Lowkey has to be one of the greatest rappers consistently talking about important political issues in the UK, if not in hip hop generally. You can get his 2009 album ‘Dear Listener,’ here, it’s definitely one of my top listens of last year.
To give you an idea of some of the stuff he’s got to say, here’s a couple of tunes:
On my old blog I wrote a longish article looking at how climate change was changing the Arctic, and the new strategic importance of the newly uncovered fossil fuels and shipping lanes in places once covered with ice to the countries surrounding the North Pole.
Now two different sound art/music projects have caught my attention for highlighting the ways that the role of the Arctic and the Antarctic are changing in our collective imaginations. The polar regions have always held a strong fascination, especially in Britain. Many writers have highlighted the ways that they provided a “white space” on which countless explorers, artists and writers could project their own ideas about masculine heroism and nation building. The races to the poles embody the idea of the national importance of conquering this environment, which for nineteenth century British imperialism provided one of the few limits on the reach of their global power.
Indeed, near where I grew up a whole city has attempted to brand itself in reference to a proud Arctic past. Dundee dubs itself “The City of Discovery” after the ship used in a pioneering Antarctic exploration mission led by the ill-fated Captain Scott, and the ship itself forms the basis for one of the city’s main tourist attractions, in whose visitor centre I briefly worked. The ship was built in Dundee, with the expertise that came from building ships capable of penetrating ever further North, the better to slaughter whales.
The desire to tame the Arctic, to make it useful and part of the imperial world system can perhaps be demonstrated by the centuries long quest for the North West Passage. Ironically, this legendary path may in the near future become a major shipping lane, as climate change opens up a faster route between Chinese near-slaves and Atlantic consumers through the once-frozen North.
The massive impact of human activity represented by the melting ice was not always so evident. In the face of one of the few remaining environments that resisted human control, many responded with horror. From Frankenstein to H. P. Lovecraft to The Thing, the ice has often been the hidden home of monsters and horrors.
But now the Arctic and the Antarctic demonstrate a very real horror, a palpable threat that many can’t bear to face. Ice which represents millenia long eras of freezing is disappearing at an unbelievable rate, melting which is worse than many climate change predictions had warned. One of the greatest causes of polar exploration in recent decades has in fact been the drilling of ice cores, cross sections of ice that are the hidden history of the world’s climate over huge stretches of time. The process of fossilisation that gave us the fuel to do i
t took millions of years, and now we have burnt a significant proportion of that accumulated time in about 200. Looking at the expanses of time recorded in the ice gives us an insight into just how rapidly we’re unmaking the conditions on Earth that allowed the evolution of civilisation.
As has been pointed out by the Arctic’s indigenous inhabitants, the first place we can see the changes which are going to affect all of our lives is in the Arctic. The immense quantities of water, if not locked up in ice, are going somewhere else. Contemplating the destruction we’ve brought to the ice and its consequences for any length of time is pretty terrifying, and it’s something that many people, including apparently the heads of government of the world’s powerful countries, would really rather not confront.
Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica is a new work by turntablist, artist and academic DJ Spooky. He travelled to Antarctica and set up a mobile studio to make sound recordings of the changing ice-forms, put under stress by global changes. These sounds were then incorporated into a seventy minute multimedia performance featuring the sampled sounds coupled with a special score, alongside visual information conveying scientific and geographical information about the frozen continent. Below is a pretty amazing short film showing some of the sounds and sights presented in the performance:
“In 1949 the British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams created a metaphorical portrait of Antarctica entitled Sinfonia Antarctica that he began with a poem adapted from the poet Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound:
To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite.
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night,
To defy power which seems omnipotent,
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent:
This… is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free,
This is alone life, joy, empire and victory.
