Saturday, December 3rd, 2005

The Fire In Oakland: Lessons From South Central

Our area has been abuzz with the trashing, burning and looting of two Muslim-owned liquor stores in West Oakland. First, twelve people–resembling members of the Nation of Islam because of their bowtie-and-suit dress–came into San Pablo Liquor and trashed the shelves with baseball bats. They told the owners it was not right for a Muslim to sell liquor. They did the same at New York Market.

The surveillance video from the San Pablo liquor store incident made headlines across the country. The owner of New York Market was allegedly then kidnapped and held while the store was burned down and looted. Two men of Yusef Bey’s local Black Muslim organization–one his son, the other a longtime associate–have turned themselves in, and four more are sought.

(For the record, the late Bey separated from the Nation of Islam amidst some nasty allegations. His organization has no formal relationship with the Nation.)

Our boy Adisa Banjoko comments here on the controversy:

As a Muslim convert I feel that there is no legitimate reason that Muslim Arabs from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Palestine or Jordan should be selling products to black people that they would never try to sell in their own countries. However, I also feel that to vandalize and burn down these stores also reflects badly on Islam. The Muslim shopkeepers, vandals, arsonists, and kidnappers have all done wrong by their neighbors and by Islam.

Somewhere between tearing the building apart and doing nothing lies a non-violent solution that can be enacted by the community. The time for peace is now. However, unless and until the issue of liquor-store infestations of black ghettos are properly addressed, I fear we may see more of the opposite.

From my point of view, living not too far from where it all went down, the immediate trigger to last week’s incidents probably had less to do with a political agenda than with some street-type business.

But if we want to go back to the early 90s in South Central Los Angeles as a model for lessons to draw, here’s what I can say:

The lack of access to inexpensive, quality food in the inner city is an important part of the context for the fostering of immigrant-owned liquor-stores.

I wrote this in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop:

The bigger problem for the community was that liquor stores were poor substitutes for grocery stores. Since the 1965 Watts Riots, very few supermarkets had reopened, and even fewer were built in the area. Vons had three hundred stores in the region, but only two in South Central. Worse, study after study found that supermarkets in South Central were the most expensive in the county, with grocery prices up to 20 to 30 percent higher than those in the suburbs and exurbs. Politicians would not do anything about it. It was as if they figured liquor was more important to inner-city residents than food. Immigrant liquor-store entrepreneurs did not provide what people really needed, but they still filled a void that no one else was willing to.

As for public policy fixes, I think Karen Bass’ work with the Community Coalition to create a multiracial front to convert liquor stores into other businesses and bring in real supermarkets was more empowering and community-building than Danny Bakewell’s efforts to get the Korean American and Arab American storeowners simply to sell their stores to African American owners. One tried to push for businesses that the community needed, the other simply tried to change the face behind the counter.

In the end, however, the liquor store conversion push failed because the LA City Council allocated much less than a million dollars to resolve the problem. This, out of a promised $4 billion public-private Rebuild LA effort. Less than a dozen stores were actually converted–in most cases to laundromats. Nothing added up to anything like a real economic development plan.

In that regard, here’s a good description of the community efforts going on Oakland around liquor-store closure. Still, there’s little talk of conversion going on.

posted by @ 10:40 am | 3 Comments

Saturday, December 3rd, 2005

Free Culture: Pareles on File-Sharing & The Grateful Dead

Intellectual property, copyright, downloading, even the issue of sampling–there’s a side to be taken on behalf of artists and audiences who aren’t down with corporate manipulation.

Folks have taken to calling this the Free Culture movement, and whether the NY Times’ Jon Pareles has intended to or not he’s made a definitive, succinct statement of what Free Culture advocates are against in today’s column on the controversy over the Grateful Dead’s audio programs.

For some background, this week the Dead asked a third-party website Live Music Archive, a site which aggregates and makes available from free download countless jam-band concerts, to pull its music. This marked a shocking turnaround in the Dead’s policy. For decades, the Dead had pioneered a free taping section at its own concerts, encouraging its fans to bootleg its shows. But initially the Dead asked Live Music Archive not just to remove its own official recordings but audience-made recordings as well.

After an outcry from Dead fans, it reversed its policy halfway, allowing the audience-made recordings back into the archive, while pulling its own. Presumably these official recordings will now be sold.

