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This piece was commissioned by Folha De São Paulo‘s Sunday magazine, Ilustríssima at the midpoint of Obama’s first term. It meant to capture the racial moment in the U.S. for Brazilian audiences, but it also reveals some of the themes and topics of Who We Be: The Colorization of America, due out on St. Martin’s Press in late 2011.

For most of 2008, the most arresting image in America was a screen print by the street artist Shepard Fairey that appeared on posters, stickers, and clothing from sea to shining sea. The image was of a Black and white man rendered in red, white, and blue. The man was named Barack Obama and the four-letter word below his image was HOPE.

Obama was, of course, the presidential candidate who had come from the far geographic and cultural edge of the United States, its Pacific border in Hawai’i, to secure the Democratic Party nomination. He ran on a platform of mending a divided country. In a speech in March called “A More Perfect Union”, he offered his own biracial heritage—the unity of Black and white histories in his own body—as a symbol of reconciliation.

That address, now popularly known as “the race speech”, was in some ways as historic as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial almost 45 years earlier. “The complexities of race that we’ve never really worked through”, Obama said, remained “a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.” If Americans could move forward on race, he seemed to say, they could move forward on anything.

From the height of the civil rights movement through the Cold War into a new era of globalization, the United States has trumpeted the value of inclusion as central to its version of democracy. Yet any student of U.S. history knows that the reality of race has belied the nation’s image of itself. Race has driven four hundred years of civil and cultural schisms, and has brought the nation to the brink of dissolution. Race, another four-letter word, is still the most troubled national divide.

So when Barack Obama’s candidacy began to gather steam in 2008, some pundits wrote that it was a sign the rancor over race in America was finally dissipating. Obama dismissed the notion in his “race speech”, saying, “I have never been so naive as to believe we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy.” Yet his triumph was epochal. In the glow of the historic victory of a Black biracial president, many declared that the U.S. had entered a “post-racial” era.

But in the summer of 2009, when, in a press conference, Obama said white police who had harassed the famous African American scholar Henry Louis Gates in a local incident had “acted stupidly”, he caused a national uproar. Conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck called Obama a “racist” who had a “deep seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” More recently the Obama administration fired African American official Shirley Sherrod after a conservative white blogger accused her of being anti-white in a speech to the NAACP. Sherrod—whose father had been killed by white racists—was in fact speaking candidly of how she had overcome her own prejudices against whites, and the administration hastily tried to rehire her.

During the hot summer months, opposition to Obama’s proposals have been mobilized by thinly veiled racial images. Last year some far-right Tea Party members protested the president’s health care reform package with picket signs depicting him as a witch doctor. Others circulated lies that he was Muslim or that he was not born an American citizen, stories that crystallized their beliefs in Obama’s inextricable foreignness. This year Beck drew thousands of Tea Party supporters to the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th anniversary of King’s “I Have A Dream Speech” to celebrate “the end of darkness.” Halfway through Obama’s first term, flare-ups over race have reached a velocity and pitch unseen since the so-called “culture wars” of the 1980s and early 1990s.

But at the same time, there has never been a time in history when non-white people have been more visible. With Obama and his beautiful young family as the apotheosis, images in the U.S. media appear more loudly and proudly multiracial than ever. Our visual culture has become colorized, to coin a phrase.

One example is the notoriously exclusive high art-world. In the late 1960s artists of color mounted protests against the museums and galleries who refused to show their works. During the 1990s some artists of color began to break into the closed art-world, but not without great controversy. The 1993 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art featured the most diverse representation of women artists and artists of color up to that time. Many, but not all, of the artists revealed concerns over race, gender, and sexuality. The Biennial became a major ideological battleground of the culture wars, and remains one of the most critically despised shows of the last half-century.

But now a reassessment of that moment of multiculturalism is underway. The curator Thelma Golden and the artist Glenn Ligon half-jokingly coined the term “post-black” in the mid-1990s as a way to describe a new generation of post-multiculturalist artists of color. “Post-black is the new black,” Golden famously wrote. Both have become art-world superstars, as have others of their generation, including Kara Walker, Julie Mehretu, Mark Bradford, and Gary Simmons.

The most successful ad campaign this year starred Isaiah Mustafa, a strikingly handsome Black man, in a set of commercials for Old Spice shower body wash called “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.” Studies had shown that women made 70% of all body wash purchases, so Mustafa, acting as “The Old Spice Guy”, began his ads with a hearty “Hello ladies!” He pattered humorously in the deep baritone of a Shakespearean actor about how attractive he was. He began the ad wearing only a towel and—through set changes that took him quickly from the bathroom to a yacht to a white horse—he remained half-naked.

The ad went stupendously viral. Its runaway internet popularity caused the corporate giant Proctor & Gamble to commission 185 more video clips featuring The Old Spice Guy responding directly to tweets, posts, and emails from fans. The videos garnered literally hundreds of milllions of YouTube views. In all of them Mustafa was shirtless.

Katie Abrahamson, a spokesperson for Wieden+Kennedy, the agency that produced the ads, denied that Mustafa was cast based on his race. “The truth of the matter is, Isaiah was one of hundreds who auditioned for the spot in a standard casting-call and was simply the best performance and overall best fit for the creative idea—it had nothing to do with the color of his skin,” she said. “The challenge was finding someone who would appeal to both genders.”

But could an attractive white man standing half-naked in a bathroom blessed with equal comic gifts have conjured as much attention? The witty, de-Ebonicized, confident (but far from threateningly confident) Old Spice Guy recalled no one so much as Obama himself, who once when the paparazzi captured him on a beach in Hawai’i, appeared shirtless on a news tabloid cover above the headline: “FIT FOR OFFICE: Buff Bam is Hawaii hunk.”

Advertising met politics when, in one of the follow-up videos, the Old Spice Guy answered a question from the television host and former Democratic advisor George Stephanopoulos. How, Stephanopoulos wondered, could President Obama stop losing women voters? The Old Spice Guy advised Obama to “henceforth only be seen in a towel” and to begin his State of the Union addresses with “Hello ladies!” If the going got tough, just remind them of “his presidential ab-boards.”

One of American history’s most unforgettable images is the mutilated body of Emmett Till, a Black boy brutally tortured and murdered in 1955 by two white men in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white girl. Till’s mother insisted on an open-casket funeral—”I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby”, she said—and the photographs of Till shocked the country and sparked the nascent civil rights movement. Back then an image of a shirtless Black man might have caused race riots.

Twenty-five years ago, Robert Mapplethorpe’s stylized photographs of nude Black men scandalized the art world and catalyzed a conservative backlash against government funding of the arts. (Ligon actually explored the questions raised by Mapplethorpe’s photos in his work for the 1993 Whitney Biennial.) Subsequent debates and political fights over multiculturalism dominated the era of “the culture wars.”

But then the hip-hop movement—with its images of defiant Black and Latino youths—redefined multicultural cool, helping remake the American culture industry for a young browning world. Hip-hop helped to colorize the culture from bottom to top. Now the image of a smart, confident, handsome Black man epitomizes sexy, the cutting-edge of the cultural mainstream.

These changes have created unprecedented opportunities for some people of color. “The reality is, I guess as the reality of hip-hop is now, that most of the people that purchase my work are not African American,” admits Ligon, with a barely perceptible hint of ambivalence. The history of U.S. visual culture, like the history of American music, can be written as a history of desegregation. So why is the U.S. also seeing a renewed rancor over race?

The U.S. population is undergoing a paradigm shift. Because of immigration, non-whites now outnumber whites in 4 of the 50 states. Americans under the age of 18 will become majority non-white in about a decade, and the entire country will follow by the mid-century. Given their cultural influence it longer makes sense to refer to non-whites as “minorities.” Yet the most politically influential American demographic, the post-World War II generation known as the Baby Boom, is over 75% white. Demographer William Frey calls this phenomenon “the cultural generation gap.”

In the 2008 presidential election, race and generation came together as never before. Obama actually lost the white vote and voters over the age of 65 and split the Baby Boomer vote, but won the presidency by forging a new cultural majority. More than two-thirds of voters under 30, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, and an astounding 96% of African Americans voted for him. He also won a decisive margin among voters between 30 and 44, gay voters, and women voters.

To his credit, Obama’s opponent, John McCain, disdained the kind of racialized attacks that have become standard in American politics. But the U.S. has hardly escaped its long history of exploiting race to amplify white anxieties. Since the civil rights consensus of the 1960s, race has been the recurring “wedge issue” that overwhelms reasoned discussion.

In 1968 Richard Nixon’s presidential victory gave birth to the infamous “Southern strategy”—playing on racial fears to realign white Democrats as Republicans. Ronald Reagan summoned images of non-white welfare cheats and youth gangsters to win support for the gutting of social programs and the expansion of prisons. Even Bill Clinton had his “Sister Souljah” moment, excoriating the rapper for her allegedly anti-white comments.

This election season has seen the vicious return of the race wedge, and the triumph of myths over facts. In Arizona, the governor built support for a drastic anti-immigration bill with the fictional image of bodies of beheaded innocents left in the desert by criminals of Latino descent. In New York City, conservatives attacked a proposed moderate Muslim cultural center by disingenuously linking it to the 9/11 attacks and Arab extremism. In Texas, the State Board of Education voted to change the history textbooks for its 5 million students, downplaying the nation’s history of slavery and emphasizing a “biblical worldview”, in one board member’s words, of the U.S. “as a nation chosen by God to be a light set on a hill to serve as a beacon of hope and Christian charity to a lost and dying world.”

In many ways, four decades of civil rights rollbacks have left a nation more divided along racial lines. A prison boom tripled the number of incarcerated over the past quarter century to 2 million, the largest population behind bars in the world. Nearly 70% of prisoners are non-white. In the current economic recession, poverty rates for Latinos and Asians have soared. Less examined, but most troubling to many experts, are the rising rates of resegregation in housing and schooling. John A. Powell of the Kirwan Institute For The Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University warns that these if these trends are not stopped, they could rip apart the social fabric in the coming decades.

Here is the paradox of the “post-racial era”: while our images show an optimistic nation moving toward cultural desegregation and racial equality, our politics reflect deep pessimism and our social indexes reveal increasing social resegregation and racial inequality. The hip-hop band The Roots call our time the “post-hope era.”

“We know this is a country that’s increasingly becoming more diverse,” says Cornell Belcher, a political pollster for Obama. “Marketers get it. People selling sneakers get it. People selling Coca-Cola get it. But from a political standpoint, we haven’t really got it.”

Belcher notes that Americans of all backgrounds tend to share certain nationally defining values: freedom, fairness, opportunity, equality. “However, this is the problem with equality,” he says. “In certain groups, it triggers a conversation that goes like this: ‘They’re trying to get equality, which means I’m losing something. You have to be very careful about triggering this fear of ‘us vs. them.’”

When Obama filled out the decennial census form for this year and checked his racial background for “Black or African American”, he was criticized for ignoring his white ancestry. But some believe his resistance to speaking as openly about race as he did when he was a candidate have resulted in “colorblind” policies that are leaving communities of color further disenfranchised.

“What the Obama administration has learned is if you talk about race you lose. But what is the positive agenda for a multiracial future?” asks Powell. “Is it Arizona? Is it Texas?”

In 2011 another image—one unlikely to turn as viral as the HOPE poster or the Old Spice commercials, but just as intriguing—may find its way into the center of a national discussion. Glenn Ligon’s mid-career retrospective, opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art next year, will likely feature his neon light sculpture of the word AMERICA. He has painted the front surfaces of the letters black so that the light—which fluctuates slowly in intensity—can only be thrown backward. Now that Obama is president, Ligon jokes that critics will probably read this last piece too literally. “Black America,” he groans, “blah blah blah.”

But Ligon says he created these works before Obama was elected, when he read of a child in Afghanistan standing amidst the ruins of his home calling on America to live up to its democratic ideals. The other inspiration, he says, was Charles Dickens’s famous opening line to “A Tale Of Two Cities”, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Rap Pages
December 1994
By Jeff “DJ Zen” Chang and Mike Nardone
+ Download a PDF of the Original

In tribute to the great Rodger “Uncle Jamm” Clayton, we’re proud to bring back this feature that another legendary LA hip-hop DJ Mike Nardone and I were blessed to be asked to do by Sheena Lester for Rap Pages. Rodger Clayton, Egyptian Lover, and Iceberg were in the house.

The real deal is that I had misplaced the tapes for years and, when I found them, I had only transcribed parts of the entire interview to use for Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. When Dave Tompkins was writing How To Wreck A Nice Beach, he asked about the tapes knowing of the Army’s vocoderistics and I lent them to him. Dave transcribed the whole shebang. (Thanks Dave!)

We want to dedicate this to the whole Army and to the Clayton family. Enjoy.

U: Uncle Jamm
E: Egyptian Lover
I: Iceberg

Uncle Jam/Egyptian Lover
Transcript
6/28/94

E: It all started with house parties.

U: First house party was right after I got out the ninth grade. I set up in my garage. I had a trip light. Remember the trip lights?

E: That’s all you needed.

U: I named my party Industrial Shop. I had the color organ. I had a speaker hanging in the corner. I had a little record player and ran the speaker into that and we were jammin’ Dr John, “Right Place, Wrong Time.” That was the first dance I did, that was in my garage. My graduation party after ninth grade. That was ’73. 1873!

ZEN: Reconstruction—after the Civil War.

U: I did that house party in high school. Charged like 50 cents. Made good lunch money. Good ass lunch money in 11th and 12th grade. Then I got outta high school and I was working at a factory six to six. And I gave a dance at the Sojourner Truth Mansion down on Crenshaw, across the street from the Kappa house. It was two dances going on. I had more people at my dance. Somebody from the Kappa House snuck across the street , found the electrical outlet switch and cut off all the power at my dance. Everybody left my dance and went across the street. I ‘ll never forget that. That was some fucked up shit man. Then my buddies Gabe Martin, who went to school with me–they had rented Alpine Village. They called me to DJ it and I DJed it and they had only 150 people. Said, “Let’s do this right.” Went back to Alpine—this was when we were called Unique Dreams. Egypt used to come and dance.

E: I was a big time dancer.

U: We gave our first dance. Had some posters. Even brought some radio—we brought KDAY. KDAY had little ten second spots where they used say it in ten seconds: “Uncle Jamm’s Army”. Used to sell ten second spots for like twenty dollars.

E: And they worked.

U: We used to buy ten second spots and we did that dance, our first dance at Alpines, called “Bustin Out.” Because “Bustin Out” was out by Rick James. We got like 500 people, man. After that we did “Bustin Loose” because Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers was out.

E: Whatever the hottest song was out—they’d name the party after.

U: Back then, man, the music was incredible. It was just like funk, man. And the massive sound system we were renting from these white boys was awesome. Disco sound systems. What’s the name of that damn sound company in North Hollywood? Sound Champion. This is right after the disco era, when they had the Bozack mixers, without cross faders, when we’d just hold it down like that. Nobody was really cuttin’ like that. The only thing we was playin was funk and Sugar Hill. Because whatever came out on Sugar Hill was happening too. The West Street Mob, Ferrari, Grandmaster Flash.

E: When “Freedom” came out that was a whole new thing.

