Before Yo! MTV Raps and Rap City hit the markets in the late ‘80s, New York culture maven Michael Holman first made the move to put hip-hop culture on TV with the show Graffiti Rock.
In 1984, Holman—who played music with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Vincent Gallo in the legendarily obscure band Grey—got a bunch of banker friends to put together $150,000 to shoot the pilot for the series at Madison Ave. and 106th St. It screened on WPIX channel 11 in June 1984.
Holman turned the show into a seminar on the culture. Alongside future superstars Run D.M.C., Kool Moe Dee and Shannon—and cameos by “Prince Vince” Gallo and Debi Mazar—he featured his own crew the New York City Breakers, pieces by graf artist Brim, and hilarious slang translations. For the time, the show is pretty slick and ready for prime-time. Holman picks up the tragic story from there…
So the show airs and actually does much better than people thought! We got great ratings and aired in 88 syndicated markets, nationwide. But when we went to Las Vegas to sell the show at NAPTE (National Association of Producers of Television Entertainment) we hit a wall. First, the station managers (the people responsible for purchasing new shows in their markets) didn’t understand why “Graffiti Rock,” and hip hop was different to what Soul Train was offering. Secondly, certain stations wouldn’t take the chance to buy “Graffiti Rock,” unless other, larger markets did first. Chicago was waiting on L.A. to bite, and L.A. was waiting on New York. But the major New York syndicated stations at the time, were controlled by unsavory characters, and they wanted money under the table to put the show on the air! My main investors refused to deal with these forces (I of course would have done whatever I had to to get it on the air, and am still pissed they didn’t play along!)...
Graffiti Rock proved a legendary snapshot into what hip-hop TV was about to be. What a shot in the arm it would have been for the culture. Gnarls Barkley would later lovingly spoof Holman and the show for the video for their 2008 hit “Run” and before that, the Beastie Boys sampled Holman’s excellent little seminar on scratching in pt. 2 on their tune “Alright Hear This.”
I’ll leave part 3 of the YouTube of Graffiti Rock off this post in an appeal for you to reward a culture hero like Holman by buying the DVD.
Amazing and hilarious, especially the clip with the mother and child. Here are The Rolling Stones at their satanic peak doing promo clips for the 1969 ABC-TV show Music Scene. Wikipedia had this to say about this odd phenomenon:
Existing promos initially used to sell this show to ABC affiliates featured the improvisational group The Committee, which featured actor Howard Hesseman (then using the name Don Sturdy), as well as the Rolling Stones. The promos implied that the Stones would be appearing with some regularity on the program. However by the time The Music Scene went on the air, the Committee was nowhere to be seen and the Stones never appeared on the show.
This of course sent me scurrying about finding clips from the actual show. Richard previously posted this one of Sly and the Family Stone. Here are a few other great ones for your weekend viewing pleasure:
Three Dog Night doing Laura Nyro’s “Eli’s Coming.” Heavy Hollywood/ Satanic/ pre-Manson/ Rosemary’s Baby vibe going on here.
The first episode in the new series by Adam Curtis, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace is now available to watch in full on YouTube.
Starting by examining our current era of supposed economic, social and online freedoms, Curtis manages to join the dots between Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, the IMF’s involvement in East Asia, radical Islam and Silicon Valley’s economic boom. This episode features some very interesting and candid interviews with Rand confidants Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, Nathaniel having had an affair with Rand that lasted many years. Presented in the typical, excellent Adam Curtis style, using lots of obscure stock footage and a great soundtrack, this is essential viewing.
Episode two of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (“How The Idea Of The Ecosystem Was Invented”) is available to watch here.
If you haven’t read Tim Dickinson’s terrific article on the genius/lunacy of Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, in the new issue of Rolling Stone, it’s a must-read, tour-de-force bit-o-journalism. Dickinson manages to make sense of the entire wacko-conservative gestalt of Fox News: It’s a top down organization of far-right toadies—no liberals need bothering applying—each vying for attention, approval and career advancement—natch—from the power-mad, brilliant yet crazy-seeming paranoiac who runs that bughouse.
