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Go-go Swing: Fantastic late-‘80s documentary about Washington D.C.’s funk scene
08.31.2010
07:03 pm
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The Godfather of Go-Go Chuck Brown, with his Soul Searchers
 
Background information on David N. Rubin’s 1990 documentary Go-Go Swing is pretty hard to come by. But that hardly takes away from how deep a snapshot it is of the highly regional Washington D.C. brand of funk called go-go.

Developed first by jazz guitarist and singer Chuck Brown (whose group the Soul Searchers were at the top of D.C.’s scene), go-go is characterized by its laidback but dynamic funk rhythms accented with heavy conga beats, freaky keyboards, blasting horns and call-and response vocals. And its been a staple of the mid-Atlantic scene for the past 35 years. 

Go-go reached a crest during the 1980s, as bands like Trouble Funk, E.U., Rare Essence, Redds and the Boys, Hot Cold Sweat, the Junk Yard Band and others got signed and discarded by various majors and independents. E.U.’s performance of “Da Butt” on Spike Lee’s School Daze was a coup as far as national exposure for the music.

Go-go has retained its shine to this day, as plenty of R&B artists dabble in its rhythms to this day, and D.C. troupe Beat Ya Feet Kings bringing next-generation go-go dance style to a range of tempos and genres.

Rubin’s doc goes deep into the context of the go-go scene, dealing with the trials, tribulations, mournings and celebrations that are all part of living in D.C. Check out the whole thing—it’s really worth it.
 

 
Part II  || Part III || Part IV || Part V || Part VI 

Bonus clip after the jump: footage of the excellent go-go rhymer D.C. Scorpio performing “Stone Cold Hustler” at the Capital Center, backed by the Soul Searchers…
 

READ ON
Posted by Ron Nachmann
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08.31.2010
07:03 pm
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Liquid Crack: “It works every time”
08.29.2010
12:40 am
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In the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, black entertainers made considerable sums of money selling ghetto wine and malt liquor to their less fortunate brothers and sisters. “Liquid crack” was dirt cheap and fortified with alcohol and shitloads of sugar to get you higher faster. As Billy Dee Williams said in his TV pitch for Colt 45, “It works every time.”

40-ounce warriors were macho, sexy and hip…at least that’s what the commercials wanted the black community to think. The reality was much more grim. Malt liquors like Schlitz, Colt 45, Olde English 800, St. Ides, King Cobra and bum wines like Thunderbird and Wild Irish Rose were responsible for an increase in alcoholism, violence and crime in black neighborhoods. High alcohol content and the cost of a bottle being under two bucks was a deadly combination. Add to that the veneer of coolness that Kool and the Gang, Fred Williamson, Biggie Smalls and Snoop Dog brought to the mix and you got a problem that went viral.  

Nowadays, low-rent white hipsters drink the poisonous piss in order to give them some kind of street cred while hip-hop artists have moved on to Cristal and Dom. But the high-end shit hasn’t trickled down to Skid Row yet.

While the product sold was crap for sure, the ads themselves are fascinating time capsules, some sending signals that are incredibly politically incorrect: making light of drunk driving, intimating that women will give it up after a few drinks, and using racial stereotypes that border on Stepin Fetchit caricature. And Blacks weren’t the only ones denigrated—check out the East Indian guy in the “Gunga Din” Colt 45 commercial below.

There’s also an interesting clip of Johnny Cannon wielding a Colt 45 pistol and a can of Colt 45 beer. A wise combination, don’t you think? Johnny’s expression of disgust as he guzzles the malt liquor is priceless.

Then I ask a question you brother
What the fuck is you drinkin’
He don’t know but it flow
Out the bottle in a cup
He call it gettin’ fucked up
Like we ain’t fucked up already
See the man they call Crazy Eddie
Liquor man with the bottle in his hand
He give the liquor man ten to begin
Wit’ no change and he run
To get his brains rearranged
Serve it to the home they’re able
To do without a table
Beside what’s inside ain’t on the label
They drink it thinkin’ it’s good
But they don’t sell the shit in the white neighborhood

—Public Enemy, “1 Million Bottlebags”
 

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.29.2010
12:40 am
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Documentary on DJ Derek, reggae’s oldest living selector
08.28.2010
05:19 pm
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The original DJ Derek, a badman
 
Thanks to the great Mixmaster Morris for the heads up on this. For many years, white DJs have played a key role in popularizing black music in the US and Britain. In the British reggae scene, alongside pioneers in the sound system game like Jah Shaka, Jah Observer, Channel One, and others, paler-skinned music fanatics like the legendary David Rodigan have been working respectfully to promote the music became a worldwide phenomenon.

Just before Rodigan, however, a guy called Derek Morris from out of Bristol started his 50-year love affair with American R&B and Jamaican music, becoming an obsessed record collector. Here’s video director Jamie Foord’s excellent short vid documentary of the extremely charming and gruff-voiced DJ Derek—still spinning reggae, chatting patois on the mic, and rolling around England on the bus.
 

DJ Derek pt. 1 from Grand Finale on Vimeo.

