blog.mp3adrenalin.com

A fair share of the 40 bands that performed at Spune Productions’ 13-hour, three-stage indie-music extravaganza at LaGrave Field supplied tunes that inarguably overwhelmed all else in their path.

The obvious selections: the Swords’ cranial and ferocious heritage metal (most of what the Austin band played was new material), Pinback’s unusually punchy meta-pop presentation, and Om’s cacophonous and fuzz-busting bass-and-drums assault (the ornery San Francisco act, which is the rhythm section for sludge-metal titans Sleep, may well be the heaviest duo on the planet).

The unexpectedly solid: Denton mainstay the Paper Chase’s unusually hard and funky turn; Massachusetts duo the Books’ dramatic and ethereal video-assisted set with just an acoustic guitar, an electric cello and a sampler; and Austin-sourced headliner Explosions in the Sky’s cracking and mood-jacking shoe-gazer instrumentals.

But Wall of Sound also lived up to its reputation for delays, sound-equipment failures and limited ancillary amenities.

Denton indie-pop heroes Midlake flip-flopped stage times with freaky-good Austin electro-rockers Ghostland Observatory because of an unspecified personnel issue (Midlake guitarist Eric Pulido vaguely cited “a really late night” at a Friday homecoming gig in Denton). Midlake overcame thin sound on Stage One to deliver a pretty, albeit abbreviated, set.

By then, the main stages were an hour behind schedule.

Stage Three, set up outside the stadium behind the home-plate wall, had been lagging since about 6 p.m., when a blown public-address speaker caused L.A.-by-way-of-Austin band Oliver Future to delay its appearance (it ended up playing “in mono,” sick of waiting for a replacement speaker to arrive). And though LaGrave Field’s concessions booths were open, only one type of beer was sold and food was practically nonexistent.

Despite a welcome and promising change of scenery from the drab-roofed confines of the Ridglea Theater to the manicured sporting grounds of LaGrave – the side-by-side main stages took up most of center field on the minor-league baseball diamond – ticket sales didn’t come close to making the event feel anything but lightly attended.

In fact, Wall of Sound felt more like an exclusive lawn party for the area’s indie community more than an open-to-the-public music fest.

Flying disc-throwing and soccer ball-kicking sessions were common in right field, which ideally would have been clogged with blankets and lawn chairs.

Only 700 or so advance tickets were sold, and walk-ups were negligible; at $35 a person and featuring music that appeals mostly to financially challenged current and recent collegians, that’s little wonder.

For Wall of Sound to grow into what Spune head Lance Yocom envisions – a communal and hipster-targeted version of Coachella – it needs to fix the delays, entice more popular indie-flavored acts (maybe some higher-profile alums from Austin City Limits a week earlier: Spoon, Wilco, My Morning Jacket, Arcade Fire, even Crowded House) and market itself more broadly and with a larger geographic scope.

The move outside was appropriate, but the move into a bigger and more complete event has to follow soon.

