The annual VH1 Hip-Hop Honors and this BBC article featuring my friends Joe Conzo and Nick Conway prompted TheRoot.com’s editor Danyel Smith to ask some of us if we had any opinions on the topic.

The great Noz, of Cocaine Blunts fame, weighed in. And so did Jozen Cummings and I. Here’s an excerpt from that short piece…

Ten years ago, I wrote a piece on hip-hop nostalgia. I was against it.

(Hey I said it was a short piece!) To read the whole thing, click here.

For the fam in NYC, the Hip-Hop Theater Festival is already in full gear with its annual showcase of the best in hip-hop performing arts. In fact you already missed Sacha Jenkins’ collabo with Tommy Smith and the Beatnuts last weekend.

But not to fear, for this week, the fest will be showcasing fam-friendly Zomo the Rabbit: A Hip Hop Creation Myth, and the New York premiere of The Word Begins, written and performed by Steve Connell and Sekou (tha misfit).

Next week, there’s Radha Blank’s “Seed”, Shontina Verdon’s “Wanted”, and Betty Shamieh’s “The Alter Rgo Of An Arab-American Assimiliationist.” Plus, another opportunity to check one of my favorite pieces of all time by one of my favorite actors, Eisa Davis in her classic, autobiographical Angela’s Mixtape. Check the video below!

For all the details on the HHTF 2009 including tix and times, check here.

]]> http://cantstopwontstop.com/blog/hip-hop-theater-festival-2009-in-full-gear/feed/ 0 http://cantstopwontstop.com/blog/rest-in-power-gina-hotta/ http://cantstopwontstop.com/blog/rest-in-power-gina-hotta/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:00:24 +0000 Jeff Chang http://cantstopwontstop.com/?p=1968 Let us now praise the great Gina Hotta. Gina passed of a heart attack suddenly Monday evening.

Gina was one of those activists who worked like a river. She never demanded the spotlight, never sought the glory. She was all about the work.

And what great work she did.

DJ Phatrick called her “the voice of Asian American Bay Area.” Her activism was never separate from her journalism, and in that way, she cast a light for many of us to follow.

She was an Asian American activist who seemed to have her mind and spirit in every major movement of the past three decades–from peace and disarmament work right up through the University walkout last Thursday, where I saw her last, working the picket lines and talking about the administration’s anti-union activities.

But most of all, Gina was a lover of beautiful sound. If hip-hop had come a decade or so earlier, I’m convinced she would have been one of the first Asian woman DJs. She carried her equipment everywhere, capturing the sounds of change, and brought her work back to the world weekly on Apex Express.

Her collection of Asian American music and interviews with musicians is probably one of the deepest in the world. We could talk for hours about this artist or that band. Music kept her young. She was as up on the latest Asian American poets and DJs as she could school you on the lost soul and funk bands of the 70s.

You know how people use the word visionary to describe those who cause you to see the world differently? I don’t know what the word is for Gina. She made you hear the world differently.

It’s been a terrible year for passings. Rest in power, Gina, we’ll miss you.

Tune in tonight to Apex Express on KPFA or on the web at 7pm to hear a community tribute to Gina.

+ Adriel Luis of Ill-Literacy’s tribute
+ Apex Express tribute
+ Hyphen Magazine tribute
+ Oliver Wang tribute

“If you call art made to express the ideals of democracy that we strive to create in the United States of America similar to that used by Goebbels and the “People’s Observer” during the reign of the Nazis in Germany, then we respond with images. If Nazi propaganda is their metaphor, than we give you the literal…”
-Artists’ Names Withheld

Download links for an 18×24 poster are at http://mccarthyismtoday.blogspot.com.

62 advertisers have pulled out of Glenn Beck’s show since the boycott began. Click here to add your name to the 275,000 who have already joined boycott support list. Click here to write letters to the editors of your local newspapers to make them tell the whole story on Glenn Beck today.

Pass it on.

The front page of the New York Times today features the sad story of Leon “MC Sundance” Heyward, a Zulu King, rapper for the Jazzy Five, and 9/11 hero.

