — they won “best show” honors and a fourth-place trophy. Every year since, a Korean crew has placed first or second. Says Battle of the Year founder Thomas Hergenrother, “Korea is on a different planet at the moment.”

…

The full thang is here. If ya dig, then Digg. If ya buzz, then Buzz.

BTW here’s my earlier wrap-up on R16 and direct links to the semis and finals videos.

posted by @ 9:23 am | 3 Comments

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Is The Republican Party Dead?

In his blog, Ferentz asks the question of the week: “What on earth happened to the Republicans?”

Topical, yeah?

It’s the question behind Joe Bruno’s surprising resignation from the New York State Senate, which in the long term, could mean a shift in state power back to the Dems for decades to come.

It’s the question behind Scott McClellan’s supposed imminent conversion to the Democratic party.

And it’s the topic on the table for the cover of Harper’s Magazine this month, as conservatives Kevin Phillips, Scott McConnell and others weigh in under the banner headline: WHY THE GOP MUST DIE.

The upshot is that the party of Bush and Rove have led conservatives into a blind alley with the wars and the economy because they insisted on governing from the Right with a paper-thin majority.

It’s fun to see conservatives putting their own party on blast. Here’s Phillips: “A major Republican weakness that doesn’t get noticed is their inability, despite all their macho muscle-flexing, to bring foreign wars to a successful finish.” Zing!

And it’s also great to see folks who really understand that demographic changes force Democrats to forge a new majority not merely to pander to soccer moms and angry white men. Of course, these guys don’t work for the Democrats. They’re way too smart for that.

So before Democrats get too happy, some words of warning from Phillips, the most compelling conservative ever:

PHILLIPS :: …the public showed that it can produce a significant swing in 2006, in electoral terms. But the issues on which they suppopsedly voted are not being addressed. How do you vote to get everybody out of Iraq for example? Vote for the Democrats? That hasn’t worked so far.

MCCONNELL :: And it cuts both ways. The people who have been voting Republican for the past thirty years on cultural rather than class issues–i.e. culturally conservative Reagan Democrats–have gotten nothing for their votes either. But there is no evidence whatsoever that they are going to stop voting Republican.

KEVIN BAKER, Harper’s Magazine contributing editor :: It’s like you have this weird inversion of Tammany. They don’t get you out of jail, they don’t give you a turkey at Christmas, they don’t do anything for you, and yet somehow they keep winning.

THOMAS SCHALLER, professor University of Maryland :: The irony is that today the government has far more power than in the past. It is a much larger part of the economy, and so when it moves a lever, it can expect a dramatic effect.

PHILLIPS :: And yet people increasingly seem to believe that their votes don’t matter, that these parties aren’t any different from each other. It’s all just a big game. Democrats are the not-Republicans and Republicans are the non-Democrats. And if None Of The Above could be on the ballot, it would scare the bejesus out of everybody. What a choice that would be!

posted by @ 2:17 pm | 1 Comment



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