U: That’s when Egypt would be in the front, and we say, “What city you from?” And Egypt and his brother say, “We from Egypt, Cairo!” And they used to jump up and down. That’s when they used to wear the doctor suits. They was dressed like doctors. Remember when people used to dress like doctors?

E: Gynecologists.

(Laughter)

ZEN: So these parties were all ages?

U: Whoever paid money.

E: There wasn’t no alcohol. I was mad young.

U: There was some older guys there too in their early 20s looking for some younger girls.
Always.

E: Some twelve and thirteen year old girls was in there that looked older.

U: Sneaking out the house. Because their mommas come looking for them. And we get on the microphone, “Such and such, your momma at the door. She got a belt.”

E: Momma at the door with curlers in her hair and belt in her hand. One of them came to the DJ booth and saw her daughter freakin’ on this dude –and her daughter must’ve been twelve , thirteen years old—whooped her ass all the way to the front door.
It was at the Playpen. It was real dark. And the carpet got pulled up off the floor –we was gonna change it to a wooden floor or whatever.

U: It was leaking. And it was mud.

E: And there was mud and stuff on the floor and she was all on the floor freakin’ the dude in the mud.

U: In the mud.

E: Soon as the doors open they were freakin on the floor all the way to the last song. No other dance. Just The Freak!

U: Mini-skirts had just came out. Lotta girls used to be in there with no panties on and just mini-skirts.

E: Just dance and reach orgasm and keep dancing. Fast slow songs all night long—just grindin on each other all night long..

U: That’s when all the electronic shit was happening too. The Planet Rock stuff, Scorpio, Survival, Electric Kingdom—all that electronic stuff. We did the hotel dances, down Long Beach State, the colleges, high schools.

E: Then Shrine Auditorium, California Center—Convention Center.

U: The pioneering man of all the dances was a guy named JC T, used to do the Proud Bird. The Proud Bird used to have 3000 people. That’s when I used to go when I was seventeen years old. I said I’m gonna do this one day. Because I was giving my little house parties and I used to go there and he used to have—that’s when Lakeside used to play.

Then LSD came up and they did the Bonaventure, they had 3 or 4000 people. After LSD was—I really wanted to start DJing-because me and Lonzo started doing a lot of parties together. So I finally DJed for LSD, and finally got to DJ for them. They wrote me a $25 check and the motherfucker stopped payment on my check. And I couldn’t catch ‘em, they wouldn’t answer my phone calls.

ZEN: $25?

U: $25! So I went to one of their dances and said, “When y’all gonna give me my money? They had security there and it was me by myself. I said that’s alright. I said, “I’m gonna get my own organization and I’m gonna put you motherfuckers out of business”. They laughed. After that we changed the name from Unique Dreams to Uncle Jamm’s Army.

I was doing a lot of promotional work for George Clinton back then. He had the album out, “Uncle Jam Wants You”. One of my buddies was working with George and George was like, “I don’t care if yall use (the name).” So that’s when we broke out with Uncle Jamm’s Army, we used to wear the fatigues. Camouflage. It was basically my neighborhood that I grew up in off of Hoover between Imperial and 111th. All the guys that was in my hood.

Back then as we was coming up against LSD we had poster wars. One time about seven guys from LSD jumped out on me and it was in Steve’s front yard and Steve was in the doorway with a gun. LSD jumped out and one of them was trying to jump on me in the yard, I’ll never forget that. Poster wars used to be a motherfucker man.

E: LSD became conceited at that time.

U: LSD had gotten to point where we’re number one and they were complacent. They got to the point where they were packing people in hotel rooms with a nasty sound system and little lights.

E: While I was a dancer I used to go to LSD dances and that’s how I found out about Uncle Jamm’s Army because they used to talk about Uncle Jamm’s Army on the mic, “Yeah you see that dance with all the fine girls? Uncle Jamm ain’t got nothing like them.“ And they didn’t do nothing but promote them. Because when they told me Uncle Jamm, I said okay LSD ain’t doing nothing this week well what’s Uncle Jamm? Let’s check em out.

Uncle Jamm’s Army had better women, unconceited women. They’d say yeah when you asked them to dance. LSD had them uppity people. So Uncle Jamm became a better organization with the dancers so it was more packed. LSD’s started going down and Uncle Jamm’s reputation started going up.

U: We could play stuff at our dances as long as it was good and in the pocket, it would work. It didn’t have to be on the radio. Then a lot of record companies and acts started coming at us because we started getting bigger and bigger.

ZEN: What kinds of groups?

U: Lakeside, Midnight Star. George started coming to the dances.

IceBerg: That happened at Veteran’s. They came and that really solidified the group as Uncle Jamm’s Army because George Clinton was there. One of the largest pieces of the dance side of it—because I came in 82—I came from the East Coast. My style of mixing was the blend. See California style was some Wham-wham-wham. Through some mutual friends I met Rodger. Then I started DJing and then it really became Egyptian Lover and Ice Berg’s show and then there was Rodger. We kind of built it that way and it grew bigger and bigger and bigger. Summer of 82, we’d put 3(smack),4,5,6,7 thousand people in one place. I’m talking 40 people on security, all the people on the payroll. We got so big at that time , all them had beepers, we had poster patrols. It was a full scale DJ organization.

U: Not to mention the groupies. You be out passing out flyers and motherfuckers give you a flyer. “Yeah I’m down with Uncle Jamm’s Army. I know Rodger.” It’d be people passing out flyers, selling T shirts, buttons, posters. Catch people taking down posters and putting them in their room.

’80 was our first dance and then ’81 was when we changed names from Unique Dreams to Uncle Jamm Army. First we did those dances at the LA Convention Center, at the concert. We had like 4000 people and 500 outside trying to tear the doors down. Off the hinges. That’s when we broke out with our new speakers. We had 32 Cerwin-Vegas.

Ice Berg: We stack ‘em in pyramids on the side. That’s when Egypt was gigantic at that time. They were so large –you couldn’t square ‘em anyway. They’d fall over on people. It made it look like it was Egyptian Lover, Uncle Jamm’s Army, Iceberg Slim because they had this big pyramid of speakers on each side. One looked like a glacier.

U: I used to wear all them crazy ass costumes.

Iceberg: He’d have on something Egyptian and I’d have on surgeon’s suit with a white glove.

ZEN: I’m pulling on the hinges, I’m pulling the door down, I’m running in—what am I going to see?

E: Whole bunch of speakers. A DJ lifted up on some kind of stage. Mixing. And you can see his upper body and his arms. Music is loud as hell. Lights, a little bit of fog.

U: Flash paper and my gunpowder (starts laughing), Here’s what I’d do. I had my watch on and a stick of incense, like this, on my hand and a little flash paper like this. I come out with my costume on and shit and you get flash paper and they think you’re throwing fire. Smokeless powder, you put it in a ash tray and when you light it–it go hissssssss. Same shit they use at concerts now. That was my homemade way. I used to wear Egyptian robes and King Tut outfits.

E: It burn up in your hand. You had a big mask on your head. The turbans. It was different than a turban, it was like one of those snake charmer things. What was your nickname?

U: Ace of Dreams. I was all on George and them because that’s when they used to wear crazy stuff. I used to wear all that stuff.

E: That was way before me. After I saw them do the dances, me and some of my buddies from the valley started doing dances. I used to get Prince records and extend them to a very long time—shit I learned from watching Dr Rock. I started doing that. I learned how to do it quicker because at home I had a sorry Sony turntable and I had to be real delicate and stuff on the scratch.

And one day I was in the mall with Snake Puppy and we was just kicking it and Rodger came by passing out flyers. So Snake said Hey y’all are the best dance music organization in LA and this is the best DJ in LA, y’all should get together.
That was Fox Hills. And Rodger said I’m on my way to do a commercial right now for the Long Beach thing, I’ll let you get on the commercial and do something. I was like Really? All these years, I’d been lying, telling these girls I was in Uncle Jamm’s Army, just to get and they was giving it up.

ZEN: So how many people did you have in the crew at this time?

U: The only DJs really was us and then there was the young Bobcat, sitting on the stairs watching.

E: A whole bunch of people. Mixx from 2 Live Crew was watching. Bobcat was watching. Dre.

U: Dr Dre and Yella, they’d be at our club and we didn’t even know they were there. And then we had posters, security, the flyer team, –at least 12, 15. Another twenty
We had a lot of fights.

E: We had a lot of people taking up for us just because we’re Uncle Jamm’s Army.
It was a household name.

Nardone: When did you get on the radio?

U: Greg Mack came in town from San Antonio. KDAY hired him and he immediately got on our dick. He heard our commercials and said, “I wanna hook up with these guys.” That was right when the electronic shit really started to take off. Because The Freak started at Ventures Auditorium before the Playpen opened. Things started going crazy. Miniskirts came out. When electronic thing happened all the sudden they start dancing like that. They started going crazy.

IceBerg: We used to have contests, the Freakiest Girl or Freakiest Guy. Oh my goodness!

ZEN: How did you guys end up at the Sports Arena?

E: It was getting packed, packed, packed.

U: We went to the Sports Arena and decided to try it.

E: And triple the promotion.

U: Yeah. Instead of 500 posters we got 2000 posters.

U: We had mailing lists too. That’s when we used to wear spikes, leather.

ZEN: When was the first time you guys did the sports arena?

U: It Easter of 82, April 82. It might’ve been June 83. It was the end of school.

E: I’d never play a Michael Jackson song at a dance. The Rollin’ 60s would shoot up every fucking body. Pow pow pow. Can’t play Michael Jackson. Sorry Mike. Sorry Mike.
We could play all the Prince shit, even if it don’t sound good.

U: Greg talked KDAY into letting us do a mix show and it was called Saturday Nite Fresh.

U: That was September of 82. Then we did another Sports Arena. Russell Simmons called me. Our dance was that weekend. They asked me to put RUN DMC on the show. And RUN and them came and RUN and them were nineteen with sideburns, the Godfathers, the leather coats. They came in, Russell was with them. Russell was their road manager back then.

We gave them 750 dollars. I basically did it as a favor. They came and they saw all these people and they had never seen that many people in their life and they were scared. “It’s Like That”—we had started playing it.

We sped it up to make it like “Planet Rock.” I said we playing the record and they said can we be on the show for $750.00 and I said fine. They was terrified because they heard of LA Crips. While they was performing a fight broke out and crowd took off. The crowd was running like a motherfucker.

E: I actually taught Jam Master Jay how to do that Run-Run-Run! The next dance at Pasadena I said I’m gonna help you DJ. I thought RUN DMC—gotta be big. So he was mixing just the beat and I was going Run-Run-Run so I was trying to rock the jump. He got all that shit from me. He said thanks man. When he came back out he said check this out I learned this. He started doing this and doing that, y’know, what he learned from me, I was like that’s cool.

ZEN: How did you guys get into making the records because you guys started doing records in ’83 right?

E: (Afrika) Islam came out and said he knew how they did “Planet Rock.” My first question was How they get the drums like that? Said they use a drum machine. A what? A machine I can program myself? Said yeah. He took us to the Guitar Center and showed us the drum machine and he programmed Planet Rock. Took him a long time but he got it. I memorized the numbers he pushed. I went home begged my mom for the money, went back up there and bought that motherfucker. Called Roger immediately said, “Man we got the drum machine.” Then Rodg went out and bought the keyboard. SH 101. Radio Shack. Lets bring that shit to the dances.

U: We used to trigger the SH101 on the accent.

E: We did “Dial a Freek” and “Yes, Yes, Yes” and I saved my money up and said, ‘Okay I’m gonna do a solo record.” One day we went out to Oxnard to our buddy named HT It was during a big dance. As soon as we came in there he was playing “Tour de France”—it was a record that JUST came out. When I heard that heavy breathing with that “Planet Rock” beat in there—that shit was bad. I was going to the studio the next day. I memorized that shit as close as I could and went to the studio and did “Egypt Egypt.” It sound just like it. I played it for Rodg , and he was like, “This shit is bad but we can’t put this shit out right now because Dial a Freek was out. It would kill it.” So I held that back six or seven months, just held back on “Egypt, Egypt.”

U: “Dial A Freek” was the first record out on Macola.

E: I drew up the label and colored the thing. All that shit.

U: Like Egypt said I love that funk. I played that bassline. I used Rich Cason and he came in and did the strings on Yes, Yes, Yes.

E: I played the record backwards and we heard the keyboards backwards and played that.

U: It was an old Maurice Starr record “Computer Rock Control”. Egypt didn’t like basslines I said man I want to put a bassline on here. Came out good on “Dial a Freek.” That was an old Korg, analog Korg that Rich Cason keyboard.

E: The original beat that I played at Sports Arena, I had an 808–after I programmed a song in the 808, I erased all my beats thinking 808 was going to save the song. All my beats were erased. So the “Yes Yes Yes” we did on the record wasn’t the same as the one we did at the dance. I could never repeat that in my life.

After I saw how easy it was to do a record I told Roger and that’s when we did “Dial a Freek.” Started playing them at dances, people started wanting it and requesting it, Greg Mack started playing it for us on the KDAY and then I came out with “Egypt Egypt.” Greg Mack immediately got on that.

U: There was a concert coming to town. We had a dance at the Sports Arena. And there was a concert coming to down with New Edition, Grandmaster Flash, Fatback Band, like seven groups. They had like 500 people. We did our dance. We had 5000. Our dance whooped their concert’s ass. Just DJing.

E: We were the acts. We had characters. It’s not like DJs today where it’s just a name. DJ Jazzy Jeff is just a name now he’s a actor. He’s no character. He’s just himself. I was like the Egyptian Lover—he must be from Egypt blah-blah-blah. We had Mr Prinze. It was characters. Uncle Jamm. They wanted to see that shit.

E: We had six turntables. I had a mix record already mixed right. And I put that sucker on and stood up on –I put my foot on the turntable and I did like this. And they thought I was scratching.

U: You used to do your elbow scratch. Remember I used to scratch with my chin. It got to the point where we were the baddest shit. We was showin off. We was up on the level where we do anything then.

E: Started going to high school dances showing off. This girl come up to me, “I know a DJ he bad. He don’t make no mistakes. He bad just like you.” I went down there and it was Dr. Dre. He was getting down. He made up his own shit too. That’s the first time I ever seen a DJ not do all my shit. Now that’s cool. I give him respect.

E: After Sports Arena, the dances slowed down a little bit.

U: Gang activity. It wasn’t no more someone have a .22 in there. It was Uzis.

ZEN: Did you guys still do Uncle Jamm’s Army parties through those years?

U: Egypt was on the road. That’s when Pooh came in. Bobcat was still there. But we didn’t do that many dances. That’s when I got deep in my promotions. I promoted the infamous Raising Hell show in Long Beach. But see what happened was RUN and them got big as fuck and that’s when the white boys came in and started promoting them. They didn’t know how the fuck to promote rap so they called me. We did Sports Arena on May 30 and did real good. I remember that day it was a Friday night, during prom season. The CIAA track meet was going on that same night. They got 14,000 people into LA Sports Arena. All that shit was going on.

Friday night in May it was unheard of doing promotions. When we did dances we’d never do a Friday night in May because of proms. That’s the one night you might have four, five high school proms going on and that takes most of your crowd. We did the Raising Hell Tour. It was Timex Social Club, Beastie Boys, Whodini, LL and RUN DMC.