 
After the jump: part 2 of the DJ Derek story…
 

READ ON
Posted by Ron Nachmann
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08.28.2010
05:19 pm
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Huey Newton compels William F. Buckley to side with George Washington, 1973
08.23.2010
02:01 am
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Huey Percey Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, would be 68 years old if he hadn’t been shot in Oakland on this day in 1989 by Tyrone “Double R” Robinson, an alleged member of George Jackson’s Marxist prison gang The Black Guerilla Family.

Here he is engaging William F. Buckley on his show Firing Line in a preliminary thought-game before getting deep into the kind of civil dialogue on political theory that’s absolutely impossible to find on television today.
 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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08.23.2010
02:01 am
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Abbey Lincoln Lives!
08.14.2010
07:01 pm
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Abbey Lincoln died today at the age of 80. She mattered in the world because she was a female jazz singer who stood up and became active in the civil rights struggle in the ‘60s when she could have remained neutral and safe.

She made great art. Nat Chinen wrote an excellent obit for her in the New York Times.

Here she is with her then-new husband, the drummer Max Roach, performing “Driva’ Man” from their 1960 album We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite.

This was a dangerous mind.
 


Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach

 
Get: We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite [CD]

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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08.14.2010
07:01 pm
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Say hello to the face of dopey wannabe-fascism
08.12.2010
10:44 pm
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Yes, talk on the white Right about “camps” and “guns” should send a shiver up my spine as a Jew (whose father spent time in an immigration camp in post-WWII Palestine). But I hope I’m not the only one who thinks that this type of thing represents the fascinating last gasp of mainstream hegemonic white-identity politics. I have trust in the rest of this country’s people. Maybe I’m hopelessly naive.

As seen in the video below, here’s Marg Baker, Tea Party Republican candidate for Florida House of Representatives, District 48, on immigration:

We can follow what happened back in the ‘40s and 50s. I was just a little girl in Miami, and they filled camps with the people that snuck into the country because they were illegal. They put them in the camps and shipped them back. We can do that.

Of course, those camps held Cuban refugees who fled the repressive Machado and Batista regimes, which leased virtually all of the country’s resources, land, financial system, electric power production, and industry to US monopolies. But, history shmistory.

On the Second Amendment:

We’ve gotta have guns!

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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08.12.2010
10:44 pm
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Remembering the Watts Riots
08.11.2010
08:01 pm
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The Watts riots happened 45 years ago today. Sparked by the arrest and beating of young African-American Marquette Frye and the detention of objecting Frye family members, the 1965 unrest happened in a context of extreme racial tension in California.

Along with the growing poverty that accompanied the post-War closing of factories in South Central L.A., the riots also happened in a context West Coast segregationist politics. By funding the passage of Proposition 14, the California Real Estate Association had just successfully cancelled out the Mumford Act, which was the part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prevented housing discrimination on the basis of race.

The week of rioting left 34 dead, over 1,000 injured and more than 200 businesses destroyed, with property damage was estimated at $40 million. Urban politics would never be the same. For some perspective, read Second District Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas’s reflections on how the riots connect with the building and revitalization of the area’s Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital.
 

 
After the jump: From Stacy Peralta’s 2008 documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America, Kumasi, a former member of the street squad The Slausons, breaks down the strategy of dealing with the National Guard presence during the riots…
 

READ ON
Posted by Ron Nachmann
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08.11.2010
08:01 pm
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We have come for your scalps: the wild world of Redsploitation films
08.07.2010
06:43 pm
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Vice online has a terrific piece on ‘Redsploitation’ movies.

Somewhere in the grey area between the noble savage and the savage-savage lies the Redsploitation film. These gems of schlock cinema feature Natives getting off their knees and kicking white ass all over the West.

For the whole scoop on really pissed off Indians in the movies check out the Vice website.

 
more vengeance after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.07.2010
06:43 pm
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Arizona’s SB1070 still in full effect today
08.03.2010
01:21 am
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OK, America, here’s how it seems to be going down in Tuscon, AZ as of earlier today, despite the standing federal injunction against SB1070, the state of Arizona’s attempt to enforce national border laws.

Run a stop sign, get detained potentially by Border Patrol.

What now, America? What do we got?
 

 
Hat tip Charlie Bertsch.

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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08.03.2010
01:21 am
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Opening in LA: How We Roll, an exhibition of black surf & skate culture
07.21.2010
12:09 am
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Attention people of Earth and Southern California!

This Thursday marks the opening of How We Roll, a six-month exhibition on African-America’s contribution to surfing, skateboarding and rollerskating culture at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.

Starting with the history of black surfing from the 17th and 18th century in Polynesia and Africa and on into the US, the exhibit rolls through the African-American surf-skateboard-rollerskate continuum featuring photos by Glen E. Friedman, Grant Brittain, Jim Goodrich, Lance Dawes, Atiba Jefferson, Neftalie and more. Spotlights include the legacy of pioneering black female pro skateboarder Stephanie Person and the way that skateboarding has cross-pollinated with black music formats like Afropunk, hip-hop, jazz and reggae.

Get a preview of what the exhibit looks like here.

Here’s a piece of the black skateboarding story on the East Coast from Jeremiah Alexis via Current TV
 

 
Bonus clip after the jump: a tribute to the irrepressible black skater & actor Harold Hunter, R.I.P.
 

READ ON
Posted by Ron Nachmann
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07.21.2010
12:09 am
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