I’ve heard rumors –which I’m not going to spread here– and I’ve loyally closed my ears to them. She performed here in Oakland at the Paramount Theater, and the reviews were merciless.

In this interview, she’s doesn’t seem “present,” but she does have some deep insight into the current state of hip-hop. Whatever the issues are, everyone please send your love and good vibes to elevate this sister back to her rightful place on the throne of hip-hop!

Check out the interview below:

(Doh! The interview got gaffled…but wait! There’s plenty of photos!)

If you know anything about Black music in America, then you’re already familiar with the traditions of the New Orleans Brass Bands. One of the family branches of jazz, brass bands are integral to the New Orleans experience. They’re present at celebrations and funerals, and one of America’s jazz greats grew up in its traditions: namely, trumpeter Louis Armstrong.

Brass bands not only play traditional dirges and upbeat Crescent City standards like “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” but they also enliven pop and soul standards, much like the marching bands of historically Black colleges in the south.

As a part of my blog, I’m going to start highlighting the best examples of my term “pure school.” Folks have been asking me to define it with examples, which is fine because it’s another term I don’t want taken out of context and misinterpreted.

The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble is a wonderful example of the presence of younger African Americans who are trying to keep our traditions alive, pure and unadulterated. Generations X and Y are always dismissed by Baby Boomers (at least in the African American community) as destroying the African American community’s traditions. Well, you can’t keep a tradition alive if your elders refuse to pass it on or you have to pry it out of their hands. The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble is a pleasant reminder of those who are gently keeping the traditions alive, while still understanding that time moves on –as will traditions.

Here’s a performance with Mos’ Def. Though we it’s hip-hop, you can still identify the pureness of the music, and of real-live musicians! Check it out…

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TRIPLE THREAT!
Anika Noni Rose, Tracie Thoms & Melissa Mercedes Cardello

Three talented and gorgeous actresses will star in the film RAZOR, directed by Gee Malik Linton, nameley: dreamgirl and Tony-Award winning talent Anika Noni Rose, “Cold Case” and GRINDHOUSEr the lovely Traci Thoms, and the spectacular Melissa Mercedes Cardello! We can’t wait to see these beautiful sisters get their day in the sun…and on the screen!

Set for release this year!!

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Rashida’s Resigned from her ‘Office’ Job!

Coming off of her 2nd season with the critically acclaimed (and hilarious) sit-com The Office (Thursday nights on NBC), actress Rashida Jones (The Office, The Dave Chapelle Show, Freaks & Geeks) is wrapping up filming as the character Hannah in BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN. Watch for it in ’08! If you’d like to see Ms. Jones on one more season of The Office, then click here to vote! (Off-site link to IBWFF)

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THE BRAVE ONE (2007)
Who knew?! Talent seems to run in this family as the progeny of Lisa Bonet (The Cosby Show, ANGEL HEART) and rocker Lenny Kravitz stars as Chloe (doesn’t that rhyme with Zoe) in THE BRAVE ONE.

THE BRAVE ONE has earned $26.6 M in box office receipts since opening. THE BRAVE ONE is playing in theaters now.

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[tag:Commercial Writing]

]]> http://adrienneanderson.com/entertainment-writing/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ http://adrienneanderson.com/soul-of-san-francisco/ http://adrienneanderson.com/soul-of-san-francisco/#comments Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:45:42 +0000 admin http://adrienneanderson.com/?p=55 This article appears in full in my book WORD: Rap, Politics & Feminism, and online at the Museum of the African Diaspora’s salon “I’ve Known Rivers” Project.

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Rap is something you do
Hip-hop is something you live
—KRS-ONE, “Get Yourself Up”, Hot 12”

Rap and hip-hop is over twenty-years old. It is legal and able to go the clubs and groove with the old folks. No longer the ingénue with the chip on her shoulder, rap is now the old lady in the club with a tumbler of gin and tonic and too much jewelry. When Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “White Lines” comes on, she stands up with both hands in the air (tumbler in one) and hollers, “That’s my song!” This is rap, the birth mother of hip-hop. Rap has nurtured me and grown with me –the sibling I never had.