What has never came to light with that motherfucking Raising Hell show—it wasn’t gangs in Long Beach. It was a race riot. Let me tell you what happened. The Long Beach Insanes had stole a Mexican girl’s purse and some Mexican dudes went upstairs, broke in the broom closet and went down and hit up the Long Beach Insanes. Hit ‘em with brooms and mops and sticks with sharp edges on ‘em. Then all the black gangs got together, that was out there and they just start whupping every Mexican boy, every white boy, throwing em off the second level, whooping they ass and everything. The news never brought that to light. I was right there on the stage trying to calm the crowd down like I always did.

They had 100 T-shirted security guards. End of the night you supposed to turn your T-shirt in. End of the night there was only about 30 of them left. They had took off and left and ran. That was a fucking race riot. It wasn’t even about gangs. All the black gangs had combined and started whooping ass. For one time. That was the first time they ever did that. The Bloods, the Crips, everybody. You should really put that in the article. I promoted the fucking show and I know.

What had happened also too was at the Fresh Fest, before Raising Hell. The Fresh Fest, they made it a general admission. The floor was open so it was packs of gangs going through the floor snatching gold chains, taking money, Long Beach Insanes. Whenever we used to dances in Long Beach, we had fights. When we was Uncle Jamm’s Army we used to have to fight the Long Beach Insanes. Long Beach State. Long Beach Holiday Inn. Big ass fight.

Reggie hit this dude with a phone and it rang. Snatched the phone off the wall and the middle of the (riiiinnng!) and it rang. I said “That’s one call that motherfucker won’t answer.”

ZEN: Did it seem like it was harder and harder to do dances?

E: We never went back to Long Beach.

U: What happened was as time went on they didn’t want kids coming in. The buildings became like this. We still could do the Sports Arena if we wanted to but it was too much. That’s when LA was going crazy. Jackings on Crenshaw. Kidnappings. The dope game. It was just crazy.

E: Venice Beach wasn’t Venice Beach no more. They got gangs up there. After ’84, ’85 doing everything live I didn’t DJ again until ’89 when I started doing track shows in Louisiana and all of the south and Miami.

ZEN: I wanted you to talk how ’85, ’86. What happened during those years? How did Uncle Jamm’s Army change?

U: DJ Pooh had grown up in my cousin’s neighborhood and they had a crew called the FBI Crew. Pooh used to be one of those DJs that would come watch Egypt at the Sports Arena. So Pooh was locked down, went to jail, got out of jail and didn’t have a job so he hooked up with me and I was at this record store. I recorded “Naughty Boy” right around that time. So Pooh came in and we were doing Skateland. We were doing Skateland more than anything . I brought EPMD out here. Queen Latifah. I had Biz there when “The Vapors” first broke. So we were doing Skateland. There were only a couple of places you could stuff at. Skateland, World on Wheels, We did UTFO there. I was promoting Anita Baker and Luther’s infamous tour. Prince. When Celebrity Theater opened I was doing a lot of their stuff too.

ZEN: Did you guys ever get to a point where you said we’re not gonna do Uncle Jamm anymore?

U: It got the point where I started doing a lot of things for myself. Started consulting for labels, doing my promotions, doing concert promotions, but always in the back of my mind, even to this day, because Egypt got a new record coming out and I’m getting ready to go in the studio and do some shit too. It’s always at the point where I’m still in my mind and in my heart—that’s when we did the reunion.

The whole west coast has evolved, even with the Ice Cube situation, because Ice Cube came from Lonzo. Me and Lonzo used to work together. It’s almost like a family tree. A big fucking family tree and it went like that. Ice T, Dre, Cube goes back to right there. Because me and Lonzo first worked together and then he did the Wreckin Cru and then we had a rivalry. We did dances together. The only reason we really stopped doing dances man was because LA got too crazy like it is now.

Every rap show that came in LA I was a part of. Every rap show. I had been around them. I knew how to hold the crowds, control the crowds, the marketing of them and the security and after that big fiasco, the Ice Cube-Too Short, after that Anaheim banned rap shows so basically there hasn’t been any rap shows with the exception of an underground show here. There’s never really been no more rap shows per se. Except for the golden boy stuff that that goes on at the Palace—something that they don’t advertise as black. That’s what happened. The whole city, the whole thing changed man. The whole structure of LA became—LA just got fucked up in a nutshell.

ZEN: Do you think there could be another group like Uncle Jamm’s Army in LA?

U: Not in LA. Back then man it was so much fun growing up. People could go to dances. Your momma could take you and drop you off. Have some fun. Once in a while there’d be a fight or someone would shoot a 22 in the air, but now, shit. Nobody owns a damn 22. Nobody. If you have a little gun in your purse it’s gonna be a 25 mack. At least that. But we broke a lot of acts.

When we do this movie it’ll show the whole stages. It won’t be this fake-ass Krush-Groove shit. It’ll have the Rolling 60s, the experiences, the shit we went through. When we were Unique Dreams, we did a dance. There was place near Fox Hills Mall , used to have a vacant bowling alley there. It rained on my two dances, I got strep throat, I got laid off my job and found out I was expecting my first child around the same time. This shit happened to me in two days man. I put up what little money I had on the dance, got laid off my job, had a bad case of strep throat, found out my girlfriend at the time was pregnant with my son. Never forget that. 1980. Unique Dreams really started—even before Uncle Jamm—me and the Unknown DJ, we had a little Japanese man invested some money for us and we did a dance at Consolidated Plaza and that’s when LA had the fucking mud slides. This was in 78. LA had the worst rains they ever had–we lost it.


RIP Uncle Jamm

This piece began as a brief acceptance speech for my 2008 North Star News Prize Award. I was trying to spell out the key roles that journalists, artists, and organizers played in bringing about Obama’s victory, all jobs that were looked down upon and that I–of course–had held during the 20+ years of my so-called career. Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation liked it and commissioned it for the magazine.

The original went live online here on April 15. 2009. Below is my version…I’ve restored a few words that were cut for space. Extensive links to come soon…

On Inauguration Day, Tom Brokaw was moved to compare Barack Obama’s election to Czechoslovakia’s 1989 Velvet Revolution. At the eye of both storms, of course, was an icon who merged the political and aesthetic—Vaclav Havel, the rock-star poet and prophet, and Barack Obama, the post-soul master of his own story. Both struck down eras of monocultural repression with their pens.

Artists played a largely unheralded role in Obama’s victory. But they had been tugging the national unconscious forward for decades, from the multiculturalist avant-gardes of the ‘70s and ‘80s to the hip-hop rebels of the ‘90s and ‘00s, plying a fearless, sometimes even unruly kind of polyculturalism. By the final months of the election season, they had secured Obama as the waking image of change.

Every moment of major social change requires a collective leap of imagination. Political transformation must be accompanied not just by spontaneous and organized expressions of unrest and risk, but by an explosion of mass creativity. Little wonder that two of the most maligned jobs during the 40 years after Richard Nixon’s 1968 election sealed the “Silent Majority” backlash were community organizer and artist.

Obama was both. So why haven’t community organizers and artists been offered a greater role in the national recovery?

During the transition, arts advocates surfaced some big ideas—including the creation of an Arts Corps to bring young artists into underfunded schools, the expansion of unemployment support and job retraining to those working in creative industries and the appointment of a senior-level “Arts Czar” in the administration. But in practice, they faced dealing with the wreckage left by a nearly three-decade long culture war.

In January, they lobbied for a $50 million request for the NEA in the stimulus package and prevailed over Republican opposition. The one-time allocation will preserve over 14,000 jobs, allow for new stimulus grants and leverage hundreds of millions more in private support for the arts. Two million Americans list “artist” as their primary occupation. Nearly six million US workers are employed in the nonprofit arts-and culture complex alone. In the words of the NEA’s Patrice Walker Powell, the stimulus vote finally “dignified (them) as part of the American work force.”

The victory reflected how notions of the value of creativity have changed. During the last decade, discussions advanced beyond the dead-end debates about the limits of government-funded free expression. Boom-era theorists like Richard Florida and Elizabeth Currid, not to mention Hollywood bulls like Darren Star (“Sex And The City”) or Doug Ellin (“Entourage”), helped make creatives sexy again. Groups like the US Conference of Mayors dreamed not just of expanding cultural tourism or fostering post-industrial innovation, but of attracting new chai latte-sipping bourgeoisies into decaying parts of town. The economic value of creativity was so firmly established by the mid-90s that it helped drive the ravenous appetite for global corporate consolidation once the Clinton administration began sweeping aside ownership caps and deregulating markets.

For decades, the de facto policy has been to confuse the culture industry with the source of creativity, and to largely abandon the production, promotion, distribution and enjoyment of arts and culture to the dictates of the boom-bust marketplace. The result has been the spread of “lifestyle economies” that are merely new forms of monoculturalism and the rise of an environment increasingly antithetical to creativity. A wave of deregulation in the culture industry has consolidated distribution channels and destroyed local scenes, locked away sources of inspiration behind fences of “rights management” and copyright and favored a “blockbuster or die” approach that raises barriers to entry and creates diseconomies of scale. Call it the privatization of the imagination.

So it is important to restate the case for public funding of culture. President Obama recently signed into law a $155 million budget for the NEA. He has also created a White House position on culture and the arts and is expected to appoint Kareem Dale, a Chicago lawyer who worked on the Obama campaign Some advocates believe this may signal an executive shift away from a position of culture-war footing to a higher level of presidential engagement in creativity policy.

Still, Dale will be no ‘Arts Czar’. Instead he will likely be juggling his duties with previously assigned responsibilities for the President around disability policy. And, Flight of the Conchords fans take note,the NEA funding is still less than New Zealand’s annual cultural budget. Even adding in an additional $155 million allocation to the NEH, we still have nothing closely resembling a national commitment to creativity.

What we might call “the creativity stimulus” goes far beyond job creation and even economic development. Culture is not just something that conservatives wage war on. The arts are not just something that liberals dress up for on weekends. Creativity can be a powerful form of organizing communities from the bottom up. The economic crisis gives us a chance to rethink the role of creativity in making a vibrant economy and civil society. Both artists and community organizers cultivate new forms of knowledge and consciousness. One of the unsung stories of the past 25 years is how both have used creativity to inspire community development and renewal. Creativity has become the very glue of social cohesion in times of turmoil.

In Detroit, the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, built around the inimitable 93 year-old woman who gives the center its name, has served as a home for some of the city’s sharpest young organizers and artists in its Detroit Summer program. One of them, the acclaimed rapper Invincible, has produced an 11-minute video for her song “Locusts” that serves not just as a fine documentary of the Center’s work against gentrification and displacement or a profound meditation on the Motortown’s past, but also as a defiant middle-finger in the face of pessimists like Richard Florida, who all but wrote off Detroit in a recent Atlantic Monthly cover story.

Obama’s green jobs for youth proposal emerged first from Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, where staffers tried to figure out how to make the environmental movement pay attention to the hip-hop youths coming in to the center. On the other side of town, the Eastside Arts Alliance helped revitalize the troubled city’s International District by serving as a haven for socially conscious artists, organizers and intellectuals, bringing together leaders of the Black Arts Movement with those of the hip-hop movement.

Deeply rooted in the communities that made Obama’s victory possible, these centers understand their work as transformational. Their communities are the most vulnerable to assaults on creativity, but they are also incubators of the most innovative ideas and movements of our time. This “creative communities” approach has created a rigorous and vital alternative to both neoliberal and neoconservative versions of change.

Cross-generational dialogues have begun between older activists inspired by the examples of 1930s Works Progress Administration (WPA) arts projects and 1970s Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) cultural development programs, and the post-NEA-meltdown do-it-yourselfers raised on the independent ethics and aesthetics of hip-hop and punk. Such discussions could help shape a framework for a new cultural policy that focuses on the demonopolization and re-regulation of the culture industry, preserves national arts legacies, restores and upholds localism, aligns corporate interests with individual expression, promotes a radical spirit of diversity and unshackles creativity to rebuild communities and the national economy.

A creativity stimulus policy might follow the example of the distinguished tenure of Brazil’s former cultural minister, Gilberto Gil. The famed musician’s own art collided with the aims of the repressive dictatorship and resulted in his temporary exile at the end of the 1960s. More recently, his desire to re-release three of his most famous songs under a Creative Commons license—songs that he said celebrated “the idea of the permanent transformation of everything that exists, of the uninterrupted re-making that produces culture, life, and the world”—was thwarted by the publisher and owner of his songs, Warner-Chappell Music.

Back in 2003, in his first speech as minister of culture, Gil stated that his aims were to forge “the opening of territory for creativity and new popular languages”, ensure “the availability of space for adventure and daring” and secure “the space of memory and invention.” Our urgent task now is not just to repair the present, but to recover the past and sow the future. When we commit to advancing creativity, we will free these trailblazers to write the new narratives of America.

Interested in more? Check out this interview with Jeff at The Arts Politic.

Before “Pineapple Express”, “Swagga Like Us”, “Slumdog Millionaire”, and a baby made her a global hip-hop heroine, there were a pair of albums. Times have changed. Junot Diaz won a Pulitzer, Obama was elected and the Tamil Tigers were routed. But here’s why M.I.A. mattered then…and still does now.

When she debuted in 2005 with Arular, critics couldn’t get over the package: the brown doe eyes, the cover model looks, the bracingly danceable music–not to mention the lyrics about war, terror and poverty. Her name–Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, better known as the rapper M.I.A.–was everywhere. Her second album, Kala, has stirred a small backlash among critics who admit they don’t know what she is trying to say. That’s hardly her fault. Kala shows she is one of the most important musical artists of the decade.

Children—brown-skinned children from Liberia, India, Jamaica and Baltimore, the post-hip-hop nationals of what M.I.A. calls World Town—climb all over the grooves of Kala. Their noise becomes part of the record’s texture: they shriek in delight, laugh and dance; they kick rhymes; they cock guns. Not unlike the fourth season of HBO’s hit The Wire, Kala explores poverty, violence and globalization through the eyes of children left behind. M.I.A.’s London refugee crew sling sugar water, bootleg CDs and color TVs to stay ahead of Border and Immigration, send remittances back to Asia or Africa and survive another day while their parents pray they become accountants. “Why has everyone got hustle on their mind?” she asks.

On the opener, “Bamboo Banga,” a nod to Darkroom Productions’ Baltimore street anthem “Bmore Banga,” she sets up an image of a Hummer speeding across the desert with a quote from the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner”: “Roadrunner roadrunner/Going hundred miles per hour/With your radio on.” For Jonathan Richman, it was the sound of postwar innocence, Kerouac in love with the modern world and the open road. For M.I.A., it’s the sound of Green Zone excess, First World abandonment, white flight on wheels. She roll-calls the planet of slums: Somalia, Angola, Ghana, India, Sri Lanka and Burma. “Now I’m sittin’ down chillin’ on some gunpowder/Strike match, light fire,” she raps. “M.I.A. coming back with power power.” Suddenly the setting isn’t the desert; it’s your country–a Lou Dobbs nightmare, the future sheathed in dark skin come home to your streets. “I’m a roadrunner,” she sings. “I’m a world runner.”