Here’s the Pareles’ piece. His argument below could be extended to the entire field of sampling law–which has often fattened both record label and publishing company at the expense of both the recording artist who has sampled and the recording artist who has been sampled.

To wit:

“The Dead are thus the latest victims of the notion that digital copying is qualitatively different from every recording technology since the invention of music notation. Yes, digital copying is fast; it’s exact; it’s easy. For a recording business that has realized far too late that it is selling music, not discs, digital copying has destroyed the old monopoly on pressing and distribution.

Digital downloads can also provide numbers for accountants to tabulate and for statistics-mongers to misinterpret. (Just because 10,000 people download a concert doesn’t mean 10,000 people would pay for it.)

Oddly enough, the numbers also seem to encourage visions of wringing every statutory nickel out of every recording ever made. In conformity to copyright law that was designed for sheet music and discs rather than the Web, visions persist of the Internet not as a cornucopia, but as a pay-per-play jukebox. The Deadheads’ old trading network had looked back to an earlier model: music as folklore.

Suddenly, after all these amicable and profitable years, Dead representatives are talking about “rights” to those concert recordings. It’s lawyer talk, record-business talk, and entirely valid on those terms; the Dead do hold copyrights and are entitled to authorize or withhold permission to copy their work. (So, incidentally, are those who own the copyrights to Dead concert staples like Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.” )

Enforcing that permission on the Internet is another matter. Digital-rights management by technical means is iffy at best: widely circumvented by professional pirates and problematic for consumers trying, for instance, to transfer songs from their CD’s to an iPod. Sony BMG Music, trying to limit copying of CD’s, included software that created security hazards in its paying customers’ computers and is now recalling some four million CD’s and facing lawsuits. The next Windows operating system may place anticopying mechanisms beyond users’ control.

The Dead’s problem is more temporal than technical. Grateful Dead recordings, including soundboard recordings, have been circulating since the inception of the Internet and are not going to disappear by fiat.

The Dead had created an anarchy of trust, going not by statute but by instinct and turning fans into co-conspirators, spreading their music and buying tickets, T-shirts and official CD’s to show their loyalty. The new approach, giving fans some but not all of what they had until last week, changes that relationship.

No doubt it will sell some additional concert downloads in the short run. But by imposing restrictions, it will also encourage jam-band fans – a particularly Internet-savvy demographic – to circumvent those restrictions, finding the soundboard recordings through unofficial channels. The change also downgrades fans into the customers they were all along. It removes what could crassly be called brand value from the Dead’s legacy by reducing them to one more band with products to sell.

Will the logic of copyright law be more profitable, in the end, than the logic of sharing? That’s the Dead’s latest improvisational experiment.

posted by @ 10:03 am | 1 Comment

Friday, December 2nd, 2005

Plan For Victory, Settle For Great Art

Bush has a plan. But Sacha Jenkins and Bill Adler are doin’ it…

Here’s the link to the Eyejammie site, and a direct link to the show. Plus, nothing says “You rock and you don’t stop” like giving them a fine Eyejammie print. Hint hint.

posted by @ 10:17 pm | 0 Comments

Friday, December 2nd, 2005

Congotronics 2 Is Here!

Cop it exclusively at eMusic. The entire back story is here at Christopher Porter’s site. Will post some more after I get a chance to dive in.

posted by @ 9:51 am | 0 Comments

Monday, November 28th, 2005

How To Make A Successful R & B Record, Pt. 4081


R&B Singer Seeks Rapper For Validation, Occasional Collabos. Inquire Here.

Great piece in yesterday’s NY Times by Jeff Leeds called “Scenes From an Arranged Marriage”.

The piece is about an upcoming R & B singer named Governor, who has delayed his release for years as he’s been shuttled from Dr. Dre’s camp to 50 Cent’s camp to now T.I.’s camp.

I told Jeff that I was jealous he had gotten the story. It’s a great example of the kind of reporting that is not often done in hip-hop journalism (Zino and Mays’ rants in The Source don’t count), and even less so in hip-hop scholarship (with the exception of Norman Kelley’s essential book Rhythm & Business). It’s a rare story that gets behind the shine into the gritty, often exploitative core of the economy of hip-hop.