I won’t start this story with “…when I was kid”, but when I was a kid, I was introduced to rap in the 6th grade. I remember taking trips to Lake Tahoe with cousins, my mother, aunties and uncles. The cousins packed six deep into an orange Gremlin or green Pinto (unbelted and sitting in the back). To pass away the hours to Tahoe, we would try to remember every line to the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” Inevitably flubbing Master Gee’s part, I would be glared at and reduced to popping my fingers and mumbling the sound of the words –like in church when I didn’t know the hymn. Back on the block, my cousins, school friends and I would play our records on our portable record players, and make up dance steps to rap songs like “It’s Nasty (Genius of Love)” (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five), “The Breaks” (Kurtis Blow), “Wordy Rappinghood” (The Tom-Tom Club) and “Numbers” (Kraftwerk). As a third generation San Franciscan, I was lucky enough to be exposed to all rap and all kinds of musicians that were brave enough to dabble in rap and rap beats and breaks. Everything from German electronica, New York rap, New Wave, punk and disco filled our household. Then the movie Breakin’ happened. I was hooked.

Read the full essay at I’ve Known Rivers Project…!

Rap and hip-hop are arguably another set of musical expressions and culture created, pushed, and developed by Blacks and Latinos in the United States. It took over 20 years for many in the music industry to even acknowledge rap’s and hip-hop’s impact on music, let alone to make some positive declaration about the people and cultures that created it. It wasn’t until rap acts like LL Cool J and Young MC were able to package the music to a larger audience, that chattel rap became labeled into the narrow stricture of commercial music that we know today. It’s taken ‘hood moguls like Sean Combs and Russell Simmons to diversify rap music into a product that can transcend culture and creativity, and spill into the aisles of Nordstrom, boutiques, and the beaches of St. Tropez. Is that a good thing? Well, we’re finding out now…

I’ve become one of those old, rickety –nee, crotchety– adults who looks back nostalgically, and thinks, “I remember when…” I’ve all but resigned myself to listening to nothing but LPs, and dumping my CDs (and digital files), for the sake of “old school.” However, I’m realizing that I’m not alone, and it’s not just nostalgia for “the way it used to be.”

There was a certain level of regulation that rap music and hip-hop culture retained. That was to keep it pure; less of an old school, than a pure school. The gramophone was invented in 1887, and we started scratching the hell out of it ninety years later…coincidentally in a year

ending in seven. (Oooh, that’s deep, but for another posting.) In between those years, Blacks in particular, had learned some pretty nasty lessons about the music industry, publishing rights, and “artistic license.” The djs had more power to regulate than b-girls and b-boys, and more pull than rappers. Producers were barely imagined when rap started. It was pure school theater: dj, emcees, dancers and artists.The true and pure school of rap was about the machine of movement and funk. Your crew provided the cogs, and oil and the dj was the wheel. Everyone in your crew was true to you and your sound: that was the only reason they were there. They believed in the vision and talent, and everyone was headed in the same direction.All of that reminiscing also made me long for the power of the dj. The mechanic, the ghost in the machine and the mover and shaker. The one who made the crew pop.There’s such a disrespect, reinterpreting, and dissecting of the rap machine, that now were just left with a hoopty running on recycled parts, rusty engines and recalled wheels.

[picappgallerysingle id="4125434"]There’s no soul, no spark of life left in the rap machine. It’s overrun by groupies, instant cash, and mogul dreams –all at the expense of the vision.I’m all for the art of the dj, and demanding that the emcee follow the lead of the dj. I don’t want my emcee to take a music class at an exclusive music school in upstate New York. The divine big bang of “the party” is being lost on a lazy producers, lackluster djs, and whack assed emcees. I’ve been on a tirade about this for a while, but it’s been building for the past couple of years, and now the public is catching up. Blacks and Latinos should expect more out of their musical forms, and we shouldn’t be forming our vision around “getting paid” and “20″ rims.” Consumerism has done rap and hip-hop a huge injustice. I love that folks can get paid for their artistic contributions and expressions, but who determines the purity of that expression? Who demands that the soul be kept in rap? Truly not the recording industry.

It’s up to the communities that create and develop it. Most cultures are so true to their cultural expressions that they refuse to let it die in corporate hands. They create institutions to preserve it. They make their expressions a family event, and pass it on –in it’s true form– to their children. They enliven the spirit of the expression in rites so that no one forgets it. They write, sing, play and document the purpose and players in their cultural expression. They create myths, legends and books to make sure that they are never forgotten.We can’t get to this point until the soul is returned to rap and hip-hop. Change happens, but surgical enhancements are deliberate. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been pulling out my LPs, and listening to the mistresses and masters of dj-ing: the turntablists. I’ve also downloaded some old reliables like the late dj J Dilla’s Donuts album, the musical magician Danger Mouse’s album The Mouse and the Mask, and throwing in some obscure folk songs like Nick Drake’s “Fly” and “Pink Moon,” the Runaway’s salacious “Cherry Bomb,” Donny Hathaways gut wrenching but optimistic “Love, Love, Love,” and a little De la Soul, KRS-ONE’s “My 9 MM Goes Bang,” Rita Marley’s “One Draw”, and Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” just for the heck of it.