Here are three key “takeaway” paragraphs from the article:
Ailes begins each workday buffered by the elaborate private security detail that News Corp. pays to usher him from his $1.6 million home in New Jersey to his office in Manhattan. (His country home – in the aptly named village of Garrison – is phalanxed by empty homes that Ailes bought up to create a wider security perimeter.) Traveling with the Chairman is like a scene straight out of 24. A friend recalls hitching a ride with Ailes after a power lunch: “We come out of the building and there’s an SUV filled with big guys, who jump out of the car when they see him. A cordon is formed around us. We’re ushered into the SUV, and we drive the few blocks to Fox’s offices, where another set of guys come out of the building to receive ‘the package.’ The package is taken in, and I’m taken on to my destination.”Ailes is certain that he’s a top target of Al Qaeda terrorists. “You know, they’re coming to get me,” he tells friends. “I’m fully prepared. I’ve taken care of it.” (Ailes, who was once arrested for carrying an illegal handgun in Central Park, now carries a licensed weapon.) Inside his blast-resistant office at Fox News headquarters, Ailes keeps a monitor on his desk that allows him to view any activity outside his closed door. Once, after observing a dark-skinned man in what Ailes perceived to be Muslim garb, he put Fox News on lockdown. “What the hell!” Ailes shouted. “This guy could be bombing me!” The suspected terrorist turned out to be a janitor. “Roger tore up the whole floor,” recalls a source close to Ailes. “He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim – which is consistent with the ideology of his network.”
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Murdoch installed ailes in the corner office on Fox’s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. (In 1989, Ailes had broken up a protest of a Rudy Giuliani speech by gay activists, grabbing demonstrator by the throat and shoving him out the door.) Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having “bombproof glass” installed in the windows – even going so far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet. Looking down on the street below, he expressed his fears to Cooper, the editor he had tasked with up-armoring his office. “They’ll be down there protesting,” Ailes said. “Those gays.”
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Ailes knows exactly who is watching Fox News each day, and he is adept at playing to their darkest fears in the age of Obama. The network’s viewers are old, with a median age of 65: Ads cater to the immobile, the infirm and the incontinent, with appeals to join class action hip-replacement lawsuits, spots for products like Colon Flow and testimonials for the services of Liberator Medical (“Liberator gave me back the freedom I haven’t had since I started using catheters”). The audience is also almost exclusively white – only 1.38 percent of viewers are African-American. “Roger understands audiences,” says Rollins, the former Reagan consultant. “He knew how to target, which is what Fox News is all about.” The typical viewer of Hannity, to take the most stark example, is a pro-business (86 percent), Christian conservative (78 percent), Tea Party-backer (75 percent) with no college degree (66 percent), who is over age 50 (65 percent), supports the NRA (73 percent), doesn’t back gay rights (78 percent) and thinks government “does too much” (84 percent). “He’s got a niche audience and he’s programmed to it beautifully,” says a former News Corp. colleague. “He feeds them exactly what they want to hear.”
Fox News will make a lot more sense after you’ve read this article. You’ll be simultaneously impressed and sickened by the evil genius of Roger Ailes. Love ‘em or loathe him—I’m firmly in the latter category I can assure you—it cannot be denied what a media-manipulating genius he truly is.
How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory: The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America’s Unfair and Imbalanced Network (Rolling Stone)
Heard the one about the footballer, the actor, English privacy laws and Twitter? Not if you live in the UK you haven’t—or so the British legal system would like you to think. However the reality is very, very different. Things are kicking off here at the moment over the distribution of certain bits of information (which cannot be mentioned) concerning certain individuals (who cannot be named) on the Internet (where all this info is being made public regardless).
In the UK the courts can issue a thing called an “injunction.” This is in effect a gagging order that stops the press from reporting on a particular story or court case, though the injunction itself can still be reported on. It can be taken one step further with the imposition of a “super-injunction,” in which the media can not even report on the issuing of the original injunction. Recently a few new Twitter accounts have popped up that claim to spill the beans and name the names in a number of super-injunctions. Although oldstream media have been forced to remain silent on these stories, the juicy details have spread like wildfire across the Internet. You can have a look for yourself, though the names will probably not mean much to a non-Brit audience—the most popular of the Twitter accounts are InjunctionSuper, SuperInjunction, and SuperInjBuster.