The context for the piece is the convergence of media consolidation and the professionalization of hip-hop careers. Media consolidation drives bigger demands on the bottom line while raising the price of the music. Fewer artists get huger budgets. Is making pop like making fast food? Although an army of good and bad music critics will tell you otherwise (and sometimes they’ll be right), the economic truth is that IT IS: CDs. Hamburgers. Product.

At the same time, media consolidation has gutted the staffs of big companies. (All the old school Neo-Marxists in the house say: ‘Contradiction’!) So people like Dre, 50, and T.I. are more than just the talent these days. They have supplanted the A & R and management apparatuses in the business. Leeds’ subtext is clear: There’s so much money on the line that Governor cannot afford not to be married to some mob.

Usually we count this as a positive (see: the ascension of Jay-Z). But for someone like Governor, it’s a mixed bag…or worse. Now that headz write the checks, is it time to start talking about Record Industry Rule Number 4081?

Here’s a teaser:

“…record labels in recent years have made a point of introducing new, little-known acts as proteges of established stars. In some cases the two musicians might have grown up on the same block. Or perhaps they had shared the struggle of performing in the same unknown group. Either way, it’s a rich backstory that can be woven into any future marketing effort.

But what if the new singer doesn’t have any long-lost pals who’ve gone platinum?

For an increasingly desperate industry, that is but a minor obstacle. These days, label executives routinely shop their new prospects around from one star to another, trying to convince them to act as a mentor. Then the newcomer is marketed as a devotee, or a card-carrying member of the star’s ‘camp.'”

Click here for the entire Happy Meal…

posted by @ 4:14 pm | 1 Comment

Sunday, November 27th, 2005

Feds To Benzino: Show Us The Money

Today, the Boston Herald and AllHipHop.com reported that Benzino has been charged by the Feds in Massachusetts for failing to pay taxes on $1.5 million in income in 1999 and 2000.

This apparently is part of the decade-long FBI probe into Benzino and his former group, the Almighty RSO. That probe included an extensive search into Benzino’s background, including whether he and his crew were involved in a homicide case.

He said, “They been investigating me for years and all they got me for is not filing taxes.”

You gotta hand it to Zino. He’s always ready with an entertaining quote. Here’s more from his lawyer, a former federal prosecutor named Leonard Sands:

“He’s very likable, very versatile, very outgoing,” Sands said. “He’s a very down-to-earth, soft-spoken guy.”

Benzino took the opportunity of his indictment to tell Allhiphop.com he has two new dis tracks coming–one aimed at Funkmaster Flex and the other at Eminem.

Thought he and Em had squashed their beef? Well, bills must be paid.

posted by @ 10:10 pm | 0 Comments

Friday, November 25th, 2005

The Voice’s Aina Hunter on The Source

Huge props to Aina for the most thorough piece on The Source’s troubles to date. Among the warning signs–estimates of the magazine’s ad pages have it at less than half the amount booked in 2000, and estimates of its readership have it at half the amount it was just two years ago. Aina’s piece is wonderfully written as well:

“When 50 Cent himself showed up in the Hot 97 studio of Funkmaster Flex on a recent Thursday-evening shift, the pair spent precious airtime stoking the feud. ‘I gotta ask you about this wack rapper Benzino,’ Funkmaster Flex said, referring to The Source co-owner Raymond Scott by his performing name. Hearing it, 50 Cent began to murmur menacingly.

A few days later, on allhiphop.com, Scott upped the ante, asserting that Flex ‘talks a lot of trash [on the air] and when he leaves, he has a group of security guards, but one day he is going to slip, and when we do collide you are going to hear about it.’

People really do get hurt for less beef than this, especially around Hot 97, where broadcast taunts have preceded flying bullets, and especially around The Source, which has picked countless fights since its birth in 1988. But given the number of hits they’re taking–tens of millions in credit claims and lawsuits, arrests, even murder charges against key staffers–it’s amazing that Scott, fellow co-owner David Mays, and rookie editor Dasun Allah can put out a magazine at all. Just keeping track of the major court cases advancing this month is a task.”

Click here for the rest…

posted by @ 3:10 pm | 2 Comments

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005

Davey D & Snoop Dogg On Tookie


Snoop Dogg & The Dogg Pound :: Real Soon (Davey D’s Rally Mix)

This MP3 comes from Davey D who says about Tookie Williams:

“Last weekend at the Save Tookie Rally, DJ T-Kash who does the Friday Night Vibe asked for all of us in media to try and find ways to keep the situation surrounding Tookie Williams in front of people… He suggested we be creative and use the same tools we use to let folks know about Nikes and parties to keep people informed about Tookie..

