Akala’s new Fire In The Both shows once again that Akala brings the full package of lyrical skill, content, flows, relevance and personality. Forget all these wannabe gangsters and autotune bubblegum rappers! Akala has set the standard. Who’s rising to the challenge?
Akala’s mixtape ‘Knowledge Is Power vol 1′ will be released on 28 May. Preorder it here.
Militant Trayvon Martin tribute over the classic Nas ‘Made You Look’ beat (produced by Salaam Remi). Great video by Bmike.
Heartening to see top-level established artists coming together to make a statement, raise awareness, educate and organise.
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Single taken from the forthcoming album, Radical Dilemma.
The song samples a late 60s Spanish pop ballad, “Soy Rebelde, porque el mundo me hecho asi..” (I’m a Rebel, because the world has made me this way…”).
Produced by G1 of Rebel Diaz. Shot and edited by Pocho1.
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First things first, RIP to a Adam Yauch, a hip-hop innovator whose contribution to the art form is widely recognised. The Beastie Boys form an important chapter in hip-hop history. Even as white, middle-class kids whose main effect was to make hip-hop more accessible to other white, middle-class kids, they were generally respectful of the art form and of the communities that created it. Chuck D commented on Twitter:
“Adam & the boys put us on our first tour 25 years & 79 tours ago. They ARE essential to our beginning, middle and today. A very real cat R.I.P MCA”
While Yauch deserves respect as an artist and innovator, the aspect of his life that has earned him the most praise in the liberal press is his activism in favour of Tibetan independence. This is interesting. While the press censors musicians who call for Free Palestine, it lauds artists who call for Free Tibet. And while western governments actively support the Israeli government against the Palestinian movement for national self-determination, they actively support the Tibetan independence movement against the government of the People’s Republic of China. Why the discrepancy? In short: because Israel is a ‘friend’ and China is an ‘enemy’. The west has consistently used the issue of Tibet in order to paint China as an evil, ruthless coloniser, thereby making it morally abhorrent, even to those that support other aspects of Chinese politics (you know… little things like the most significant poverty alleviation programme of all time).
Every western liberal knows that Tibet must be free. And yet 99.9% of them haven’t got the slightest clue as to the history of Tibet, or the relationship between Tibet and the rest of China. Wearing that ‘Free Tibet’ t-shirt is simply the easiest, most acceptable and least confrontational way of saying “I am a good person”, absolving the wearer of all responsibility for developing their knowledge and understanding.
In fact, the issue of Tibet is not an open-and-shut case of Chinese colonialism. And perhaps more importantly, there are better ways for people in the ‘first world’ to be active in pursuit of a fairer, more peaceful world. The Beastie Boys were/are privileged white Jewish kids from affluent families in New York. They have made a fortune, and built a musical legacy, on the basis of a culture created by people of African descent in the poorest districts of New York. Instead of taking up a cause celebre which poses zero challenge to the US ruling circles, surely it would be more appropriate to use their privilege and wealth in support of the oppressed communities that hip-hop grew out of?
Incidentally, New York wasn’t always called New York – it was given that name by English colonisers in 1664. Native Americans have lived in that area for an estimated 12,000 years. Wealthy European settlers could consider supporting indigenous rights and power as an outlet for their activism. But that would be a bit difficult. It would mean standing up to their government; it would mean getting labeled in the press as subversives rather than lauded as heroes; it would mean taking on corporate interests; it would mean not sharing the same views as George W Bush. It doesn’t take any courage for a wealthy North American or European to stand up to ‘Chinese tyranny’. The Chinese are an easy target. The west is generally anti-China to begin with, and there’s a prevailing sense of indignation that they are no longer our colonial subjects (things were soooo much better in China back when we fought wars for our right to get the Chinese masses hooked on opium). In the US this sentiment is mixed up with the intellectual legacy of McCarthyism, which means that anything called ‘communist’ is automatically considered demonic. The prevailing hatred only grows as China is developing into an economically and politically strong country, the number one challenge to the total dominance of US imperialism.