Among the many firsts in the storied career of 1970s daredevil Evel Knievel — the lines of cars, casino fountains and desert canyons he jumped, or nearly jumped, on his motorcycle — one is too often overlooked.Knievel was the first to jump the shark.Yes, pop-culture junkies, it was Evel Knievel’s planned 1977 jump over a shark tank in Chicago that inspired the infamous “Happy Days” episode in which the Fonz did the same (in his case, on a pair of water skis). “Jumping the shark,” of course, has come to refer to the point when a TV series runs out of original ideas and grasps at any gimmick to fill airtime.To his credit, Knievel got out of the game before he crossed that point of no return. He was seriously injured, and a cameraman lost an eye, during a test run for the shark-tank jump. He never did stunts again.”There comes a time in a person’s life when they say, enough is enough,” says Jef Bek, a longtime Knievel fan and the composer-creator of “Evel Knievel: The Rock Opera,” which opens this week at the Bootleg theater. “People would come up to him and say, ‘Oh, I saw you jump the Grand Canyon,’ when in fact it was Snake River Canyon, or, ‘I saw you jump 100 cars,’ when in fact it was 15 cars. So he thought to himself, ‘Whatever I do, it won’t be enough for them — I can’t live up to what they expect of me.’”He also said, ‘Motorcycles don’t have wings.’ Which is a lyric that I took for the show.”The through-sung rock opera, co-written with guitarist Jay Dover, has been a pet project of Bek’s for several years. A progressive-rock musician in Chicago, Bek (his given name is Jeff Beck, but he changed it to distinguish himself from the former Yardbirds guitarist) was bitten by the theater bug when he joined John Cusack’s New Crime Productions and learned that “you can really go out there when you’re doing music for the theater — a great discovery for me.” Later, as a member of the Los Angeles-based troupe Zoo District, Bek’s scores helped bring to life a smoldering Nosferatu, in a show of the same name, and accompanied the flight of a pig in 2000’s “The Master and Margarita.”"If we were able to get a pig off the ground, I think we can manage to get a bike off the ground,” said Bek, 45, who ultimately envisions the show as a Las Vegas spectacle but for now is content to “focus on what we can do with low-tech and make it look high-tech, and to really focus on the story and the songs.”To realize his vision in a small-theater context — in other words, on a bare-bones budget of reportedly less than $10,000 — Bek turned to Keythe Farley, an Actors’ Gang actor-director whose musical-theater claim to fame is as co-writer of the unlikely success “Bat Boy: The Musical.”"The biggest challenge here is living up to the name,” said Farley, whose wife, Ann Closs-Farley, is doing the costumes. “With ‘Bat Boy,’ it was the reverse — the compliment we got with that was, ‘Oh my God, it was so much better than I thought it would be.’ With ‘Evel Knievel: The Rock Opera,’ you expect to see motorcycles flying through the air, crashes, huge explosions. Well, can I do a giant rock-show spectacle for 25 cents and a pack of gum? I think I can.”Farley helped Bek and Dover hone the script and score and ultimately vetoed one key staging element.”If I could have a motorcycle, what would I do with it?” Farley said. “I realized, not much. You can’t fire it up onstage. It’s an 800-pound beast that becomes a gargantuan pain in the rear. So I hate to give anything away, but we’re using theater magic, the right lighting and video, to create a representation of flying.”Far more important than the pyrotechnics, it would seem, is calibrating the piece’s tone. The story of Bobby “Evel” Knievel, a self-made salesman and daredevil from the mining town of Butte, Mont., is pure, uncut Americana, with a thick layer of ’70s kitsch slathered on — what witness of the ’70s doesn’t remember his stars-and-stripes jumpsuit, complete with matching cape and helmet?Filter this larger-than-life story through an earnest, wailing rock-opera score, and one has to wonder: Who’s jumping the shark here?”I wanted to write something that was big and crazy and over-the-top and wild, just fraught with drama,” Bek conceded. “My music, unintentionally, has this built-in drama to it. I don’t know why, but everything I write has this epic quality — everything’s ‘grand,’ ” he said, drawing out the last word in a mock-English accent. “It’s that theatrical presence I always feel when I listen to a song by Yes or Genesis.”As a “Bat Boy” co-author, Farley knows from irony. He’s found that the more he celebrates excess and the less he winks, the better the results.”It’s sincere and gigantic,” Farley said of the show. “When you’re watching a guy get into a rocket and fly over Snake River Canyon, that’s an amazing event. What rock music can do is give you that raw emotion onstage. Hopefully, the surprising thing about ‘Evel’ is that you’ll end up feeling something. God willing, we’re going to touch your heart. I’m always wary of snickering.”Indeed, it was Bek’s boundless sincerity that won over Knievel himself when the composer first approached him in 2002. Now 68 and living in Florida, the retired daredevil is working on an autobiography, but he’s given Bek the musical stage rights to his life story.”Nobody would put this much time into a rock opera without having a dream,” said Knievel, who knows something about outsized dreams. “I just took a liking to the guy.”That personal rapport stood Bek in good stead when he insisted on portraying the lows as well as the highs of Knievel’s career, including a fair amount of boozing and womanizing. The bleakest point Bek depicts is the notorious incident in which Knievel beat a former publicist, Sheldon Saltman, with a baseball bat, breaking both of his arms. “When I read about that, I just felt, ‘That’s so Macbeth-like — that’s got to be in the story,’ ” Bek recalled. “It’s like a Greek tragedy at that point.”Knievel was less moved by the episode’s dramatic potential, Bek said.”He has raised some resistance to some of the areas I’ve gone,” Bek admitted. “But this is an exploration into the human condition, and he was an embodiment of every man’s fantasy — he was living a fantasy life. So it was really interesting to me to see how he achieved these things, and then hit these valleys so hard, and then to see how he rose out of them. I told him, ‘We have to go there to see how you respond; otherwise it’s just a fluff piece. I don’t wanna write a fluff piece.’ “When Farley came on board as director, he had one big question for Bek, which helped push the rewriting process into its home stretch.”Why does this guy get up every time? He has these horrible crashes, where most people would say, ‘This is crazy. I’m going to go be an accountant or something.’ So why did he do this?”Knievel himself doesn’t know.”Who would wanna take a motorcycle and jump it over these obstacles, miss them, and keep getting up and doing it over and over again?” Knievel asked. “I don’t know why. It’s something inside of a man that drives him to want to win. I’m working on my autobiography, and I hope I find out what the reason is.”