As the only uninhabited continent, Antarctica has no government and belongs to no country. Various countries claim areas of the landmass, but essentially, the area between 90°W and 150°W is the only part of Antarctica, indeed the only solid land on Earth, not claimed by any country. In the era of satellites, wireless networks, and fiber optic cables, its ever harder to see the vision that Vaughn described for his orchestral work. What DJ Spooky’s Antarctic Suite: Ice Loops portrays is a land made of complex ecological interactions. Instead of a metaphor, the composition aims to go to Antarctica and record the sound of the continent. More than 170 million years ago, Antarctica was part of the supercontinent Gondwanaland. Over time Godwin broke apart and Antarctica as we know it today was formed around 25 million years ago. Using digital media, video, and high tech recording equipment, DJ Spooky will go to Antarctica and paint an acoustic portrait of this rapidly transforming environment. . .He aims to bring Antarctica to the contemporary imagination by digitally reconstructing it: historical maps, travelers journals over the last several centuries, crystalline ice’s resonant frequencies, and the Earth’s magnet poles – will all be paints for the audio palette he will work with. Essentially, he will go to the continent and create a recording studio that will be portable enough to move all over the territory. Think of it as sampling the environment with sound – something that Vaughn could only do with metaphor in 1949. The difference Is that Miller approaches the task with a technological background that fosters a direct interaction with the territory that inspires the composition. . .
For most people, thoughts of exploration in Antarctica typically center on dogs, skis, snowshoes, and people in fur, not paintbrushes or sketch pads. Actually, art has always had a prominent place in the exploration of Antarctica. Photography began in the 1830’s and only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was it possible to take photographs in cold environments. Therefore, it was common for explorers of polar regions to be accompanied by artists to visually record the sights and phenomena for research and for popular distribution in books and articles. In the modern era, artists continue to venture to Antarctica. Their intent is not simply to record but to provide visual interpretations of the continent, based on direct observations combined with artistic talent. . .
Miller creates a separate scenario from those envisioned by these artists by focusing on the acoustic qualities of ice and its relationship to geography.
In another film showing the project, DJ Spooky emphasises the idea of music as information, implying that his Sinfonia Antarctica communicates essential, but hidden, knowledge about the processes at work on our planet:
On the project’s page on DJ Spooky’s site there’s also a lot of Antarctic images, including posters he made to represent an imaginary Antarctic revolution.
But another project, by artist Katie Peterson, puts an even stronger focus on the melting ice. In 2007 she laid a microphone in the ever-expanding Jokulsarlon lagoon, which has been created by meltwater from Vatnajökull, the largest glacier in Iceland, and one of the largest in the Northern Hemisphere. During the time it was there the sound input from it went through to a telephone line, so that people could call a number and literally listen to the sound of the Arctic melting.
But after this process of recording she then took the process a step further. The sounds made from recordings at three other Icelandic glaciers were pressed into records that were made from frozen water from the lagoons. These records were then played continuously on a trio of turntables, creating a new sound, combined from the original recordings of a melting glacier and the actual sound of those recordings melting. The result is a powerful recreation and re-enactment of the hidden destruction created by humans in the northern part of the world. The sound itself is, especially in context, really menacing:
The records that were made no longer exist, but they are preserved in the form of three DVDs, and there are clips from the original sounds on her site.
What these projects highlight for me is the changing role of the polar regions are coming to play in our culture, as they morph from the arenas for displays of heroic human achievement, to a testament to our unwitting destruction of the Earth. The fact that these two artists have used sound to allow the environments to speak for themselves, as opposed to the stock wind sound effects that once would have stood in countless Arctic-based films, is really interesting, and tries to make our intellectual engagement with what’s going on there that bit more real. The fact that at least some people, culturally, artistically and politically, are willing to engage with the scientific facts of what is happening to the Arctic and Antarctic is a source of hope in the face of the new terror: the destruction of what was once endless white.
The music magazine XLR8R, in a fit of some kind of cross-promotion that suits me, have put together a mixtape of electronic music inspired by the upcoming sci-fi show Caprica, the prequel to the essential Battlestar Galactica.
It features great tracks from The Field and White Rainbow, as well as the ubiqitous FUSE by Glasgow’s own Hudson Mohawke. Great to see Scotland holding it’s own in the field of music inspired by cutting edge science fiction.
Here’s something pretty cool I was shown over the holidays. Youtube has several different clips of sounds that have been recorded by NASA probes in proximity to several different planets of the Solar System. These aren’t sounds that you would hear by sticking a microphone out in orbit, but rather are the electromagnetic “sounds” given off by the planet, recorded and then translated into a frequency audible to humans.