One international cause which doesn’t typically attract the support of many wealthy western celebrities (especially Jewish people from New York) is that of Palestinian national self-determination. Why not demand an end to Israeli oppression of Palestinians? There are few such clear-cut cases of ongoing colonial occupation, organised and paid for by the west. Opposition to Israeli occupation is a lot more valid than joining in with the fashionable Hollywood-liberal cries of ‘Free Tibet’. However, I can’t find any record of the Beastie Boys voicing their support for Palestine. Indeed, they played concerts in Israel in 1995.
So in celebrating the legacy of the Beastie Boys (Paul’s Boutique is playing in my headphones as I write this), I suggest we emulate their creativity rather than their activism. Be an activist, for sure, but pick the right side!
A sad day for ska as one of its originators, Lloyd Brevett, passes away at the age of 80. The following tribute is from Billboard.
Lloyd Brevett the upright bass player and founding member of the seminal Jamaican ska group The Skatalites passed away this morning at Andrews Memorial Hospital in St. Andrew, Jamaica where he was being treated following a stroke and a series of seizures. Brevett was 80 years old.
The Skatalites were the preeminent collective in popularizing ska, an early 60s creation melding R&B, jazz, calypso and Cuban musical influences, and characterized by its distinctive emphasis on the after beat, as opposed to the down beat of R&B.
Together for just 18 months between 1963-1965 The Skatalites recorded many timeless instrumentals including “Eastern Standard Time” and “Guns of Navarone” for a variety of producers, most notably Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd.
Backing virtually every singer of note during that era, including teen sensations The Wailers on their 1964 hit “Simmer Down,” The Skatalites’ pioneering efforts at the dawn of the island’s recording industry laid the groundwork for the development of rocksteady and reggae later in the decade and the subsequent international embrace of Jamaica’s various indigenous genres.
Considered the grandfather of Jamaican bass players Brevett was taught by his father David who built and played his own basses. A recipient of several awards throughout his long, highly influential career, Brevett was bestowed Jamaica’s fifth highest honor, the Order of Distinction, in October 2001 and the Silver Musgrave Medal for his contribution to music in October 2010.
According to a recent report in the Jamaica Observer newspaper, close family friend Maxine Stowe (former A&R at Columbia Records and Clement Dodd’s niece) said Brevett’s health had rapidly deteriorated following the fatal shooting of his son Okeene Brevett on February 26, near the family’s home in Seaview Gardens area of St. Andrew. Okeene was returning home after accepting an award on his father’s behalf from JaRIA (Jamaica Recording Industry Association) for his contributions to the development of Jamaica’s music industry.
This week we’ve heard that not only have the Olympics disrupted our transport system more than snow blizzards on top of autumn leaves, but that they also meant that our city is to be militarised, quite literally, out of the money this whole country, not just London, pays in tax. The Royal Navy have deployed their largest assault vessel, HMS Ocean, in Greenwich, Marines encircle our coast, in the city centre itself there will be 12,500 “Olympic Police, 13,500 armed services (2,000 of which fully armed), 5,000 specialist police, 1,000 in logistical support, not to mention the 7,500 private security forces roaming the street. A combined force of 23,700 security forces will restrict liberty for the “safety” of us all. Security on such a vast scale will be overseen by that beacon of democracy G4S, the private security company that has recently made inroads into schools, prisons and roads– big societing it up.
As if that wasn’t enough, Typhoon fighter jets and military helicopters will be in our skies, just to deter those terrorists that have no aerial power in their own countries, but of course have full capabilities to breach British aerospace. Add the cherry on top of the cake is of course the surface to air missiles that will be placed on top of residential blocks. While this may make that xenophobic, patriotic, Falkland war loving Brit feel safer at night, those with a little more sense and self-consciousness will move beyond inherited jingoism to feelings of caution, worry and dismay at the need to deploy such capacities for destruction to fight an enemy that at his worst operates using over the counter chemicals cooked in basements with crude equipment. The notion that such enemies can be fought with full military might is not only erroneous, as the Afghani resistance proves daily, it also evokes the great satire of Team America, Trey Parker and Matt Stones scathing critique of over-militarised responses to terrorist threats.