That’s the spirit of the dj –the draw of music to move the body and soul, and mashed-up to make it pleasing to the ear’s of the primal woman and man. You just can’t do that with mush-mouthed rapping of some crap that’s coming out nowadays.

It’s going to take a belly busting exorcism to filter the whack out of hip-hop. So ya’ll, let’s purify ourselves in the waters of Lake Minnetonka and exorcise the “suck” out of hip-hop, and bring back the soul! To quote Chef’s mother Nelly while she performed her own version of an exorcism, “Lord, Thomas…don’t let it get on the curtains!”

Resources (I’ll be adding more, so stay tuned!):

DJS
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• Grandmaster Flash
• J Dilla

EMCEES
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• Human Beatboxing

GRAFFITI ARTISTS + ART
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• B-Girl Be – Intermedia Arts
• B-Girl Manifesto

PRESERVING HIP-HOP CULTURE
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• True Skool
• B-Girl Manifesto
• The Zulu Nation
• The Electric Boogaloos

KINDRED SPIRITS
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• “Return return of the DJ”, Billy Jam, SF Bay Guardian, February 13, 2008

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RightsAgent Verification
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When Bob Marley sang, “When music hits you, you feel no pain,” he probably didn’t know the back story of musician and Afro beat originator Fela Kuti. Born to Nigerian middle-class, educated parents, Fela shocked much of the world during the late-60′s and early-70′s with his in-your-face sexuality, driving traditional African beats, and funk laden spirit.

If you were around and coherent anytime during the 1970′s, you knew political climate of the United States, and the world. The stale smell of embers from the Vietnam War, urban rioting, protests and anti-war movement were still lingering, and people were worn out and tired. The civil rights and anti-war movements were limping along still trying to recover from calculated attacks on their ideals and themselves.

Fela Kuti was a touchstone for the Black Power movement. His music bridged the chasm between African Americans and the African continent. Opening up the globe to African Americans was pioneered by such musicians as Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba. Fela’s music lured African Americans in with funky extended tracks and by singing in English. He “de-exoticized” African music by using traditional Nigerian syncopation that funked and thumped with James Brown infused beats. Fela was the originator of Afro beat music: Not the sunshiny, happy dance lyrics that we hear today in the “world beat” clubs, but a darker, more ominous prophetic music with danceable overtones –the most dangerous music around.

Anyone who’s listened to bubble gum Top 40 music stations have experienced how radio-friendly beats with heavy bass can fool us into dancing to lyrics that regularly call women bitches and ho’s. You can imagine what was happening with Fela’s music, except he was calling for African unity, against colonialism, against military rule, and for a fresh embrace of Africa in its true raw self, to heal itself on its own terms.

Fela was a maverick with a controversial edge that confused and infuriated many, especially in his home country of Nigeria in West Africa. In 1977, Fela and his music group Africa ’70 composed and performed his most famous song “Zombie,” a scathing indictment against the military-led Nigerian government. Like the title of the song, “Zombie” exhibited how those in power are only followers, waiting from instructions. If you go deeper into the song, you begin to ask yourself, “Who’s giving the orders?” For Fela, the government at the time didn’t want too many people asking that question. For a growing country fresh from colonial rule, it was a question best left unasked.

As the song –and the album– grew in popularity, the government responded by raiding his music compound Kalakuta Republic, and beat him mercilessly as they threw his 78-year old activist, feminist mother Funmilayo out of a second story window, eventually leading to her death shortly thereafter.Fela didn’t stop recording controversial songs with political overtones. He followed up with such albums as Expensive Shit, which he documented how the government frequently raided his home and compound looking for marijuana, even in his feces.He was a prophet, musician, revolutionary and, most importantly, he described himself in African pidgin, “I be great obeah black powah man!” Unfortunately, he regularly demonstrated his moniker, and at the time of his death, had 27 wives, one of which could have easily transmitted HIV to him which result in his death August 2, 1997. Personally, I grew up with Fela’s music, political ideology and expressions of post-colonial Africanism. My friends and I frequently listened to his music, and every great thinker in my group had a least one original Fela album in their collection, whether inherited from their parent, picked up at a recycled record store, and trading their Rob Bass album for someone else’s Fela album. As an African American woman, I had many concerns about his reputation as a polygamist and supposed chauvinist, stating such quotes as “…women are mattresses.” Now whether he meant this as alongside such statements as Kwame Ture’s quote that the only position of women in the revolution is “prone,” or as a remark on women as deliverers of comfort is arguable. In either circumstance, it’s an underlying problem within the African American political community, i.e., relegating women to peripheral objects without context or purpose outside of providing sexual satisfaction to a man, or any man, for that matter, without consideration to her goals, intelligence or purpose. It’s short-sighted, harmful and laughable –especially in the 21st century.