Here’s the Earth first of all:
But if you’d like to compare how we sound, a small rocky world covered with oceans of liquid water, to Jupiter, a gigantic world of gas with no solid surface, where hydrogen is eventually compressed into liquid then plasma, where winds traveling at thousands of miles per hour are part of centuries old storms which are bigger than Earth, then here’s 10 minutes of its full creepy glory:
Interestingly, these sounds all seem to originate on the site of a sound therapy guy, Dr Jeffrey Thompson, who claims to be able to use them to improve people’s health. He’s got a big archive on what I suspect is an old site of his here.
A Happy New Year to any readers who still around after the lack of posts in the last wee while. I’ve been busy with other things, and as you can see from the image above, the weather hasn’t exactly encouraged doing much aside from huddling to keep warm.
However, the next few weeks should see a rash of new content coming, so stay tuned.
In the meantime, I think it’s important to bear in mind that, despite the cold in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere, it’s still quite likely that 2010 will be one of the hottest years on record. If you’ve encountered folk in everyday life who are as daft as John Redwood, then be sure to point them in the direction of this Monbiot article on the Guardian site.
In fact, one of the important points to remember about climate change is that it makes the future highly unpredictable. One of the possible consequences, disruption of ocean currents like the Gulf Stream, could actually lead to the removal of a factor that helps keep the British Isles temperate. An unusual set of circumstances that has led to exactly that appears to be the cause of our current cold snap. The current situation is just an unusual freak event, but in fact global warming in the tropics actually pushes water north that by the time it reaches us is pretty cold. The Gulf Stream is thought to have slowed 30% in the last 12 years. The past couple of weeks for those of us in Scotland could really be a taste of how winters might get in years to come.
I’m sure many readers will be already aware of the work of the pioneering folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax.
He’s famous for having travelled around the globe from the 30’s onwards collecting songs and musics from many different peoples. He played a key role in documenting the blues in the US, recording important interviews with the likes of Lead Belly and Muddy Waters. Through radio shows and other media work he introduced many different kinds of music from around the world, such as gamelan, to a large US audience for the first time. In Scotland he’s known for collaborating with Hamish Henderson to record singers such as Jeannie Robertson. He famously advocated for rock n roll as a music that combined the black and white cultures in America to create something new. And he was also the subject of multiple FBI investigations during the McCarthy era.
But an aspect of his work that hasn’t come to light until recently is a 1936 expedition he made to Haiti on behalf of the US Library of Congress. His aim was to record the sounds and images of the island as part of a much larger project of tracing the history of African folk culture in the Americas. Such a mission was a very different proposition than it might be today with easily portable digital recording technology-he dragged 155 pounds of luggage around Haiti for months, in the face of lack of money, bureaucratic obstruction, technological limitations and bouts of malaria.
Haiti in 1936 was just emerging from 15 years of occupation by US troops, who had recently left leaving a fragile government in control. The occupation dismantled the previous constitution, and treated workers on projects like building roads as virtual slaves. Following the removal of foreign forces, the country was in a period of transition, reflected culturally in a renewed interested in its African cultural origins, which were traditionally frowned upon by the island’s elites.
The recordings that resulted from the exhibition add up to 50 hours of sound, along with six films and Lomax’s own extensive diaries of the trip. All of this material lay largely forgotten in the Library of Congress for 60-odd years, until a massive effort to digitise it all was undertaken and it was recently released as a 10-CD boxset, accompanied by two books of the diaries.
All kinds of music for many different contexts can be heard on the recordings, including work songs, romances, carnival music, sacred music of the Vodou religion and even children’s songs. The music reflects the roots of Haitian culture in Africa, but also the strong influence of French music from colonial times as well as the spread of Spanish and Latin American styles from neighbouring islands.