The day I sat down with Elijah Anderson to talk about violence, police in Colorado Springs, Colo., were blaming a rise in local thuggery on rap music.

The professor let out a laugh. Talk about your usual suspects - in the last two weeks, authorities have dragged hip-hop culture into lineups from Madison, Wis., to Lee County, Fla., in an attempt to understand what's going wrong in their towns.

What's really going on, the sociologist says, isn't so easy to assign to songs that glorify a gangsta life.

Anderson, who left Penn for Yale this summer, conducts ethnographic field studies. That's a fancy way of saying he finds a place that interests him, then spends long hours observing, interviewing, absorbing, and analyzing what he's seen.

Thirty years ago he made his mark with A Place on the Corner, a study of Jelly's barroom on Chicago's South Side. But it was 1999's Code of the Street that caused me to seek him out. Based on families he followed along Germantown Avenue, the book probes the attitudes of inner-city youth, both "decent" kids and "street kids."

Shaded from the blazing sun, we sat for a few hours on a bench in Chestnut Hill, where Anderson delivered a short course in the sociology of violence.

He began with the underlying problems - poverty, alienation, racism - each deep-rooted, and worsened by a changing economy that shifts jobs away from U.S. cities, away from the poorly schooled and badly trained.

But he kept coming back to street cred.

Locked out and loaded If you feel the police and courts aren't serving you, "you have to settle disputes on the streets," he said. "And your reputation for vengeance and payback becomes very important. It's very important to keep your sister safe, keep your mother safe, keep your boys safe.

"If you don't have that, the assumption is that people will roll on you - they will try you."

One reason for Philadelphia's runaway murder rate is that street cred is high-maintenance.

"You can't get it for once and for all. That's why these disputes, which to outsiders are so meaningless, are so consequential. A person can get killed for taking a parking space."

People in the communities Anderson studies talk about two types of people - "decent" and "street." Even the decent have a hard time resisting the call of the street.

Being a good student - a Poindexter - is no advantage in the 'hood. And going to college only taints your street reputation. "College boys come home, and the street boys ask them, 'Can you still hang?' "

Anderson bridged a few worlds of his own growing up. The son of a domestic and a factory worker, he was a precocious reader who worked from the time he turned 12 and walked the streets of South Bend, Ind., asking every shop owner for a job.