Some of these claims leaking through these accounts are believed to be false, but some not. If they are true, this brings English privacy laws into massive disarray, and makes injunctions pretty useless at stopping information from reaching the public. And with the information now available, people are now voicing what many have suspected for years—that super injunctions are used not for the sake of justice but to protect the careers and public images of the rich and famous by gagging the press. Comments from senior members of the legal system only go to re-enforce the idea that they are badly out of touch with the public and the reality of social networking media. From the Telegraph interview with Lord Judge (yes, that is his name) last Friday:
“The internet had “by no means the same degree of intrusion into privacy as the story being emblazoned on the front pages of newspapers”, which “people trust more”, he said.”
But Internet access means that people in the UK can quickly and easily read about the injected stories in other countries’ media, begging the question, what’s the point of injunctions in this day and age? And so the British print media are fighting back, finding ways of getting around the court’s orders. Yesterday the Scottish Sunday Herald published the face of the footballer at the centre of the biggest super injunction row, Ryan Giggs, on its front page (injunction are apparently limited ot the English press). Giggs’ name was also mentioned in British Pariliament, meaning that that story can now be reported on in the English newspapers due to rules over “Parliamentary privilege”. MPs and the courts are now at loggerheads over whether injunctions should restrict Parilamentary privilege.
The major questions all of this brings to mind are: are we going to start seeing clampdowns on freedom of expression here on the Internet? Are new rules and measures going to be put in place to stop people from talking and writing about specific topics? Those topics may or may not be true, but should we be stopped from mentioning them? And just how exactly would these potential rules on the limiting of expression be enforced? The English courts have already issued the first ever injunction specifically for Facebook and Twitter but just how they are going to enforce these laws, in this age of WIkileaks and Anonymous, of proxies, of IP address blockers, of pay as you go dongles and multiple fake online personas, remains to be seen. Somehow I just don’t think it will be as simple as the lawyer Mark Stephens (interviewed in The Independent) believes:
“The person who has committed this contempt of court will be best advised to take their toothbrush because they will probably be going to Pentonville jail,” he said. “Their emails used to upload this information are being traced, I imagine, as we speak.”
The cat is out of the bag, as it were, or to use another mammalian metaphor, the horse has bolted. New information on the super injunction story (and the stories the super injunctions are trying to protect) is coming to light every day. To keep abreast of what’s going on you could keep tabs on the British news outlets I have linked to above (The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Evening Standard) or ironically you might just be better off getting your info from a non-British source. Me, I’ll stick to reading the no-holds-barred Super Injunction Blog. Tough luck Mr Giggs.
Just thought I would check in and report on how it’s going on the other side of the world on this momentous day. And I just LOVE this “Prairie-Dog Rapture” pic! Well, so far so good… unless you are a fundie, I guess. No sign of any earthquakes or bodies being mysteriously sucked up into the sky. Yet. There’s still two hours to go ‘til the official kick-off time so you never know, it might happen, but reports from the expanses of the planet that have already hit that 6pm deadline report nothing unusual. Oh, wait, there WERE a couple of earthquakes in the Pacific, but they were small (3-4 on the Richter scale, surely not God bothering size?) and apparently there tends to be a small earthquake somewhere in the Pacific every day anyway.
I am in Ireland at the moment and interestingly (for such a predominantly Catholic country) no one seems too fussed by this whole rapture malarky. Maybe the populace have had other things to think about. This week has seen a royal visit by Queen Elizabeth, the first visit to this isle of a British monarch since Ireland fought for, and won, independence way back in 1922. Now THAT is a momentous occasion. People who would normally be described as “patriots” and who within their own lifetimes have seen periods of real animosity against the British were seen cooing and ahhing at the British monarch’s presence. There were protests, of course, but the turnouts were small, estimated at around the 200 mark. This is what they looked like from the inside:
By all accounts the visit was a roaring success. Liz had a tour of ghostly Dublin, where roads were blocked off to keep people away from her highness. She was brought to Croke Park, the 80,000+ capacity sports arena that has a very special significance in the history of Irish nationalism. Bought by the Gaelic Athletics Association in 1913, it was used to encourage the playing of indigenous sports hurling and Gaelic football (at a time when the country was under strict British rule) and was seen as a hotbed of anti-British conspiracy by the then powers-that-be. It was at Croke Park that the infamous original Bloody Sunday occurred in 1921 when, in retaliation for a number of assassinations by the IRA, the British army and the Royal Irish Constabulary indiscriminately shot into the crowd during a Dublin-Tipperary football match killing 13 spectators and the Tipperary football captain. It was this incident that turned the tide of the war of independence against the British and ultimately led to the withdrawal of British troops from most of the island. The fact that the Queen visited this specific arena says a lot about how far relations between the Irish and the English have come in the resulting ninety years.