Much has been made of Arulpragasam’s revolutionary birthright: her estranged father is a founding member of a Sri Lankan Tamil minority resistance group, the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (or EROS, a name that becomes ironic given the way Maya’s art has been seen through the frames of sex and violence). EROS was responsible for a number of bombings and kidnappings in Sri Lanka in the 1980s and had links with the PLO, from whom her father reportedly learned how to devise explosives. He later became a member of the militant Tamil Tigers, whose violent tactics in their fight for a separate Tamil state (including suicide bombings) led the State Department to declare them a terrorist organization. His name, Arul Pragasam, inspired the title of her astonishing 2005 debut.

But perhaps not enough has been made of the fallout from that revolution. Arulpragasam’s early childhood was one of perpetual motion. Soon after she was born her family moved from Hounslow, London, back to Sri Lanka, just as the island’s ethnic tensions descended into civil warfare. Her father left the household to serve the resistance; she has never lived with him. Sometimes her mother booked her to dance at parties, where she was paid in food. The music she performed to–a Bollywood disco tune called “Jimmy Aaja”–turns up on Kala, named in tribute to her mother, who secured their passage out of Sri Lanka to an Indian refugee camp. They then returned to England, where Maya’s mother sewed clothes to support her three children.

Raised in the South London council estates, England’s postwar housing projects, the revolutionary’s daughter listened with a schoolgirl’s concentration to a radio tuned to Madonna and Bananarama. One day it was stolen by estate boys. Suddenly the Public Enemy she heard playing from other apartments seemed not only crucial to survival but inviting. She has said that hip-hop–the arts movement that grew from the find-and-use, cut-and-paste pastimes of socially and politically abandoned city kids–made her feel connected to England and the wider world for the first time.

First as a visual artist, then as a rapper and musician, M.I.A. courted controversy. As a 1998 grad of hipster factory St. Martin’s College of Art and Design, M.I.A. stenciled tigers and armed militants onto her canvases, not unlike the way Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of the Clash had stenciled Rastafarian slogans onto their jumpsuits a generation before. She soon discovered the Roland MC-505 Groovebox synthesizer/drum machine and almost instantly began making tunes like “Galang,” whose sheer exuberance made it one of the most infectious songs of the ’90s. The schoolgirl chants, crashing dancehall-style percussion and Clash and Hendrix references made it easier to digest (if not ignore) messages like “They say…work is gonna save you/Pray and you’ll pull through/Suck-a-dick’ll help you.” On Arular, she adopted the squiggly minimalism of Virginia hip-hop, the screechy braking beats of East London grime, the two-clap bounce of Puerto Rican reggaeton, the blazoning bass thrusts of Brazilian baile funk and the skittery percolations of Baltimore club to back fist-pumping slogans like “Pull up the people, pull up the poor” and “I got the bombs to make you blow.” On “Sunshowers,” she shouted-out the PLO.

While her enthusiasm for emerging Third World club sounds made First World clubsters swoon with jungle fever, critics–mostly male–asked what a St. Martin’s grad was doing playing with fire in a post 9/11 world. They complained that her politics didn’t reveal enough program, as if artistry and policy were the same thing. (Is Bono a better artist for working with Jeffrey Sachs? Are Sachs’s politics better for working with Bono?) They accused her of hipster imperialism. No less a critic than Simon Reynolds, author of the seminal Rip It Up and Start Again, charged, “Arular, strictly speaking, comes from nowhere.”

But perhaps M.I.A.’s “nowhere” was really everywhere–or, to be specific, everywhere but the First World’s self-regarding “here.” At the time of the album’s release, she said she felt homeless–and that she hoped the music might be a way home. She told one interviewer, “My survival technique in Britain was to forget Sri Lanka–completely–and block it out of my mind. Then I thought, ‘I know the other side, I’ve lived through that for 10 years, and I have to speak for them at some point.’” She also complained about the insularity of her British Sri Lankan community: “It’s obvious I care about where I came from. It’s obvious I’m fucking brown. I don’t have to say it again and again, underline it and talk to the people within the circle when it is about getting out there.”

Like writers Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat and Rattawut Lapcharoensap, artists Nadine Robinson and Julie Mehretu, and cartoonists Marjane Satrapi, Adrian Tomine and Lalo Alcaraz, she found herself caught between roots and a desire for rootlessness, communitarian uplift and mainstream success, freedom and responsibility, exile and return. The languages of salad-bowl multiculturalism and authenticity-obsessed pop criticism (which labels everything not from “here” as “world music”) couldn’t locate M.I.A. But pop culture could.

On Arular, she broadcast the sound of those with one foot in the First World door, the other in a Fourth World gutter, where the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Big Poppa,” Chaka Demus and Pliers’ “Bam Bam,” New Order’s “Blue Monday,” Basement Bhangra, Black Francis and Bobby Friction and Nihal are equal touchstones. Her spray-can and stencil art featured images of young gunmen flashing peace signs or bereted, bare-kneed Third World female soldiers marching en masse. But those images–like Arular’s words and sounds–weren’t just about war, sex and revolution; they were about what it means to consume those ideas. Against a media flow that suppresses the ugliness of reality and fixes beauty to consumption, M.I.A. forces a conversation about how the majority live. She closes the distance between “here” and everywhere else.

In trying to synthesize realities, Kala made stunning connections. Some of this was accidental. After Arular, M.I.A. signed with media giant Interscope, home to 50 Cent and Eminem. She rented an apartment in Brooklyn and prepared to record her second album with superstars Timbaland, Lil Jon and Akon, among others. Had everything gone as planned, Kala would have been a capital-P pop album. But visa problems, probably related to her father’s affiliations and her own art and lyrics, delayed her entry to the United States. In a sense, Kala is what happens when antiterror hysteria touches the artistic soul.

Literally homeless, she traveled to Liberia, India, Angola, Trinidad and Jamaica, and met the children who shaped the record, holding recording sessions as she went and collecting the noises, movements and rhythms of those moments into often sublime songs. Youth whistles, cheers, interjections and cries drive singles like “Boyz” and “Bird Flu,” which, in their boldly antisubcultural use of, say, Hindu dhol drumming, Trinidadian chutney-soca and New York hip-hop, deliriously suggest a new kind of everywhere.

In the videos, hundreds of boys dance–including Jamaican dancehall kings like Spikes and Sponge Bob and scores of Indian villagers in oversized T-shirts screened with M.I.A.’s ironic antislogans “Buy All Means Necessary” and “It Takes Immigration of Millions to Hold Us Back”, jokey reversals of Boogie Down Productions’ By All Means Necessary and Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Boys move ecstatically in choreographed unison. “How many no money boys are rowdy?/How many start a war?” M.I.A. shouts above the pandemonium. She also sees that their competitiveness–an alternative to military conformity and enforced discipline–has its own trap doors. “Oh gosh, it’s the new warlord,” she remarks with ambivalence.

The album’s masterpiece, “Paper Planes,” takes Wreckx-N-Effect’s booty-call anthem “Rump Shaker” and replaces the “zoom-zoom” and “pum-pum” lyrics with gunshots and a cash register, linking everyday misogyny with the violence of globalization. In her rap, she adopts the pirate outlook of the corner boy, walking through a sonicscape where Mick Jones’s tremoloed guitar lick evokes the ruins of American shock-doctrine projects from Baltimore to Baghdad. Its core sample comes from The Clash’s “Straight to Hell,” in which a Vietnam GI coldly dismisses an Amerasian war orphan’s plea to be brought to the United States, leaving the boy exiled from both Main Street and the rice field.

If rootlessness is the defining condition of the planet of slums, then what does it mean for art to come home? Kala‘s answers–like all great “political” art–cannot be any more than provisional. But now, at least, no longer running to or from someone else’s utopia, M.I.A. is behind the wheel, switching the lost youth of the Fourth World into the network society, her radio on.

You can also find this article on the website of The Nation with other pieces I’ve done.

Can the freshman senator from Illinois stick to his ideals and still become the first man to rock Air Force Ones on Air Force One? We’re entering the mostly hotly contested election of our lifetime. It’s time to decide? Is Barack Obama our man?

On a Tuesday afternoon in May, the lines for a Barack Obama rally are as long as they would be for the rock concerts that are the normal fare here at the Electric Factory, a vast, converted warehouse in North Philadelphia.

Even for this mixed city, the crowd is stunningly cosmopolitan. The orderly line includes a coed reading The Bookseller of Kabul, South Asian engineering majors from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Arab American law students from the University of Pennsylvania, veteran activists from the National Hip-Hop Political Convention in crisp suits, community organizers in ACORN t-shirts, young white, Black, and Latino parents with kids in strollers, elderly people in wheelchairs, and everywhere, high schoolers—some sporting HOT CHICKS DIG OBAMA buttons, some from North Philly in their school uniforms, others from South Jersey in Abercrombie & Fitch, drawn like the faithful to Mecca.

They have all donated $25 to $50 — star prices for the B-Rock — to be, in Common’s words, ignited. Obama pitches himself as the candidate of change, and many here hope he can turn around a nation polarized by George W. Bush, war, the economy, race, religion, political parties, and even hip hop.

Beverly Washington from the Mount Olivet Tabernacle Church is wearing her red Sunday power worship suit and gripping her varnished brown cane. Four generations from her congregation have come on buses. The last time she felt this good about politics was two decades ago. “Jesse was real. But now Barack is coming,” she says. “He’s fresh, he’s new, he’s inspiring.”

Carmen Mitchell, 14, got her cousin, Anthony Lewis, 17, to ask his mom to write them a fake doctor’s note that morning. They dressed in their summer-brite polos, grabbed their black D&G stunna shades, and skipped classes to catch a train from the boondocks of Conshohocken. Then they hiked two miles from 30th Street Station to be the first in line at their first political rally. They want the wars in Iraq and in their old West Philly neighborhood to end. “He makes us feel like he’s really talking to us,” Carmen says.

Obama arrives backstage, a retinue of Secret Service agents trailing behind. He introduces himself to the employees, looking them in their eyes. On the decks, King Britt cues Aretha Franklin’s “Think,” and she wails, “Oh, freedom! Freedom!”

Now it really is Obama time. This crowd of 3,000 isn’t the biggest he has seen — there were 12,000 in Oakland, 20,000 in Atlanta and Austin — but, as he ascends to the stage, they are deafening. “Spring is here in America,” he says in his soothing baritone. “It’s time for us to renew the spirit of America, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

When he first ran for state office in 1996, Obama continues, “People would say to me, ‘You seem like a nice guy.’” The crowd laughs. “‘You’ve got a fancy law degree. You could be making a lot of money. You’ve got a beautiful family. You’re a church-going man. Why would you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics?’” Obama talks slowly, as if he’s unsure whether he’s really made up his mind, and when he has an opportunity to go hard, he often gets complicated instead. But while his voice is doing one thing, his body is doing another. He carries his slim 6’ 2” frame with a hint of streetball swagger. And when he comes to a money line, he holds his position like he’s daring you to charge. His is the opposite of in-your-grill. Obama’s game is finesse.

“We feel as if we can’t make a difference, and so half of us don’t even vote,” Obama says, to swelling cheers. “This nation is founded on a different tradition,” he says, his voice rising, “a very simple idea that we all have mutual obligations toward each other, that we all rise and fall together, that we can value our individualism and our self-reliance but ultimately we have to lift up this idea that we are connected. And if there are children in Philadelphia right now that are killing each other and shooting each other, and without an education and dropping out, that impacts all of us.”

The crowd goes bananas.

When he’s done, he comes offstage to shake hands, followed by the men in headsets. A throng of bodies pushes toward the barriers. People hold up copies of his book, The Audacity of Hope. An elderly Black woman fights back tears. Carmen and Anthony reach out to clasp his hand. Aretha sings, “You need me…and I need you.”

•••••

It’s Wednesday afternoon in Washington D.C., the day after the rally and two other fundraisers in Philly. The western end of the seventh floor of the Hart Senate Office Building is humming.

Two young white receptionists field an unrelenting stream of calls on pending votes for the immigration bill and the war supplemental budget. Between rings, they train an eager, racially mixed group of interns how to run the constituent response software. Behind closed doors, aides are working feverishly on a major lobbying/ethics reform bill the Senator has sponsored. Ben Labolt, Obama’s press secretary, sighs, “These are the days my coffee pot is full all day.”

A sudden whoosh of air, and Obama himself is in the room, stopping everyone dead for a second. He apologizes for the delay and invites me into his high-ceilinged, mustard yellow office. One wall is adorned with pictures of him with his wife Michelle, 43, and his daughters, Malia, 9, and Sasha, 6. There’s a small photo of the surf-swept cliffs of Bamboo Ridge at the southeastern edge of Oahu, where the ashes of his mother, Ann Dunham, were scattered. Another wall is dominated by a painting of Justice Thurgood Marshall. There are portraits of Lincoln, Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., each one Obama’s definition of a “uniter not a divider,” to borrow the phrase George W. Bush once used to describe himself.

Obama takes a chair and kicks his feet up on the coffee table. He wears a blue pinstriped suit. A touch of gray is creeping into his closely shaven hair, but he maintains a gym rat’s physique. When I tell him I went to his rival high school in Honolulu, he can’t resist a little trash talk. “We used to wipe the floor with them,” he tells Labolt, flashing that marquee smile.

Near his desk is an encased pair of bright red Everlast boxing gloves, signed by Muhammad Ali. Above them hangs a framed poster of Ali towering over a prone Sonny Liston, after the famous “phantom punch” in the first round of their 1965 rematch, when Ali is screaming at the former champion to stand up and fight. Here is the other side of Senator Obama: The baller who still enjoys throwing ’bows on the basketball court. The high-roller who raised $56 million from over 250,000 donors in the first half of 2007 to lead all candidates in the paper chase. The man who could become the first Black president.

Obama’s political career has been charmed, some might even say blessed. In 2004, his opponent in the Democratic primary race for the U.S. Senate faded amidst claims of domestic abuse. Then Obama was tapped by Senator John Kerry to give the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Inspired by his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the speech updated Jesse Jackson and Gil Scott-Heron, invoking “the audacity of hope” to end a “long political darkness”. It made him an overnight celebrity.

Obama’s first Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, quit after his ex-wife disclosed his sexual perversions in documents related to a child custody dispute. Republicans searched for an African American to challenge Obama. Unfortunately they plucked perennial loser Alan Keyes, who at one point said, “Christ would not vote for Barack Obama.” Obama took 70% of the electorate. He is now the only African American in the Senate, and just the third elected since Reconstruction.

But when Obama announced he was running for president, some shot-callers, like the Reverend Al Sharpton, seemed skeptical of an inexperienced candidate who had not emerged from the civil rights establishment. “Right now we’re hearing a lot of media razzle-dazzle,” Sharpton said at the time. “I think when the meat hits the fire, we’ll find out if it’s just fat or if there’s some real meat there.” Sharpton recently told VIBE, “I’m warming up to Obama, but I’m not there yet.”

Obama’s “blackness” has also come into question. “Obama isn’t black,” Salon.com columnist Debra Dickerson wrote. “‘Black,’ in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves.” The debate exposed fears that a discussion about race that expands to include immigrants of color and their descendants might thwart continuing attempts to address the terrible legacies of slavery. And could someone who grew up in Hawai’i and Indonesia really be “black”? Obama’s Southside-for-life wife, Michelle, plays this line of questioning for laughs on the campaign trail when she talks about her first impressions of him: “I kind of thought any Black guy who was raised in Hawai’i had to be a little off!”