He got one at a typewriter store and worked there until graduation from high school, where he played halfback, but was a step too slow to win a scholarship. He studied sociology at Indiana, then Chicago and Northwestern.

A bit of a Poindexter?

"I was on my way to being one," he says with a smile, "but I straightened out."

Getting any job is not so easy these days, he says, and not just because there isn't much call for typewriter repair.

"There is a stereotype of the inner-city, poor, young black male. A lot of employers don't want to take a chance on him. There's a bias against him - even kids who are 'decent' have a lot of trouble. You go to a lot of restaurants, and you don't see black people working on the wait staff. It's almost segregated. It's different in the kitchen."

Hoping for hope What's needed, he said, is "a strong sense of future. Without that, everything is about here and now, 'cuz tomorrow ain't promised to you."

Which makes me wonder what he thinks the next mayor faces.

"You've got to have a sense there is something there for you, gives you incentive, motivation for the long view, to get rid of the short fuse. That's the challenge for [the mayor] and the business people."

Whoever leads Philadelphia, he says, must appreciate that the economic shifts have left one in four Philadelphians living below the poverty line (making $20,444 a year for a family of four.)

"That's a heavy statistic. It screams for economic development, investment. We need jobs, jobs, jobs. We need to be encouraging the development of jobs that pay a decent wage."

I asked him if he's pessimistic. He said he's hopeful.

Anderson keeps coming back to Philly, his home of three decades, to research a book about how we deal with race and diversity in everyday life. He's expanding on themes he explored in a 2004 article that celebrated the way people get along at places like the Reading Terminal Market, where strangers of all walks are open to encounters.

He called the market "the cosmopolitan canopy," providing cover for city dwellers trying to connect with others.

"It may be," he said, "that the canopy is our salvation as a society."

A SUPERMARKET is paying to provide a music teacher for an Epsom charity’s Friendship Scheme.

Andy Hunn, manager of Waitrose in Epsom, took the £2,600 cheque along to St Barnabas Church Hall where the Ebbisham Association’s Friendship Scheme for people with severe learning difficulties meets.

Mr Hunn was delighted the money was being used provide a music teacher for the Wates Club, which entertains the clients, many of whom are from the former Epsom mental hospitals.

He added: “As a local organisation Waitrose is proud to be associated with the scheme and will continue to give support.”

Waitrose already supplies the refreshments at the Wates Club, which is named after the local building company thatinitially contributed funds to enable the club to get started.

And Waitrose’s latest donation has meant that Tom Rhind-Tutt, the chairman of the Ebbisham Trust, was able to secure professional music teacher Tom Arnold.

He has offered to lead the musical enhancement activities with a variety of percussion instruments and his songwriting abilities.

Mr Arnold is a full-time professional musician and plays with the new production team from Stomp, aptly named The Lost and Found Orchestra.

The orchestra boasts 35 performers who play an assortment of miscellaneous instruments made from oil drums,old kettles, wash boards and other household items.

This year they have played in numerous famous locations,including a season at the Sydney Opera House and the Brighton Dome.

Tom was also a member of the group Cutting Crew who had a top 10 hit in the eighties with I Just Died in your Arms Tonight. He has also played with the Brighton Beach Boys.

Previously he worked at the Orpheus Centre in Godstone for people with severe physical impairment and is now looking forward to his stint with Ebbisham.

The Friendship Scheme seeks to recruit and introduce suitable volunteers to the patients of the former Epsom mental institutions with a view to them forming a friendship together.

In some cases the patients’ own relatives are either too old to visit or have died.

The association also offers a range of activities including various entertainment facilities including drama, music, art and general socialising.

As a registered charity,the association is independent of Government and official influences. From the start, the borough was supportive of the association and allowed it the name Ebbisham, which is the medieval name for Epsom.

