Not Just Another Protest Album: Alison Crockett’s ‘Mommy, What’s a Depression?’

Not Just Another Protest Album:

Alison Crockett’s ‘Mommy, What’s a Depression?’

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

In his review of Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, Ralph Ellison famously accused Baraka of giving The Blues…the blues.  Ellison was of the belief that art should stand on its own, a point of view recently echoed by scholar Joan Morgan, who suggested that her only expectation of artists is that they produce the best art they were capable of.  Baraka, in comparison, was driven by other concerns; the expectation that Black art, particularly music, should reflect and inspire the political possibilities; that is should function as a form of protest and agitation for those who would never have the platform to “name evil in the world.”  It was an old debate when Ellison and Baraka took it up, nearly forty years after Langston Hughes (“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”) and George S. Schuler (“The Negro Art-Hokum”) debated whether there was such as thing as Black art at all, let alone a political Black art.

The irony of contemporary mainstream Black music, is that there are too few examples that uphold the integrity of the art or a tradition of protest, let alone the ability to do both.  And contrary to popular belief, rap music is far from being the worse offender.  However clunky and messy Rihanna and Nicki Minaj’s devotion may to the carnival-esque, its a welcome counter to the bland have your “pie-in-the-sky-in-your-new-Lexus” that is found in most contemporary Gospel music. Rihanna and Minaj don’t need to be silenced, they just need access to more dynamic visual-media platforms (so say Greg Tate) and some serious engagement with the work of Katherine Dunham, Carmen De Lavallade, and Grace Jones (to name a few).

Much of the criticism targeted at Rihanna and Minaj has much to do with their hyper-visibility within corporate media structures that has long figured out the bottom-line value of spectacles of blackness; how else do you explain Basketball Wives and Love and Hip-Hop.  Fact is, there are no legitimate measures to make claims that Black music is fundamentally worse now than it has been during previous generations (let alone a concrete criteria for what we might define as “worse).  What is true is that it is much more difficult to find what some might claim as “better” music, owing to many factors, including the fact that what have historically been trusted media outlets within our own communities cannot be easily distinguished from the very corporate entities that are exploiting our talents and our desires (and yes, we are complicit) in the first place—despite what Tom Joyner, Cathy Hughes and Debra Lee tell you.

You can’t claim to speak for “the people,” while running ads from predatory lenders and companies that support (one step removed) “Shoot First” and Voter Disenfranchisement laws, like State Farm, who months after Trayvon Martin’s shooting death, are still tethered to ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Company), an entity largely responsible for the introduction of bills regarding “Shoot First” laws in State legislatures.

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Alison Crockett will never claim to sing “for the people,”  yet with her new recording, Mommy, What’s a Depression?, in the spirit of the Occupy Movement, literally occupies Black music on behalf  of the myriad issues that affect the everyday lives of folk who can never, legitimately, hope to benefit from the lives of the so-called 1%.  With it’s double-worded title—a nod to economic realities that have looked like a depression for many even before the 2008 economic crash and the mental health issues that afflict far too many brilliant and productive citizens—Mommy, What’s a Depression? recalls a time when Black music captured the full range of human emotions, instead of simply our desires to be desired and to consume and be consumed.  As Crockett notes on her blog Diva Against Insanity “I thought real long and hard about what I wanted to say with this record…The point is that on this record I'm trying to make more than just music. On this record I want to reach your brain (or at least your subconscious) even as it makes you move your behind.”

To be sure when an artist starts talking about “more than just music” it rarely inspires the belief that aesthetics will outweigh dogma and ideology (check KRS-One’s oeuvre for a reference); Marvin Gaye was most explicitly concerned with the artistic value of What’s Going On?, not the goal of recording, what is arguably, the most perfect balance of pop and politics.  In the case of Crockett, it is to her credit that she never loses sight of that balance; a balance that has been cultivated throughout her career on recordings like On Becoming a Woman (2003) and the phenomenal Bare (2007).  Indeed, part of her rationale for launching a blog was to offer a broader context for her music: “I think of the blog as an extension of [Mommy, What’s a Depression?]; I found I have so much more to say than I could put into lyrics and sounds.”

Crockett’s musical ideas find a wide range of expression.  To call her an R&B vocalist would be too limiting; to call her a Soul artist is too conjure a tradition she is indebted to, but  not defined by.  On Mommy, What’s a Depression? Crockett’s gestures to Go-Go, Jazz, Santigold-styled Funk, gut-bucket Blues, Trip-Hop, Tin-Pan Alley, and what I like to refer to as “Cosmopolitan Soul” (see Foreign Exchange or Julie Dexter).  Like her previous recordings where she’s covered pop-Soul icons like Janet Jackson (“When I Think of You”) and Sade (“Love is Stronger Than Pride” or classic Soul recordings—Crockett’s stripped version of “Isn’t She Lovely” would bring Stevie Wonder to tears—Crockett is not afraid to take on a giant or two.  On Mommy, What’s a Depression, that honor goes to Donny Hathaway, as Crockett covers his version of the Gary McFarland penned “Sack Full of Dream” (also previously recorded by Grady Tate and most recently pianist Onaje Allan Gumbs with vocals by actor Obba Babatunde).