The archive is especially valuable within Haiti itself, where many of the musical forms of the 30’s have been forgotten and evolved without recording facilities to preserve them. The Association for Cultural Equity, the foundation which continues Lomax’s work and legacy, is working to make the full archive available for use in Haiti, allowing people a window on their own cultural past that helps illuminate the many kinds of popular music made in Haiti today. For example one of the recordings contains a medieval form hymn singing that came to Haiti via the colonial power France, and that was thought long since lost.
Although such a big set is probably a pretty major investment for most readers, there are a couple of places online where you can hear a lot of the material. Check out the blog The Haiti Box, as well as the video clips and other material on the Association for Cultural Equity site.
OK, the time has come to say something. Tim Westwood is an embarassment to anyone who supports hip hop and related musics in the UK.
But we already knew that. The man who was literally the role model for Ali G has been derided for a long time. But since BBC digital radio station 1xtra restructured their schedule, he is now on EVERY week day at dinnertime.
For those that don’t know, 52 year old son of a Church of England Bishop, and former public school boy, Tim Westwood was for many years the only DJ on legal radio playing hip hop in the UK. Where I grew up in rural Scotland his show was the only way to hear new hip hop (no broadband in those days!) I used to listen to his show regularly, but even as an adolescent his persona made me feel deeply uncomfortable.
Put simply, Westwood’s show has always been driven by a really unpleasantly sleazy approach to women. He gets women on the line to perv on them, and celebrates misogynist records at every opportunity.
Now there has of course been a long and complex debate about what if any causal relationship you can show between sexist music and sexist behaviour in general. And there have historically been some really reactionary groups that have attempted to suppress hip hop on these grounds when in fact they were motivated by racist or other ulterior motives.
But I’m not interested actually here in the music that Westwood plays-his dinnertime show works off the 1xtra daytime playlist as far as I can see anyway. Im not even writing about his constant harassment of female 1xtra newsreaders.
The reason I’ve been building up to writing something like this for the past couple of weeks is because of the seemingly tireless work Timothy has decided to undertake in favour of violence against women.
Specifically, virtually every day on his show he talks about Chris Brown’s assault on Rihanna. Often he’s been doing this whilst on the line with women who have been selected to be chatted up by him/tell him how hot he is etc.
The first time I heard this he used a formula along the lines of “What he did was unforgivable but we forgive him because we have forgiving hearts.” This was accompanied by him talking at length about Chris Brown’s tracks and other things he’s publicly done to try and get back together with Rihanna.
However, this week it stepped up a gear, with Westwood reeatedly telling women on the line about how he dressed up as Chris Brown for Halloween, and went to a party “with a girl who painted a black eye on”. He really was revelling in this.
And yesterday Jimmy Carr, a comedian well known for his class and racial hatred, with constant talk about “chavs” and “gypsies”, joined him on the show, and revealed his love for Westwood’s radio programmes going back to the 80’s. (Why does this not surprise me?) Despite trying to cover himself afterwards by calling Rihanna’s behaviour positive, Carr’s opening comment on the topic was “I’ve been in one of those cars, there’s not room to do much in the back, maybe a back hand slap.”
Westwood then went on to say that Rihanna was only discussing what happened to her now because she has an album to sell.
What’s the point of repeating all this, why don’t I just switch off? Well for one thing I have already decided after last night to completely boycott his show, I’m listening to BBC Asian Network while I cook now.
But the point is that there are no nuances here. Westwood is not “representing” for real social conditions where he came from or anything like that. His show, which goes out to a mass audience every day, is straight up justifying and excusing violence against women, in other words tacitly encouraging it.
In the headline of this post I called him the Alan Partridge of hip hop, because the way he puts himself across is constantly cringe worthy and frankly embarassing to listen to. But althought the Partridge character was definitely a misogynist, if he were real he never would have had the influence and power that Tim Westwood has within youth culture in the UK. Although many regard him as a joke, it doesn’t change the fact that thousands of young men will have listened to his show this week and heard that it’s basically OK to beat their girlfriends.
Celebrity lifestyle news of corporate pop creations isn’t usually what I’m that interested in discussing here. But Chris Brown’s assault on Rihanna in fact has become an important moment for discussion of issues that rarely get talked about in entertainment culture, and the fact that there is by some figures an orchestrated camaign to get Chris Brown “forgiven” can hardly be an accident. Aspects of male social power have been challenged by the whole affair, and some have reacted by closing the ranks. Tim Westwood seems to be leading the charge in the UK.