While I grappled with his views on women, it took an amazing article written by Nigerian writer Gbemi Olujobi who described Fela’s views from a non-Western perspective, and wrote:

“Fela lived in a patriarchal society that glorifies maleness and worships manhood; where a woman is nothing without a man; where a woman must be married to be considered a real woman. Such a society actively encourages women to give up everything for the ‘fulfillment’ of male affection, defines a woman by her marital status and questions, in the most cruel way, her essence as a woman if she is not married… He sought to give them the respectability only marriage could confer upon them, in this society that insists that marriage is the ultimate, by marrying all 27 of them. He married all of them on the same day so that they would all be equal. In that way, there would be no senior or first wife to lord it over everyone else.” (“Far from home, a Nigerian journalist finds Fela’s legacy alive and well in art,” SFGATE, May 4, 2004, Gbemi Olujobi)

With all things great and small considered, Fela’s legacy is that of an orisha: Live a life, and serve as an example of what not to do and what to do. Your character decides which is greatest.

Links:

+ “Far from home, a Nigerian journalist finds Fela’s legacy alive and well in art,” SFGATE.com, May 4, 2004, Gbemi Olujobi

+ The Fela Kuti Project

+ The Shrine

[bandcamp album=4190952724 bgcol=FFFFFF linkcol=f62c9b size=grande3]

“…Changing the vision and image of one of hip-hop’s most prolific voices was like changing the voice of urban America. KRS-ONE’s politics sadly became defined and marketed by the recording industry and by the new hip-hop audience. He was even paired with such groups as alternative rockers R.E.M.!

“The relevance of his music was buried under multiple layers of bad marketing and pandering to a widening hip-hop audience. Unfortunately, themes of such songs as ‘Black Cop,’ ‘My Philosophy,’ ‘Love’s Gonna Get You,’ were replaced by bright and shiny raps of danceable tunes with blatantly ripped off, radio-friendly songs – a lá P. Diddy—like ‘Step Into a World,’ biting one of the lamest rap songs in history: Blondie’s ‘Rapture.’ As a self-described ‘teacher,’ the lessons were still the same, except they were now being taught in the well-scrubbed, hallowed halls of ivy-covered private schools, instead of over-crowded, urban American classrooms…” (page 50)

Word: Rap, Politics and Feminism is available through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com and iUniverse.com.

“One woman had jumped up and saved her name from being dragged through the mud by a doctor, a Kangol kid and an “educated” rapper. Not to be outdone, a completely different group of men responded to her response with –as usual—another woman. Rather than doing the dirty work themselves, the original producers of ‘Roxanne, Roxanne’, Howie-Tee and Full Force, found another woman to go against Roxanne-Shante. By appropriating her name and re-defining the glaringly feminist ‘Roxanne’s Reply’ with a squeaky, baby voiced, nasally imitation who was lyrically talent-less compared to Roxanne-Shante’s biting styles, the ‘Real’ Roxanne was introduced. The new and improved Roxanne no longer reflected the round-the-way rawness of Roxanne-Shante. She was now clad in head to toe Fendi, overwhelmed in ringlets and manicured in acrylic nails and door knocker earrings. Rather than focusing on taking rap to the “next level” and into a viable art form, the rap world spent untold months whittling the Roxannes down the n-th degree until the public got tired of all of them…” (page 24)
Word: Rap, Politics and Feminism is available through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com and iUniverse.com.

“There was always something new in the band’s sound. It was that blend of live instruments, samples and heart-felt lyrics brimming with images of humid, down-home days and warm summer nights. When you listened closely, the music massaged you, while the lyrics wrapped knowledge within honeysuckle-scented nights and soul drenched pews…” (page 41)

Word: Rap, Politics and Feminism is available through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com and iUniverse.com.