Thematically, Crockett takes aim at the 1% on tracks like “Gentrification” and American imperialism on the track “My Man’s Gone Now,” which in the spirit of non-partisanship, holds both President’s Bush and Obama accountable.  On “Talkin Like You Know,” Crockett takes on  “professional” pundits: “objective my ass, you don’t give a damn,” replete with a Go-Go Beat (and shout-out to the late Little Benny), making explicit that s, he is offering a critique to the political culture of Washington, DC and, and acknowledging how localized musical forms like Go-Go offer critical resistance.

Nowhere is Crockett’s vision most sharp than on her update of Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues” with “Trouble in the Lowlands (Backwater Blues).” With a nod also to Gil Scott-Heron’s “H2o Blues,” “Trouble in the Lowlands” is a tribute to the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf region oil spill, featuring comments from Presidents #43 & #44 (again in the spirit of non-partisanship) about both “natural” disasters--wrapped around laugh tracks to highlight just how absurd the Federal Government’s response was in both cases.

Using “Backwater Blues” as a prime example, part of the brilliance of Crockett’s Mommy, What’s a Depression?, is her ability to use music to highlight the cyclical nature of the trauma many in America are experiencing.  In adding her voice to the “Dream Act” generation, Crockett’s reaches back to an old composition “The Old Country,” originally recorded on a Nancy Wilson/Julian “Cannonball” Adderley collaboration from 1961, which featured lyrics by Curtis Lewis—a popular Black composer from the era of Tin Pan Alley—and music by Adderley.  The song, in Crockett’s hands, makes clear the connection between the history of citizenship and origin in the United States.  As Crockett writes, “I really love the song because I believe it's a story about our country: immigration.  With the exception of us black folks whose ancestors got off a different kind of boat, almost everyone else in this country has an ‘old country’.” 

Crockett, makes direct links to the Great Depression of the 1930s with the medley of the Gershwins’ “They All Laughed” (1937), Harold Arlen’s “I’ve Got the World on a String” (1932) and Bob Thiele’s hopeful “What a Wonderful World,” originally recorded in 1968 by Louis Armstrong in a gesture towards racial harmony in the midst of the Black Power era.  Thiele was the longtime head of Impulse Records, where he worked with John Coltrane and Oliver Nelson, among many, and later his own Flying Dutchmen Records, which was the recording home of Gil Scott Heron early in his career.  All three songs represent efforts in their historic moments, to divert attention away from the social and economic crises of the time.  Reflecting the mediated sonic quality of the song—recorded as if on what would have been inferior audio equipment from the 1930s—Crockett interjects her own views into the narrative, albeit comically, effective undermining the rosy view that the songs’ composers and lyricists intended (“damn trickle down economics | been thirty years and ain't nothing trickled down to me yet”).

Other standouts on Mommy, What’s a Depression? include “I Am a Million,” “H-U-M-a-N” and “Come Back as a Flower” which features spoken-word artist Ursula Rucker. The latter track is a truly obscure cover from Stevie Wonder’s oft-dismissed The Secret Life of Plants, (1979) though Francesca Royster’s forthcoming book Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Minnesota Press), should put the album in its proper context.  Crockett’s version of the song, featuring the multi-tracking of her vocals, has the feel of the fictitious Sweet Honey in the Rock Do the Stevie Wonder Songbook.

It does a disservice to Alison Crockett’s talents and art, to reduce Mommy, What’s a Depression? to a protest album;  it is so much more.  The shame is that so few will ever know, just how much more.

Video: "The Economy Sux"--by T.E.S. featuring Corey Glover

"The Economy Sux" Feat. Corey Glover

Available on iTunes: http://bit.ly/wFWMuU

Produced By Andre Betts

RockYoMama and Skutch Entertainment 2012

What’s the Deal with Russell Simmons? Deconstructing the Black 1%

The Def Jam icon is part-activist, part-capitalist...so who is he really?

What’s the Deal with Russell Simmons? 

Deconstructing the Black 1%

by Mark Anthony Neal | Ebony.com

For far too many Americans, there is little distinction to be made among those who comprise the so-called 1%; this was made apprent recently in the dismissive reaction to the travails of locked-out NBA ballers, where the conflict was reduced to a battle between millionaires and billionaires (as if the NBA owners were not in position to set labor relations precedents—worker mobility, depressed wages, the value of labor unions—that could impact everyday American workers). The general lack of nuance with which many in this country engage the issue of wealth is symptomatic of a general inability to make broader distinctions between power and wealth. Thus it’s not surprising that many lump all of the so-called 1% into one group, as if they shared common values, traveled the same routes to their wealth, or deployed their wealth to the same ends—ends that are thought to be inherently antithetical to progressive movement.