Her Madge also stopped off at the Coolmore Stud, the world’s largest breeding centre for thoroughbred horses, and in Cork city made a visit to its famous English Market. That bit was of particular significance to me, as my mother’s family have had a fruit and vegetable stall there for over 100 years. The English Market is a beautiful, hidden treasure in the vastly under-rated city (Cork is MUCH nicer than Dublin!) and could dearly use a boost in visits and trade in this era of multinationalization.
The English Market - the white haired man is my uncle.
Even more excitingly though, for me and a lot of people other people anyway, on Monday we will be being graced by a visit from President of the United States and the First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama. It’s only a flying visit really, as he is on his way to the UK for 4 days, but while here he will be travelling to County Offaly to look up some of his ancestors, and giving a public address on College Green in Dublin city centre. I expect the turn out for this to be very strong, and even though there will be a stepped up security presence, I really don’t think he has anything to worry about. In fact I think he will be greeted by a very warm Irish welcome, something that eluded President Bush a few years back. I won’t be here then, unfortunately, but the Irish media will be supplying day-long rolling coverage of his visit if you are interested in watching. I expect there to be protests too, but they will most likely be Queen-sized.
Anyway, so where was I… oh yes! The Rapture. Hmm, well there’s still a bit of time to kill before believers get hoovered up (or not). If there is any breaking news on this side of the pond I will dutifully report it. Or I might not actually, preferring to spend that time with my family. But for some reason or other all day I just haven’t been able to get this bloody song out of my mind. Any ideas why? Answers in a comment to the usual address…
I read this at my new favorite blog, No More Mister Nice Blog. If you like liberal rants as much as I like liberal rants, then you’ll find much to love about Steve M’s sharp, witty writing.
The context here is Steve’s contention that FOX News seems oddly intent on making it very, very difficult for a nationally electable Republican to get the party’s nomination because the network seems more interested in profitably pandering to their freedom loving patriots scooter-riding senior citizen wingnut viewership than continuing to be a reliable partner of the Republican party.
We call it “the right-wing noise machine” because we see it as an efficient, mechanized generator of propaganda that predictably steers the country rightward and regularly puts government in the hands of Republicans. But the Murdoch part of the machine is operating in such a way that the GOP is much less likely to win in 2012. Why?
Either the folks in Murdoch Land are supremely confident that they can move the country not just to the right but that far right—as far as Cain and Palin and even the birthers—or they don’t really care anymore about being the Republican Party’s propaganda wing, because catering to the needs of drooling ultra-extremists, even at the GOP’s expense, is such good business (and fits the personal predilections of rage junkies such as Roger Ailes).
Which means that Murdoch’s media properties may be harming the GOP right now—and may be helping to guarantee Obama’s reelection.
FOX News has really been floundering lately. Did you watch the clip of Jon Stewart on The O’Reilly Factor last night? He was being nice and he still wiped the floor with Bill O’Reilly on his own show. The Osama bin Laden hit left FOX’s talking heads discombobulated. It scrambled their predictable anti-Obama talking points. What do they have without them?
The notion that FOX News itself might be helping to reelect the president is one pregnant with irony, I think you’ll agree!
On the other hand, a just as valid argument can be made that it is now FOX News that runs the Republican party and not the other way around.
William Burroughs ponders the atom bomb, UFOs, dreams, psychedelics, astral projection, space travel, Brion Gysin and the cut-up technique in this lecture held at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado on August 11, 1980. Allen Ginsberg takes part toward the end.