The film starts with the destruction of Paris by American forces seeking to neutralise a jihadi with a suitcase. In response, missiles are fired and destruction is wrecked at comically disturbing levels. When I hear of the measures taken to keep London safe, all I can think of is that opening scene. Imagine a terrorist does make it through the net of GCHQ, Mi6, Mi5, Special Branch and the SO15’s intelligence. Does the aforementioned security infrastructure fortify London even slightly? I fail to see how. If I work on mainstream perceptions of this world, there’s some math that just doesn’t work.
Since 9/11, attacks upon Western power have come in numerous forms, but mainly suicide bombings. With the exception of car bombs, the only difference I can think of is the gunmen in Mumbai. Now, tell me how the jihadi at the gates can be taken out with a missile? I don’t think he can and I do not believe the measures of security that we will be subject to have been conceived with the quintessential “Islamist extremist” in mind. While some on the right will engage in fantasy and provide a long-list of conjecture over potential security threats that warrant such disturbing force, I think we must consider these measures as a message more than a response to need.
What we are witnessing is the normalisation of militarisation of our cities. We accept the surveillance infrastructure to keep us safe, we accept our actions being logged, so why not accept armaments on top of buildings? It’s not too far of a jump and has hardly been met with critical commentary. When such actions were taken in China, it was used as a stick to beat the central committee who were going mad with paranoia and continuing to “abuse human rights”. But instead of seeing this through the prism of state repression, we are made to feel that “our boys” provide us with comfort, their presence on our streets in the thousands embraced. And that’s the most troubling part – as we’ve seen countless times across this world, military deployments come quickly and are dismantled slowly. Imagine London is attacked – imagine the attackers breached security in a way that is sensationalised, imagine that the enemy at the gates was said to be upon us and knows more about the inner workings of our system than we thought. Imagine a world of suspicion. Imagine that as well as having your movements logged and your texts and emails read – you are also in the crosshairs of weaponry countless times a day. It is not the world we are living in, but it could be round the corner.
I do not believe this is the final stage in the building of the dystopia – it is merely a lunge towards it. The greatest threat London faces is embarrassment. With movement restricted around this city, an increased cost of living and a depletion of resources, the disenfranchised youth who were so combustible last summer will have powder kegs beneath them. The Olympics have long been a tool of dispossession and neo-liberalism and London’s 2012 is no exception. Public money has been pilfered into private hands and for generations the urban poor will be paying for their own displacement. Military deployments are about scaring the radical elements to make the elites feel safe. The Olympics is accelerating the processes by which London becomes a sanitised investors paradise, civil disruption would hurt the magnetising effect the Olympics would have on business with the Big Smoke. With the coalition’s austerity measures failing, they are reliant upon a lucrative Olympics to pull in the private businesses that their economic plan hinges upon. With recession being the consequence of their foray so far, there is very little room for complacency. London 2012 must generate money.
So, like the abusive father inviting friends over for dinner, certain punitive measures are put in place to ensure that once guests are in the house, everyone will act civilised – or will have hell to pay. That’s the message I take from the militarisation of my city – and like the petulant kid grown use to abuse from power – my response is this: go fuck yourselves.
I went to see ‘Marley’, the new and highly-publicised documentary about Robert Nesta Marley, at the Rio cinema in the heart of gentrified Dalston. While I enjoyed my green tea and organic chocolate bar (definitely a step up from pepsi and popcorn!), I found that being surrounded by trendy middle-class types only added to my sense of fear that the film was going to be annoyingly eurocentric and patronising.
But let’s start with the good parts. Doing justice to the legacy of Bob Marley in the space of two hours and 24 minutes is an impossible task. All things considered, the people behind the film did a pretty decent job. The archive and interview footage is nothing short of incredible. The production team must have gone to extraordinary lengths to get the level of access they got. The interviews with Rita Marley, Bunny Wailer, Lee Scratch Perry, Danny Sims and other important figures in Bob’s life are brilliant, and do a lot to explain how this giant of a man came to be who he was. For any fan of Bob Marley, the film is worth watching for the footage alone.