The criticism faced by #Occupy Movement supporter Russell Simmons is emblematic of a trend among critics of Black elites about their seeming contradictory support of the movement. In one critique, “The Black Millionaires of Occupy Wall Street,” writer Cord Jefferson takes Simmons to task for his own business practices—like predatory pre-paid debit cards—noting that the Hip-Hop mogul’s support of #Occupy is “convenient” in that it “doesn't call into question the foundation on which he’s amassed a 35,000-square-foot home.” Simmons’ business practices are, of course, fair game—yet to think that Simmons, or any of the Black celebrities who have empathized with the movement are some how complicit in the world that the 99% are symbolically dismantling, is to not really understand how power really functions.

Simmons’ depiction as a celebrity endorser of a pre-paid debit card—as figures such as Suze Orman and Lil Wayne have recently launched such cards—has recently drawn his ire. In an open letter to the “Financial Press,” where Simmons compares himself to Richard Branson and Mark Zuckerburg, he writes, “With the issuance of the first RushCard, I created the first Prepaid Debit Card Account, requiring no linkages whatsoever to a consumer checking account. Today, millions of Americans manage their financial lives with the assistance of prepaid debit cards issued by UniRush and our competitors.”

Yet underlying Simmons’ complaint and response to the reduction of his business acumen to his celebrity is largely motivated by a dismissal of hip-hop culture and its constituents (or consumers, depending on your vantage) as anything of value. It is a well-worn accusation, that is more often on-point than not, but also highlights the classic spin of a cultural gatekeeper, who resists having to address real issues of accountability by continually highlighting his (now tenuous) relationship to hip-hop culture. Simmons may not be of a 1% that actually impacts policy in this country, like say the Koch Brothers or the substantial number of elected officials who are amongst the nation's most wealthy. Yet, his role in contemporary Black life is deserving of some level of scrutiny.

Read Full Essay @ Ebony.com

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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press) and Professor of African & African-American Studies at Duke University. He is founder and managing editor of NewBlackMan and host of the weekly webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

Jasiri X and 1Hood Media Talk with Occupy the Hood

Jasiri X:

It’s hard to believe Occupy the Hood is just a little more than 3 months old. Inspired by Occupy Wall St, Malik Rhasaan and Ife Johari formed Occupy the Hood to make sure issues specific to the Black community were not overlooked. In the subsequent media firestorm Occupy the  Hood was featured on sites as diverse as CNN and WorldstarHipHop and was highlighted in Time Magazine’s 2011 Person of the Year, “The Protester“. 

But, with attention comes haters, some upset that Occupy the Hood is getting the recognition they feel they deserve, some afraid they may lose their funding to Occupy the Hood, and some who feel because they haven’t personally co signed Malik and Ife they’re not “legitimate” leadership.

In this interview Malik Rhasaan breaks down the origin of Occupy the Hood and takes on their critics and detractors.

What If We Occupied Language?

Dread Scott and Kyle Goen

What If We Occupied Language?

by H. Samy Alim | New York Times | The Stone

When I flew out from the San Francisco airport last October, we crossed above the ports that Occupy Oakland helped shut down, and arrived in Germany to be met by traffic caused by Occupy Berlin protestors. But the movement has not only transformed public space, it has transformed the public discourse as well.

Occupy.

It is now nearly impossible to hear the word and not think of the Occupy movement.

Even as distinguished an expert as the lexicographer and columnist Ben Zimmer admitted as much this week: “occupy, ” he said, is the odds-on favorite to be chosen as the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year.

It has already succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate, taking phrases like “debt-ceiling” and “budget crisis” out of the limelight and putting terms like “inequality” and “greed” squarely in the center. This discursive shift has made it more difficult for Washington to obscure the spurious reasons for the financial meltdown and the unequal outcomes it has exposed and further produced.

To most, the irony of a progressive social movement using the term “occupy” to reshape how Americans think about issues of democracy and equality has been clear. After all, it is generally nations, armies and police who occupy, usually by force. And in this, the United States has been a leader. The American government is just now after nine years ending its overt occupation of Iraq, is still entrenched in Afghanistan and is maintaining troops on the ground in dozens of countries worldwide. All this is not to obscure the fact that the United States as we know it came into being by way of an occupation —  a gradual and devastatingly violent one that all but extinguished entire Native American populations across thousands of miles of land

Yet in a very short time, this movement has dramatically changed how we think about occupation. In early September, “occupy” signaled on-going military incursions. Now it signifies progressive political protest. It’s no longer primarily about force of military power; instead it signifies standing up to injustice, inequality and abuse of power. It’s no longer about simply occupying a space; it’s about transforming that space.

In this sense, Occupy Wall Street has occupied language, has made “occupy” its own. And, importantly, people from diverse ethnicities, cultures and languages have participated in this linguistic occupation — it is distinct from the history of forcible occupation in that it is built to accommodate all, not just the most powerful or violent.

As Geoff Nunberg, the long-time chair of the usage panel for American Heritage Dictionary, and others have explained, the earliest usage of occupy in English that was linked to protest can be traced to English media descriptions of Italian demonstrations in the 1920s, in which workers “occupied” factories until their demands were met. This is a far cry from some of its earlier meanings. In fact, The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “occupy” once meant “to have sexual intercourse with.” One could imagine what a phrase like “Occupy Wall Street” might have meant back then.