BreakThru Radio Airs Special Minty Fresh Records Showcase

BreakThru Radio (BTR), the Internet's source for the World's Best Independent Music, announced today that it will air a brand new specialty show co-hosted by DJ Matt and DJ Emily, showcasing the energetic indie pop label, Minty Fresh Records. This significant new show will feature a playlist with many talented artists from the impressive label. The "Minty Fresh Showcase" is the latest installment in the station's impressive series of record label specialty shows.

To spruce up its fall lineup and undoubtedly appease those who have long criticized the network’s history of vapid programming, BET is airing Hip-Hop vs. America, a town-hall style meeting addressing the negative impact of hip-hop music.

It’s a three-part special starting tonight and ending tomorrow. Parts 1 and 2 air tonight and tomorrow, respectively, at 8 p.m. on BET; Part 3 airs tomorrow online at BET.com. Moderated by camera-friendly BET personalities Jeff Johnson and Toure, the series features different panels of cultural critics (Stanley Crouch, Nelson George, Michael Eric Dyson) and hip-hop stars past and present (MC Lyte, Master P, T.I. and Nelly). Among the topics discussed before a live studio audience: hip-hop’s relationship with criminality, the culture’s misogynistic images of black women and how blacks feel about hip-hop’s public airing of the community’s “dirty laundry.”

These issues are debated tonight. The discussion is indeed lively, good points are made, a few speakers (namely Dyson) impress the house with showy, rhythmic commentary that reeks of self-aggrandizement. After watching it, though, I’m still left wondering: What is the point of this debate?

In the wake of the Don Imus controversy and with the steep decline in sales of rap CDs, mainstream media for the past six months or so have been questioning the integrity of hip-hop. Is it art or poison? Is it dead or alive?

But the discussion is nothing new. It has been going on in the black community for at least a decade. Long before Imus insulted Rutgers’ women’s basketball team, activists such as the late C. Delores Tucker and hip-hop intellectuals (writers Joan Morgan, Kevin Powell and Farai Chideya) were debating the genre’s degrading imagery and lyrics. At the time, such concerns were largely ignored by mainstream media. And all the while, BET gladly served as an accomplice to black musical oppression by offering little counterbalance to the inanity and straight-up buffoonery glorified in mainstream rap.

But now that the music isn’t selling in huge numbers and the media have questioned the possible negative impact of its lyrics and images, here comes BET with a tepid special, acting all concerned about the state of hip-hop.

“The issues may ring familiar - sexism, violent lyrics, degrading words and images - but this time the debate is different given hip-hop’s complicated relationship with corporate America,” says Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, executive producer of BET News. “This is why it was so important for BET to provide a forum for each voice to shed light on every angle of this issue.”

But the “issue” is actually much bigger than hip-hop. The pathologies glorified in mainstream rap - violence, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, juvenile views of sex and sexuality - are all rooted in American standards. As author Ernest Hardy writes in BloodBeats, his brilliant 2006 collection of essays, “Hip-hop is America. Its only real crime is being so much so. It boils ‘mainstream’ standards and practices down to their essences, then turns up the flame.”

And it’s frustrating that Hip-Hop vs. America (at least the first part) doesn’t really address that the genre’s negative impact isn’t just a black problem.

“The most devastating words ever created out of hip-hop was ‘keep it real,’ because it’s a concept that actually cannot be sustained by the mechanism that hip-hop has become,” says Nelson George, one of the more rational, plain-spoken speakers on tonight’s panel.

To break it down further: Hip-hop more or less has become a “grand hustle,” which happens to be the name of T.I.’s Atlantic-distributed record label. It has been years since mainstream rap was the “black CNN.” With today’s popular hip-hop figures (Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Kanye West, Nelly) mostly celebrating the bling life over a beat, how could hip-hop possibly “keep it real” and speak for everyday people with real concerns such as unemployment and the rising cost of health care?

Mainstream hip-hop long ago sold its soul, and now its biggest supporters are wondering what will become of it.

