Thursday, June 7th, 2007

Marley Marl Has A Heart Attack

Nobody’s smiling. Article at AllHipHop.com is here. Link via Noz.

posted by @ 8:48 am | 1 Comment

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

This Weekend For Bay Heads


Summer weekend, lots of great music to go around.

Tune in Friday night to the Uhuru Maggot’s long-standing, definitive History of Funk show, 10pm on KPFA FM 94.1. We’ll be getting behind the Betty Davis story.

And on Saturday night, at The Independent, the Writer’s Block DJ crew–that loose-knit federation of writers who DJ and DJs who write organized by Weyland Southon of Hard Knock Radio, and featuring a growing cast of folks like Susie Lundy, DJ Ripley, DJ Emancipacion, Eric Arnold, the tragically Bosux-loving (1-3 vs. the A’s this year) Adam Mansbach, and yours truly–will be warming you up for the great Meshell Ndegeocello!

Come early to catch the vibe…

posted by @ 9:50 am | 0 Comments

Friday, May 18th, 2007

New Times/VVM Sells East Bay Express

A former employee tipped me to this article:

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

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

Now, there will be no ties.

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

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

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

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

posted by @ 8:00 am | 1 Comment

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

Thank You Warriors

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

posted by @ 9:29 pm | 0 Comments

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the whole thang

posted by @ 7:31 am | 0 Comments

Saturday, May 12th, 2007

Air Baron


You got Kirilenkoed!

posted by @ 7:54 am | 0 Comments

Saturday, May 12th, 2007

Marian Liu :: Is Hyphy Over?

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

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

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

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

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

posted by @ 7:52 am | 1 Comment

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

Jeff Yang on Angry Asian Men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted by @ 7:15 am | 1 Comment

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

Mark Anthony Neal :: "What’s the Real Reason for the Sudden Attack on Hip Hop?"

Mark Anthony Neal turns in a classic on VIBE.com. This slams as hard as Baron Davis on Dirk No-game-ski:

In the context of these questions, we can also ask why the attacks on hip hop – and why now? That some people hoped to enact political retribution for the so-called victory of Don Imus’s firing, goes without saying. But I’d like to suggest that, more significantly, the current critique of hip hop is aimed at undermining the culture’s potential to politicize the generations of constituents that might claim hip hop as their social movement. After high profile voter registration campaigns in 2004 that were fronted by Russell Simmons, Sean Combs and others, much was made of the lack of impact that hip hop generation voters had on the outcome of the 2004 Presidential election. The hip hop generation, in fact, embraced the franchise in unprecedented numbers, but those numbers were obscured by the unprecedented turnout of religious fundamentalists who were galvanized by issues like same-sex marriage and threats of anti-American terrorism. With no candidate on the Right likely to galvanize religious fundamentalists, the hip hop nation – which has continued to organize since 2004 – represents a legitimate political bloc. With this political bloc comes demands for social justice, particularly within the realms of the prison industrial complex, the labor force, US foreign policy, law enforcement, the electoral process, mainstream corporate media, the economy, public education and a range of other concerns.

While there has long been criticism of hip hop culture from the standpoint of social conservatives, pro-hip hop feminists, religious groups, anti-homophobia activists and hip hop heads themselves, what marks this moment as different are the attempts to force mainstream black political leadership and Democratic Presidential candidates to repudiate hip hop culture (reminiscent of the pressures placed on Reverend Jesse Jackson to distance himself from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in 1984).

Emblematic of these pressures is a recent Chicago Tribune editorial, which asked,

“Will Obama scold David Geffen, the entertainment mogul who is one of
his most prominent contributors and who owns Snoop Dogg’s record label? Will
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton admonish rap impresario Timbaland, who recently
threw a benefit for her at his Miami home that raised $800,000?”

Asking figures like Reverend Al Sharpton, Senators Clinton and Obama, and Russell Simmons to publicly distance themselves from hip hop is a transparent attempt drive a wedge between them and a constituency that has both the energy and the creativity to galvanize a youth-based electorate in the 2008 election season.

The sexism, misogyny, violence, anti-intellectualism and homophobia that rap music traffics in is real – but it is also reflective of where American society is at this moment. Remove offensive and vulgar lyrics from rap music, and we are still faced with a society that is largely sexist, misogynistic, violent, anti-intellectual and homophobic. The real story here, is that as the hip hop generation(s) have come to maturity and begun to realize their civic, social and political responsibility, that there are many in the larger society who are disconcerted – and they should be.

Such is the reality of social change.

Bravo.

posted by @ 5:27 pm | 0 Comments

Tuesday, April 24th, 2007

On The Hip-Hop Summit Action Network’s Language Ban

Here’s that promised piece from Davey D I mentioned the other day. It provides the deep context for the editorial by Dave Zirin and I that ran in the LA Times yesterday, and it’s coming from one of the people who has been at the forefront of this hip-hop media justice movement for two decades.

I should also mention that there is a quote of me apparently going off on the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network’s “recommendation” for a voluntary industry ban on the N-word, the B-word, and the H-word, a “Coalition on Broadcast Standards”, and artist mentoring, and in today’s AM New York.