In October, Zimmer, who is also the chair of the American Dialect Society’s New Word Committee, noted on NPR’s “On the Media” that the meaning of occupy has changed  dramatically since its arrival into the English language in the 14th century. “It’s almost always been used as a transitive verb,” Zimmer said. “That’s a verb that takes an object, so you occupy a place or a space. But then it became used as a rallying cry, without an object, just to mean to take part in what are now called the Occupy protests. It’s being used as a modifier — Occupy protest, Occupy movement. So it’s this very flexible word now that’s filling many grammatical slots in the language.”

What if we transformed the meaning of occupy yet again? Specifically, what if we thought of Occupy Language as more than the language of the Occupy movement, and began to think about it as a movement in and of itself? What kinds of issues would Occupy Language address? What would taking language back from its self-appointed “masters” look like?  We might start by looking at these questions from the perspective of race and discrimination, and answer with how to foster fairness and equality in that realm.

Occupy Language might draw inspiration from both the way that the Occupy movement has reshaped definitions of “occupy,” which teaches us that we give words meaning and that discourses are not immutable, and from the way indigenous movements have contested its use, which teaches us to be ever-mindful about how language both empowers and oppresses, unifies and isolates.

For starters, Occupy Language might first look inward. In a recent interview, Julian Padilla of the People of Color Working Group pushed the Occupy movement to examine its linguistic choices:

To occupy means to hold space, and I think a group of anti-capitalists holding space on Wall Street is powerful, but I do wish the NYC movement would change its name to “‘decolonise Wall Street”’ to take into account history, indigenous critiques, people of colour and imperialism… Occupying space is not inherently bad, it’s all about who and how and why. When  white colonizers occupy land, they don’t just sleep there over night, they steal and destroy. When indigenous people occupied Alcatraz Island it was (an act of) protest.

This linguistic change can remind Americans that a majority of the 99 percent has benefited from the occupation of native territories.

Occupy Language might also support the campaign to stop the media from using the word “illegal” to refer to “undocumented” immigrants. From the campaign’s perspective, only inanimate objects and actions are labeled illegal in English; therefore the use of “illegals” to refer to human beings is dehumanizing. The New York Times style book currently asks writers to avoid terms like “illegal alien” and “undocumented,” but says nothing about “illegals.” Yet The Times’ standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, did recently weigh in on this, saying that the term “illegals” has an “unnecessarily pejorative tone” and that “it’s wise to steer clear.”

Pejorative, discriminatory language can have real life consequences. In this case, activists worry about the coincidence of the rise in the use of the term “illegals” and the spike in hate crimes against all Latinos. As difficult as it might be to prove causation here, the National Institute for Latino Policy reports that the F.B.I.’s annual Hate Crime Statistics show that Latinos comprised two thirds of the victims of ethnically motivated hate crimes in 2010. When someone is repeatedly described as something, language has quietly paved the way for violent action.

But Occupy Language should concern itself with more than just the words we use; it should also work towards eliminating language-based racism and discrimination. In the legal system, CNN recently reported that the U.S. Justice Department alleges that Arizona’s infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, among other offenses, has discriminated against “Latino inmates with limited English by punishing them and denying critical services.” In education, as linguistic anthropologist Ana Celia Zentella notes, hostility towards those who speak “English with an accent” (Asians, Latinos, and African Americans) continues to be a problem. In housing, The National Fair Housing Alliance has long recognized “accents” as playing a significant role in housing discrimination. On the job market, language-based discrimination intersects with issues of race, ethnicity, class and national origin to make it more difficult for well-qualified applicants with an “accent” to receive equal opportunities.

In the face of such widespread language-based discrimination, Occupy Language can be a critical, progressive linguistic movement that exposes how language is used as a means of social, political and economic control. By occupying language, we can expose how educational, political, and social institutions use language to further marginalize oppressed groups; resist colonizing language practices that elevate certain languages over others; resist attempts to define people with terms rooted in negative stereotypes; and begin to reshape the public discourse about our communities, and about the central role of language in racism and discrimination.

As the global Occupy movement has shown, words can move entire nations of people — even the world — to action. Occupy Language, as a movement, should speak to the power of language to transform how we think about the past, how we act in the present, and how we envision the future.

The illustrations for this post are part of a collection of Occupy movement posters at the site Occuprint .

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H. Samy Alim directs the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL) at Stanford University. His forthcoming book, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S., written with Geneva Smitherman, examines the racial politics of the Obama presidency through a linguistic lens.

My Barack Obama Problem

My Barack Obama Problem

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

Like many people on the Left, I have become disillusioned with the Obama Presidency.  As one of those people who devoted huge amounts of time, money and energy to getting Obama elected, and who cried on election night when his victory was assured, I found myself hoping against hope that there was some redemptive quality to his leadership amidst expansion of foreign wars,  attacks on public school teachers, bailouts of banks unaccompanied by serious controls, and a host of other policies that appeared to contradict everything he stood for during his campaign.