This man has no place in a job where he has mass influence, or a salary paid by the public. Whatever we can do to get him off air (and maybe Ace and Vis, who did a dinnertime show I really enjoyed, back), let’s do it. Positive suggestions as to how we achieve this welcome!
Several weeks ago I stuck up a review of a truly original and exciting documentary, ‘Slingshot Hip Hop,’ which tells the story of the hip hop scene in Palestine. Against the backdrop of racial discrimination and occupation, Palestinian youth have since around 2000 built a vibrant cultural movement that expresses their frustrations and needs through the medium of rap in Arabic. Watching the film is inspirational, and reminds you of the very real social power hip hop as a movement has all across the world.
This week I was very lucky to catch up with Jackie Salloum, the director of the film, following a screening at the Glasgow Film Theatre introduced by her and Suhell Nafar of DAM. Here’s what Jackie had to say about the film, the scene in Palestine, and what she’s working on next:
FCBF: Tell us a bit about yourself and your background as an artist, filmmaker and activist?
JS: I’m a 1st generation Arab-American, my Mom is Palestinian and my Dad is Syrian. When I was growing up we saw only negative images of Arabs in the media and popular culture. The message put across in the media is important, and when I was younger it had a negative impact on me-I didn’t want to be an Arab.
When I got older I became focussed on challenging stereotypes. I used pop culture references like bubblegum machines to put across a message. In 2002 I heard [DAM’s track] ‘Min Irhabi?’ [Who’s the terrorist?] on the radio and I flipped out, I was so excited. I went on the internet to find out more and discovered the arabrap site.
I made a video for the song, using images we never see in the US, of the intifada. It was very effective, and had a big impact on the people that saw it. People that previously had no interest or support for Palestine were moved, and when I asked them why they said, “Because it’s hip hop, it’s from the heart.”
My Professor suggested I should make a documentary. I thought it would be easy and take about a year! In fact it took 5! It was an amazing experience, and I learned so much I didn’t know about Palestine. My family are from the West Bank, I’d never been to Gaza.
FCBF: What difficulties did you encounter making the film?
JS: A lot of the problems were just more of a nuisance. I was typically held at the airport for 4-7 hours coming into Israel. You get passed from interrogator to interrogator, and you don’t know if you’ll be denied entry, which is something they do all the time to Palestinians from the diaspora. Once you’re in it’s not so bad, but you still have to get through checkpoints, and getting into Gaza is different, and more difficult.
In terms of the film, I wasn’t from a film background. Things were a bit unplanned, I just went in with a love for the subject. I didn’t wait until I got funding, I just went ahead and started. In some ways I think that was an advantage, but it meant I had to fund a lot of the film myself. I had to move back home and work in my parents’ ice cream parlour. That’s why I put Fresh Booza Productions at the end of the film; Booza is Arabic for ice cream, and it’s a tribute to them and their support.
I left cameras with some of the artists, and between us we collected 700 hours of footage, and so a lot of work went into editing.
FCBF: And what were the highlights of the process?
JS: Getting to know the artists; we became very close, like family. Before I met and saw them, visiting Palestine was quite a depressing experience for me. But seeing the hip hop scene in Palestine gives you hope, a small dose of hope for the future.
What was also great was meeting grassroots people who helped with the film, in the US and Canada as well as Palestine. Artists like Patriarch, The Narcicyst, The Philistines and Invincible came to help with the film, but have continued being involved and are a huge support to the artists in Palestine, for example by making beats. The Philistines made ‘Free the P,’ a compilation of hip hop and spoken word artists from around the world in support of Palestine, and all the proceeds helped fund the film.
I was lucky to work with Waleed Zaiter, who did all the graphics and animations in the film, as well as a lot of producing and editing. I was worried that if people didn’t know the background to Palestine, where Gaza and the West Bank were, they would be confused. But I also didn’t want to hit people with too many facts and statistics. The maps and graphics really help get the facts across.
