Black Radio gets what it deserves

Blackagendareport.com
Is it really HR 848 or Black Radio?

Once again the big media machine is working, while Congressional lawmakers are being besieged with lobbyist and broadcaster rhetoric, the truth is being diverted by Black radio about the Performance Rights Act, HR 848. Founder and Chairman of Radio One, Cathy Hughes recently made her opposition public on the syndicated Tom Joyner Morning Show. Joyner, who broadcasts to millions of listeners in over 100 markets, once again demonstrated that information to people of color is often one sided. Hughes, framed the conversation as if the pending legislation would put an end to black radio, while Joyner failed to ask his business partner the tough questions. Millions of listeners were fooled into believing HR 848 was the certain end of Black radio. The truth is Black radio is it’s own worst enemy.
“The Performance Rights Act” was the creation of John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who for decades has backed the effort to win performers and artists royalties for their radio-played works. Conyers, believes it is finally time to establish equity for recording artists and allow them to be paid fair compensation for their creativity.

For decades, radio has profited from airplay, free promotions, and concerts in a pay for play situation, often leaving artist penniless while turning their backs on local audiences that they are licensed to serve. Black radio has been the testing ground for syndication for close to twenty years. Black listeners are 20 times more likely to hear syndicated programming then whites. Syndication, unknowingly has limited the voices and opinions, while condensing the play-list and stifiling local news and information.

Black radio for decades was the only voice in local communities, it’s been replaced with a share holder mentality reacting only to revenue and not listeners. If Black radio fails, it’s not HR 848, it’s simply failing to serve the local communities they are licensed to serve.

So the next time you hear black radio framing an issue, make sure you question the source.

Paul Porter
www.IndustryEars.com

Death of Autotune

Is it me or is Hip-hop the most self conscious genre of music ever created? I know every genre of music has its die hard fan boys stuck in one era or another but with hip-hop it feels like we are constantly trying to control any kind of change in the genre as a way to prevent the death of said genre at the hands of the evil pop conspiracy. Don't worry you don't have to grab your tin foil hats to continue reading.

I made the above observation while listening to Jay-Zs most recent street leak "Death of Auto Tune". It is a solid NO.I.D production reminiscent of something left off of his American Gangsta album in production Asiatic but the lyrics bill Jay as the man who is coming to save us all from the auto tune fad and make everyone start acting grimy again. Now since it is Jay-Z I can only grade him against himself and this is another ok effort nothing lyrically to write home to mom about. However the thing that irks me most is how this track doesn't have a genuine sentiment to it. Not saying that he isn't as sick of the whole Autotune thing as the rest of us but this feels like the whole hip-hop is dead debacle(i.e. just a talking point turned into a song to provide people who hate autotune like me a theme song).

This leads me to why I don't feel this effort was genuine or necessary. I always say things like Autotune are fad driven and they run their course if left to social Darwinism. So why waste time making tracks about the death of the Autotune fad when you could just work on making some incredible songs with real singers on the hook to under mind autotune? Jay has so much industry clout he could take a indie soul singer and make him/her the next big thing with a cosign. Look at what he did for Rhianna or how a cosign from him really help 9th wonders career to further blossom. Can you imagine if this blue print album actually had studio musicians playing modern soul with hard hip-hop drums and bass. Throw Jay in there rapping about real issues in a clever way not just rapping to other rappers to prove he can still rap and you may just have a viable death threat to Autotune which will run its course in a few years if not sooner anyway. So I ask the immortal question what could drive him to come in all Anti-Autotune/hipster like most of the folks on message boards when he is making money off of one of the blatant missuses of Autotunes (808's and hot trash anyone)and then I realized this must be the marketing play to get these people excited about Jay-z's new release. I can see stans bristle with excitement at the thought of being rescued from the bad old hipster Autotune guys by their aging pseudo thug figure. Never mind the fact some of Jay's fashion is very street wear like maybe no girlfriend jeans but he or his stylist are definitely clothe whores just like most of the so-called hipster set. So why would a man who has seen styles come and go even wiaste his time addressing another mans poor fashion choice. Couple this with a plea to get violent, something the hip-hop culture needs like another BET and you have Jay-z's conversation with the hip-hop stan. Rather than just making a mindblwing return to force or a introspectively song that held weights Jay-Z chose to just phone in some talking points designed some of the chief concerns of some people in the culture.

