As anyone who knows me can tell you, I am a serious reggae buff. Here are some of my favorite “Roots” era clips on You Tube. First up, a look at a reggae sound system in England in 1978. Note how few women are in this club.

 
The Gladiators recording session session captured in the clip above (taken from Roots Rock Reggae, one of the best, if not the best, reggae documentary) really starts to cook when they perform Hearsay. When someone says they don’t “get” reggae, play them this clip!

 
Reggae great Johnny Clarke sings a mellow version of None Shall Escape the Justice in Bunny Lee’s studio (I prefer the faster version of this song, but it’s still ace to see a vintage performance like this, an extended version of the bit seen in Roots Rock Reggae)

 
And finally the Jah Shaka Soundsystem from the 1981 UK film Babylon. The sound is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

 
If only American Big Brother was this good… Sorry about the wonky quality, but you’ll most definitely get the point.

 
Thank you Chris Campion!

 
Is there a more-beloved bassist here at Dangerous Minds than the supremely dubby-minded Jah Wobble?  As we all everyone minus Richard (who scored one early) awaits yet another remastered incarnation of PIL‘s Metal Box (for its 30th anniversary!), check out this incredibly rare, circa ‘84 interview with Mr. Wobble himself.

 
Well, would you expect anything else from one James Osterberg?  Even his mild lecherousness sounds sweet!  And while it might have taken Iggy 9 months to answer the 20-page fan letter of a 21-year-old, his reply apparently arrived in the nick of time.

Laurence, the letter-writer, received it just as her family was being evicted from their Parisian home.  By the time she finished reading it, she was reduced to tears.  The first part of Iggy’s actual handwritten note follows below; its entirety can be found at Letters Of Note.

dear laurence,

thankyou for your gorgeous and charming letter, you brighten up my dim life. i read the whole fucking thing, dear. of course, i’d love to see you in your black dress and your white socks too. but most of all i want to see you take a deep breath and do whatever you must to survive and find something to be that you can love. you’re obviously a bright fucking chick, w/ a big heart too and i want to wish you a (belated) HAPPY HAPPY 21st b’day and happy spirit. i was very miserable and fighting hard on my 21st b’day, too. people booed me on the stage, and i was staying in someone else’s house and i was scared. it’s been a long road since then, but pressure never ends in this life. ‘perforation problems’ by the way means to me also the holes that will always exist in any story we try to make of our lives. so hang on, my love, and grow big and strong and take your hits and keep going.

all my love to a really beautiful girl. that’s you laurence.

iggy pop

 
Wonderful interview with Brian Eno in yesterday’s Guardian.  It starts off by reminding us that of the 100-Greatest-All-Time-70’s-Albums-According-To-Pitchfork, Eno’s had his hand in 25 of them.  The discussion goes from Abba to Zappa, and addresses, intriguingly, the very industry that made him famous:

I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky.  There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time.  I always knew it would run out sooner or later.  It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out.  I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going.  The record age was just a blip.  It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel.  Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth.  Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber.  Sorry mate ?

Jeff VanderMeer chimes in on Jaron Lanier’s new book, the short essay version of which apparently sobered some people up a few weeks ago when it was published in the New York Times. Nooo! The Illuminati have turned against the web! What next, oh evolutionary mandate… don’t… don’t… DON’T TAKE MY DRUUGS

Even as I?

New Scientist on a growing, vocal minority that maintains that consciousness is not linked to the brain. Well, you all knew that already, of course…

MOST neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time is near when we will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. There is, however, a vocal minority of neurosceptics who contest this orthodoxy. Among them are those who focus on claims neuroscience makes about the preciseness of correlations between indirectly observed neural activity and different mental functions, states or experiences.

This was well captured in a 2009 article in Perspectives on Psychological Science by Harold Pashler from the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues, that argued: “...these correlations are higher than should be expected given the (evidently limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality measures. The high correlations are all the more puzzling because method sections rarely contain much detail about how the correlations were obtained.”

Believers will counter that this is irrelevant: as our means of capturing and analysing neural activity become more powerful, so we will be able to make more precise correlations between the quantity, pattern and location of neural activity and aspects of consciousness.

This may well happen, but my argument is not about technical, probably temporary, limitations. It is about the deep philosophical confusion embedded in the assumption that if you can correlate neural activity with consciousness, then you have demonstrated they are one and the same thing, and that a physical science such as neurophysiology is able to show what consciousness truly is.

(New Scientist: You Won’t Find Consciousness in the Brain)

(Consciousness: An Introduction, by the venerable Susan Blackmore)

 
via ill doctrine

At this time of year we always hear the same 2 or 3 MLK clips over and over, but there was much more to the man. So here are ten of my favorite quotes from MLK that aren’t heard as often.

Thanks again Ron Nachmann !

 
As if the self-serving clod-isms of Limbaugh and Robertson weren’t offensive enough, now Ann Coulter‘s waxing wise on the Haitian tragedy:

Ann Coulter is jealous of the attention Rush Limbaugh has been getting since making his comment about the Obama administration wanting to exploit the Haitian tragedy to “burnish” his credentials with the black community.  So she’s making a conscious effort to out-controversy the controversial radio host, and on Fox News on Sunday, she didn’t make much effort to keep that a secret.

“Stop asking about Rush’s statement. I made some controversial statements this week too,” Coulter said on Geraldo at Large.  Then she went on to prove it. Discussing the bi-partisan humanitarian effort by former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Coulter said Clinton is a “national embarrassment” and Bush shouldn’t be “forced” to partner with him.

“To force poor ex-President Bush—like he hasn’t suffered enough—to be hanging around with Bill Clinton, who’s leaving his essence on Kleenex in the White House…”

 
Coulter Does Her Best To Out-Limbaugh Rush

 
Yes I did!
 
Cute Things Exploding
 
(via YBNBY)