“We as a culture are still confused about race,” Obama says carefully. “There’s this assumption that there’s only one way of being Black. That if you are not conforming to a certain pattern of behavior, that somehow you may not be authentic enough. And those of us in African American culture know that there’s as much diversity in the African American community as there is in any other community.”

Some took just one look at him to make up their mind. On May 4, CBSNews.com disabled all user comments on its articles about Obama because the website was receiving too many racist posts. That same month, he was granted full Secret Service protection, the earliest ever for a presidential candidate who had not previously served, in part because of racist e-mails to his Senate office. Only Jesse Jackson Sr., during his 1984 and 1988 runs, required similar arrangements. “He is both black and black enough for whatever individual or individuals unnerved his handlers enough to seek Secret Service protection,” observed Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr.: “That’s a truth that cuts the clutter.”

When asked what he thinks of the “Is he Black enough?” discussion, Obama grins. Perhaps it’s that bit of Ali in him. “If you go to my barber shop, the Hyde Park Hair Salon, 53rd Street on the Southside, and you ask my guys in there, people don’t understand the question,” he says. “But it’s something I worked out a long time ago. I know who I am. My friends, my family, my constituency know who I am, and by the time this campaign is all over, America will know who I am.”

•••••

Obama, who turned 46 on August 4th, calls himself a member of the Joshua generation, an heir to the heroes of Selma, but he really falls somewhere between the civil rights and the hip-hop generations. He’s too young to have been a Freedom Rider and too old to have worn a Public Enemy t-shirt like a middle finger. He pays respect to the idealism and commitment of the civil rights generation, but he does not belittle the hip-hop generation’s skepticism toward politics.

Polls show Obama leading Hillary Clinton amongst the college-age crowd. The internet is awash in rap, reggaeton, and R&B tributes to him. Hip-hop activists across the country stump for him, and Island Def Jam chairman L.A. Reid recently hosted a fundraiser at his Park Avenue apartment that brought in over $350,000 from the likes of Beyonce, Jay-Z, and Jermaine Dupri. Obama’s supporters include Andre Harrell, Eddie Murphy, Ludacris, and Oprah Winfrey.

So it came as a surprise when, in the wake of the firing of radio host Don Imus and the subsequent backlash against hip hop, Obama was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that rappers were “degrading their sisters”. Many hip hoppers, knowing that the culture has been used as a wedge issue since Bill Clinton attacked Sister Souljah in 1992, were angry that Obama seemed to be lining up on the other side of the battle. Obama says he was misquoted. “I stand by exactly what I said, which was that the degrading comments about women that Imus said is language that we hear not just on the radio, not just in music, “he says. “We ourselves perpetrate this, and we all have to take responsibility for that.”

Rather than score easy political points, Obama took fire from both sides. The Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News hammered him for criticizing hip hop, yet accepting campaign donations from Ludacris and David Geffen. They called on him to return the donations. (When asked if he plans to do so, Obama simply laughs). Russell Simmons attacked Obama as a “mouse,” and told the New York Times, “What we need to reform is the conditions that create these lyrics. Obama needs to reform the conditions of poverty.” Simmons later apologized.

Obama says that, in part, he agrees with Simmons. “Rap is reflective of the culture of the inner city, with its problems, but also its potential, its energy, its challenges to the status quo. And I absolutely agree my priority as a US senator is dealing with poverty and educational opportunity and adequate health care. If I’m ignoring those issues and spending all my time worrying about rap lyrics then I’m wasting my time.”

“On the other hand, I think that there’s no doubt that hip hop culture moves our young people powerfully. And some of it is not just a reflection of reality,” he adds. “It also creates reality. I think that if all our kids see is a glorification of materialism and bling and casual sex and kids are never seeing themselves reflected as hitting the books and being responsible and delaying gratification, then they are getting an unrealistic picture of what the world is like.”

Hard work, sacrifice, empathy, ambition — these are Obama’s core personal values, values he says he sees in the most successful hip hop artists and execs. “But,” he points out, “that’s not necessarily what you see on videos.”

•••••

Cerebral and casual, Obama offers a new picture of the 21st Century Black Man as a symbol of power. Men’s Vogue and Vanity Fair covers have made him something of a style icon, but Obama finds this funny. “Esquire chose me as one of the 20 best-dressed men in the world, and my wife couldn’t believe it,” he says. “She talked about how there’s probably some guys sitting in a café in Milan who spend all their time thinking about the latest Armanis and stuff, going, ‘Who is this guy Obama? How did he get there?’”

Sure, Obama has brought sexy back to politics — check the “I Got A Crush On Obama” YouTube video or the Will & Grace episode where Grace dreams she’s showering with him and getting her world Ba-rocked. But it’s Obama’s own redemption song that makes people see in him what they want to see. Black Joshua. Global bridge-builder. New American polyculturalist. “Healer-in-Chief.”

His story, told in Dreams From My Father, a memoir written before his political career began, is a familiar hip-hop generation tale about a boy raised by a single mother and his grandparents, trying to reconcile with a mostly distant dad. But the details are new. His father, Barack senior, was a Kenyan student, the son of a Muslim noble who worked as a house-servant for British colonials. His mother, Ann Dunham, was an anthropology student from Kansas in love with the big world. Her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, were working-class whites from Kansas who raised Obama for much of his early life. They gave him that midwestern accent, which shades southern for Black audiences, enunciates its consonants to whites, and becomes melodious around island Locals.

Growing up a planetary citizen has made Obama an adept code-shifter. He spent his childhood in Hawai’i and Indonesia. In Jakarta, he lived on a dirt road that turned muddy in the monsoon rains, learned to box from his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, kept pet turtles, apes, and crocodiles, and attended both Muslim and Catholic schools. “One of the gifts that was given to him was the fact that he was able to see people in very dire poverty,” says his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, 37, a high school teacher who grew up with him.

“He was able to understand people on both sides of the fence,” she says from her home in Honolulu, “and he was able to negotiate the worlds of the relatively affluent with a profound understanding of what it was like to be poor.”

In Hawai’i, he was a rare working-class student and one of less than a handful of blacks at the exclusive, missionary-founded private Punahou School. Unbeknownst to his classmates — the diverse descendants of whites, Asians, Puerto Ricans, and Pacific Islanders — and even to his mixed-race family, young Obama seethed over race and class issues, even as he put on an amiable front as a popular scholar-athlete.

For escape, he bodysurfed at Sandy Beach, bought comic books from a blind Filipino vendor, and played a lot of basketball. The court was, he wrote, “turf where blackness couldn’t be a disadvantage.” He checked out funk and reggae bands at local clubs, and admits inhaling pakalolo smoke frequently—“that was the point”, he now jokes—and experimenting with cocaine and alcohol. At home, he sequestered himself with books by Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X.

“He didn’t really share any of his struggles,” says Soetoro-Ng of her brother’s teen years. “He has always been rather independent. And although he had a great many friends, he sort of understood that the most challenging journeys of discovery would have to be undertaken alone.”

Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, and then transferred to Columbia University, at a time when Afrocentrism and the anti-apartheid movement dominated campus discussions. When he graduated, he moved to Chicago, the birthplace of modern urban organizing, to earn $12,000 a year working in Southside neighborhoods decimated by steel-plant closings and Reaganomics.

“He had started taking himself very seriously,” Soetoro-Ng recalls. “Everything he did touch he was very successful at.” His mother teased him, saying he would become the first black president.

Three years later, he entered Harvard Law School and put his game face on. He was elected editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review, the first African American to attain the position. James Bernard, a labor union organizer and community activist who helped co-found The Source while at Harvard, says, “I remember one of Barack’s roommates was saying to people that he would be president someday.”

Although hip-hop was stirring the campus, friends say that Obama was not the type to stay out late at rap shows. In 1990, when Harvard law professor Derrick Bell resigned to protest the denial of tenure to Black visiting professor Regina Austin and progressive law students organized a national protest over faculty diversity, Obama played a background role.

“He was supportive, and spoke at a few rallies, but he didn’t really have time,” says Bernard, an organizer of the protest. “The image I have is him being on the way to the Law Review building, chain-smoking and joining us for a few minutes before he had to go.”

During the summer after his first year of law school, Obama returned to Chicago for an internship at a law firm. His adviser was a gorgeous and brilliant Harvard Law grad named Michelle Robinson, three years younger but already on the fast-track. They fell in love, and were married four years later. Their relationship, Soetoro-Ng says, is full of humor and strength. “[Michelle is] fiercely pragmatic,” she says, “and that has helped him to balance out the romantic parts of himself, the ultra idealistic.” Michelle recently left her position as vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals to campaign full-time.

In 2006, after serving only a year in the U.S. Senate, he was greeted with RUN OBAMA signs wherever he went. He and Michelle began discussing seriously the possibility of him running for president. By October, when The Audacity of Hope debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, the will-he-or-won’t-he stories reached fever pitch. On Oprah, flanked by Michelle, he ducked the question again.

He and Michelle finalized their decision during their annual Christmas vacation back to Oahu. In Honolulu, Obama joined his basketball buddies for a holiday streetball outing at their favorite court off Kapiolani Park. Privately, Obama spoke with his grandmother and his sister, and told them that he and Michelle had decided he would run. Soetoro-Ng told him she fully supported his choice, but added, “Once you make a decision like that, you don’t belong to the family anymore, you belong to the world.”

Traveling to the windward side of the island, Barack and Michelle watched their daughters catching waves, the green-capped Mokulua islets rising gently offshore. “You’re sitting on Kailua Beach, watching your kids play in the water,” he recalls. “You’re realizing, okay, at least for a couple years you’re giving this up. And that was, uh…” he looks down, his hand covering his lips, as if he’s still picturing the lost moment. After three years of a whirlwind ride into the center of public life, Obama is learning to live with regrets.

•••••

To some extent, Obama has been given a pass by a media and a public that’s willing to overlook his inexperience and his still paper-thin political program. It’s not just that he can grip the mic and tell a story like he was Ghostface, but because his is such an amazing story. He may be the perfect candidate for a post-Reagan, post–Real World environment in which celebrity and politics feed each other.

But Obama’s chosen field is not entertainment. Before the primary battles begin in Iowa in January, Obama must clear a lane through a crowded field of Democratic candidates. He will have to take his shot on a wide range of issues. And then he will need to box out his competitors when the media rebound comes.

All the Democratic candidates now oppose the Iraq war, but more than the other frontrunners, Obama has staked his campaign on it—never mind the fact that the next president will still be a wartime president. In January, Obama introduced a largely symbolic bill that called for a drawdown of combat troops in May and complete withdrawal by April 2008. Now he urges his audiences to force Congress to vote for troop withdrawal.

“When we do that,” he said at the Philadelphia rally, “as bad as our foreign policy seems right now, there is light at the end of the tunnel.” But while Obama has chastised his Democratic opponents for taking the wrong stand on the war, he hardly led the fight against Bush’s war supplemental budget, voting very quietly against it in the 11th hour.

The Reverend Al Sharpton says Obama’s greatest weakness is that he seems to be a candidate without a cause. “I want to see a strong stand on issues that concern people,” he says. “The cause can’t be the candidate, the candidate must rally around the cause. The reason for
that is that if they lose, at least we will have advanced the cause.”

For two decades, most presidential candidates have avoided addressing two trends that have shaped the hip-hop generation—the widening wealth gap and exploding incarceration rates of people of color. Obama says, “They will be part of this campaign.”

In May, on the 15th anniversary of the Los Angeles uprising, Obama warned of the rise of “quiet riots,” a term coined in a Reagan-era Commission on The Cities report to capture the despair of abandoned ghetto youths. Obama said he wanted to reach “young men and women without hope, without miracles, and without a sense of destiny other than life on the edge—the edge of the law, the edge of the economy, the edge of family structures and communities.” At the third Democratic debate in June, before a largely African-American audience at Howard University, he talked about education, urban policy, and the criminal justice system. But he failed to address the day’s biggest issue, the Supreme Court’s blow to five decades of school integration.

Onstage in Philly, Obama garnered the biggest cheer of the day when he said: “Listen, when George Bush steps down, the entire world is gonna breathe a sigh of relief.” But is Obama ready to stand up? Critics of his performances in the first two Democratic debates—in a word, he bricked—have called him “Obambi”. Others say his Senate record already shows him knuckling under to credit card companies on interest rate limits and corporations on class-action lawsuits.

Yet everyone wants to root for the skinny boy with the funny name who grew up to become the Great Black Hope. On some days, like that evening in Philadelphia, his candidacy feels bigger than a presidential campaign or a referendum on the Iraq war, and more like a test of whether America can truly end three decades of culture wars fought across the lines of race, class, gender, and generation. More than any other candidate in recent memory, Obama — who describes himself as a “hopemonger” — seems to embody America’s unfinished promise as a multiracial, polycultural democracy. He speaks to the hope — there’s that word again — that a new face and a fresh start might finally make things right.

“I think there is the potential,” Obama says, “not the certainty, but the potential—that if we are successful we could change how America sees itself and how the world sees America. And that would be worth it.”

•••••

For the two-part transcript of this interview, visit here and here at Vibe.com!

How did South Korea come to rule the b-boy world? What role did Asian Americans play? When I visited the 2008 R16 competition in Suwon, heads dropped a history of breaking and hip-hop in South Korea and Korean America on me…

This summer, the United States is reaching new heights of dance fever as TV shows like Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance” and MTV’s “Randy Jackson Presents: America’s Best Dance Crew” have returned to the airwaves.

MTV’s runaway hit is considered especially cutting edge, showcasing hip-hop dance groups from across America. But if MTV really wants the best dance crew, it should be looking in South Korea.

“Of the top six or seven crews in the world, I’d say half of them are from Korea,” says Christopher “Cros One” Wright, 33, an American dance promoter and b-boy who was recently in Suwon, South Korea, to judge the second annual global invitational hip-hop dance competition, called R16, that was held at the end of May.

The development of South Koreans’ hip-hop dancing could be seen as a cultural parallel to their sharp global ascendance in electronics and automaking. A decade ago, Koreans were struggling to imitate the Bronx-style b-boy and West Coast funk styles that are the backbone of the genre. Now, a handful of these crews are the safest bets to win any competition anywhere.

Certainly no country takes its hip-hop dance more seriously. The Korean government — through its tourism board and the city of Suwon — invested nearly $2 million in this year’s competition. Two of the most successful teams, Gamblers and Rivers, have been designated official ambassadors of Korean culture. Once considered outcasts, the b-boys now seem to embody precisely the kind of dynamic, dexterous and youthful excellence that the government wants to project.

Although hip-hop dance goes back at least 35 years, the top Korean b-boys trace their histories back just 11 years, to 1997, the Year Zero of Korean breaking. By 2001, the first year that a Korean crew entered the Battle of the Year — the world’s biggest b-boy contest — they won “best show” honors and a fourth-place trophy. Every year since, a Korean crew has placed first or second. Says Battle of the Year founder Thomas Hergenrother, “Korea is on a different planet at the moment.”

The R16 competition, held at the Olympic Sports Complex, is broadcast live in prime time in South Korea and dozens of other countries. The government expects to gross $35 million from advertising and TV rights this year. And it isn’t the only one profiting: Gamblers Crew, formed in 2001, may now be one of the most world’s most lucrative hip-hop dance groups. The members regularly tour Asia, have endorsement deals with Fila, Kookmin Bank and Enerzen energy drinks, and will star opposite American teen idol Omarion in the $25 million movie “Hype Nation,” the latest in the Hollywood dance-ploitation genre, set to open next year.