In an experiment based on the cut-up technique, video of apocalyptic scenes from various Japanese monster films were randomly juxtaposed with Burroughs lecture. There are moments of synchronicity that are both humorous and bizarre and at times genuinely resonant. I think the Burroughs video mashup illustrates how randomness is often not as random as it seems and accidents often reveal hidden truths that are not accidental.
In light of recent developments in Japan, Burroughs comments on nuclear energy and the atomic bomb are particularly on point and prophetic.
Like probably many of you reading this, I absolutely loathe Andrew Breitbart. Seeing him on TV turns my stomach sour the same way seeing Pamela Geller or that Koran-burning idiot with the Yosemite Sam mustache being given airtime does. Foul, hateful people. WHY do the major news outlets (non-Fox News, I mean) offer these distasteful, tacky creeps a platform to spout the lousy nonsense they KNOW IN ADVANCE they’re going to come on to these programs and puke at their viewers?
Breitbart is a KNOWN fabulist. A KNOWN practitioner of “creative editing” and outright DECEPTION. What is a guy like him doing on any supposed news channel? He’s not a serious person who has opinions worthy of respect, so why pretend that he is? He’s just a punk, like his dweeby, pimple-faced side-kick James O’Keefe.
Another person who causes me to wince when I accidentally see him on TV is anti-gay rights activist Tony Perkins, he of the respectable sounding hate group, Family Research Council. Giving an asshat like Perkins a national stage is like providing the same service for one of the most rabid witch burners in Salem, Massachusetts if there were cable news channels back in 1692. This is how history will remember a man like Perkins—if history marks him at all, which is doubtful—as an ignorant, hateful, intolerant religious extremist.
So why allow a malignant goofball like Tony Perkins the airtime and the credibility it confers upon him?
Was Noam Chomsky already booked???
CNN seems to me to be the most pathetic of all the cable newsers—grasping at straws as their ratings slide. Watching CNN recently, it would seem that a misguided management decision was made to do like a “reverse Fox News” using a lot of the same guests. Does the upper management at CNN really think that their audience (or potential audience members) want to see the same exact idiots they see on Fox News, albeit in an environment less welcoming than the joint owned by Rupert Murdoch?
Poaching some guest bookers from Fox News was hardly the innovation CNN needed to reinvent itself. Why not just have some random haters from the Free Republic boards on with Wolf Blitzer if that’s the sort of “sizzle” they seek…
And again, I ask CNN’s upper management, is the reason we don’t see America’s greatest living intellectual on your channel—but we do see an un-credentialed, perhaps deranged, rightwing racist gasbag like Pamela Geller—because Noam Chomsky is not taking your phone calls???
MSNBC is a lot better when it comes to the way they contextualize their guests, but you still have the likes of Orly Taitz appearing on the network. WHY?
Even if Chomsky is BOOKED SOLID, there are still options to Orly fucking Taitz!
But Andrew Breitbart always gets a pass on MSNBC—as does Pat Buchanan—and that always pisses me off. Just imagine how much BETTER the news would be—how much BETTER OFF AMERICA WOULD BE—if each and every time these two appeared on TV the “lower third” under their names read “Lying Fuck” or “Increasingly Senile Racist & Author.”
Some basic “truth in advertising.” Is that too much to ask of our cable news outlets? I can dream, can’t I?
Recently James Rucker, the co-founder of Color of Change waged a bit of a campaign to make sure Dylan Ratigan understood how offended he and others (raises hand) feel about seeing Andrew Brietbart on TV sans context other than his name and his URL. Not everyone knows who he is or what his greatest (s)hits as a Republican media assassin are. If they were told about just a lil’ bit of that history upfront, they’d be greatly assisted in their understanding of what they were watching and be much better equipped to properly evaluate the bullshit coming out of Brietbart’s lying pie-hole.
It’s almost like those cigarette labels with the pics of cancerous lungs. Why can’t America’s responsible journalists ALWAYS perform the same sort of service regards Mr. Brietbart and his fellow travelers?