This quote was taken out of context by the reporter. Last week, reporter asked me how I felt generally about the reaction of activists like the Rev. Al Sharpton. He was not asking specifically about the ban which, when he interviewed me, had not yet been announced. Folks, that’s called shitty reporting.

For the record, my position is simple: radio and TV already have banned these words, so the statement–a “recommendation” for “voluntary action”–does nothing new. There are no real incentives in this for the industry to bring more balance to the airwaves.

As for all this top-down stuff, it will always be too little too late unless hip-hop generation activists who have been working hard on the issues and have the community’s interest at heart are brought into the discussion. Otherwise, it is posturing and grandstanding.

Extra stuff:

* Here’s what Bakari Kitwana and Joan Morgan think.

* Lastly, Davey and Chuck Creekmur from allhiphop.com will be part of a roundtable panel on Fox News with John Gibson this afternoon at 5pm est/2pm pst to talk this stuff. Tune in.

Finally, I don’t agree with everything in Davey’s piece, and he does call out a lot of close friends of mine, some of whom I’m very inclined to defend. But I also know, having known Davey for two decades now that this piece is probably the realest he’s been in a long time with himself and with his audience.

Read it and debate it in the context of the major soul-searching we all are doing now.

This Gangsta Stuff & Russell’s Call For Change
by Davey D

I’ve read the recent criticisms launched at Russell Simmons and the assertions that his current position of wanting to ban the use of certain words on records is “self-serving.” Of course it is. Anything Russell does is gonna be self-serving. What did we expect? Wasn’t that the plan? Weren’t we supposed to create an economic, political or social situation where he would see it in his best interest to change up?

He has business interests to protect — and the social and political climate has rightly changed now, with calls for balance growing substantially louder. Russell’s business is being impacted by people who are tired of the mass marketing of the mainstream minstrelsy that we see all day, every day.

Certainly no one seriously expected Russell or Ben Chavis to come up to Harlem to watch a screening of Turn Off Channel Zero. Why would we? And let’s be honest…did we really want them there? I think one of the things we overlook is the role that we played in getting these issues as much attention as they’ve gotten. We are the ones who changed the current climate with our collective efforts.

The fact that so many people are fed up is the result of the Turn off the Radio tribunal longtime radio vet Bob Law had up at the church on 126th street in NYC several years ago.

The climate was also changed as a result of the Hot 97 campaign, which was quite successful in New York. We not only made them lose money, but we blemished people’s records as well, and even got several people dismissed as that station saw its ratings drop. They went from number 1 to number 8 in their market, which, in the radio industry, is major. Sure there were other factors at hand, but we certainly played a big part in initiating change there.

The climate change that we’re seeing is also the result of the KMEL People’s Station campaign put together by Tony Coleman of Minds Eye Collective and Malkia Cyrill of Youth media Council in San Francisco after I got bounced from working there. That was a successful campaign that forced KMEL to start playing local music and even offer me my job back (which I turned down).

We’re seeing the change in climate now as result of Black Out Fridays in Detroit too. There we had intense lobbying efforts by Industry Ears to the FCC, Attorneys General, and Congress about the continued abuses of our airwaves. The new focus on balance is the result of people like Chuck D, dead prez, Immortal Technique and so many others…voices who railed against fucked-up media in public spaces in places. It’s also the result of films like Turn Off Channel Zero and Hip Hop Beyond Beats and
Rhymes, and of the Zulu Nation’s Bring Back The Balance campaign.

This climate is the result of us starting our own media outlets like The Block Report, Freemix Radio, Soul Patrol, Harrambe, Radio, Breakdown FM and others. I could go on and on…

These changes, both large and small, are due to us pushing and pushing — and agitating and demanding better scenarios for our collective community. Russell’s proposal to change lyrics is but a small victory…he wouldn’t have done this a year ago. We now need to take credit and push even harder for substantial change both within and outside of the industry.

Having been deeply involved with the first wave of content battles back in ’88 when we led the NWA boycott, I clearly recall how the community argued ferociously against our effort. We did two weeks worth of radio shows getting community input back then, and I remember how many well-meaning Black folks who considered themselves conscious and revolutionary told us we were straight-up wrong. Maybe I’ll post those landmark radio shows at some point — shows which which included me, the guys from Digital Underground, Beni B of ABB records and all the Black college deejays from the Bay at that time. Now that time has passed people have a very different stance, but that big debate back then lead to the formation of the Bay Area Hip Hop Coalition.

The debates we had were fierce. Many felt we should never glamorize disrespectful language, while others felt like NWA and Luke were somehow revolutionary. Hell, I even have a tape of KRS coming on our show praising the rough use of language by those guys — he felt like it was good thing at the time.

There were many who felt that the stories by NWA needed to be heard and that they were indeed a reflection of us. I recall people throwing their fist in the air saying “fuck what white people think, this is our music” and “we gonna use the N-word all day long.” People felt like keeping it ‘hood was important. We were coming off the tail end of people criticizing Bill Cosby for not showing his Brooklyn neighborhood as a rough and rugged ghetto. Even Spike Lee caught heat for having a ‘too clean’ Brooklyn ‘hood when he showed Do the Right Thing.