From the article:

Leon Heyward emerged from the subway just as the second plane struck, piercing the south tower. As others fled, he helped evacuate disabled employees from 42 Broadway, where he worked for the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs, and when the first tower fell, he was caught in the churning plume of contaminated dust and smoke.

Within months he started to feel sick…

Last October, after developing lymphoma, Mr. Heyward died at age 45 in the Bronx, where he was born and had formed one of the earliest rap groups. He became, officially, the latest casualty of the Sept. 11 terror attack, and just after 10 on a gusty, dreary Friday morning, the name Leon Bernard Heyward was read for the first time at ground zero as the nation paused again to remember its losses.

Read it all here.

Peace to his surviving family and to all the pioneers.

Are you mad yet? You should be. Glenn Beck has now taken down Yosi Sergant, the second hip-hop activist to be targeted in the Obama administration in a week.

Last night the 34-year old communications director at the National Endowment For The Arts was asked to resign. Why? Because he was trying to organize artists to support President Obama’s national service program, United We Serve. If your next question is: so what? That was ours too. But Glenn Beck compared the effort to “Nazi propaganda”.

(Just sick–especially since Sergant, a Jewish American, has worked as an activist for peace in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.)

This was the same logic paleocons used to batter Obama’s school speech. If he does it, it’s indoctrination. If they do it, it’s “journalism”. But there’s much more to this story…

Coming For Hip-Hop Heads

Sergant was the key organizer in the historic arts effort to back the Obama campaign. In January 2008, Sergant teamed with Shepard Fairey to produce the now iconic HOPE posters (a variation on Fairey’s original PROGRESS poster, above and flipped). He began handing out the first 3,000 copies at a rally at UCLA and they stumbled into history.

He then went on to commission literally dozens of artists–and inspire hundreds more–to create Obama images–making the candidate the face of hope, progress, and change. By the end of the summer, Obama was riding the biggest creative surge for any presidential candidate ever.

Earlier this year, at the request of grassroots artists and arts advocates, Sergant helped organize a White House meeting for them–I was there–and he has helped open the doors to artists like Saul Williams, Mayda Del Valle, and graffiti artists like Kofie to the White House. He was appointed to one of the country’s most influential positions in culture as the director of communications for the National Endowment for the Arts, the nation’s largest funding agency and policy-setting body.

In an interview I did earlier this year with him, he told me he started out in Los Angeles as a self-described “goofy kid trying to get down” in the cipher with the freestyle dancers and trying to get up in the train yards with the graffiti writers. “It’s who I am, “ he said. “Spray-paint brought me to the NEA and I won’t forget that.”

He added, “I think we can revolutionize the way that Americans think about art.” He wanted to do that in part by continuing to engage artists more directly in working in their communities. He was working to enlist high-profile artists for the United We Serve national service initiative when Beck started attacking him a couple of weeks ago.

Beck said, “Your government is trying to trick you, use your tax dollars to change your mind. It’s called propaganda.”

You can see all of Beck’s stupidity and hypocrisy compiled here.

Why Culture Always Matters

Why was Beck going after a communications director at an arts agency?

Beck’s agenda is unveiling itself–he means to go hard after the progressives in the Obama administration whose work engages grassroots movements and reaches people and communities directly through media and the arts.

This is why he has also been attacking Mark Lloyd, Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer at the FCC, and others like him. Real diversity means that voices like Beck’s are in danger of being drowned by the roar of the masses.

Beck is not just trying to make progressives who are young and/or of color absolutely dispensable to the establishment. He is trying to take away their platform as well. To Beck, this is a fight not just over the individuals, but to block the ways change is actually made.

Van Jones did not just have great ideas, he used culture to make them viable. He brought inner-city youths to anti-prisons and environmental justice agendas using hip-hop. He also found a way to speak to wealthy environmentalists through speeches and books. Culture created openings to forge new alliances between inner-city youths and wealthy environmentalists.

Yosi Sergant worked at what the Obama campaign thought were the margins: to use the creative power of artists to ignite the imagination of the people. When he got started, all of the money was raised through creative communities. And when the artists got rolling by the end of the summer, they didn’t need the campaign to do their thing. But they were arguably as important to shifting the public tide towards Obama’s victory as all the pollsters and precinct organizers on the campaign payroll.