FCBF: What differences are there between the hip hop scene in Palestine and other parts of the world? For example, there seems to be a lot more support from the older generation, and the position of women, both as artists and audience, seems to be much better than other places?
JS: The cross generational support is so nice to see, it’s one of my favourite things about the scene. They get into the lyrics, which lift their spirits. Because the lyrics talk about the occupation and the problems facing Palestinians, older people support it.
The groups get invited to so many different kinds of events. One event we see in the film is at an Eastern Orthodox Easter celebration!
My other favourite thing is the women’s involvement, and the way they are treated. Artists in Palestine don’t try to imitate what they hear coming from elsewhere, before they heard Tupac they weren’t into hip hop. There’s a completely different attitude towards women.
FCBF: It’s particularly interesting to see considering the main stereotype we are told in the west is that Arab societies are really oppressive to women.
JS: Right. I mean, there is oppression of women everywhere, but it takes different forms.
FCBF: Does the support for women’s involvement cause any problems within Palestinian society? We saw in the film how one female artist is threatened out of performing because relatives don’t think it’s appropriate.
JS: There’s absolutely no organised opposition to women’s involvement. Where there are problems it’s really internal to one particular family or local region. But other artists have very supportive families. Where there is opposition to hip hop, it’s on the grounds that it’s seen as something that’s ‘American’ and foreign.
FCBF: Something that’s really interesting in the film is seeing people use the internet and digital technologies to overcome the checkpoints and barriers of the occupation. What difference has the internet made for hip hop in Palestine, and how limited is it?
JS: It’s made a huge difference. It’s what made me aware of the scene, and when I went to shops asking for this music they kept giving me rai, which wasn’t what I was looking for! The only place you could find it was on the internet.
In Palestine, as you see in the film, people are separated by the occupation. People that may live only a short distance from each other are never able to meet because of the boundaries of the occupation. But they are able to connect online. It’s what made the scene possible. It’s not really smooth, but it is doable, and that’s what matters.
FCBF: Obviously the situation in Palestine forces artists to be political. But how far has hip hop crossed over from being a cultural movement to a political one? How much time do artists devote to politics vs. their music, or do they not see a distinction between the two?
JS: To be in Palestine, everything is political. What separates the good from the crap is talent, and the popular artists in Palestine are really, really good. The scene there is so huge, and is so saturated with political content that talent really makes the difference.
The music appeals to hip hop heads, as well as activists as a voice of the oppressed. It’s more attractive to many than classical Arab music because it’s in a form that people all over the world can recognise.
The film holds a special appeal in the Arab world, it’s won best film awards in film festivals in Syria, Egypt and Lebanon. In some ways that’s a more difficult audience because they already know the narrative of the Palestinian, it’s not new to them. They like it because they’re not allowed to go to Palestine, and so it’s the first time they see different aspects of daily life there, it’s the first time they see Palestinians happy. They love to see Palestinians smiling and happy instead of just images of suffering, and it lets them learn about daily life in Palestine.
FCBF: Is there an influence from traditional Palestinian music and poetry on Palestinian hip hop?
JS: Definitely. The lyrics reference poets like Mahmoud Darwish. And the artists are always aware of incorporating Arab musical influences, and use Arab instruments live on stage.
FCBF: From early on in the film I was impressed with the quality of the beats. What kind of beatmaking facilities do people have access to? Who’s doing the production?
JS: It’s different in different places. In Gaza for example there’s no access to beatmaking facilities, and the beats are downloaded off the internet. This made it difficult for us to find beats to put in the film, because many of those used by the artists were originally very well known ones. But after 6 years making music, DAM started making beats, and a lot of the ones used in the film are theirs. DAM produce for a lot of others as well, but now other groups like WEH and Arapeyat are producing beats for themselves as well.
FCBF: Is there a strong hip hop scene in all it’s different aspects? We saw a bit of graffiti, but what about DJs, breakers etc.?
JS: Graffiti is a really strong part of Arab culture, but it’s not necessarily hip hop graffiti, it’s political. People have been using graffiti in Palestine for a long time to express their political frustrations, and the artists are not necessarily hip hop.