As you may know, ColorOfChange members led the charge to ensure that Breitbart’s credibility and image weren’t sanitized by ABC News or the Huffington Post. After we saw Breitbart on Ratigan’s show, with Ratigan seemingly praising Breitbart as “smart” and a “sharp shooter who gets results,” we were deeply concerned.
When I spoke with Ratigan, he explained what he was trying to do. He quickly agreed that Breitbart was a race-baiter, dishonest, and undeserving of credibility—without question. And he frankly hadn’t thought about the legitimizing effect that having Breitbart on his show—without clearly labeling him as the race-baiter and deceiver he is—would have.
Ratigan’s core issue is exposing the corruptive nature of corporate dollars in politics (which I, and many ColorOfChange members would agree is a critical and important endeavor). Ratigan’s goal in interviewing Breitbart was to ask him why he chose targets like Sherrod or the NAACP, while Breitbart and the Tea Party activists he defends seems to agree that banks and corporations with undue influence over government are actually the ones destroying our country. It’s an important criticism of Breitbart. Ratigan’s goal was to keep the conversation there, and he believed that if he focused on Breitbart’s penchant for race-baiting and deception, it would simply trigger Breitbart, and he’d end up in the same conversation others have where Breitbart goes on a rampage and the conversation goes nowhere.
Moving forward, Ratigan said that if he deals with Breitbart at all in the future, it will be with the explicit disclaimer that Breibart is someone who deceives and race-baits. Ratigan recognizes and respects the argument that there’s a problem with giving Breitbart a mainstream platform, and he’s committed to making sure that his show is not used to lend Breitbart the appearance of legitimacy and credibility.
Breitbart, not surprisingly, is completely unapologetic. Can’t expect a racist to give up that white robe so quickly. However, I give Ratigan and his producers credit for being receptive to this at all… too often, these kinds of issues are raised by liberals and dismissed out of hand. I’d rather that MSNBC acknowledge that people like Breitbart (and network regular Pat Buchanan, come to that) really have no right to expect a national platform for their racism and hate. I doubt very much that Ratigan or the suits at MSNBC have any idea the message it sends to people of color. But I’ll take this incremental step gladly and keep pushing for more.
Nice work James Rucker and Color of Change! The repercussions of this victory are still to be felt for some time.
Curtis yesterday published an article through the Guardian about the death of Osama bin Laden, and what that means for the global political spin-machine. In it Curtis addresses the bogey-man status of Bin Laden and how his death will impact on the ongoing Western cultural narrative of “Goodies” vs “Baddies”:
Journalists, many of whom also yearned for the simplicity of the old days, grabbed at [the Bin Laden story]: from the outset, the reporting of the Islamist terror threat was distorted to reflect this dominant simplified narrative. And Bin Laden grabbed at it too. As the journalists who actually met him report, he was brilliant at publicity. All three – the neoconservatives, the “terror journalists”, and Bin Laden himself – effectively worked together to create a dramatically simple story of looming apocalypse. It wasn’t in any way a conspiracy. Each of them had stumbled in their different ways on a simplified fantasy that fitted with their own needs.
The power of this simple story propelled history forward. It allowed the neocons – and their liberal interventionist allies – to set out to try to remake the world and spread democracy. It allowed revolutionary Islamism, which throughout the 1990s had been failing dramatically to get the Arab people to rise up and follow its vision, to regain its authority. And it helped to sell a lot of newspapers.
But because we, and our leaders, retreated into a Manichean fantasy, we understood the new complexities of the real world even less. Which meant that we completely ignored what was really going on in the Arab world.
Curtis neatly sums up, in one statement, just why there is so much distrust for politics and the media in this day and age, be it from the right or the left, the fringe or the more mainstream:
One of the main functions of politicians – and journalists – is to simplify the world for us. But there comes a point when – however much they try – the bits of reality, the fragments of events, won’t fit into the old frame.
The article is highly recommended reading and you can view the whole thing here. I especially love Curtis’ work on the effect of the media in propagating certain cultural memes, particularly oldstream media, which tries to pretend it has no effect on politics and society even though it has a huge impact on how we think and function. If you’re not aware of Curtis’ work and his sharp insights (or even if you are) here’s a segment he produced for Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe on media and political paranoia:
