Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Who Gotcha? :: The Story Behind The Story Behind The Roxanne Shante Story

By Wayne Marshall and Jeff Chang

X-Posted at Wayne and Wax…

If a rapper claims to be a killer, no one cares. If she says she has an education, they send in an investigative reporter, or at least someone who purports to be.

Oh don’t we love gotcha journalism. But who’s really getting got here?

Two weeks ago, the New York Daily News ran a story in which legendary rapper Roxanne Shante says she forced Warner Bros through a contractual clause to pay for her education, earning degrees from Marymount Manhattan College and Cornell University.

Yesterday, lawyer and “pro-copyright” blogger Ben Sheffner published his piece of gotcha journalism, claiming that not only did Warner not have direct contracts with Shante, but that she hadn’t finished her coursework at Marymount Manhattan and never enrolled in Cornell.

Perhaps most annoying to Sheffner was that “the story was endlessly blogged and tweeted, heralded as an example of a heroic triumph by a girl from the projects over her evil record label.”

Commenters around the web have praised the Slate piece as a fine bit of investigative reporting by a disinterested journalist. Here’s our gotcha: he’s not disinterested, and the investigative reporting wasn’t all that investigative. Read more

posted by @ 11:30 am | 64 Comments

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

Art Works :: Landesman Time Begins

landesman

Yesterday the Senate confirmed Rocco Landesman as new chair of the NEA and Jim Leach as the new head of the NEH. Arts advocates have been especially interested in what Landesman would have to say about his agenda for the NEA.

In an interview with the New York Times, he seemed to capture their restlessness. “Art Works” is his new brand for the agency, a step up from ““A Great Nation Deserves Great Art”, the old one. Of that, Landesman said, “We might as well just apologize right off the bat.”

Fire. That’s what many arts advocates want now: a national arts leader who won’t tiptoe through the three-decade wreckage of the culture wars, but one who will stand up and call for a new era. Landesman speaks like he’s ready to fill that role.

Here’s how he came out swinging yesterday–not without a little barbed wit and bare knuckling:

In American politics generally, he added: “The arts are a little bit of a target. The subtext is that it is elitist, left wing, maybe even a little gay.”…

On the subject of the endowment’s budget, too, Mr. Landesman did not hold back. Though he would not put a dollar figure on his own fiscal goals, he called the current appropriation of $155 million “pathetic” and “embarrassing.” And he seemed to imply dissatisfaction with increases proposed by Congress and by the president, which both fall short of the agency’s 1992 budget of $176 million.

“We’re going to be looking for funding increases that are more than incremental,” he said. …

“I wouldn’t have come to the N.E.A. if it was just about padding around in the agency,” he said, and worrying about which nonprofits deserve more funds. “We need to have a seat at the big table with the grown-ups. Art should be part of the plans to come out of this recession.”

“If we’re going to have any traction at all,” he added, “there has to be a place for us in domestic policy.”

To start, he proposed a new program called “Our Town” which might help artists finance moves into downtown centers. This idea seems to draw from the popular boom-era notion of “The Creative Class” being the key to urban revitalization.

But what about a “creative communities” approach that is less tied to issues of gentrification and boom-and-bust development? Why not identify and spur the development of arts organizations who are building stronger communities in the inner cities of places like Detroit or East Oakland? If the NEA wants to make the case for a creativity stimulus, then it should also be promoting examples of success on the ground.

Landesman also suggested that arts grants needed to be more carefully linked to “merit”. This idea may prove controversial with many arts organizations, especially given the way Landesman, a Broadway theater producer, put it:

“I don’t know if there’s a theater in Peoria, but I would bet that it’s not as good as Steppenwolf or the Goodman,” he said, referring to two of Chicago’s most prominent theater companies. “There is going to be some push-back from me about democratizing arts grants to the point where you really have to answer some questions about artistic merit.”

(For those who didn’t live through the culture wars, the aesthetic debates over the words “quality” and “democracy” became a way to talk about just how much representation artists of color should or shouldn’t have without talking about race explicitly. Not unlike that Obama/Sotomayor “empathy” thing. Hmmm, there’s a book in that… oh yeah, I’m writing it.)

Many will be happy that Landesman seems willing to use his bully pulpit to reframe the importance of the arts for the country. But in the coming weeks, he may need to more closely engage with the people on the ground who can build the massive support he’s going to need to make his case.

posted by @ 10:52 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Free Band Names! :: The California Budget Disaster Edition

cabudget
How funky is your budget compromise? How loose is your accounting?

Instead of killing myself over how f-ed up this Cali budget “compromise” is going to be for me and most everyone I care about, I figured I’d devote my energy to coming up with something everyone really needs: a list of band names inspired by this disaster.

Because who knows better than The Big 5 that this is as good a time as any to start a band or a crew?

So here we go. Free. Just shout us out when you blow up on Myspace. And please add more. The budget you save may be your own.

The Worthless Bonds
The Mandatory Furloughs
The I-O-Meez
The No Solution
The Terminated
Proposition Xed
Eff The Children
Cancel My Future
Long Summer Shortfall
I Moved To California And All I Got Was This Lousy Prison
Corrections Killed The Biology Star
And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of The Idiots…
Cut Me Asshole
Fire Me Asshole
Pay Me Asshole
The Simple Majority
Masterrace Supermajority
Two-Thirds Of Death
The Oily Severants
Santa Barbara Oil Slick
Roll Over Pat Brown
The Michael Jackson Stimulus
The Gray Davis Revival

posted by @ 8:59 am | 3 Comments

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

On Hip-Hop, the New Depression, and the Creativity Stimulus

cover10

Here’s an interview I just did that focuses largely on the role of the arts and culture in the current economic crisis. Huge thanks to Jasmine Mahmoud, editor of the fantastic new magazine and webzine The Arts Politic.

The inaugural issue features work from and interviews with other people who were at the White House briefing in May, such as Judy Baca, Dudley Cocke, and the great Arlene Goldbard. Bonus: Mayda Del Valle!

Check out and if you dig, support them.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview w/your boy:

The inclusion of you and Davey D, among other arts activists, seems to be a big step forward from the 1990s when political wars waged on hip-hop, and culture wars waged on the arts. Would you call this progress?…

Yes, I do think this is progress. At certain points in history, change seems to accelerate and I think we’re in the flux of that kind of moment right now. We witnessed an outpouring of art, culture, and creativity around last year’s elections. People like Tom Brokaw compared it to the Velvet Revolution. In other words, politics and creativity seemed to converge to bring about a societal leap. Into what, I’m still not sure. But we all have a hand in guiding where we will land.

I work among artists and community organizers daily, and the thing we’ve all noticed is that we have a great urge to convene, to share, to talk, to try to puzzle out the moment. Liz Lerman likes to joke that “artists aren’t afraid of living in Depression-like conditions because that’s our lived reality.” Right now, there’s a sense among everyone that there isn’t much to lose, and that’s liberating. What I think many of us are coming around to understand is that creativity is at the heart of community sustainability and renewal. Hip-hop is the perfect example—here’s the picture of forgotten, abandoned kids hard at work defining how to play amidst chaos. Out of nothing, they literally forge the conditions for their own breakthroughs. They created a new language for a new global generation.

In this country, the debates over the arts are still haunted by questions of individual freedom raised in the culture wars. These are rooted in President Kennedy’s founding Cold War-era charge for the NEA (articulated best here) in which artists were positioned as the social outsiders an enlightened U.S. democracy was happy to bring into the fold. Communists in Russia and China, by comparison, were oppressing dissident artists. (This logic ran its course by the end of the 1980s, when anti-arts neocons took up—quite seriously—the role of Kennedy’s cartoon communists. The irony escaped them, apparently.)

But what if we looked at arts and creativity as society’s key to collective survival? In this re-imagining, artists and creatives—like community organizers—are not outsiders, so much as those who experiment and test and prod, but within the heart of the community. Their risk is indispensable not because it comes from the fringe, but from the center. When they succeed, they strengthen community and move it forward…

Catch the entire interview here.

posted by @ 2:37 pm | 0 Comments

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

The Death of Vibe And The Future Of Magazines :: A Roundtable with Alan Light and Raymond Roker

alan

Vibe’s death yesterday sparked conversations across the blogosphere about the future of magazines, especially the kind many of us most care about–urban culture and music magazines. I wanted to surface one of them here.

It began with a Twitter post that reposted to my Facebook account. Here was that original post (re-rendered into something resembling proper english).

Jeff Chang: I could live with a smaller media landscape–but we need that middle between 1m+ circulation mags and circs of less-than-100,000 zines back.

And who should reply but Alan Light.

Alan was one of my first editors at Vibe. (He actually did me the favor of sinking a horrible Tribe Called Quest piece I did, easily the worst interview I ever did…a long story for another time.) Alan started at Rolling Stone and went on staff there from 1989 to 1993. He moved over to become Music Editor at Vibe in its inaugural year and took over as Editor-in-Chief the following year, where he worked until 1997. He edited Spin from 1999-2002, then broke out to start a new magazine called Tracks.

Tracks is a really interesting story. It launched with independent capital in November 2003 with a circulation of about 150,000. It targeted readers from 30-50, a bit of an older audience, more white than not. This group was thought to be the holy grail of the dying music industry–they were folks who actually still bought music. The writing got better, they started moving more urban (Prince was on the cover at the time of “Musicology”) and they built an audience, doubling their circulation.

But by April 2005, they folded. The magazine industry had shifted dramatically. The middle–as in all media and entertainment industries, hell, in American society–could not hold.

Let’s pick this up where Alan responded:

Alan Light at 1:00pm June 30
you have no idea how right you are…well, ok, you have some idea. but take it from one who’s been there – it has become almost impossible to make that model work. which is awful, because it’s obviously the most interesting place to be. Read more

posted by @ 11:53 am | 37 Comments

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Vibe Is Gone

vibecover
History.

The void that the closing of Vibe leaves is immense. I don’t believe any other media is equipped or even remotely interested in taking up the space that Vibe has.

After speaking with my man Rob Kenner, and Twittering the hell out of my grief and anger over this, I’m coming to this realization:

The only upside of this depression is that many of us no longer have a side hustle to distract us from the incredible art we gotta make.

RIP VIBE. RIP “Urban Magazines”.

posted by @ 12:20 pm | 3 Comments

Friday, June 26th, 2009

Michael Jackson :: Morning’s End

mj
Home.

Long before anyone could read into Michael Jackson’s cubist, etiolated face a work of performance art, the wounds of internalized racism, or the excess of boredom and wealth, all those things that would make us either look away or gawk, there was his voice.

The thing that Berry Gordy heard from the 10-year old boy was “knowingness”, he said, “feeling, inspiration, and pain”. There was an early protest song, “The Young Folks”, that now seems telling. But as time went on, Gordy and his songwriters gave Michael songs in which loss loomed large, the better to exploit that glorious instrument of his. And for that voice, he lost his childhood.

Or more precisely, he gave it to us. Many of his most affecting performances were about distance and displacement, the desire to be somewhere else, the inability to return to a lost past. Think of the songs that the hip-hop generation adored so much: “I’ll Be There”, “I Wanna Be Where You Are”, “Who’s Loving You”, “Maybe Tomorrow”, “All I Do Is Think Of You”, “Ready Or Not”. On these songs, Michael’s “knowingness” sounds more like fragility. (On the other hand, but hardly balancing the scale, is the joyous Bronx summer break of “It’s Great To Be Here”.)

If you want to wonder how ambivalent this boy-dream, this incarnation of all our notions about youth and beauty, felt about the limelight and wanting to be “normal”, listen to him sing “Got To Be There”. When he sees the girl of his desire walk into the morning light, it’s as if he has transferred the shine away from himself to her, imagining a perfect love above the blood and grind of the daily celebrity-making machine. When he hits that high “me” (matched later by the word “home”), he has given all of it up to all of us.

But as an audience, we were insatiable and ruthless. Years later, after the satisfaction and ease of his 20s, after he had been broken by self-mutilation and bizarre scandal in his 30s, Michael Jackson would reveal a tragic, bathetic emptiness, pleading, “Have you seen my childhood?” By then, many of us had either turned away or turned on him. The transaction was done.

In the end, he lost even his voice, autotuned first by lawyers and other keepers of his dissipating wealth, consumed by Mickey Mouse-sounding paid-TV defenses and overproduced songs, before finally going silent forever. Time will restore the greatness of Michael Jackson’s artistry. May it also cause us some revulsion at our complicity in his fall as well.

posted by @ 12:34 am | 36 Comments

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Justice For Alex Sanchez

alex

Yesterday morning, Sanchez was indicted by the Feds for allegedly conspiring to assassinate a MS-13 leader in El Salvador. Don’t believe the damn hype.

Those of you who have read Can’t Stop Won’t Stop already know of the story of Alex Sanchez, the ex-MS-13 turned gang peacemaker who ran afoul of the notoriously corrupt LAPD Rampart Division.

(This Division was the one whose street task force officers colluded with gang leaders to sell drugs on the streets. One of them, David Mack, was on Suge Knight’s payroll and has been fingered as a possible suspect in the murder of Biggie Smalls. He was finally convicted for his role in a bank heist masterminded amongst Rampart cops.)

Because Sanchez was trying to stop gang warfare in the area and get gang members to get out of the life, he was harrassed by both the Feds and the LAPD. He was held in an immigration jail for months while he was threatened to be deported. After a massive grass-roots campaign, Alex won his freedom back and was granted political asylum.

Authorities are still trying to exact a high price on Sanchez for his work on human rights and gang peace. Read more

posted by @ 9:35 am | 5 Comments

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Benefit For Ras-Cue :: Health Care For Hip-Hop

RASQ

When adversity strikes, you often see the best of your community coming out.

My man Frank “Ras-Cue” Quattlebaum has been holding down the Bay Area hip-hop scene for over 15 years now, one of the most generous, caring individuals you could ever meet.

Two years ago, he was admitted to the hospital for congestive heart failure. The doctors told him that he was close to kidney failure as well. Since that time, he has changed his lifestyle dramatically. “These diseases are affected by what you’re doing to your life,” he says. “I was affected by high blood pressure.”

His heart is healthy now. But his kidneys are slowly failing him again.

Ras Cue is dealing with it the only way he can. He’s on intensive dialysis treatment at least 3 times a week. He is now on a kidney transplant list.

He has learned that the transplant list could take 5 to 7 years to get around to him.

His part-time work and Medi-Cal cover his dialysis costs, but they’re not making a dent in the bills for the tests he had to undergo. He has also learned that even if he is able to get a transplant–which won’t be covered entirely by Medi-Cal–he may be paying up to $2000/month in medication afterwards.

When artists get sick, there is rarely a safety net for them. When they get really sick, they rely on their community to be their safety net. Hip-hop has been this and will continue to be this. But it’s why many of us get hardcore when we talk about health care. We take it personal.

This is not meant to be a dis, but if all of my fam wearing Dilla tees now had been pushing health care for artists–hell, health care for all–back then, well who knows what this world might sound like now…

For Ras Cue’s part, he has become an activist for awareness around organ donations. “When they ask you on your driver’s license about donating your organs, think about it. You could be saving someone’s life,” he says.

The National Kidney Foundation will be part of this benefit and that’s huge. Ras Cue says, “This is about bringing awareness to our community. This is much bigger than me.”

If you’re in the Bay, come to the benefit. You can find more info at the Urban Umpires website. If you can’t make it, try to send what you can to:

Ras-Cue
590 Bowden Way #1
Oakland, CA 94610

Stand up for one of our own. And then stand up for all of us.

posted by @ 3:43 pm | 0 Comments

Friday, June 19th, 2009

THE BREAK/S Opens Tonight In Seattle!

I’ve been hyping our man Marc Bamuthi Joseph‘s play “the break/s” to def from its opening last year at the Walker (for which the vid above was made) not just because it’s been part of a powerfully inspiring artistic dialogue he and I have been having over the years, one spanning books and plays and essays and events, but because many of us just think it’s the joint.

Now you lucky folks in Seattle get a chance to see Bamuthi’s acclaimed piece in a run at the ACT Contemporary Theatre that starts tonight and runs through July 12th. Don’t miss it!

Tickets are available here.

Some affirmation?

“All of “The Break/s” is uncommonly good. No false notes. No easy answers. It’s as complicated and powerful as the best hip-hop can be.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“This one-man show isn’t just one man’s show; it’s a thunderous, expansive and deeply felt wrestling match with being an American in the 21st century.”
—Washington Post

Seattle, show your love. Check it out. Come back and let us know what you thought.

posted by @ 3:27 pm | 0 Comments



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