Although my heart wasn’t in it, I tried to justify his policies as the result of a powerful congressional opposition that refused to support policies that brought the full power of the federal government behind job creation and income policies designed to ease the pain of the  nation’s  struggling working class and middle class, along with those long trapped in poverty.

But recently, I have started to think that the “real” Barack Obama is not the community organizer pictured in Dreams from My Father or the fierce defender of the middle class that emerged on the campaign trail, but a cynical, ambitious, politician who loves spending time with the rich and the powerful and who has tied his administration’s and his own future to gaining their support.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, after many disappointments, was the image of the President regaling a $2,500 a plate dinner in San Francisco while Occupy Oakland was being attacked by an army of police using tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray and bulldozers.  The Obama of Dreams from My Father would have rushed across the Bay to stand with the Occupiers, but this Obama didn’t so much as give the protesters a second thought. 

The President was totally relaxed and in his element with the hedge fund and dot com executives, and media moguls, supporting his campaign. THEY, not the Occupiers, were now his real constituency. Not only were they the ones funding his presidential campaign, they were the ones who were going to be employing him after he left the Presidency, assuring that he, and his family would be part of the 1 Percent for the foreseeable future.

As a young man, who like the President, grew up in a lower middle class family and went to an Ivy League college and graduate school, I can understand the lure of great wealth and power to someone who grew up with neither.  When you are a talented person from a family of modest means, it can be very heady to be courted by and praised by some of the nation’s smartest, wealthiest and most powerful people.   And if you are so talented and charismatic that these people decide to groom you to become one of them, it can definitely persuade you to make compromises that end up affecting your conscience and your social consciousness.

For very personal reasons, I never enjoyed hanging out in the clubs and restaurants and vacation houses of the wealthy as much as the times I spent in neighborhood ball fields, schoolyards, and community centers interacting with working class and middle class people. I keep my feet in both worlds but I consider “the hood” to be my moral compass, the place where I have to go to find out if my life’s mission has any real traction, any real meaning.

But I fear the President is different.  The people who come to the White House, whether the professional basketball players who show up at his birthday parties, the talented musicians who come to entertain, or the CEO’s and political kingmakers who come to discuss policy, are always a cross session of the most successful people in whatever field they are in. The President never tries to bring in ordinary people to talk to him privately and find out what is going on in their workplaces and neighborhoods. Those are not the people he trust, those are not the people he is comfortable with; those are not the people he wants to spend time with when he leaves the Presidency.

A real cue to the President’s character came when he decided to host an Education Summit. To this event, he invited CEO’s of the nation’s largest corporations, and executives in some of the nation’s wealthiest foundations, but not one teacher.   This is the real Barack Obama—someone who has left the world he grew up in, and the communities in Chicago he organized in, and who craves the company and advice of people, like himself, who have accomplished great things or accumulated great wealth.

In some ways, he is the perfect President for a country where ambition is honored above loyalty, generosity, and concern for those who have fallen in hard times and where we honor those who have overcome great obstacles to “rise to the top.”

But whether he is the right President to lead us through the worst economic crisis in seventy years and stand up for all the people who have lost jobs and homes and hope is another matter entirely.

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Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

"It Refuses to be Dismantled": Angela Davis at #Occupy Oakland

From truthpeaceful:

 

Angela Davis speaks to the Occupy Oakland rally on the day of the West Coast Port Shutdown. Barbara Becknell (representative of Stanley 'Tookie' Williams) and Angela Davis propose a national day of action in solidarity with the 2.5 million prisoners incarcerated and 3,500 on death row in the U.S. She proposes occupy mobilizations at every major prison in this country to act against the prison-industrial complex plaguing the nation and cannibalizing our education system.

FILM THE POLICE - B. Dolan feat. Toki Wright, Jasiri X, Buddy Peace, Sage Francis

DOWNLOAD THIS MP3 FOR FREE on the homepage of http://StrangeFamousRecords.com right now!

B. DOLAN's "FILM THE POLICE" pays tribute to N.W.A.'s infamous "F*ck the Police," serving as a call to action for the digitized media movement while responding to the recent explosion of police brutality all across the world.

This free MP3, courtesy of STRANGE FAMOUS RECORDS, features a reconstruction of Dr. Dre's original beat, brilliantly reanimated by UK producer BUDDY PEACE. Label CEO, SAGE FRANCIS, opens the song by picking up the gavel where Dr. Dre left it 23 years ago, introducing a blistering, true-to-style flip of Ice Cube's original verse by SFR cornerstone, B. Dolan. TOKI WRIGHT (Rhymesayers Entertainment) follows up by stepping into the shoes of MC Ren, penning the people's struggle against cops as a case of "Goliath Vs. a bigger giant." Finally, Jasiri X (Pittsburgh rapper/activist) rounds out the track by filling in for Eazy-E, reminding us that police brutality disproportionately affects poor people of color.

With the Occupy Movement bringing various forms of injustice to the forefront of people's consciousness, "Film the Police" is a reminder that cops have been a continued and increasingly militarized presence in public streets. Thanks to the widespread use of smartphones and video cameras, along with the popularity of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, the power of the media has been put back into the people's hands as they document the injustices perpetrated by those who have sworn to serve and protect them.