I recall white writers like Dan Charnas of The Source getting props and blessings from revolutionary types when he praised Ice Cube for reflecting anger in the ‘hood when he called women bitches. In fact, I even remember Harry Allen almost coming to blows with this cat because he took such a strident stance and had revolutionary types ‘supporting his efforts.’ If you think I’m lying go back and look at the arguments that were raised at that time around this subject matter.

Part of the praise placed upon NWA and gangsta rap was this was Hip Hop way of ‘keeping it real’ (that’s when that phrase started to get popularized). Hip Hop has always been about being honest and true to the subject matter at hand — but soon that definition got narrowed down to Hip Hop supposedly keeping it ‘true to the streets.’

Complicating this issue further was the fact that West Coast rap prior to NWA often wasn’t even considered Hip Hop by our east coast brethren. I have all those early New Music Seminar tapes with Egyptian Lover and Rodney O complaining about being clowned when they came to the Big Apple because their music was considered too soft.

I also remember groups like The LA Dream Team, Sir Mix-a-Lot and numerous others being dissed. Paradise even talks about the time when Hammer came up to the Latin Quarters by himself to do his song “Ring ‘Em,” which was big hit in the hoods out here in Cali, but was clowned in NY.

NWA, with its booming beats and harsh lyrics, put LA and the west on the map and got Cali some acceptance. This was a big incentive for folks out here to overlook their own morals and common sense and get behind those gangsta groups that knocked the doors down. Personally, despite doing some of NWA’s first interviews, I felt uncomfortable calling what they did revolutionary because I recall both Cube and Eazy telling me they were cursing up a storm as a way to initially be funny and that they enjoyed seeing the shocked look on people’s faces. They weren’t doing it because they really felt that way (as many like to romanticize). Look at some of the old articles on them and you’ll see them admitting to that.

This was a big point of contention, and was also the beginning of how shit started to get co-opted. When we did the boycotts, they were the result of community approval, involvement and support. The boycotts were effective and lasted for a year, and we did follow up interviews with NWA about them.

During one landmark interview, Cube spoke passionately about his desire to change and be more political, and even talked about the internal debates he and his group were having about being responsible. It wasn’t that long after that that he left the group, and much of what he talked about soon surfaced on his Amerikkka’s Most Wanted album.

Ironically the NWA boycott was broken by white deejays who felt like the group’s material, and material like it, should be heard, and that NWA was somehow more authentic and real then groups like X-Clan and Public Enemy.

This assessment not only played itself out on college radio, but it was replicated on commercial radio as well — and I personally saw our playlist switch up almost overnight from playing PE, X-Clan and Paris to gangsta rap.

Again, non-black deejays like Theo Mizuhara lead the charge in pushing gangsta material over the positive. This attitude was also embraced by several high profile black writers like Cheo Choker, James Bernard and later Toure — who once bragged to me via email that he “killed the career of Public Enemy” by writing a widely read negative review of their album

In hindsight, we can see (and hopefully understand) that it was probably a mistake for us to not have been more involved in demanding what we knew to be right at the time, and we soon began to see people cash on the love that those outside of our communities were showing for gangsta rap. In 2007, we are seeing the end results.

The fact that we helped create a climate to start to turn things around is a good thing. If it manifests itself in stations saying they wanna change up then that’s great. If it means it will help get more people excited about doing a different type of rap highlighting different subject matter then I’m all for it.

If it means Russell (who for the past few years has said he would never try and tell an artist to change his or her lyrics) is now calling for an end to hateful and derogatory words in commercially-released material, I say that’s good thing. We should push harder and encourage more to follow suit.

What’s the next step? That’s our collective challenge.

Now that we have people ready to push for better music, how do we intend to distribute? Keep in mind that while we were arguing about Russell being a culture vulture, the RIAA and US Copyright Law flipped the script and developed a new type of payola which effectively has wiped out Internet radio and any other digital distribution streams.

They got the US Copyright office to raise rates by 1200% and to have it apply retroactively starting on May 15th. Appeals to this ruling have been denied, which means that most small internet broadcasters and streaming will stop by the end of May because cats are gonna be bankrupt. The big players like AOL radio, Yahoo and Microsoft will be around, but not the rest. So how are we gonna get all this good alternative music across?

If you think you can get around it by using independent artists, think again. Because of fear of lawsuits, most internet providers are gearing up to protect themselves from lawsuits. They won’t want to take the chance of one of us putting out RIAA-owned material, so they will take precautions and limit the ability to pass the good music along.

While many small broadcasters like us (who saw the internet as a saving grace) will now find themselves in serious legal and financial jeapordy, the big time radio stations are cutting side deals with the major labels so they don’t have to pay the high royalty rates — in exchange for normal airplay.

This is why some of us — like me, Paul Porter, and Lisa Fager from Industry Ears — were harping on this payola stuff so much. Now the shit is about to come back and haunt us big time. That’s a serious battle that we will have to undertake. For those who have concerns about censorship, this change in copyright law is where we have the real battle.

Peace out for now,

Davey D

posted by @ 8:39 am | 2 Comments



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