While some fans on the message boards for “America’s Best Dance Crew” still don’t know what a “b-boy” is, the word in South Korea has become synonymous with national pride. B-boy contests around the world attract mostly young males, but the R16 Sports Complex is full of grandparents, high school couples and teenage girls in their school uniforms. When one holds up a sign that reads “I (Heart) Physics!” she isn’t referring to her college-prep curriculum, but to the 24-year-old, Bogart faced, elbow-spinning star of the Rivers crew, Kim “Physicx” Hyo-Geun.

In South Korea, b-boying rules. The question even Americans are asking is, “How did this happen?”

During the 1970s, an array of dances practiced by black and Latino kids sprang up in the inner cities of New York and California. The styles had a dizzying list of names: “uprock” in Brooklyn, “locking” in Los Angeles, “boogaloo” and “popping” in Fresno, and “strutting” in San Francisco and Oakland. When these dances gained notice in the mid-’80s outside of their geographic contexts, the diverse styles were lumped together under the tag “break dancing.”

The most physically demanding style — the Bronx dance called “breaking” or “b-boying”/”b-girling” — fueled a global fascination. In the mid-’80s, b-boys could be found spinning at the Olympics or at President Reagan’s inauguration and promoting consumer products. But after the explosion, the dancers were cast off, the detritus of an exhausted fad.

Still, the dances took root around the world. While South Koreans have often been hostile to American imports, from Hollywood films to Washington beef (massive street protests against the government’s lifting of the ban on U.S. beef broke out in Seoul the day before R16), hip-hop dance has been welcomed.

That may be partly because of South Korea’s history of cultural repression of youth countercultures. During the 1970s, young Koreans in Seoul were being exposed to “Soul Train” and funk music via the U.S. Armed Forces Korea Network. A club scene arose in Itaewon to service American G.I.s. But as early as the summer of 1971, U.S.-backed dictator Park Chung-hee ordered his police to round up longhaired Korean men and cut their hair.

As the decade wore on, he escalated his “social purification” campaign, detaining artists, intellectuals and church leaders. In the first six months of 1976 alone, police reported checking over 600,000 men on hair length and possession of “obscene” T-shirts. Park’s censorship committee blocked hundreds of American songs, from “We Shall Overcome” to “Me and Mrs. Jones.”

“Black music was considered illegal because it was not good for the youth. The only music allowed was folk music,” said Lee “MC Meta” Jae-hyun of the influential Korean rap group Garion, through a translator. “The music scene itself died. Influential music makers left the country.” When he and his peers became enthralled with images of b-boys at the 1984 Olympics, they had no outlet for their creativity.

It was not until opposition leader Kim Young-sam became South Korea’s first civilian leader in 1992 that youth culture seemed to flower again. At first, dance-friendly pop imports like Bobby Brown and MC Hammer spawned a host of Korean copies. “Up until then, it was all ballads,” said Choi “DJ Wrecks” Jae-hwa, a pioneering Korean DJ who now spins for the Rivers crew, through a translator. But, Lee added, “the curiosity began and people became hungry for the real thing.”

In just five years, Koreans would have their own thing.

•••

It’s a cool evening in front of the Ibis Hotel, an imposing postmodern gray slab that commands the Suwon skyline. Dozens of b-boys from around the world gather in groups in the lobby, bolts of color and noise against the hotel’s minimalist white marble.

The Dutch crew, Funky Dope Manouvres, looks as ethnically diverse as Supercrew, the American one (which will fly directly from R16 to tape “America’s Best Dance Crew”, then proceed to win it). Drawing dancers not just from Holland but Scandinavia too, FDM includes second generation kids whose parents come from Brazil, Indonesia, Poland, Ghana and Suriname. Iranian Swede Mahan “King Foolish” Noubarzadeh, 21, talks about how b-boying has brought together Muslims and Christians. Then he scans the lobby and sizes up the competition: “The favorites here? Gamblers and Rivers.”

The next day is the marquee event, head-to-head elimination battles that are the heart of b-boying. Two crews challenge each other with aggressive, stylized choreographed steps and freestyle solo and ensemble moves. Egos are on the line. Tempers sometimes flare. “America’s Best Dance Crew” doesn’t dare approach this kind of a format. But the heat of the battle often makes the dancing spectacular.

Outside the hotel entrance, a Belgian dancer is challenging Kim “Bang Rock” Hyun-jin, 24, a genial round-faced dancer from Rivers, the defending R16 champs. They don’t speak each other’s language, but the Belgian is calling out the Korean by pointing to the ground and staring out from a chin-up tilt. Kim won’t step in the cipher, the space between the dancers surrounded by a circle of onlookers that forms the battleground. So the Belgian starts with a six-step, then drops to a flurry of footwork and ends with a shoulder roll.

Now Kim has to respond. He humiliates the Belgian by imitating the European’s movements, and climaxes with a series of virtuoso body spins. When he comes to a stop, he is leaning upside down at an inverted angle, balanced on a shoulder and a hand. He grins up at his opponent. This encounter is over. The Belgian offers a congratulatory hand.

Later, sucking on an ice cream treat, Kim laughs. “I didn’t want to battle. I keep asking, ‘Why?’” Of course, he knows the answer. It’s the reason Korean crews regularly practice five hours a day, seven days a week.

“We know there’s always somebody trying to catch up with us,” says 27-year-old Gamblers crew spokesman Chung “B-Boy Sick” Hyung-sik through a translator. “We always have to be ahead.”

R16 co-organizer Johnjay Chon says that a decade ago, there were just five crews in the wholecountry. This spring, more than 50 entered the country’s qualifying competition for R16. At events or clubs in Seoul, Chon regularly spots unknown b-boys taking out experienced pros.

“What happens is they practice on the lowdown until they’re up at a level where they can actually come out and shock somebody,” he says. “They practice in the shadow.”

Cho “C4″ Chung-woon of Rivers says through a translator, “We’ve been praised for our technical skills, but that’s because we would practice head spinning all day long. That’s what sets us apart.”

Still, the old “Asian work ethic” explanation is just part of the story. When Koreans first emerged, Americans praised them for their power moves — the highflying crowd-pleasing spins, freezes and gymnastics moves — but criticized the Seoul b-boys for lacking soul. They were thought to be mechanical, unable to rock with the beat, and lacking in “foundation skills,” such as the top-rock and footwork moves that form the historical roots of the dance.

“What the Americans said really influenced them,” says Charlie Shin, Chon’s business partner and a Korean b-boy advocate. “They went back in the lab. It changed them.”

They mastered routines, the choreographed ensemble moves that are essential parts of a showdown. They immersed themselves in the music and the rhythms. They studied the history of b boying and hip-hop culture. Three members of the Rivers crew — Born, C4, and Red Foot — are now affiliates of Mighty Zulu Kings, a crew whose lineage can be traced back to hip-hop pioneer Afrika
Bambaataa’s Bronx River Project dances in the early 1970s. Even their crew name, Rivers, was chosen to capture an aspect of the hip-hop aesthetic. “You know how rivers flow? Rivers flow swiftly, and that’s also how we move and how we think,” C4 says. “B-boys in other countries do it as a hobby, but to the Korean b-boys, our life is b-boying.”

R-16 organizers Shin, 31, and Chon, 32, are what Asian-Americans call one-point-fivers — young people born in Asia but raised bilingual and bicultural in America. Shin’s 15th birthday came days after riots erupted in Los Angeles on April 29, 1992, after the Rodney King verdict, a traumatic period that Korean-Americans now simply call Sa-I-Gu or “4-2-9″ the way one might refer to “9/11.” Parts of Koreatown were still in flames and hundreds of Korean-American businesses had been reduced to ashes.

The era had poisoned mainstream perceptions of Asian immigrants. White pundits used them to score rhetorical points against welfare and affirmative action, while black leaders boycotted their shops. But neither Shin or Chon was close enough to the fires to have been burned by them. You could call them members of the post-Sa-I-Gu generation. Hip-hop formed a crucial part of their identity, and a source of redemption.

“For me, growing up in the States, I had been called all kinds of names,” Shin says. When he moved to Seoul eight years ago, supporting Korean b-boys became a cause. Seeing them win respect from others, he says, “kind of dissolved all that racial bullshit I grew up with.” The Korean-Americans became exemplars of hip-hop culture at a moment when young South Koreans were trying to define a new national identity.

Chon was born in Japan and raised in Seattle. After forming and competing nationally with the multiracial Circle of Fire crew, he came to Seoul on a summer trip in 1997 to visit family. Armed with videos and DVDs of dozens of contests, Chon began scouring the clubs for b-boys to battle. He met the Expression crew — now a hip-hop dance theater troupe — and gave it a video of a legendary Los Angeles b-boy competition called Radiotron (organized by Julio ‘Lil Cesar’ Rivas, head of the Air Force Crew).

“A year later I came back and I just saw there were more b-boys. They were telling me, ‘Oh you gotta see this footage,’” Chon says. “I’m watching it and it’s the Radiotron [video] that I brought out a year ago. It’s been dubbed so many times the screen is shaking.”

During the year Chon was gone, teenagers such as the Gamblers’ B-Boy Sick had caught religion after watching grainy videos like that one. Lively Internet groups brought hip-hop fans together. Japan’s obsession with underground American hip-hop was at its peak, and CDs and videos found their way to South Korea through Tokyo. As South Korea’s economy spiraled downward in 1997, a vibrant counterculture was emerging in Seoul.

At the Master Plan club in the Chungjeong neighborhood, rap groups like Garion, Artisan Beats & Keeproots and Drunken Tiger JK explored the rhythms of their native tongue and sometimes disclosed personal traumas or attacked social ills. In Taehongno, an area rich in college campuses, nightclubs, galleries and theaters, b-boys suddenly appeared. The Rivers crew and Expression crew, South Korea’s first Battle of the Year winners, were among the b-boys who gathered there.

They battled all evening in front of the crowds at the popular Maronie Park, then moved to the clubs in the early morning hours. When dawn broke, they headed to school. Their intensity impressed Chon. “I’m like, ‘OK how does this work?’” he says he asked the b-boys. “I just sleep in school” was their invariable reply.

These Korean hip-hop heads were the first generation to grow up after authoritarian rule. Those before them had come of age on the front lines of demonstrations against American-backed dictators. But these youths lived under relative, if yet unstable, democracy and prosperity.

They were also mostly working-class outsiders. “The minute you’re born in Korea, depending on what your economic background is, or who your parents are, what network you’re in, what neighborhood you’re in, what high school you went to, what college you went to, your life is pretty much decided for you,” Shin says. “The b-boys, it’s not like they’re the most highly educated kids, but they’re good at what they do, and they put as much effort into practicing as the other kids do into the Korean SATs.”

Because South Korea is still a country at war, looming over every young man’s life is mandatory
military service. For working-class b-boys, it acts as a passage into a bleak future. “If they’re not in college, they have to do some kind of menial job,” according to Shin. Many say that the prospect of military service is the main factor that has accelerated the Korean breaking scene’s development.

“You see that hunger and that drive,” says Korean-American filmmaker Benson Lee, whose 2007 hit documentary “Planet B-Boy” featured a DMZ scene with members of Gamblers and Rivers as battling soldiers.

They know that the freedom of b-boying can’t last. “The service will come up when you’re 21, 22. But they can always extend that using some excuse,” Chon says. “A lot of the b-boys — now they’re like 26, 27, they haven’t gone. They have to go soon. They keep putting it off because the culture is kind of peaking now.”

He estimates that four out of five b-boys currently competing in South Korea have postponed their service or have illegally evaded their conscription.
Chon and Shin say they know many b-boys who
have mutilated themselves to dodge the army. Kim “Bang Rock” Hyun-jin of the Rivers crew says through a translator, “Everyone tries to avoid the service.” Then he switches to English for emphasis.

“It’s like going to hell.”

•••

On the final day of R16, there are more government officials in suits wandering around backstage, the crowd is thicker and louder, the TV crews are everywhere, and the energy is high.

Through the opening rounds of the crew-on-crew battles, the Gamblers and Rivers dispatch their rivals easily. In the semifinals, the Gamblers face the fluid and elegant Brasil All-Stars, whose moves vibrate with the traditions of capoeira. They win in a pleasingly close contest, three judges to two. But when the Rivers crew faces Russia’s Top 9 crew from St. Petersburg in the other semifinal — potentially a classic duel of power versus finesse — tension builds.

On an arena stage, crews must face each other across the floor, as if across a DMZ turned battleground. This staging emphasizes the metaphor of the attack. By the rules, each crew must give the other its space on the floor while it is performing. They alternate their turns. No touching of opponents is allowed.

But minutes into the contest, Physicx begins dancing before Russia’s tiny dynamo Flying Buddha has finished his solo. When Buddha moves over to stare down Physicx, who has begun a difficult flare sequence, a Rivers member pushes him away.
Physicx backs out of the cipher, comes around to high-five Buddha and motions for him to retake the floor.

Instead Top 9 starts a three-man routine. Physicx steps back in to disperse Top 9, then motions again to Flying Buddha. The Russian takes a wide berth, flings off his light blue shirt, does a six step, then launches into a spectacular one-armed move known as an air chair. Now Top 9 is fired up.

B-boy Robin, Russia’s assassin in a brown Yankees hat, oversize polo shirt and cargo slacks, circles the floor and then taunts the Koreans by pulling back his eyes. Some in the crowd gasp at Robin’s slanted-eye dis. But his subsequent solo, featuring a Tony Hawk-style hand plant and surging rolls broken up with one-armed freezes, is flawless. In what b-boys call a “commando” attack — a routine in which a run is begun by one or more b-boys but finished by another, named for the post-gang-era Bronx dancers who invented it as a tactic to prevent the other crew from immediately responding — C4 dives through two Rivers members and leaps straight at Robin, pulling his own eyes back, then miming a castration of Robin. The crowd roars.

But as the battle continues, Rivers seems exhausted, while Top 9 gains momentum. In their final routine, the Top 9 b-boys do a number of clever duet Lindy Hop-style routines, jumping off each other, flipping each other into spins and forming circles for crewmates to leap through. When Top 9 wins 5-0, some in the crowd boo. But this won’t be Rivers’ day. It finishes fourth behind the Brasil All-Stars.

In the finals, South Korea’s Gamblers crew counters Top 9′s routines with elaborate commandos and ample personality. As the clock ticks down, the dancers play “pass the hat.” B-boy Pop handstands across the stage and balances on his left hand. Then he arches his body into the heart of the Top 9 line and passes a white baseball cap to a hand-spinning Soul Soy. On the Gamblers’ last run, b-boy Sick chases Robin and Top 9 out of the cipher, drops down for some fleet footwork, then quickly contorts himself through a set of wire-doll freezes that wouldn’t look out of place on a Cirque du Soleil stage.

When the Gamblers are announced as the champions, Pop flings his shirt into the crowd and strikes a kung-fu matinee idol pose at the edge of the stage. Cameras and cellphones flash. Soul Soy announces to the media that it is donating its R16 winnings to victims of the earthquakes in China and Myanmar. It’s an audacious statement. The $15,000 first-place prize is the largest that has ever been offered at any b-boy event in the world.

