American producers Cecil Otter and Swiss Andy have created Wugazi: 13 Chambers, the result of "a year's worth of cutting up every imaginable Fugazi record and trying out every Wu-Tang acapella they could get their hands on."
Is hip hop Black America's answer to punk? The two genres of music and subcultures share plenty of traits such as oft-politicized lyrics, repetition, an incredible ability to annoy parents, as well as the central concern with identity that has been played out through the politics of race for decades.
Fugazi frontman and punk hero Ian MacKaye once held some views about race that now seem shocking. At the age of 19, MacKaye was interviewed about race and the Minor Threat song "Guilty of Being White" for Maximumrocknroll, which he later stated to be "an anti-racist song." White Riot editors Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay try to unpick his rants in their introduction to the interview:
Professor Cary L. Cooper reviews Intern Nation for Times Higher Education (THE). recommending Ross Perlin's insightful account of the internship culture which dominates our cotemporary labour market, where young people and students “earn nothing and learn little”.
Ross Perlin has penned a serious and extremely well-written text that offers sophisticated historical material about the origins of internship and its impact on the individuals concerned, the firms that use it and the world of work more generally. Intern Nation is not merely a collection of narratives of intern experiences but takes a strongly critical view of the majority of intern users, pithily summed up in the statement: "they hawk hope, sell unpaid labor for a fee and peddle in human futures".
Richard Seymour appears on the programme Double Standards to discuss key events of recent weeks, from the escalation of NATO bombardment in Libya to the phone hacking scandal. Seymour, author of The Liberal Defence of Murder , explores the reasons for and consequences of the involvement of Western powers in conflicts and politics around the world, and describes Murdoch’s media empire as the vehicle of neo-liberal ideology and the American economic crisis as the consequence of savage capitalism.
Visit Double Standards to watch this and other programmes.
Few North American readers will be familiar with the derogatory term chavs, as described by Owen Jones in his latest book, but they are no doubt well versed in the collective consciousness of the subtitle 'The Demonization of the Working Class.' The idea of "welfare queens" being an almost universal pejorative across the neoliberal universe. Pulitzer Prize winning writer Connie Schultz describes the term as the rough equivalent of North America's "trailer trash" in a review of Chavs in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Jones, she writes,
is at his strongest when he reports on real events, such as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's methodical dissembling of her country's manufacturing base. He also deftly dissects how British media increasingly promote a disregard for the real lives of the underprivileged.
Ross Perlin, the author of Intern Nation, comments on the current fight against unpaid and underpaid internships in Britain. In an interview for Graduate Fog, Perlin discusses some of the positive steps which are being taken in order to end this harmful practice.
The name-and-shame culture in the UK is really interesting from a US perspective, where people are really reluctant to single out unscrupulous employers. Likewise, the Cashback for Interns scheme [organised by the National Union of Journalists] is very impressive: unions in America have steered clear of this issue, and there’s no one out there helping interns get justice or navigate all the legal issues out there.