“Corporate America’s interest is to separate people, turn people into product, consumers,” says Chuck D, the figurehead of Public Enemy, one of rap’s fiercest political voices. “You got to remember as black folks … we were all sold just like product, too.”

After years of selling itself, mainstream hip-hop is in search of its humanity. And although the intention behind Hip-Hop vs. America may be good, I’m still wondering what will be done to change things after all the talk is over.

    BEIJING, Sept. 25 — A star-studded show featuring a fusion of Asian pop
cultures was staged on Monday to gild the First Asia-Pacific Youth Arts Festival
running in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

    Fans were delirious with joy to see the night bringing together top Asian
musicians led by mandopop king Jay Chou.

    Artists from Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Vietnam took to the stage
one by one to show off the culture of their countries.

    The gala was wrapped up by Chinese pianist Lang Lang’s passionate rendition
of classical music.

    The five-day arts festival, running until Thursday, will have two other
concerts on Tuesday and Wednesday, featuring Singaporean singer JJ Lin and pop
singer Ah Niu from Malaysia.

    A total of 100 or so young artists from 24 countries and regions are
expected to stage a series of performances during the festival.

    The event is jointly held by China Central Television and the Asia-Pacific
Broadcasting Union, with an aim to promote “harmonious communication” in the
region.    

    (Source: CRIENGLISH.com)

Black Folk’s music is travailing in creativity. Rap has dominated having no good purpose.Consequently, the music is recycled, lyrical contents are shallow, and it’s onedimensional.Historically, black people are renowned for their musical influence on the world. Black musical creativity extends from musical instruments to the majority of musical genres (Gospel, Rhythm and Blues, Soul, Funk, and Rap) that touch every aspect of the black experience while creating musical balance. Moreover, drums, horns, guitars, etc. are imperative to the expression of that experience. Unfortunately, since Hip Hop has become the dominant genre, black music has become onedimensional, stifling the balance and benefits of the others.The rhythms of R&B, Soul and Funk are gratifying and timeless; therefore sampling and remixing their tunes is undoubtedly the reason for Hip Hop’s success and longevity. However, over time this has led blacks from musical innovation of the past. Most urban artists exercise no instrumental talent, so they are unable to bring raw melodies into existence. Instead, rap artists have convinced themselves that sampling beats and remixing is innovative.Besides lacking musical innovation, lyrical content is shallow. There is no depth because it is deficient of intellectual and affectionate challenge.”It is basically about possessions,” said Jasmine Brannon, 19. Director of Student Services, Sherri Paysour says the lyrics speak to the “vagina” instead of the female’s heart.Ray Bullock, 22, says the lyrics “have an influence on the way males dress and the younger generation’s inability to separate reality from fantasy.”Hip Hop has a rightful place in black music, but it does not need to dominate the music scene since it doesn’t unite or uplift these days. Since its domination, it has been a major disruption in the plight of black people.Motivated by love, musical variety is the binding force that aide blacks in accomplishing the goals and task at hand. Brenda Taylor, Freshman Seminar Coordinator agreed, saying Hip Hop is lacking a soulful element.”There is no love in it,” Taylor said.

Hip Hop culture is again being attacked by the major news outlets, which of
late began with Don Imus, when his virulent racism was spotlighted after his
hateful remarks against a college basketball team made up mostly of Black
women. However, some capitalist news outlets appear to have embraced Hip Hop in
revolutionary Cuba.

It’s not that this should be a confusing turn, not for those who’ve
been in solidarity with the Cuban revolution. Nor should it be for people
struggling against racism and oppression in the U.S.

When FIST, a revolutionary youth group, visited Cuba this July, the youth had
an opportunity to meet with the head of the Cuban Rap Agency and several Cuban
rap artists. The artists explained what the music means to them, how they first
came in contact with Hip Hop culture, and how it is viewed by the
revolution.