Unfortunately, the film is let down (as I knew it would be) by its eurocentric perspective. Let’s face it, the first feature-length documentary on Bob Marley should have been directed by somebody else. Kevin Macdonald is perfectly competent as a film director, but he is a western white liberal. The story of Bob Marley is the story of black suffering and strength inna Babylon; the story a great revolutionary activist; the story of a people stripped of their freedom, languages, religions and traditions, building a voice and a collective identity. In short, it is not a story that Kevin Macdonald is qualified to tell.
Bob was Africa-oriented. He considered that Africa represented the future for his people. And yet Africa is presented in the film as a continent of dictators and basketcase governments. The film gets a cheap laugh when Marley’s first visit to Africa – to give a concert in Gabon – is somewhat marred when the band realise that Gabon is “a dictatorship”. We see a picture of Gabon’s then president, Omar Bongo Ondimba, wearing a suit and looking slightly severe. Our collective prejudice requires no further information to confirm that this rarely-mentioned West African nation is yet another hopeless failure, its natural wealth squandered by incompetent, malevolent kleptocrats. This shallow treatment serves to strengthen the near-universal colonial prejudice that African people are not capable of governing themselves. No mention of the devastating impact of French colonialism; no mention of the oppressive neocolonial relations that sustain such a “dictatorship”. It all comes down to: Europeans are civilised; Africans are barbarians. It’s the narrative of the White Man’s Burden.
One of the most poignant moments of Bob Marley’s career was his performance at the Zimbabwe Independence celebrations in 1980, to which he was invited on the strength of his beautiful song, Zimbabwe, which became an anthem of the liberation movement (“Every man got the right to decide his own destiny / And in this judgement there is no partiality / So arm in arms, with arms, we’ll fight this little struggle / Cos that’s the only way we can overcome our little trouble.”). Covering this event, Macdonald can’t help but take a pop at the leader of Zimbabwe’s hard-fought liberation struggle, Robert Gabriel Mugabe. There are long, drawn-out shots of posters showing Mugabe’s face, the obvious subtext being: Zimbabwe is a crazy African dictatorship, because only in a crazy African dictatorship would you find pictures of the Prime Minister on a poster. Apparently it is too far a stretch of the imagination to think that people would ever willingly display affection and respect for a man who personified their decades-long fight against apartheid and white supremacy.
Mugabe is considered by millions of Africans as one of the great heroes of the African cause, but that didn’t stop the trendy liberals of Dalston from booing at the footage of him making a speech. Tellingly, they were quiet just a few seconds earlier during the footage of Ian Smith – the apartheid fascist Prime Minister of ‘Rhodesia’ – making a speech saying that black majority rule would not be allowed “even in a thousand years”. Bob Marley must be turning in his grave.
Incidentally, London now has a statue of well-known state terrorist Ronald Reagan. That’s the type of hero-worship us civilised westerners prefer.
Perhaps unsurprisingly – given that he is one of the film’s producers – Island Records founder Chris Blackwell is positively portrayed in the film. He is shown as being very sensible and wise; the voice of reason. When one of Bob’s former band members claims that the doctors wanted to amputate Bob’s leg in order to treat the melanoma that had developed in his foot, Blackwell sets straight this slightly outlandish claim (the doctors only wanted to amputate a toe). The comedic timing of this scene confirms Blackwell’s role as the wise old white man. We hear about Blackwell the visionary businessman who knew just the right polish to add to the Wailers’ sound to make it acceptable to audiences in Europe. Very little is made of the fact that Blackwell used his colour and class privilege to build a fantastically lucrative career off the back of black culture. Blackwell’s sponsoring of the Wailers’ first album is seen as an act of great benevolence, but the film-makers choose not to explore the fact that Blackwell only had the money in the first place because he comes from a wealthy white family that profited from slave labour. Perhaps such difficult sociological issues will be addressed in the sequel?!
I also feel the portrayal of black Jamaicans in the film is somewhat one-sided and patronising. A few of the interviews don’t go past the level of showing ‘cool’, ‘colourful’, charismatic people who smoke a lot of high-grade ganja. I don’t think it’s done intentionally, but a middle-class white western audience is left with its prejudices intact. A different film-maker might have taken the perfect opportunity to highlight the deep understanding and experience of black Jamaicans and, in so doing, shatter some prejudices.