There’s an increasing amount of breakers, especially in Gaza. As for DJing, in the occupied territories it’s mostly using CDs as people just don’t have access to records and record playing. In Israel itself there is access to that kind of stuff because it’s popular with Israelis as well, but the key issue is whether you can afford it.
FCBF: So you’re still in touch with people from the film, what’s been happening since it was made?
JS: Since the film hip hop in Palestine has just been expanding, there are more and more people performing. DAM are working on their second album. PR [Palestinian Rapperz] are separated by the occupation, but they’re continuing to use the internet to make music. Arapayat are still making music, and Mahmoud Shalabi is playing the kawala, a traditional Arab flute now, and incorporates it on stage with DAM.
FCBF: How can we in other countries help and support Palestinian hip hop and the Palestinian people?
JS: Support the artists, support oppressed people! I think that art and culture are more effective at opening many people’s eyes than purely political activism. So get the artists out to perform, and buy their music. If you’re part of any kind of institution that has funds to bring people over or to send people to Palestine then use them. Even recording one song is so expensive for these artists, and they’re still working and struggling financially. Just bear in mind no major music corporation is going to invest in Palestinian hip hop any time soon, so they depend on grassroots support.
FCBF: What are you working on next? I heard you’d like to make music videos for Arab artists?
JS: Suhell and I just now are writing a children’s film. I’m not going to make the mistake I made with ‘Slingshot’ and tell you all about it before it’s made. I would like to make more videos, and make them available through youtube. A lot of the artists now are making videos, like the Letters video by Suhell [see below]. Abeer is making a documentary as well, she’s making videos as well as music.
I don’t want to do another documentary for a while, I’d like to work on something a bit more structured with a script! I’m sure that will come with it’s own set of problems, but I look forward to finding those out.
Who should have the right to call their music Black Rock? And what happens when black musicians make music that doesn’t fit into conventional definitions of “Black music”?
The next few weeks are set to see the release of not one but two projects using the name Black Rock. Damon Dash, former partner of Jay Z, has collaborated with the band The Black Keys on ‘BlackRoc,’ presumably seeking to gain cachet from his previous association with Roc-a-Fella records, and featuring a host of rappers such as Mos Def, Billy Danze of M.O.P., Q Tip, Raekwon, Pharoah Monche and the late ODB. However, the veteran hip hop group Onyx have come out as publicly outraged by the title due to their own soon to be released ‘The Black Rock,’ album, which they describe as “mad guitars, hard drums. . .a hybrid album of Hip-Hop and Rock & Roll.”
Dash, for his part, doesn’t do anything to allay concerns that his project is a cynical attempt to capture two musical audiences with one release when he says the project is “a good business model… that kind of protects the artistry, it’s lucrative, but where a lot of people can get [into] it without compromising the brand.”
Onyx have come out saying that the BlackRoc project is “biting” their concept and that they had the idea of a rock/hip hop album first. They are clearly very angry.
Onyx are clearly angry more widely at what they perceive as an attempt to write them out of hip hop’s history, when in fact since they were formed in 1988 they have been very influential. For their role in bringing a certain kind of hardcore rap to a wider audience they were dubbed “a disgrace to blacks” by the NAACP.
But their claim to be the originators of the concept of rap/rock linkups is clearly absurd. From Run DMC’s ubiquitously known ‘Walk this Way’ with the group Aerosmith, through a great deal of the career of the Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine or indeed rappers such as Mos Def forming rock projects, it’s clearly hardly something that’s a new idea.
This is of course leaving aside the whole obvious issue of rock and roll’s origins in the blues and black music. Although those reading this article may be well aware, it is always shocking the lack of awareness there is in the modern, white, rock audience that their favoured genre was appropriated by white records companies and groups in order to make money from a musical form which black artists were then excluded from. It’s a pattern that has been repeated again and again throughout the history of African-American musical creativity in the last 100 years.
But I encountered perhaps the most interesting take on the controversy over on Racialicious, which linked to an article by Rob Fields of the Bold as Love blog. He argues that how can the Dash/Black Keys project have the right to call itself ‘BlackRoc’ when all the rock artists are white?