Later, Sick signs autographs and takes pictures with two stricken schoolgirls. As he waves and disappears into the bus, they clutch their autographed programs and continue blushing and bowing. There are few big-name b-girls now in South Korea, but who knows? Perhaps those girls will form the next generation of champion dance crews.

“The world is a big place, man, and there’s another hungry competitor stepping up,” R-16 judge and legendary Rock Steady crew b-boy Ken Swift says. “It’s a cycle, and the cycle is based upon crews like these Korean crews who go out and inspire these new fans. And then five years from now, those new people are going to be saying, ‘OK we’re the shit now.’”

In 2002, then 33-year-old Bakari Kitwana ushered in a new era of hip-hop intellectual work with his book, The Hip-Hop Generation. Since that time, hip-hop studies has quickly expanded in the academy. Here’s a snapshot from that new dawn.

Without dogma or jargon, Bakari Kitwana’s important new book, The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture, cuts right to the chase. “What will be our generation’s contribution to the centuries-long African American struggle for liberation, and how do we redefine this struggle for our time?” he asks.

For us freedom-thinking young’n’s, Kitwana’s emergence as a young Black public intellectual is itself as important as the questions that he poses. Up until now, folks who have been grandfathered into the hip-hop generation have interpreted and explained, per DMX, “who we be” to the world. Last summer’s Hip Hop Summit, sponsored by 44-year old music mogul Russell Simmons proffered the brains of author/pundit Michael Eric Dyson, Columbia professor Manning Marable, and prophet-turned-rapper Cornel West to augment hip-hop’s industrial brawn. The three promised to set up a think-tank, which was kinda like the Impressions saying they’d like to study what makes the Neptunes so cool.

While rappers like KRS-1 and Chuck D have been celebrated (and attacked) as the hip-hop generation’s vanguard, the difference between these edutainers and hip-hop generation intellectuals is the difference between Nina Simone and Angela Davis. Since the mid-90s, the intellectual output of the much-maligned, oft-misunderstood hip-hop generation itself has expanded exponentially. But the hip-hop intellectuals find themselves laboring mostly in obscurity, waiting, often graciously, sometimes angrily, for the baby boomers to clear the lane.

For years, intergenerational conflict has underscored the relationship between the civil rights generation and the hip-hop generation. Baby boomers of color wholeheartedly supported many of the repressive anti-gang and anti-crime laws that led to the widespread racial profiling and jailing of youths of color. Although C.Delores Tucker denounced rap misogyny, many hip-hop feminists felt her 1995 crusade against gangsta rap was a generational attack. “(W)e often see our parents themselves (and their peers) as the enemy within,” writes Kitwana in his book.

His personal story reflects this tense relationship like Radio Raheim’s “Love”/”Hate” four-finger-rings. He was a 19 year-old sophomore mechanical engineering major at the University of Rochester–the first from a family of African American migrant workers to attend college–when he caught the tail winds of the revolution, during a reading by Chicago-based black power poet and author Haki Madhubuti. After picking up masters degrees in English and Education, Kitwana followed Madhubuti back to Chicago to take an editing job at the Third World Press, a publishing house founded by activists specializing in Afrocentric books. Black Power exemplars such as Sonia Sanchez, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Kalamu ya Salaam nurtured Kitwana there. At one point, Kitwana was tapped as Madhubuti’s successor.

“But”, Kitwana says, “I felt that the message, as important and as critical as it was, had to be redefined for our generation.” He moved to New York to join the influential hip-hop magazine, The Source. The contrast couldn’t have been greater–from low rents to high rollers, agenda-minded to hype-oriented, black-and-white to living color, from the past into the future. He might have appeared to fit a Gen-X-with-a-hip-hop-twist stereotype: seduced by power and money, soft of moral and ideological fiber, the career-minded hip-hopper squanders the opportunities afforded him by the civil rights activist’s frontline heroism.

Kitwana argues that the truth is much more complicated. The hip-hop generation–a cohort he limits to African Americans born between 1965 and 1977, but which could well apply to youths of all colors who came of age with and after the Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force’s “Planet Rock”–has been shaped by globalization and unemployment, incarceration and racial profiling, gender wars and nihilism. Gone forever are the days when “the struggle” was simply about fighting segregation. The hip-hop generation is beset by economic dislocation, environmental racism, AIDS, inadequate schooling, inner-city disinvestment, culture wars, and ya don’t stop.

At the same time, Kitwana notes, the hip-hop generation is the first to grow up without the limitations of legal segregation. He writes, “It is impossible not to see young Blacks in the twenty-first century’s public square-on television, film and the Internet. Our images now extend far beyond crime reports.” This is a conundrum: images of Blacks proliferate in global media at a time when they remain politically marginalized. Not many civil rights/black power intellectuals have fully grasped the implications of this turn.

Hip-hop gen thinkers, largely inspired by early 60s-born “elders”–what Kitwana terms the “bridge” generation–like Nelson George, Tricia Rose, Harry Allen, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Greg Tate, have been advancing their own thoughtful responses to this new world. Mark Anthony Neal, Ogbonna Ogbar, and S. Craig Watkins examine the image of the black male in music and film. Raquel Rivera, Cristina VerAn, and Oliver Wang use hip-hop to understand the effects of immigration. Everything loops back into the African American experience, but there’s a whole lot going on in that cultural flow.

Hip-hop’s cross-fading mixology is the perfect analogy for this polycultural generation, as Farai Chideya’s book, The Color of Our Future (1999) makes clear. This year’s biggest conference, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s third annual “Hip-Hop As A Movement” was launched by a white student Ben Runkle and a biracial student David Jamil Muhammad. “I’m (half) Boricua in the Nation of Islam and then my boy is this punk rock kid,” laughs Muhammad. “I was like, yo, we’re the hip-hop generation!”

Hip-hop intellectuals tend to share a combustible mix of beliefs. They sneer at the very idea of “intellectual.” They resent being called “apolitical” but use “political” as a curse, don’t need “radical” to be “chic” but tend to abuse the word “revolutionary”. They have internalized the most heated debates of thirty years ago and may agree with both sides. They prefer hard negotiation to taking a hard line, dig independence but don’t fear dancing with the devil. They are both more equal and more separate. In other words, unlike baby boomers, they embrace their contradictions, indeed, throw them into the mix.

All hip-hop intellectuals still labor under the long shadow of baby boomers. Take Joan Morgan’s classic, When Chickenheads Come Home To Roost. Morgan addresses gender issues in the best hip-hop fashion–rocking ample wit, candor, style, and emblematically, ambivalence. As she reaches for the right words to describe her generational break with the past, she falls Icarus-short, calling us the “post-Civil Rights, post-feminist, post-soul children of hip-hop.” That long, ugly appellation reveals our insecurity in defining ourselves more concretely than simply “post”-our parents.

But although many a hip-hopper’s point-of-view was forged in the heat of argument with an elder, Kitwana insists he bears no animus. *The Hip-Hop Generation* takes us beyond our counter-punch reflex. The book synthesizes positions into a kind of intergenerational Third Way.

To Kitwana, as with “bridger” Russell Simmons (my former boss at the late 360hiphop.com) and his Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, the next stage requires moving the global reach and the national infrastructure of hip-hop toward political power. *The Hip-Hop Generation* is Kitwana’s manifesto. No self-esteem-driven mazes or passive-voice philosophizing here. Kitwana issues a generational call to bridge culture and politics to pursue an issue agenda for the hip-hop generation. He argues for renewed focus on education, employment, reparations, business development, health care, and incarceration.

Equal parts generational critique, pro-black youth polemic, op-ed analysis, and hip-hop Molotov, Kitwana’s book has already garnered comparisons to Harold Cruse’s brilliant 1967 rant against black leaders, The Crisis of The Negro Intellectual. It may be closer in spirit to another classic of that year, Kwame Toure and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power. Kitwana hasn’t yet achieved Cruse’s depth or Toure and Hamilton’s focus, but The Hip-Hop Generation passionately makes its point: the black community can only move forward if it stops living in the past.

Kitwana blames the civil-rights-gen leadership, in part, for the failure to address the hip-hop generation’s poor education, high unemployment, and unprecedented incarceration rates. The flagging power of civil rights organizations, like the NAACP and the Urban League, is directly linked to their exclusion of a more youthful voice. “If these organizations take our issues and our agenda and make them the centerpiece of their own agenda, they’re going to breathe new life into their own organizations. Those organizations are going to inevitably change, and become more relevant,” Kitwana said in a recent interview.

But Kitwana also decries images of nihilism in rap videos and hip-hop movies. He believes no generation has ever seen an uglier war between the sexes. He rips the hip-hop generation for being enamored with celebrity worship and materialist fantasy. In fact, this year’s UCLA nationwide freshman survey–the most complete accounting of student attitudes since the 1960s–found that today’s student is three times more likely to have participated in some kind of a political demonstration than students at the peak of the civil rights movement. Still, the point is taken: we’ve got work to do.

Kitwana’s pragmatism argues against ideological rigidity, and dismisses both civil rights and hip-hop era orthodoxy. “We don’t mythologize the social gains of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s because having experienced the benefits of these gains firsthand we know they weren’t panaceas,” he writes. But if many hip-hoppers believe that debates over the usage of “bitch” or “baby mama” are just played-out semantics games with sensitive old folks, Kitwana systematically attaches facts, citing evidence that 2 out of 3 Black marriages now end in divorce.

Hip-hop, Kitwana argues, can be the solution. The global hip-hop industry offers a powerful infrastructure that can be turned towards transformative, liberating purposes. A generational agenda can be pursued in a “unified front” merging culture and politics.

Simmons’ HHSAN has already been working this angle. But Kitwana has sharp criticism for the HHSAN, at one point calling it an organization that runs “the same game with another name” for the benefit of music execs and entrenched civil rights leaders. Kitwana argues the HHSAN has neither reached out to hip-hop activists nor fostered hip-hop gen leadership. Mercifully, he stops short of inviting the HHSAN to holla at the hip-hop activists he highlights.

Yet his critique fails to clarify how he proposes to create this “unified front”. Where might we find common ground between music execs and anti-globalization activists?

Hip-hop culture has impressively energized global and local motion among disaffected youths. From Poland to Cuba to South Korea, the voice of young rage is hip-hop. In communities like Selma, Alabama and San Francisco, California, hip-hop activists have begun building substantial power bases. And Los Angeles City Council President Alex Padilla, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, and the Newark City Council candidate Ras Baraka (the son of Amiri Baraka) point to the coming wave in electoral politics.

But can hip-hop culture, now a precious commodity, really do the work? For Kitwana’s Third World Press mentors, politics–specifically decades of African decolonization and American civil rights activism–begat culture. Kitwana and the hip-hop intellectuals are faced with the opposite dilemma. In this generation, the culture must foster a politics. “The real question is this,” he writes, “why should hip-hop generationers continue to participate in and support a multibillion dollar industry if it fails to in any way address the critical problems facing our generation?” Well, we built it. Is it hip-hop’s–and our generation’s–destiny to enable revolution or accelerate entropy? As Gangstarr would say, the question remains.

…the logic is an extension rather than a negation. Alias, a.k.a.; the names describe a process of loops. From A to B and back again.
—Paul D. Miller

It has become myth, a creation myth, this West Bronx party at the end of the summer in 1973. Not for its guests–a hundred kids and kin from around the way, nor for the setting–a modest recreation room in a new apartment complex; not even for its location–two miles north of Yankee Stadium, near where the Cross-Bronx Expressway spills into Manhattan. Time remembers it for the night DJ Kool Herc made his name.

The plan was simple enough, according to the party’s host, Cindy Campbell. “I was saving my money, because what you want to do for back to school is go down to Delancey Street instead of going to Fordham Road, because you can get the newest things that a lot of people don’t have. And when you go back to school, you want to go with things that nobody has so you could look nice and fresh,” she says. “At the time my Neighborhood Youth Corps paycheck was like forty-five dollars a week–ha!–and they would pay you every two weeks. So how am I gonna turn over my money? I mean, this is not enough money!”

Cindy calculated it would cost a little more than half her paycheck to rent the rec room in their apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Her brother, whom she knew as Clive but everyone else knew as Kool Herc, was an aspiring DJ with access to a powerful sound system. All she had to do was bulk-buy some Olde English 800 malt liquor, Colt 45 beer, and soda, and advertise the party.

She, Clive, and her friends hand-wrote the announcements on index cards, scribbling the info below a song title like “Get on the Good Foot” or “Fencewalk.” If she filled the room, she could charge a quarter for the girls, two for the guys, and make back the overhead on the room. And with the profit–presto, instant wardrobe.

Clive had been DJing house parties for three years. Growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, he had seen the sound systems firsthand. The local sound was called Somerset Lane, and the selector’s name was King George. Clive says, “I was too young to go in. All we could do is sneak out and see the preparation of the dance throughout the day. The guys would come with a big old handcart with the boxes in it. And then in the night time, I’m a little itchy headed, loving the vibrations on the zinc top ’cause them sound systems are powerful.

“We just stay outside like everybody else, you know, pointing at the gangsters as they come up, all the famous people. And at the time they had the little motorcycles, Triumphs and Hondas. Rudeboys used to have those souped up. They used to come up four and five six deep, with them likkle ratchet knife,” Clive says. He still remembers the crowd’s buzz when Claudie Massop arrived at a local dance one night. He wanted to be at the center of that kind of excitement, to be a King George.

Cindy and Clive’s father, Keith Campbell, was a devoted record collector, buying not only reggae, but American jazz, gospel, and country. They heard Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole, even Nashville country crooner Jim Reeves. “I remember listening to Jim Reeves all the time,” Clive says. “I was singing these songs and emulating them to the fullest. That really helped me out, changing my accent, is singing to the records.”

In the Bronx, his mother, Nettie, would take him to house parties, which had the same ambrosial effect on him that the sound systems had. “I see the different guys dancing, guys rapping to girls, I’m wondering what the guy is whisperin’ in the girl’s ears about. I’m green, but I’m checking out the scene,” he recalls. “And I noticed a lot of the girls was complaining, ‘Why they not playing that record?’ ‘How come they don’t have that record?’ ‘Why did they take it off right there?’” He began buying his own 45s, waiting for the day he could have his own sound system.

As luck would have it, Keith Campbell became a sponsor for a local rhythm and blues band, investing in a brand new Shure P.A. system for the group. Clive’s father was now their soundman, and the band wanted somebody to play records during intermission. Keith told them he could get his son. But Clive had started up his own house party business, and somehow his gigs always happened to fall at the same times as the band’s, leaving Keith so angry he refused to let Clive touch the system. “So here go these big columns in my room, and my father says, ‘Don’t touch it. Go and borrow Mr. Dolphy’s stuff,’” he says. “Mr. Dolphy said, ‘Don’t worry Clive, I’ll let you borrow some of these.’ In the back of my mind, Jesus Christ, I got these big Shure columns up in the room!”

At the same time, his father was no technician. They all knew the system was powerful, but no one could seem to make it peak. Another family in the same building had the same system and seemed to be getting more juice out of it, but they wouldn’t let Keith or Clive see how they did it. “They used to put a lot of wires to distract me from chasing the wires,” he says.

One afternoon, fiddling around on the system behind his father’s back, Clive figured it out. “What I did was I took the speaker wire, put a jack onto it and jacked it into one of the channels, and I had extra power and reserve power. Now I could control it from the preamp. I got two Bogart amps, two Girard turntables, and then I just used the channel knobs as my mixer. No headphones. The system could take eight mics. I had an echo chamber in one, and a regular mic to another. So I could talk plain and, at the same time, I could wait halfway for the echo to come out.

“My father came home and it was so loud he snuck up behind me,” he remembers. Clive’s guilt was written all over his face. But his father couldn’t believe it.

Keith yelled, “Where the noise come from?”

“This is the system!”

Keith said, “What! Weh you did?”

“This is what I did,’” Clive recalls telling his father, revealing the hookup. “And he said, ‘Raas claat, man! We ‘ave sound!!!’

“So now the tables turned. Now these other guys was trying to copy what I was doing, because our sound is coming out monster, monster!” Clive says. “Me and my father came to a mutual understanding that I would go with them and play between breaks and when I do my parties, I could use the set. I didn’t have to borrow his friend’s sound system anymore. I start making up business cards saying ‘Father and Son.’ And that’s how it started, man! That’s when Cindy asked me to do a back-to-school party. Now people would come to this party and see these big-ass boxes they never seen before.”

It was the last week in August of 1973. Clive and his friends brought the equipment down from their second floor apartment and set up in the room adjacent to the rec room. “My system was on the dance floor, and I was in a little room watching, peeking out the door seeing how the party was going,” he says.

It didn’t start so well. Clive played some dancehall tunes, ones guaranteed to rock any yard dance. Like any proud DJ, he wanted to stamp his personality onto his playlist. But this was the Bronx. They wanted the breaks. So, like any good DJ, he gave the people what they wanted, and dropped some soul and funk bombs. Now they were packing the room. There was a new energy. DJ Kool Herc took the mic and carried the crowd higher.

“All people would hear is his voice coming out from the speakers,” Cindy says. “And we didn’t have no money for a strobe light. So what we had was this guy named Mike. When Herc would say, ‘Okay, Mike! Mike with the lights!’, Mike flicked the light switch. He got paid for that.”

By this point in the night, they probably didn’t need the atmospherics. The party people were moving to the shouts of James Brown, turning the place into a sweatbox. They were busy shaking off history, having the best night of their generation’s lives.

Later, as Clive and Cindy counted their money, they were giddy. This party could be the start of something big, they surmised. They just couldn’t know how big.

To give to the DJ Kool Herc Fund, go to djkoolherc.com.

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You may use the search function on the site and blog as well if you’re looking for specific search topics. For whatever it’s worth, this guy has a lot of opinions on a lot of things.

Please let us know of any missing interviews that need to be added or dead links to drop or fix. We web gnomes will do our best to keep it fresh given the crappy salaries Jeff is paying us and our bad morale.

Note: for a complete bio of our tormentor and patron, click to the Self page.

Print/Web

+Evelyn McDonnell, on the role of journalism in building community and the state of the art of arts journalism (podcast)
+The Arts Politic, on hip-hop and the role of the arts in social change
+In conversation with Marc Bamuthi Joseph on hip-hop aesthetics, hip-hop activism and artistic influences at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Led by Stephanie Shonekan)
+ mp3
+ pop-up stream
+ Short transcript at the USA Artists site
+T.A. Negro blog, one of the best interviews ever
+Cornell Daily Sun
+AP, on Jeff’s days at Cal
+Shades Magazine in conversation with the great Joan Morgan, whom we adore
+Total Chaos Forum :: Walker Art Center (podcast)
+Walker Art Center blog
+Scheme Online
+HipHopGame.com

-DN.Kultur (In Swedish! We love Swedish web gnomes…)

-The Beatrice Interview: Jeff Chang and Simon Reynolds Plus, Part 2

-Asia/Pacific Arts

-MusicDish

-Wiretap/Alternet

-Boston Phoenix

-Morphizm.com

-Word Magazine Toronto

-Folha Online (From Brasil! We love Brasilian web gnomes, too.)

-Honolulu Advertiser

-Blogcritics

-Honolulu Star-Bulletin

-SFist.com!

-Campus Progress

-The Nation

-St. Paul Pioneer Press

-Minneapolis Star-Tribune

-Chicago Reader

-Bronxmedia.com

-Philadelphia Weekly

-Los Angeles Citybeat

-Daily Bruin

-Morphizm.com

-Alternet

-San Jose Mercury News

-San Jose Metro

-San Francisco Bay Guardian

-East Bay Express

-CIIJ Newswatch

Radio/Audio Interviews with Jeff

-The Takeaway, on poetry and arts in the White House
-Addicted To Race Premium

-WBAI Wake-Up Call, on Jeff’s 2007 Barack Obama article for Vibe

-NPR News and Notes, a discussion with Farai Chideya on global hip-hop. We love Farai Chideya.

-WNYC Soundcheck, on the Imus fallout. Imus sucks worse than our boss.

-KPFA Morning Show, on Total Chaos

-Sound of Young America

-Fire On The Prairie

-Sound Opinions with Jim DeRogatis & Greg Kot MP3 podcast

-NPR Day To Day “The South Bronx Sound From Mambo to Hip-Hop”

-Open Source Radio a panel with Bakari Kitwana and Boots Riley!

-The Progressive Radio (downloadable/podcast ready)

-Basementalism on KVCU (scroll to 4/30/05)

-NPR: KQED Forum with Michael Krasny (scroll to “History and Future of Hip-Hop”)

-NPR News & Notes with Ed Gordon and Farai Chideya

-MPR :: 89.3 The Current

-WXRT with Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot (Click Segment 4. Jim and Greg rock.)

-WNYC Soundcheck, we like the Soundcheck crew because they have good taste.

-WBAI with Jay Smooth, Hashim, and Leanne, three of the coolest radio people in NYC.

-Hard Knock Radio (3 days worth if you can take it! Just scroll down to 2/16-2/18/05. Weyland gets props for endurance.)

Video Interviews with Jeff

-“Hella Strike!” :: Speech at UC Berkeley, 2010 Educate The State Teach-In

-Walker Arts Center Teen Arts Council :: Elephants, Needles and Hip-Hop (This was at the 2008 Republican National Convention after we got teargassed. Jeff didn’t.)

-LBTV, Part 4 :: Politics and Art, from the great Lyrics Born’s website, done by the indubitable Justin Berger.

-LBTV, Part 3 :: Hip-Hop Revolution? Naw!

-CNN Blog Buzz, this one’s hilarious.

-KPIX-5 (San Francisco), with Pam the Funkstress! We love Pam.

-LBTV, Part 2 :: My So-Called Writing Career

-LBTV, Part 1 :: The SoleSides Story

-Flow TV

-Profiles (Asian America)

That’s it. And it should be more than enough, haha.

Thanks for coming around,

Edith and Archie

Note: for a complete bio of Jeff, click to the Self page.

Q: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is subtitled “A History of the Hip-Hop Generation”, which seems to me to be rather distinct from calling it “A History of Hip-Hop”. Is there a distinction between the two?

A: I’m not interested in writing about hip-hop just in terms of rap music—which is what most people might think when they hear the word “hip-hop”—or even as a cultural force encompassing the “four elements”. Hip-hop is all that and—to kind of flip dead prez’s epigram—it’s also bigger than all that. Hip-hop offers a generational worldview that encompasses the shoes you choose to whether you’re inclined to vote or not to how you understand the issue of race. So I use this worldview to look at the last three decades of the American century.

Q: In 2004, there was a celebration commemorating the 25th anniversary of “Rapper’s Delight”, which many people see as the beginning of hip-hop. Your history starts in 1968, which is more than a decade prior to that. Why?

A: The hip-hop generation has come up in the shadow of the baby-boomer/civil rights generation. 1968 is a mythical moment, the year in which students around the world are protesting—from Columbia University and San Francisco State to Paris to Mexico City—the year that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy are assassinated, the year that Tommy Smith and John Carlos raise the black fist at the Olympics, the year that riots break out in Chicago, Washington D.C., Cincinnati. The anti-war movement and the black power movement are at their peak. 1968 is when the baby boomer/civil rights generation come of age.

But something very different is happening in the Bronx that will profoundly shape the following generation. The seeds of what will happen politically, socially, and culturally over the next three decades are being planted. 1968 is when heroin floods the streets, the gangs come back and the fires begin. What follows leads to the emergence of hip-hop culture.

Interestingly, the political abandonment of the Bronx—the wholesale municipal withdrawal and massive white flight which lead to racial resegregation, increased poverty concentration, and a space extremely vulnerable to global and local violence—is replicated in many other inner cities over the next two decades. It’s poetic that a culture emerging from that environment should be able to take root in other similar spaces. What happens in the Bronx is what happens in Los Angeles, Miami, Oakland, Houston, Chicago, New Orleans, and around the world.

Q: There have been other books that have dealt with some of the same topics, to the point, I would argue, that there is now a canon of hip-hop studies books. In what ways does your book follow that canon and in what ways does it diverge from it?

A: My book definitely draws upon the foundational works of hip-hop journalism and hip-hop scholarship like Steven Hager’s Adventures In The Counterculture and David Toop’s Rap Attack, movies like Wild Style and Style Wars, the two crucial theoretical works of the mid-90s—Tricia Rose’s Black Noise and Brian Cross’s It’s Not About A Salary: Rap, Race + Resistance in Los Angeles—and Bakari Kitwana’s important book, The Hip-Hop Generation (read more about Bakari here), as well as many, many other sources I give props to at the back of my book.

What I’m trying to do is also talk about how the hip-hop generation impacts America at the end of the 20th century, what some have called “The American Century”. So just as much as I drew upon what folks now call hip-hop studies, I pulled from a shelf of stuff like Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, James Miller’s Democracy Is In The Streets, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of The United States, Don Delillo’s Underworld, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, Michael Thelwell’s The Harder the Come, Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home To Roost, and Naomi Klein’s No Logo. It’s a weird list, yes, because I’m basically undisciplined and not very linear.

Q: Lots of books have a top-down approach to hip-hop. You look at the big names, the big movements, the big changes. But what strikes me is that you have also done many oral histories with people whom we may have not heard from before, and whose stories are seminal but have gone largely untapped. Is this a reflection of your own background as a scholar and journalist?

A: What formal training I have is in ethnic studies, which has always been about recovering voices outside of the mainstream. But more to the point, hip-hop is the voice of the unheard. Hip-hop looks at the world from the street corner up. You could call it the “Straight Outta Compton” approach—to go right back down to the street corner, to the neighborhood, and to understand, say, how urban style develops and evolves on a block. In a global era, what we need to recover is The Local.

Q: You’ve been writing on hip-hop for over 10 years. What surprised you the most?

A: One was this idea that there are loops of history. In the Bronx and then two decades later in Los Angeles, the politics of abandonment leads to street violence, then against all odds, the gangs forge peace, and an unimaginable explosion of creativity happens. It’s possible hip-hop never would have started were it not for the 1971 Bronx gang truce, that hip-hop never would have gone mainstream in the way it did were it not for the 1992 Watts peace treaty.

Over the years, I did hundreds of interviews: speaking to the late great activists Richie Perez and Rita Fecher and former gang leaders Benjamin Melendez, Carlos Suarez and Felipe Mercado about the Bronx in the late 60s and early 70s, talking with Kool Herc and his sister, Cindy Campbell, about their immigration experience, meeting and learning from pioneers and peacemakers like Afrika Bambaataa, BOM 5, Crazy Legs, Jorge “FABEL” Pabon, LADY PINK, Alex Sanchez, and the Sherrills brothers in Watts, the list is endless. Everyone was so generous. Every single day there was something to learn, to be awed by.

Q: To what extent have the last three decades in American history shaped hip-hop and to what extent has hip-hop shaped American history?

A: Hip-hop shows how deeply the last thirty years of American history have been affected by the politics of abandonment. These inner cities where hip-hop took root were abandoned by government, business, and frankly, the white middle class. What comes out of that is this intense mass longing to create history, to paraphrase Don Delillo, a deep desire to crush invisibility, to make culture that impacts the world and says “we’re here”. That’s hip-hop.

In the mid-80s, there are little municipal and shopping mall bans on breaking and boomboxes. Kind of a joke, really, but then they start adding on curfews, anti-cruising ordinances, and sweep laws against young people who have literally taken over public space with hip-hop. A decade later, there are vast gang databases that might include the names of two-thirds of a city’s black youth males, and unconstitutional anti-loitering ordinances that go back in spirit to slavery and Jim Crow. After the politics of abandonment have turned inner cities into places where all the rot and horror of American Cold War militarism comes home to roost, a politics of containment takes shape. One way to understand the hip-hop movement and the hip-hop generation is to put it back into the space and time of the politics of abandonment and the politics of containment.

Q: I was watching an MTV clip where P-Diddy was rolling through town in a Bentley encouraging people to vote, and Trick Daddy was registering voters in Florida. To what extent do you think hip-hop is a force for political change?

A: Without question, hip-hop is a political force. The question is: what kind of political movement are we looking at? Media will focus on celebrities. They’ll say that when you stand Russell Simmons and P-Diddy and Trick Daddy against Rosa Parks, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. there’s no comparison. There isn’t. It’s comparing apples to oranges.

In my book, I focus on the grass-roots movements. Hip-hop activists and organizers have elected and deposed politicians, stopped multimillion-dollar juvenile jails from being built, convinced taxpayers to vote for millions in youth services, and much more. They’re just not marching on Washington. Hip-hop activists and organizers fight below the radar, at the local level, and the mainstream media never talks about it. So there’s a false perception that the only political actors in this generation are the visible millionaires. How progressive politics is being remade day-to-day, block by block, city by city, is another great untold story of the hip-hop generation.

Q: What was the most rewarding thing about doing this book?

Doing a book like this is incredibly humbling. You don’t create a world, you’re trying to recapture it. At every turn, there’s a debt you owe to the people and the subject that you have to respect, that inspires you to get above the limits of your talent and lingers with you permanently. My Acknowledgments section, in true hip-hop fashion, is as long as any chapter. I probably missed a lot of folks, and I’m gonna feel bad about that forever. But here’s the thing: there are a million ways to tell this story. This book is just one. I want to hear all those stories. All of us need to hear those stories.

Q: The last questions are personal. You talk about transformative moments in the hip-hop generation’s history. What was your first transformative encounter with hip-hop?

A: I grew up in Hawai’i during the 70s with AM radio and FM free-form: the Spinners and Little River Band, Gabby Pahinui and Bob Marley. I was 12 when “Rappers Delight” hit the islands. Folks were locking, then popping. A little later, I started seeing music videos on cable from the Clash and Malcolm McLaren, of all people. To see “This Is Radio Clash” and “Buffalo Gals”, with all these kids like me doing graffiti and b-boying and just having fun, got me and my friends really excited. Hip-hop was something that we could do, too. So we just went out and did it.

Q: What was your most recent transformative moment with hip-hop?

A: The National Hip-Hop Political Convention. There were thousands of people coming together to set a generational political agenda with no other bond than this hip-hop worldview. The most exciting and humbling thing to me was the fact that many of the folks were half my age, and had been touched by hip-hop in the same way that I had been when I was 15. So the loop kind of turns again, and continues.