When you show certain images and footage without giving proper historical context, it strengthens prejudice. We see the leading politicians of the time, Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, both of whom are (basically) white. Then we see the black ‘enforcers’ using extreme violence against each other. No mention of the real issues within Jamaican politics. No mention of interesting facts like how the CIA trained and armed the JLP gangs. So our existing prejudices (that white people are ‘thinkers’ and black people are inherently violent) are confirmed. This sums up my overwhelming feeling about the film: that it serves to reinforce rather than challenge prejudice.
Overall I feel the film represents a missed opportunity and fails to present Bob as the deeply revolutionary figure that he was. I hope some time soon a solidly afrocentric director and producer will step forward and tell this particular story from a different perspective – for the enjoyment and inspiration of the downpressed masses of the world, rather than western university students. In the meantime, go see the film in spite of its faults – the footage makes it a very worthwhile experience.
Check the new video for this firing track from Hasan Salaam’s excellent ‘Music Is My Weapon’ album.
‘Miss America’ explores the hypocrisy of the United States, which brands itself as the centre of the free world, whilst busily creating war, famine and discord throughout the world.
The content is important, the lyricism is deep, and Hasan Salaam’s voice rides perfectly over the intense beat. My only issue with the song is that a male rapper using the metaphor of the ‘slut’ is problematic, given the context of the patriarchal society we live in, where men disapprove of female ‘sluttishness’ whist applauding male promiscuity. The sociology of this issue runs deep, and has racial and class aspects to it as well as gender ones (society holds up an image of the virtuous, passive, pure, affluent white woman, which is contrasted to the immoral, nympho, poor black woman). Anyway, check bell hooks’ book “Ain’t I A Woman” for further ideas on that subject! In the meantime, check the video and support the album.
UPDATE: Hasan Salaam reached out on Twitter to clarify the meaning of the metaphor he used: “I don’t think your critique was on point due the fact it wasn’t held up against male promiscuity or women of color. The name Miss America comes from the ‘beauty pageant’ here in the states & is attacking the falsehood of Americas purity.”
The concept behind Hasan Salaam’s EP “Music Is My Weapon” is the belief that music can be used as a powerful tool in the pursuit of freedom, justice, and equality. With the release of the project, Hasan is aiming to prove that music can change people’s lives, literally. All profits from the sale of the EP will be used to fund a school, clean water well, and medical clinic in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa. The school has already been completed, and construction of the well is underway. In November 2010, Hasan became the first U.S hip hop artist to ever perform in Bissau. On the same trip he worked with the young artists, taught creative writing to the youth, and headlined a concert to promote freedom of speech. The “Music Is My Weapon” project is the next step, in an effort to provide change to a country that remains one of the poorest and least politically stable in the world.
Get Music Is My Weapon on iTunes. Follow Hasan Salaam on Twitter.
Check out this dope remix of J Cole’s “Can’t Get Enough”. RodStarz (one half of Rebel Diaz) and Luss represent for Mutulu Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, Oscar López, Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners.
Also check Rebel Diaz’s track Never A Prisoner – Free Mumia
Follow Rebel Diaz on Twitter Follow Luss on Twitter
Nice to finally see Logic on SBTV, with this Warm-up Session where he addresses himself to all the young rappers trying to build a career by fronting as gangsters.
“If every gangsta rapper really was a gangsta, all you’re doing is making it easier for the feds to catch ya”.
There’s a lot to be said on this topic, so it’s positive that Logic is helping to open up the discussion and is holding rappers responsible for their actions. It’s also important to remember that young rappers are playing in to an image that is perfectly acceptable to the music industry – and the racist power structure in general. This image is glamourised, glorified, distorted and then sold to us so forcefully that many of us start to actually accept and expect it (and this is a process controlled overwhelmingly by rich white men, not poor black boys). MK Asante’s excellent book It’s Bigger Than Hip-Hop explores these issues in detail.
We have to fight the music industry by continuing to develop an alternative, independent, positive, resistant, radical culture that meets the needs of the communities that make it, rather than serving the interests of corporate profit and the political/economic/social status quo.
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