In case you aren’t aware, Clear Channel has launched a ‘Kill Tookie Williams’ Hour on its number one rated station here in LA. They are going all out by making racist comments, dissing not just Tookie, but Black people in general etc etc.. This isn’t shock radio. its regular talk radio where millions tune in to get news and information..

In any case here’s a small contribution to hopefully combat that… It’s an extended version of Snoop and the Dogg Pound’s song with Snoop’s remarks from last week’s rally attached at the end… I think he sums things up nicely…”

posted by @ 5:15 pm | 1 Comment

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005

I’m A Little Rootkit / Google World Order


Sidney Verba: Lonely librarian seeking hot books? Or the new face of Google World Order?!

Don’t you love it when corporations get all Big Brother on you? Maybe Sony-BMG and Google should just merge.

Now just to clear this up–because we all know intellectual property law is the ongoing legal equivalent of a tule-fog 20-car pile-up (in which the victims are always the artists), and also because I’ve had my own recent episode in, uh, code appropriation–the two situations aren’t exactly the same.

Google wants to index every book in existence. I actually think the concept of public knowledge is a pretty good idea in principle. What some authors and publishers have a problem with is the idea that Google will retain a copy of all of the books. And their soaring stock price is a clue that they’re not exactly a public-interest entity.

Sony wants to–or at least wanted to–index every buyer of Sony CDs in existence, which is just not that good an idea.

For a hometeam take on the Rootkit debacle, visit the good fighters at Downhill Battle.

For a good description of the Plan-Formerly-Known-As-Google-Print debacle, check this NY Times piece on poor old Harvard librarian Sidney Verba.

For an interesting, if not unflawed, alternative to Google World Order, check this piece which introduces you to Mr. Enthusiasm, Brewster Kahle.

Now, search Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. Go head! I won’t sue you!

posted by @ 12:12 pm | 6 Comments

Monday, November 21st, 2005

Still Recovering From Hurricane Meters


“That felt good yall! Come on, guys, just 1 more song!”

Now this is the kind of hurricane you love to have.

The Meters played about 3 hours on Friday night and I’m still recovering. In fact, they were having such a good time on stage that Art didn’t want to leave. He coaxed two encores more after two blistering 75 minute sets by just sitting at his keyboard and playing stuff–“All On A Mardi Gras Day” or “Big Chief” until the other guys—-all of them about a decade his junior–came back.

At the end, when even the house folks were urging him out of his keyboard seat, he sat and did the “Sesame Street” theme. Then he smiled and got on his cane and was escorted out, but not before he got a ton of love from the audience.

It was easily one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen. I mean the singing was loose, the jams went on, and the cues weren’t air-tight, but the joy of them playing together again really came through. Whoever gets to see them this week in NYC I’m sure will get a show.

Too many highlights to recount. Each of the songs became an extended jam–and the old songs especially got some wild new changes added in. The goosebump moment was their refashioning of “Africa” into a new version where the chorus became “Take me back–to New Orleans!”

It was Zig’s night. All the bandmembers were generous in giving him the spotlight, and he gave an amazing performance. Spoke briefly to Zig the next day–a few hours before the Saturday show sound check and all he could say was, “Man, I’m tired!”

Here’s Joel Selvin’s review and my best recollection of the set list:

Set 1:

Little Old Moneymaker
Cissy Strut
He Bite Me (The Dragon)
Fiyo On The Bayou
Doodle Oop (The World Is A Bit Under The Weather)
You’ve Got To Change (You’ve Got To Reform)
–dedication to soldiers and New Orleans–
Keep On Marching (Art adds in Neil Young’s ‘Ohio’)
People Say

Set 2:

Medley: Funky Miracle/Cardova/Get Out Of My Life Woman/Look-Ka Py-Py/Hand Clapping Song
Africa (New Orleans) featuring monster Zig solo
Funky cover tune I didn’t recognize Folks call this one “Chug-A-Lug”
It Ain’t No Use

Encore 1:
Medley: All On A Mardi Gras Day/Hey Pocky A-Way

Encore 2:
Medley: Big Chief/Go See The Mardi Gras
Sesame Street

posted by @ 10:16 am | 0 Comments



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