A New York Times article written last December entitled, “Cuba’s
Rap Vanguard Reaches Beyond the Party Line,” attempts to assert that
youth in Cuba are at odds with the revolutionary leadership and that these
tensions are evident in the burgeoning Hip Hop culture there.

The writer claims that “many” of the five million people under the
age of 30 question the system. It is not to suggest that Cubans are not
critical. Perhaps the greatest criticism comes from Fidel, but criticism itself
is not a bad thing. In an ever changing world there are always new questions
and problems and healthy criticisms are part of deepening socialism, especially
with the contradictions of a global capitalist market.

While many of the emerging leaders on the island were not alive during the
revolutionary armed struggle, they came of age during one of the most difficult
and challenging periods of the Cuban revolution. That period is known on the
island as the Special Period, and the Cuban economy is just recovering from the
effects.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost its largest trading partner.
Eighty percent of Cuban trade was with the Soviet Union and the socialist camp
in Eastern Europe.

While perhaps some can look at the counterrevolutionary reforms of Perestroika
under Gorbachev as a warning sign, it was not expected that trade would stop
immediately, but it did.

The U.S. and many in the imperialist West expected that the Cuban revolution
would fail, but history and the resolve of the Cuban people were the best
weapons to ensure that this did not happen.

The Cuban people experienced a significant reduction in caloric intake. Food
had to be rationed. Temporary market reforms were put in place. Cuba promoted
tourism on the island as its primary way of securing hard currency with which
to trade on the international market.

Only a person who lived through it can truly attest to the difficulties, but
regardless of the hardship, not one hospital or school closed. But neither did
antagonism from the U.S. government cease.

It was during this period that Cubans began to really get exposed to Hip Hop
culture. While rap music started being broadcast from Southern Florida in the
late 1980s, it was in the 1990s—during the Special Period—when this
culture and music began to take hold with youth on the island.

If one were to listen to this music from the late 1980s and early 1990s, known
as the “Golden Age of Hip Hop,” what is clear is that the music was
the pulse of oppressed Black and Latin@ youth, that the rhythms and the lyrics
expressed the frustration and anger of youth living under the reactionary
Reagan regime.

If the musical explosion that emanated from the South Bronx in the late 1970s
was a manifestation of “a dream deferred,” then the evolution of
the music to what it became in the late 1980s and early 1990s can best be
described as the chain reaction in urban centers across the U.S.

Though Cuban youth may not have fully understood each and every word, the angry
sentiment towards oppression is easily translated.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was felt hardest by underdeveloped nations.
The Soviet Union, even with its many internal contradictions, was the buffer
that held U.S. imperialism at bay and was supportive of liberation movements
around the world.

The fact that Cuba was undergoing such a crisis as the Special Period, and that
Hip Hop culture, rap music and its energy and break dancing, caught on during
this time symbolizes the difficulty of the times and the draw of the
culture.

Part 1 of a two part series.

The writer is a leader of FIST—Fight Imperialism, Stand Together—youth group and was a member of its
delegation that traveled to Cuba in July.

Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php

Not too long ago, it seemed that hip-hop and mainstream America had finally reached an uneasy peace.On the one side, the music industry had made concessions: Radio stations bleeped out offending words, MTV blurred objectionable imagery and record companies printed advisory warnings on CDs hoping to mollify outraged parents and politicians. From the other side came a grudging acceptance that hip-hop — violence, sexism and all — was likely here to stay.But these days, the cease-fire has ended. In the wake of the Don Imus controversy, the Rev. Al Sharpton began pressuring record executives to purge racist and sexist language from hip-hop albums. Hip-hop station Power 105 launched an effort to curb material potentially demeaning to women, and the NAACP even held a symbolic ceremony in Detroit to “bury” the N-word. Congressional hearings into rap music’s lyrical content — titled “From Imus to Industry: The Business of Stereotypes and Degradation” are scheduled to begin tomorrow.