The lyrics are available at: http://bdolan.net/film-the-police-lyrics/
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http://twitter.com/SFRupdates

This video was directed by Mason Johnson (Klepticenter Productions) and edited by Weston Woodbury.

"Film the Police" will be included on B. DOLAN and BUDDY PEACE's "HOUSE OF BEES VOL. II" mixtape at http://StrangeFamousRecords.com

Politics as Usual: Decoding the Attacks on a Liberal Education

Politics as Usual: Decoding the Attacks on a Liberal Education

by David J. Leonard, Mark Anthony Neal and James Braxton Peterson | NewBlackMan

Few university courses generate much attention from mainstream media, but Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson’s course “The Sociology of Hip-Hop: Urban Theodicy of Jay-Z” has drawn national attention from NBC’s Today Show, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, USA Today, and Forbes.com among many others.  To be sure such attention is not unusual for Dyson, who is one of the most visible academics in the United States and has offered courses dealing with hip-hop culture, sociology, and Black religious and vernacular expression for more than twenty-years.  Yet, such attention seems odd; hundreds of university courses containing a significant amount of content related to Hip-hop culture and Black youth are taught every year—and have been so, for more than a decade.  In addition, there are dozens of scholarly studies of Hip-hop published each year—Julius Bailey’s edited volume Jay-Z: Essays of Hip-Hop’s Philosopher King, among those published just this year—and two Ivy League universities, Harvardand Cornell, boast scholarly archives devoted to the subject of Hip-Hop.

Any course focused on a figure like Jay-Z (Shawn Corey Carter), given his contemporary Horatio Algernarrative, and his reputation as an urban tastemaker, was bound to generate considerable attention, but the nature of the attention that Dyson’s class has received and some of the attendant criticism, suggest that much more is at play.

In early November, The Washington Post offered some of the first national coverage of the class, largely to coincide with the arrival of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne tour to Washington DC’s Verizon Center.  Jay-Z dutifully complied with the attention by giving Professor Dyson a shout-out from the stage. The largely favorable article about the class, did make note, as have many subsequent stories, about the cost of tuition at Georgetown; as if somehow the cost of that tuition is devalued by kids taking classes about hip-hop culture.

Other profiles of the course and Dyson have gone out of their way to make the point that the course had mid-term and final exams, as if that wouldn’t be standard procedure for any nationally recognized senior scholar at a top-tier research university in this country.  Such narrative slippages speak volumes about the widespread belief that courses that focus on some racial and cultural groups, are created in slipshod fashion and lack rigor; it is a critique that is well worn, and that various academic disciplines, such as Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies and even Sociology have long had to confront.

As ethnomusicologist Joe Schoss, author of Foundation: B-boys, B-girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York, recently suggested on Facebook, courses constructed around the mythology of “great men” are often the vehicle in which outlier disciplines are made legible within traditional academic settings. Indeed Dyson’s career has been marked by such studies, where he’s examined figures such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marvin Gaye, hip-hop artists Tupac Shakur and Nas (Nasir Jones).  He is also teaching a class on the legacy of Jesse Jackson this semester, to commemorate the Civil Rights leader’s 70^thbirthday. 

Figures like Dyson, and Brown University Professor Tricia Rose, who authored the landmark Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America in 1994, were at the forefront of establishing Hip-Hop studies as a viable—and yes popular—academic discipline for nearly two decades. 

The reality of the presence of Hip-Hop Studies at virtually every major college and University, unveils the “oh my, golly gee” discovery mode of so much of the reporting and controversy surrounding the Jay Z class, as more manufactured, than anything else.  More to the point, the attack on the validity of a class focused on a prominent and highly influential cultural figure, who happens to be a young Black man who has trafficked in outlier sub-cultures, seems more emblematic of an assault on the value of a liberal education. This assault comes at a historical moment when the products of a liberal education, are literally raising critical questions about the nature of inequality in American society.

There are other critics, some of whom throw darts from within the realm of Hip Hop Studies.  They disparage Jay-Z as merely a misogynist, a hustler who promotes consumerism and other poisonous messages to young minds that mindlessly follow him.  Some of these same critics have also questioned Dyson’s knowledge of Hip Hop culture, his cultural bona fides on the discourses of the subject matter and his ability to choose the appropriate subjects.  So at the same time that conservative critics question the validity of Hip Hop studies vis a vis Shakespeare or *yawn* classical music, other critics (the one’s we’d assume might appreciate the value of such a course in the broader context of Africana, Popular culture, and Hip Hop studies) are quick to cast Dyson as an outsider; to proffer Dead Prez or Mos Def as more appropriate subject matter for this kind of course. 