Fields feels that the project had no right to appropriate the name Black Rock when it is already the name of the Black Rock Coalition, an organisation that since 1985 has sought to challenge stereotypes of what kinds of music black people can legitimately make. They say on their own website:
To date, the BRC is the only national nonprofit organization dedicated to the complete creative freedom of Black artists. . . The BRC opposes those racist and reactionary forces within the American music industry which undermine and purloin our musical legacy and deny Black artists the expressive freedom and economic rewards that our Caucasian counterparts enjoy as a matter of course.
Rock and roll, like practically every form of popular music across the globe, is Black music and we are its heirs. We, too, claim the right of creative freedom and access to American and International airwaves, audiences, markets, resources and compensations, irrespective of genre.
The BRC embraces the total spectrum of Black music. The BRC rejects the arcane perceptions and spurious demographics that claim our appeal is limited. The BRC rejects the demand for Black artists to tailor their music to fit into the creative straitjackets the industry has designed. We are individuals and will accept no less than full respect for our right to be conceptually independent.
Fields adds in his article:
“BlakRoc” is a slap in the face to those of us who have been working to develop audiences for black artists who don’t fit neatly into pre-conceived categories. It’s an affront to those of us who still face apathy and dismissiveness when it comes to the place of blacks in beyond hip hop and R&B. . .The BlakRoc Project will probably do well. But it won’t be worthy of its name.
The conversation carried on in the comments section of the Racialicious post is very interesting as well, with some defending the BlackRoc project name as merely a merging of the names Black Keys and Roc-a-Fella. Also, they challenge Fields’ assertion that the album is manned instrumentally by white people and vocally by black people by pointing out the work that RZA did composing his contribution. (The RZA in fact is a major talent in this regard, having done really impressive scoring work on films such as Ghost Dog and American Gangster, both of which have really strong soundtracks.)
However, whether the name was a result of ignorance or not, it’s hard to disregard the feeling of being appropriated that Fields, and by extension the Black Rock movement clearly have. Their fight for full freedom for black artists and the black imagination is something that I think we should totally support, despite some of the music involved not being completely my cup of tea.
One commenter on Racialicious made what I thought was a very important contribution, writing:
I still feel the remnants of being the “white kid” for being very much into rock music and then having the actual white kids turn around and call me a poser for being a black person who liked something other than the stereotypical music I was expected to listen to as a black person.
The context is far from comparable, since I as a white child was never a victim of racism, but I remember myself being shocked at the racism of schoolmates who used to ask me why I like hip hop because “isn’t that black music?”
The whole controversy raises important issues about the usefulness of the term “black music”. As a way of asserting the black origins of most of American (and through them, world) popular music of the 20th century, it is obviously important. But what happens when the same term is in fact turned on its head and used as a way of excluding black artists from musical forms that were themselves originally black music (!). It’s definitely something I want to explore further on here.
However, in the meantime this piece gives me as good a reason as any to bring up something I’ve been wanting to mention for a while-The Street Sweeper Social Club, a collaboration between musicians Tom Morello and others from Rage Against the Machine with Boots Riley of The Coup (the group who did the song that this blog is named after!)
Back in the day I was a big fan of RATM, although I was never a great appreciator of the rock side of where they came from. For me they combined rapping with incredible sonic experimentation and radical politics.
The new project, Street Sweeper Social Club, is really what I expected it to sound like (as my brother put it “Rage with better rapping,”) rather than anything radically new or different, but it still sounds pretty good to my ears, and they’re well worth checking out. Tom Morello is an incredibly skilled guitarist who can stand up there with the most amazing user of synths or computers in terms of making strange new sounds. And I don’t think it would be going too far to describe Boots as one of the most underrated rappers of all time. If you don’t know The Coup, get to know! In any case, check out their band’s cover of M.I.A.’s ‘Paper Planes’:
BlackRoc is released on November 27th. Try as I might I haven’t been able to find a release date for Onyx’s project, it appears to have been delayed for some time and is described as coming 2009.
On 
Fat Cats, Bigga Fish 