The final word in the matter is this crushing Autotune, cats rocking tight jeans and getting violent isn't going to make hip-hop better. Substance presented in an entertaining manner would definitely help, Not to mention hire and promote our singers who can sing without the help of Autotune. But we definitely need to chill on the self conscious thing when it comes to pop,dance etc..... Pop will never provide a true picture of any genre of music and if hip-hop does not start cultivating more balance and demanding to hear variety rather than the one fad at a time distribution system we have going now it will be in any even larger decline. It would be nice if artist with the weight to do so like Jay-z worked to develope distribution systems that showed hip-hop in its many forms rather than the one dimensional pop machine. That would probably do wonders for hip-hops self conscious nature and its overall survival.

The Greyboy Allstars "Still Waiting"

The Greyboy Allstars first formed almost 15 years ago to realize the vision of rare groove luminary DJ Greyboy: an original sound reminiscent of ..70s soundtrack music. What Happened to Television? (April 17, 2007/SCI Fidelity), the group’s first studio album in nearly a decade, finds them reunited with Greyboy for the first time since their seminal 1995 breakthrough, West Coast Boogaloo.

K naan new video

K'NAAN "T.I.A" music video directed by: NABIL from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.

New Knaan video. Knaan is a breath of fresh air in the stagnant pool we call hip-hop culture. Knaan represents for Somalia home of the most recent piracy propaganda news. He has a more conscusious flow than most american rappers not to mention his music is like a vacation for your ears.

Zulu Mech1

New York, NY - March 4, 2009 - Wesley Snipes, the internationally acclaimed star of the “Blade” movie series, is set to introduce Zulu Mech 1, a breakthrough science fiction franchise for which he serves as producer, at the African American Pavilion during this year's Book Expo America at New York's Jacob Javits Center.

Snipes will be on hand along with Zulu Mech 1 co-creators Mshindo I and Brother G, award winning author of the “Shades Of Memnon” epic adventure series on May 30 at 2:00 pm. on the African American Pavilion stage. After an introduction by co-producers Snipes, Mshindo and Bro. G, the BEA audience will be treated to the debut of the Zulu Mech 1 animated adventures series.

“I think the world will be just as pleased as I was when Brother G and Mshindo brought this ground-breaking adventure series to my attention,” said Snipes. “Everybody knows I love sci-fi and there is really nothing like it on the market. Zulu Mech 1 as written by Brother G and illustrated by the amazing Mshindo can easily stand next to other epics like Star Wars on the strength of the story telling alone. But when you consider that it brings a fresh, untapped perspective to scifi, that really makes it hot! We expect ZM1 to be the hottest franchise around.”

Snipes will be providing voice-over for the adventure epic, set in a near future where the nations of the Earth are on the verge of creating a world-wide utopia and Africa is a prosperous united state. But just as things look the best, the fate of the world takes a tragic turn as humanity faces an invasion by strange, highly intelligent creatures called “The Elder Race.” The twist is that the Elders come not from outer space, but from inside the Earth, the product of an unknown pre-human evolution. In a brilliant “reverse Planet Of the Apes” scenario, the Elders want things back the way they used to be, before they destroyed their world and placed themselves in a billion year slumber deep inside the planet. Unleashing a devastating attack on the humanity with weird and unknown technology, the Elders intend to take the Earth back. They nearly succeed, until the rise of the amazing Mthunzi family from South Africa, and the forging of the astonishing hero Zulu Mech 1.