Glenn Beck, like other conservatives, is deathly afraid of the colorized world we now live in. In the continuing battle between the ideas–monoculturalism vs. polyculturalism, domination vs. justice, repression vs. change, fear vs. hope–there is no doubt what side he is on.

But better than any other conservative, Beck understands the new role culture is playing in how change is made. When all avenues for change are blocked, organizers and artists find the holes to slip through and connect with their communities.

This is why he is using his own media perch to attack those who are young, idealistic, progressive, and have a strong understanding of the ways culture builds diversity, and diversity builds strength and longevity.

Put bluntly, this is the shape of the new culture war.

It can’t work. Not just because we have worked too long, too hard, and built too strong a foundation to be broken, but because culture can always find a way. But we will need to steel ourselves for the kind of attacks we have never seen before. That’s going to be our work now.

UPDATE :: Color of Change is re-upping their Glenn Beck Boycott. Here’s James Rucker’s piece on the Huffington Post. If you want to sign the petition, go to the Color of Change Beck petition page here.

So let’s get into another media controversy, this time one that has serious national and generational implications, shall we?

Last night, Bay Area organizer/activist and White House green jobs advisor Van Jones resigned from his post in the Obama Administration after a high-tech Fox News lynching led by Glenn Beck, he of the “Obama Is A Racist” fame.

Beck had Van in his sights before he made those comments, which referred to Obama’s initial reactions to the Skip Gates incident. Blowhard Beck said it proved Obama “had a deep-seated hatred of white people”. But the success of a Color Of Change petition calling on advertisers to drop Beck’s show kicked the attacks into high gear. After tens of thousands of signatures were gathered, major advertisers left the show. Color Of Change, those of you who have been following this blog will remember, was founded after Hurricane Katrina to become the Black online equivalent of MoveOn.org, and is best known for helping mobilize the demonstrations around the Jena 6. Van was one of its founders.

By this morning, one Fox News commentator was crowing that “(t)he Van Jones affair could be an important turning point in the Obama administration if we use it as a window to understand the structure of the left and to stop the huge power-grab now taking place in the name of green jobs…The Van Jones affair is, as President Obama likes to say, a ‘teachable moment,’ and we need to put not just him but the whole corrupt ‘green jobs’ concept outside the bounds of the political mainstream.”

It’s an unusually frank statement of what Beck and Fox were up to–an effort to derail the progressive green agenda, one that Van had helped to shape with his best-selling book, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, a bold, important hip-hop generation approach to thinking about race, the environment, and the economy. It’s an agenda that even many in business support.

But the right is not interested in having any real discussion over ideas. They want to demonize and dissemble and play the politics of fear. In the process, they are developing a whole new set of ways to mix fears of race, youth, and left politics together for political advantage in a new era.

Van was one of the few in the White House who could strongly articulate what a new energy policy needed to mean for the hip-hop generation, and especially inner-city youths. At the Ella Baker Center For Human Rights, he and the brilliant organizers there helped develop the model project in Oakland that linked green job training to unemployed inner city youths, rethinking the links between the hip-hop activism, racial justice, and environmentalism movement. This idea became the core of Obama’s green jobs proposal.

So when the right-wing is talking about killing green jobs, they’re talking about eliminating opportunities in the new economy for youths already locked out or locked up, at a time when teen unemployment is reaching record numbers every summer.

Angry yet? You should be.

There’s another story here: no hip-hop head who cares about changing the world is going to be safe from personal attack in the coming years. We’re coming into power now, and that means we’ve got to knuckle up.

Over a decade ago, Van had been involved with an activist collective called STORM, a group that did important work in building the Bay Area youth movement. That movement expanded and transformed, and helped make the Bay a center of hip-hop activism during the 90s, directing attention to police brutality, the prison-industrial complex, youth unemployment, and neighborhood violence in new ways.

In the past several years, Van’s main work has been around green jobs and energy policy. He has largely been working in and with mainline environmental organizations, “safe” organizations, in other words. He even appears as a core figure in pro-globalization writer Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America. Van was building national networks and a bipartisan, multiracial consensus. He was a hip-hop gen success story, and when he was appointed to the White House, many of us cheered.