Well, “we don’t believe you/You need more people.” “Do you dudes listen to music?/Or do you just skim through it?”   Yes Jay-Z’s music has many limitations, faults, and critical flaws – some of which he is poignantly aware.  But that is exactly why his life and lyrics make substantive subject matter for sociological inquiry.  His influence and impact – or what some may deem popularity or sell-out-status – are more grist for the sociological mill.  In the end, the critique of the course that suggests that Hip Hop Studies has no place in the academy is eerily connected to those critiques that question Dyson’s authenticity as either an elite scholar or a ‘real’ Hip Hop Head.   And we LOVE Dead Prez, but the “mainstream” media ain’t checking for a Dead Prez class and in order to stave off the onslaught against area studies, interdisciplinary studies, Hip Hop studies, and more broadly but directly, the Humanities, we are going to need some of that mainstream attention.  Folks hate to hear this, but part of the reason why we have access to so much of the ‘underground’ Hip Hop that we know and love is because there exists a healthy amount of popular attention (and dollars) directed at the drivel we (love to) hate.

In a recent article that was less than optimistic about the future of the humanities within American higher education, Dr. Frank Donoghue wrote, "When we claim to wonder whether the humanities will survive the twenty first century, we're really asking, 'Will the humanities have a place in the standard higher-education curriculum in the United States?' (2010).  The answer appears to be no from a myriad of places.   “But there's no denying that the fight between the cerebral B.A. vs. the practical B.S. is heating up,” writes Nancy Cook in “The Death of Liberal Arts.”  “For now, practicality is the frontrunner, especially as the recession continues to hack into the budgets of both students and the schools they attend.” Peddling the often-cited binaries between “cerebral” and “the practical,” the intellectual and the useful, Cook highlights the ubiquitous attack on academic enterprises that seemingly don’t produce tangible results or profits.

While commentators tend to focus on the declining interest and place of a liberal arts education that has resulted from the increased costs of higher education, the focus on securing a good job upon graduation, and the professionalization of higher education, the waning place of liberal arts and humanities is not simply an organic process.  It reflects a direct assault from conservative factions within the American political landscape.  In Texas, Governor Rick Perry and the Texas Public Policy Foundation called for substantial changes in the delivery of higher education, proposing greater emphasis on teaching and research that benefits the state and its economic needs.  Defending the call for reform, Ronald L. Trowbridge, “The Case for Higher Ed Accountability” described his views on educational reform in the following way:

What is the value of any research endeavor to students or to wider societal needs? Some process of evaluation must be established. If researchers wish to pursue matters that do not serve students or wider societal needs, they are certainly free to do so, but such should be so without release time from the classroom.

Texas is not alone.  In Florida, Governor Rick Scott recently announced his desire to remake public universities with greater emphasis on programs that stimulate the economy and produce future workers in key industries.  “If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education then I’m going to take that money to create jobs,” Scott noted “So I want that money to go to degrees where people can get jobs in this state.”  The divestment of public investment in the arts, human inquiry, and humanistic endeavors has been central to the conservative movement.  Opposition to intellectual pursuits and the neoliberal emphasis on professionalism has had profound influence on contemporary culture.

Describing a friend who wanted to study comparative literature, Andrew Bast notes his initial reaction as one of “bewilderment” and “fascination,” asking himself, “What in the world would be the value in that?” Capturing the hegemonic of the assault and systemic devaluing of the humanities within contemporary culture, he makes “The Case for a Useless Degree:”

I later learned that there's actually a huge value in it. Computer science, accounting, marketing—the purpose of many majors is self-evident. They lead to well-paid jobs and clear-cut career paths. (One hopes, at least.) But comparative literature, classics, and philosophy—according to the new conventional wisdom—offer no clear trajectory.

The recent spectacle and media frenzy surrounding Michael Eric Dyson’s “Sociology of Hip-Hop” course points to the powerful ways that “useless degrees” and “useless” knowledge are under attack.  It also exposes the critical discourses that exist within Hip Hop studies – who can teach it/who is authentic enough to teach it.  The media frenzy and the debate about this class reflect a well-organized attack on the humanities, liberal arts education and individual academic FREEDOM.

Strangely enough, the internecine squabbles about whether or not Jay-Z is fit to be taught or if Dyson is fit to teach similarly swirl in the discursive diatribes against certain “less practical” disciplines.  What reflects back at us is an ideology that demonizes critical thought, demonizes intellectual inquiry, and silences conversations about race, gender, inequality and other issues of social injustice.  A focus here on Jay-Z or Michael Eric Dyson misses the point because the class is becoming a stand-in for a larger assault on education, intellectualism, and critical thinking.  The media coverage and the ensuing debates about it—on social media—reflect  an overall effort to demonize those who teach, those who educate, and those who articulate "freedom dreams."  The culture wars are back and it’s us against them and us against us. 

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris. Follow him on Twitter @DR_DJL.

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press) and Professor of African & African-American Studies at Duke University.  He is founder and managing editor of NewBlackMan and host of the weekly webcast Left of Black.  Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

James Braxton Peterson is Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University  and the author of the forthcoming Major Figures: Critical Essays on Hip Hop Music(Mississippi University Press). Follow him at @DrJamesPeterson.