“Its Africa based scifi,” said co-creator and scriptor, Brother G. “The Elder race is based on traditions of many African peoples that there was a creation before this creation, a world before this world that was destroyed. And the Zulu Mech is based on African practices involving spiritual “totems” or power items, ancestor communication and tapping into the power of the Earth. There are also heavy doses of nano-technolgy, advanced metallurgy and other high tech elements. I love the Transformers and Terminator etcetera, but its time we had epics from another perspective. This is truly sci-fi for the age of Obama!”

All who have glimpsed it say the linchpin of the Zulu Mech 1 epic is the amazing artwork of it's co-creator, the acclaimed Mshindo I. With his detailed painted figures, rich backgrounds and comic book inspired action sequences, Mshindo brings the epic to life with unprecedented style. The Zulu Mech 1 team plans to introduce video game, toys, limited edition art and other merchandise that will all be designed by Mshindo.

“The Elders unleash giant artificial creatures called “Constructs” to terrorize the Earth,” said Mshindo. “As an artist I get to bring forth imagery and monsters from the traditions of many cultures and that is a lot of fun to illustrate. I am also a fan of giant robots; so it was great creating Zulu Mech 1. As a mechanical creature ZM1 seems similar to other famous mechs, but believe me, he is something different. Zulu Mech 1 is unique, he is a Spiritual Cybernetic Organism.”
_________________
Author of the Shades of Memnon book series.

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What in the world is wrong with charles Hamilton???

Charles Hamilton is one of the few rappers using the internet to his advantage. Infact he is one of the hardest working rappers in the blogosphere. You would think he would work this into sometype of social network like thisis50.com or Okayplayer and become a full online phenom. But nope he most recently tried to create an internet moment by issuing a challenge to legendary battle rapper rhymefest only to be dismantled. Then he goes out and steps to serius Jones only to get shut down yet again and further diss rhymefest in said battle. I know the logic to be the best you've got to beat the best, but the problem is Charles didn't need to step to two seasoned battle rappers to get validation. That is usually a desparate move by cats with no shine not a kid who has grinded his way up on the blog circuit and created minor buzz for himself. This is a detour that isn't necessary and it may cost him what little cred he has. I was hoping he made better use of the net to provide a solid blueprint for other good indie rappers to follow but noooooooo he decided to go the kamikaze route. Well to each his own and I guess all pubilcity is good in showbiz because it keeps folks talking about you one way or another.

P.S. Charles, What's up with all the pink and the Sonic the hedge hog references? Is this where we are in the rap gimmick world? I will reserve judgement on you until your ablum arrives but it had better be damn creative or all these silly little gimmicks will have been in vain.

Below is the second response from rhymefest and it clears up everything in a grown man way in my opinion. Charles chill before somebody eats your food really.

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Great blog post about Jazz and Hiphop from HiphopDX

The Continuation Of The Art - Ishmael El

This is the new blog about Jazz music and its connection to Hip Hop. As we look back to 1973 and the origins of Hip Hop as we know it today, those basic elements of DJing, Emceeing, Break Dancing, and Rhyming have done more than anyone could have ever imagined. The stars (and executives) of Hip Hop/Rap have sold hundreds of millions of records, and some of them have even gone on to appear in blockbuster films and change the face of entertainment. In the next blog or two, I will be as specific as possible what is about to happen. It is important that the correct dates of events are given also. The points must connect so that the examples properly serve their purpose.
We talk about ciphers in Hip Hop, right? A cipher/ circle/ or cycle. We see this as a point where we can now bring art back to our community in an elevated way. Jazz music has the standards in place that Hip Hop can look to as a guide. I want to argue that Hip Hop is Jazz music. The pioneers of Hip Hop will definitely point our how the “music industry” and the art form that started out in the Bronx, New York are not the same at all. Some of that growth was good and some was bad. So the best thing to do is to move forward. How are we going to do that? We are reaching back into our communities and letting our youth (and everyone else) know that the legacy of Jazz music is a standard that can assist in revitalizing music (and our lives).
If it is true that our communities are in a crisis, Jazz music can definitely serve as an inspiration and a blueprint of how to get to where we are supposed to be. Does every young man or woman in our community realize that Louis Armstrong was once arrested at twelve years old for firing a gun into the air? From there, the future legend who hailed from the Storyville section of New Orleans, Louisiana was sent to a home for delinquent youth. Yet when one looks at the complete story, the story will unfold about how Louis Armstrong is probably the most famous figure in Jazz music. His trumpet playing and showmanship set the tone for all others in Jazz music for almost 100 years. Yes, there are criticisms (due to his commercialism), but the overall achievements of Louis Armstrong must be respected for what it meant to advancing Jazz. We’ll get into the full history of all of the Jazz masters of the 20th Century here.
The purpose of showing how Jazz is the foundation and of all music after the Blues is to make a connection to what we are all in a position to do. We are all in a position to begin anew and raise the art form called Hip Hop. At the same time, we are in a position to reclaim our neighborhoods and bring practical information and solutions to the streets.
There has to be something else done. For example, go back to roughly 1986-1988 when Hip Hop artists were right on our blocks, streets, and neighborhoods. We’d see them on the streets, because they were from our neighborhoods, or they were there often. The material things Hip Hop artists had were things that regular people had. The clothes were clothes that we wore. They had certain luxury items, but there was someone around that had the same things. We will explain that at a later day though.
Hip Hop has grown in so many ways. The recording budgets are multi-million dollar, and the cars are ones that we seldom see in our neighborhoods. The tools that are immediately attainable are the jewels of knowledge that youth can use to move forward and avoid the ills of the streets.
The science of survival and advancing “is” Jazz music by definition. That message is also Hip Hop. These are the themes that we will deal with and we will provide solutions that will move us all forward. The potential of where music can go right now are beyond description. All of the tools are there. The impact of Jazz history has the potential to show people a new direction to take in their lives. The principals of Jazz focus of dedication, creativity, tenacity, consistency, and a long list of other qualities. These qualities can be applied to basic tasks and will give positive results. We will give examples of these ideas in Jazz and Hip Hop.
Jazz music began in the slums. Jazz musicians were not allowed to play in ‘legitimate’ establishments. Because of that (and segregation), Jazz musicians usually worked in the speakeasies and clubs that belonged to ‘questionable’ figures, etc. When one looks at Jazz today, it seems like it was always a sophisticated genre that is easily accepted. We know the truth of how Jazz artists had to keep pushing ahead until their art was respected for what it was: genius, layered in refined defiance. Overall, the standards of creativity and musicianship were a cornerstone of Jazz music. Hip Hop is that art form, if it wants to be. That young man/woman that may have gotten into trouble before is Louis Armstrong, if s/he wants to a master of his/her pursuits too. As things come together for the organization (our paperwork is being evaluated by ‘regulators’ right now), we will do things that will help everyone. This help will be at a high level too.
Among other things, Ishmael El works with the not for profit community organization Elevated Track Recording, Inc. The website is: http://www.elevatedtrackrecording.org

Out of this world

Lil Wayne and the Afronaut Invasion
Why have so many black musicians been obsessed with outer space?By Jonah WeinerPosted Friday, June 20, 2008, at 1:50 PM ET
In 1927, the Rev. A.W. Nix, a preacher from Birmingham, Ala., entered a recording studio to commit several of his sermons to wax. He intended to release them commercially on the burgeoning gospel-music circuit. A Southern Baptist, Nix had an ear for the musical possibilities of oratory and a taste for fire and brimstone. His sermons, delivered in the rich, ravaged singsong of a Delta bluesman, bore darkly chastening titles like "Death Might Be Your Christmas Gift" and "The Prayer Meeting in Hell." Tucked into this catalog of apocalyptic warnings, though, was "The White Flyer to Heaven," a rapturous, six-minute homily about riding a spaceship piloted by Jesus up to the pearly gates: "Higher and higher! And higher! We'll pass on to the Second Heaven, the starry big Heaven, and view the flying stars and dashing meteors and then pass on by Mars and Mercury, and Jupiter and Venus and Saturn and Uranus, and Neptune with her four glittering moons."
"White Flyer to Heaven" is probably the earliest recorded evidence of a phenomenon that's persevered in black music ever since: Call it the Afronaut tradition. Last Tuesday, rapper Lil Wayne put this tradition atop the pop charts with his No. 1-debuting album Tha Carter III, which sold a stunning 1,005,545 copies in its first week. Lil Wayne starts from a hardened gangsta-rap template, but outer space has figured into his increasingly loopy songs for more than a year now: During the 2006 freestyle "Dough Is What I Got," he claimed Martian provenance in a boast about his otherworldly skills; on the woozy 2007 drug track "I Feel Like Dying," he imagined playing "basketball with the moon," adding, "I can mingle with the stars and throw a party on Mars." On Tha Carter III, Wayne devotes an entire song, "Phone Home," to the subject of his alien origins: "We are not the same, I am a Martian," he announces in an E.T.-inflected croak.
The last rapper to post comparable first-week sales was Kanye West (957,000), who is currently traveling the world with a space-themed tour titled Glow in the Dark; West's set features a rocket ship named Jane, animatronic shooting stars, and a stage designed to resemble rocky, lunar terrain. The Afronaut has been a hip-hop trope since Afrika Bambaataa recorded "Planet Rock" in 1982, but this is the first time it's occupied such a significant spot in the pop mainstream.
Many white rockers—Pink Floyd and David Bowie, most prominently—have taken to the cosmos for inspiration, but space has played a particularly vital role in the articulation of African-American musical identity. As a worldview, Afronautics began to take form in the late 1930s with a Birmingham-born college student named Herman Poole Blount. While meditating one afternoon, Blount said, he was beamed to Saturn by friendly aliens, who explained that his purpose in life was to speak truths of the universe through music. By the late 1950s—around the same time that Sputnik went into orbit—Blount had renamed himself Sun Ra, claimed Saturn as his true birthplace, and formed an elaborately costumed jazz collective called the Arkestra, specializing in noisy jams full of chants about space ways, satellites, and, in one of Ra's most-quoted formulations, "other planes of there." In songs, poems, and interviews, Sun Ra mapped out the fuzzy contours of his philosophy, which combined mystical futurism with an interest in ancient Egyptian civilization, and found sympathetic ears among avant-gardists, psychedelia heads, and hippies.
Ra grew up an outsider twice over: once for his refusal to participate in military service during World War II, which earned him brief imprisonment and ostracism from his family, and again for the simple fact of being black in the American South. We can glimpse the psychological framework of his space obsession through the lens of his alienation. His 1972 poem "Tomorrow's Realm" mixes images of solitude, slavery, and cosmic escape:
I'll build a world of otherness …Other-abstract-natural designAnd wait for you.In tomorrow's realmWe'll take the helmof a new shipLike the lash of a whip, we'll be suddenlyon the way.
The whip's appearance in this fantasy brings to mind a compelling formulation from "Black to the Future," a 1993 essay on black sci-fi by cultural critic Mark Dery: "African Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees." In Ra's mythology, the future is inextricable from the past: His spaceship carries the specter of the slave ship within itself.
Another likely influence on Sun Ra—and a considerable influence on many hip-hop stars of the late '80s and early '90s—was the Nation of Islam, whose pamphleteers the jazzman associated with in '50s Chicago. Sun Ra never claimed membership in the Nation of Islam, and he disagreed with many of its teachings; still, his encounters with the group are interesting, since a racialized cosmology is central to both his and the NOI's beliefs. In Elijah Muhammad's 1965 tract Message to the Blackman in America, Muhammad writes of a massive "mother plane"—built by ancient black scientists and containing inside its metal hull "fifteen hundred bombing planes with most deadliest explosives"—that hovers above Earth, poised to rain damnation upon "the white man's evil world."
Echoes of Sun Ra and NOI are audible in the music of George Clinton, who must have had both in mind when he transformed Parliament from a doo-wop group into a mother-ship-worshipping acid-funk congregation in the 1970s. Clinton's mother ship, of course, was likelier to drop megatons of booty and cocaine than warheads, but hedonism wasn't the only goal. In the opening bars of "Mother Ship Connection," Clinton announces, "We have returned to claim the pyramids"—a nod to paleocontact theories, which hypothesize that ancient astronauts shared technological secrets with North Africans. Perceptible in this ripple of the Afronaut impulse is the yearning for and fantastical reclamation of an ennobling African history: A trip to space doubles as a return to roots.
The Afronaut universe, of course, comprises more performers than those mentioned here and extends beyond music, from the hero of Brother From Another Planet to Astronaut Jones, Tracy Morgan's ridiculous SNL creation. Where hip-hop is concerned, though, the first Afronaut to speak of is Afrika Bambaataa. A gang leader turned community activist and DJ, Bambaataa spun Parliament-Funkadelic records alongside reggae, techno, and rock vinyl and wore elaborate African-Samurai-Cherokee-cyborg costumes doubtless inspired by the Arkestra. In the burnt-out South Bronx of the early '80s, Bambaataa's Afronaut mythology—championing Zulu valor and an interstellar utopianism—offered both racial pride and an escapist-hatch out of the bleak, inner-city quotidian.
Ironically, a George Clinton fan named Dr. Dre helped push space to hip-hop's margins for the better part of a decade. In 1988, Dre co-produced Straight Outta Compton, the epochal album by ur-gangsta-rap posse N.W.A, which made the group's stone-faced "reality rap" hip-hop's dominant perspective. Cosmic journeys became fanciful departures from hip-hop's so-called "true" locus, the flesh-and-blood, asphalt-and-concrete street. In the mid-to-late-'90s, bling-era hip-hop supplanted gangsta rap, trading an exaggerated narrative of urban despair for an exaggerated narrative of upward mobility—but not the sort you get from a shuttle blastoff.
Rappers continued to construct Afronaut fantasies, of course. Underground New York MC Kool Keith fashioned himself a star-humping Marquis de Sade; Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliott filled music videos with cyberpunk imagery and goofy zero-gravity effects. But Atlanta duo OutKast did more than anyone else to put the Afronaut back on the hip-hop radar. OutKast's 1996 album, ATLiens, came packaged with a comic book in which rappers Big Boi and Andre 3000, armed with holographic lions and purity of spirit, battle an alien warlord named Nosamilli. When OutKast announced that they were "extraterrestrials" in their songs, their purpose was twofold. As Southerners, they'd been excluded from hip-hop's dominant East/West axis, and they sought to turn that outsider status into a weapon. But just as important, these students of Funkadelic and Prince, bored by the conservatism of steely thugs and dollar-eyed hustlers, were arguing for the rightful place in hip-hop of that crucial figure in black postwar pop, the boa-sporting, id-unleashing, out-of-this-world freak.
So, what does space mean to Lil Wayne, the biggest Afronaut in the world right now? When he says he was born on Mars, it's a brag: He means it takes an alien system of thought to conduct his chaotic assault on sound, rhythm, and meaning. But Wayne's Afronautic vision goes beyond this. He redefines what it means to be a gun-toting gangsta, importing the anarchic values of a black spaceman: For him, space seems to signify the excesses of emotion, imagination, and appetite banging around his body and brain, dark matter the gangsta-realist idiom typically excludes. Whereas Jay-Z and 50 Cent boast about focus and composure, Wayne allows himself to sound genuinely unhinged—sobbing, spewing gibberish, breaking into fits of laughter. And whereas many rappers talk about destroying their competition, Wayne is certainly the first to fantasize so extensively about munching on his.* On "Phone Home," he raps, "I just eat them for supper, get in my spaceship, and hover." Any gangsta can level a Glock at his enemies. It takes a Martian to whip out the cutlery.
Correction, June 23, 2008: The article originally stated that Lil Wayne was the first hip-hop artist to fantasize about munching on his competition. In fact, other rappers have contemplated consuming their rivals. (Return to the corrected sentence.)Jonah Weiner is a senior editor at Blender and has written about music for the Village Voice and the New York Times.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2193871/


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