But when Beck came hard, the Obama admin caved. The argument will rage on–and should–over what the Obama admin could have done. The bottom line now is that we’ve raised the stakes. We’ve begun impacting national debates on some of the most important issues of the day. So we’ve definitely got to begin to think about how best to defend each other.

Add’l Links:

+ Van’s resignation letter

+ Van On Colbert Nation

+ RaceWire dissects Glenn Beck’s dissemblings

+ On The Lack Of Truthiness To Glenn Beck’s charges

UPDATED

+ Ludovic Blain asks Can white liberals keep their eye on the prize when racism comes a knockin?

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.

First, his “disinterest”: his Slate piece contains, at the bottom, what seems like a standard statement of disclosure: “While an attorney in private practice in the early 2000s, he represented numerous AOL Time Warner entities, including several Warner Music Group companies, on issues unrelated to Roxanne Shanté.” Yup, he was defending the “evil record labels,” even then.

And still is. His bio on his blog states that he is an attorney currently employed by NBC Universal, and his job description includes — we presume — looking sometimes at exactly the kind of artist contracts Shante would have signed.

By his own writing, he is not really a disinterested observer. The bio reads:

“Ben Sheffner is a copyright/First Amendment/media/entertainment attorney and former journalist. Ben is currently working as a production attorney in the NBC Universal Television Group. Preiously [sic], he worked as an associate at O’Melveny & Myers LLP, as Senior Counsel, Content Protection Litigation at Fox, and as Litigation Counsel at NBC Universal. From July-November 2008, Ben served as Special Counsel on Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign where, among other responsibilities, he handled the campaign’s copyright, trademark, and other IP issues” (emphasis ours).

Clearly, Sheffner’s interest in this story, which motivated his questionable “investigation,” grows out of his ongoing efforts to protect the interests of his former and current (and future?) employers and, more generally, to advance the pro-copyright, pro-corporate side of the intense public conversation around the present state and future of the music industry.

Sheffner has backed the same interests in his coverage on his blog and for other online outlets, on the two cases involving the RIAA and alleged copyright-infringing filesharers that have, to date, gone to trial. He’s pretty much in the pocket, as they say.

We can imagine him looking at that piece and going, “Aw shit. Now I’m gonna have to give those kiddie actors a college clause — no way!” Then firing up his word-processing program and emailing Slate’s editors.

OK, so Shante didn’t have Warner pay for her education directly — and perhaps we’ll never know if one of the subsidiary labels made such an agreement with her because Pop Art’s contracts were supposedly lost in a flood. Cold Chillin’s file with Warner, according to Sheffner, didn’t have that level of detail. (Makes sense the file might be incomplete — they ended up at odds with each other after the big judgment against Biz Markie over his sampling case.)

Here’s what WB’s counsel wrote to Sheffner: “If Cold Chillin’ guided this artist’s compensation to education expenses that would certainly be a worthy one.” Then Sheffner makes what seems to be his main point right after that: “None of the half-dozen music industry sources contacted by Slate for this article had ever heard of a record label making an open-ended commitment to finance an artist’s education.” Gotcha!

But what of her education? Sheffner makes a big point of alleging Shante did not receive her Ph.D and is not listed as a practicing doctor. Gotcha again! (Sheffner seems to fetishize this “Doctor” thing. Maybe he’s sharpening his knives for Dr. Dre next?) But according to her, Shante has received her BA and MA degrees. Her passionate message in her talks to hip-hop youths across the country is about the importance of education. Clearly much more of the story here is begging to be told.

Most importantly, Shante said she attended college under another assumed name–not even her birth name–because of a domestic violence situation. Sheffner didn’t follow up on, we think, a reasonable, relevant, and obvious lead here. If she was right, he must have known at that point the story might have required real investigative reporting. Yet Slate’s editors didn’t put the brakes on the story even at this point. Instead, the piece ran with Sheffner’s slander that she failed to “substantiate such claims.”

So what did we learn here? One, Warner Brothers didn’t, but perhaps someone in the industry did fund Shante’s education. Two, Shante may not have a Ph.D.

We think that’s all pretty thin for a so-called expose.

Too bad this couldn’t be settled with battle rhymes. We all know who’d win that one.

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.

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