This is What Democracy Looks Like: The Occupy Movement Will Reinvent Itself

This is What Democracy Looks Like:   

The Occupy Movement Will Reinvent Itself

by Mark Naison | NewBlackMan

The tent cities have been bulldozed and the parks have been cleared.  Big city mayors see clean spaces, washed and sanitized, and hope that the Occupations were a bad dream. Obama supporters hope that the three months of protest represented a brief detour in a progressive movement that will ultimately come to its senses and concentrate on re-electing the president and campaigning for Democratic candidates for congress, realizing- with the help of a collection of bizarre and frighteningly ill informed Republican presidential aspirants--, that the most important initiatives to achieve a more just society take place at the polls, not in the streets.

It’s a plausible scenario, to be sure, neat and rational. As many liberal pundits have pointed out, taking practical steps to address the economic inequality issues Occupy Wall street has raised- such as shifting the tax burden from the working class and middle class to the very wealthy- can only be done by creating electoral majorities in favor of such policies that don’t currently exist, and that can only be achieved through the “grunt work” of voter registration an organizing election campaigns in behalf of progressive candidates. And there is no question that many constituencies who were uneasily allied with the Occupy movements, particularly labor unions, plan to do just that in coming months and coming years.

But I am not sure that the experience of the last three months can be nearly excised from the national consciousness and the energy of Occupy supporters nearly directed into electoral activity.

First of all, the experience of direct democracy in the Occupy movement has had a profound, even transformative effect, on those who have participated; one that will not be so easy to persuade those who have experienced it to relinquish.  The young people in this movement—part of an entire generation facing a stagnant job market and crippling debt—discovered  they had the power to make the whole world pay attention to what they were saying by occupying public spaces, working outside normal political channels and refusing to anoint leaders to speak for them. 

But it was more than the reaction of the outside world that was transformative. It was the transformation of the Occupy spaces themselves into places where free discussion and debate could flourish in ways that existed nowhere else in the society, certainly not in increasingly corporatized and bureaucratized universities, stressed filled public schools under pressure to deliver higher test scores, or workplaces ruled by dictatorial managers cognizant that a tight job market assured them of worker compliance.  

When Occupiers chanted “This is what democracy looks like,” they were proclaiming what few people have been willing to acknowledge—that lived democracy and freedom of expression have been eroding in the United States for some time, as institutions become more hierarchical and wealth has been more concentrated at the top.  What the Occupy movement created was a space for a no holds bar discussion of a huge array of issues where people, thanks to the mic check method of repeating comments, actually listened to one another.  Do such free zones exist in our schools,  universities and workplaces?  If they did, the Occupy movements would not have generated the levels of participation they did!  There is a reason why Occupy movements sprung up in over 300 towns and cities and that is because they embodied a deeply felt need for freedom of expressions as well as a hunger to address issues of economic inequality and the mal-distribution of wealth.

Which brings us to the next point about why this movement is likely to persist and that is the reaction of authorities, whether mayors, or college presidents, to its emergence. The size, technological sophistication, and at times the astonishing violence of police mobilizations against Occupy protests dramatized to the nation, and the world, the degree to which the United States has become a police/national security state willing to go to extraordinary attempts to intimidate its own citizens.  To immigrants, and to people living in minority and working class communities, particularly young men, this insight is nothing new—they have experienced intimidation by police forces and other government authorities on an almost daily basis, not only in their neighborhoods, but in prisons and detention centers. But until the Occupy movement, most middle class Americans including college educated youth, could ignore abuses of police power or pretend that the most extreme examples (the police murder of an unarmed Sean Bell in Queens NY) were more the exception than the rule.

But now, for three months, the people of the United States have been exposed to a steady array of images of police forces using helicopters, bulldozers, sound cannons, tear gas and pepper spray not only against protesters peacefully assembling in universities and public parks, but against representatives of the press covering these events, and doing so with the collusion of the federal office of Homeland Security.  Not only were such police tactics borrowed from the playbook used by police in gentrifying cities to intimidate and contain minority youth, they drew upon post 9/11 National Security protocols used to combat terrorism such as closing bridges and subways and placing limits on what photographs might appear in the press.

In the repression of the Occupy movement, images of free speech under attack were created that cannot be neatly excised from the national imagination any more than pictures of Bull Connor unleashing police dogs and water hoses on teenage marchers  in Birmingham in 1963.

If the Occupy movement’s showed us, in words and deeds, “This is What Democracy Looks Like” those attacking the Occupations showed the world, albeit unintentionally “This is What a Police State Looks Like.”

It would be nice, our liberal friends tell us, if we could forget all of this unpleasantness and go back to the days of the first Obama presidential campaign when youth idealism and energy were directed to electing the first black president. Now, they say, it’s time to give him a second term, with a strong Democratic congress, so he can finish the job he started.

But the given what is happened in the last three months, I don’t think that is likely to happen. The genie has been let out of the bottle. Young people who have had a tasted of lived democracy of a kind they had never experienced and then watched it snuffed out by highly militarized police units using war on terror tactics will not become obedient doorbell ringers for a president who ignored their protest and may have secretly encouraged its suppression.

The Occupy movement may not take the same form as it did this fall, but it is very likely to reinvent itself in forms that will not please its liberal would be controllers, or its conservative critics.

And that is a very good thing for the country.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depressionand White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

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