Sunday Casual Reading

On some days every link begets two or three more, and soon my Firefox tabs are overflowing (a lot of my recent posts are really just research archives.) Let's just say it's been yet another educational morning.

I finally realized that WireTap Magazine is the youth section of Alternet.org. I'm also starting to see why everyone's switching from Blogger to Wordpress. The way that block quotes and pasting screws up the format in the new Blogger is pretty aggravating. No matter, in four months this blog will be finished.

WireTap Magazine, "Bigger than Hip-Hop." This article describes the current hip hop political movement: "So, culture, class issues, consumerism and varying degrees of complacency all divide African Americans, as much if not more than generational differences. In fact, to reduce the fragmentation of black politics into a generation gap is to play into the hands of the right."

"Shinin' the Light on White Privilege." A detailed history and time-line of the institutionalization of racial oppression in the United States.

"The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), is a national and international collective of anti-racist, multicultural community organizers and educators dedicated to building an effective movement for social transformation." This group has roots in New Orleans.

Letter of the People of New Orleans to Our Friends and Allies: "The South has been traditionally underfunded and often exploited by institutions, including corporations, the labor movement, foundations, and the federal government. We have faced the legacy of centuries of institutional racism and oppression, with little outside support. And yet, against massive odds, grassroots movements in the South have organized and struggled and won historic, inspiring victories with international relevance." The list of signatories at the end of the letter is a Who's-Who of the New Orleans grassroots social activism community.

New Orleans Network - Web Resources. A database and calendar of social activism in New Orleans; possible model for the new CenLamar.

Southern Human Rights Organizers' Network: "The primary goal of the network is to develop innovative and practical methods of organizing across the region. Another important objective is to strengthen the capacity of civil rights and social justice organizations in the Deep South."

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. Their most recent publication, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, is described as follows: "In this landmark collection, over 25 activists and scholars describe and discuss the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC)--a system of relationships between the state, the owning classes, foundations, and social service &social justice organizations that results in the surveillance, control, derailment, and everyday management of political movements." This group has been particularly active in New Orleans.

Wiretap Magazine, "New Orleans: Continuing Crisis:"

For many in the nonprofit field nationally, post-Katrina New Orleans has been an opportunity for career advancement. While local residents have been too overwhelmed by tragedy to apply for grants, a few well-placed national individuals and organizations have not hesitated to take their place in line. Although some have no relation to New Orleans, they often have previous relationships with the foundations, as well as resources that translate into easier access to funding, such as development staff, website designers and professional promotional materials

[...snip...]

Foundations are an integral part of the current structure of U.S. nonprofits, a system that INCITE has called the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, to emphasize the intersecting, dependent and corporatized ways in which the system is constructed. It is a system in which organizations are frequently pitted against each other for funding, where organizers are discouraged from being active in their own community, and where accountability to and leadership from those most affected has become increasingly rare.

Update: In the spirit of Easter, the first four of the Eight Beatitudes,

• Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
• Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the land.
• Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted.
  
• Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.
  

MCTenz Gives Tibetan Teens a Dose of Authentic Hip-Hop

Cath Marsh, the New Zealander who taught my class last year, has been trying out her new English learning materials on the students on the weekend. Following from her conviction that language must be learned in context and with interesting content, the module she is currently testing is on hip-hop.

In Kangding she bumped into a vacationing Tenzin Gyaltsen, a half-Tibetan from California (not to be confused with my colleague Tenzin Mullin, who is not Tibetan). He is an MC in Chengdu performing around China, and is a director of Pro-Motion Solutions, working to expand the hip-hop and DJ scene in Asia. He blogs at MCTenz.com.

She invited him up to give the class his views on hip-hop and a first-hand example of MCing, with Sacsha on the beat-box. It was classic (don't miss Tenzin's lecture notes on the board). Even if you're in a rush, watch this video. It's about the sweetest thing I've seen since being in New Orleans or India (you know I wouldn't lie to you):



Update: here's the URL for the Youtube video in case the embed becomes corrupt.

Tenzin has a few pictures of some break dancers in Kangding and his version of the experience on his blog.

I got pretty fired up during his explanation of hip-hop culture, and the students were definitely into it. He stressed that the theme of struggle in hip-hop stems in part from the oppression of minorities in the Bronx in the late Sixties and Seventies. "Struggle, Revolution, Growth." I asked him if the emphasis on cutting down rivals in MC Battles, out-flexing other B-Boys in a face-off, and throwing up the best bombs and tags was a way of getting one's opponent to be the best they can be. He didn't think so, but agreed that that was a result.

At that time my moustache was freshly crafted, and I was a little paranoid that they'd think I was a redneck winger from Louisiana. I couldn't get Deltron's words outta my head:

A lot of white boys like the style and copy
Dig in something deeper and you'll peep that were not free
It's not about the separation its about the population

Word. I've been trying to reconcile the opposing ideas that hip-hop is about individual power and that it is about community. At some point last week when reading about something unrelated, I stumbled across this story in WireTap: The Political Power of the Midwest. In spite of the title, this post is about how progressive urban grassroots organizers use hip-hop to mold the characters of inner-city youth, in community centers like Elementz and Urban Underground. "Our central theme is respect. We don't have the typical metal detectors and security guards. Instead, we focus on letting young people in on nearly all of the decision-making."

On DailyKos I also came across an interesting diary when I was doing a little research on grassroots hunger initiatives. The Politics of Hip-Hop reads like a manifesto constructed from hip-hop flows, arguing that the nature of hip-hop is political, oriented towards the class struggle of the common man and woman (not necessarily the black man and woman) and based on revolution. I know it sounds Socialistic but it grow up. When I began looking, I found similar sentiments. One diary encourages us to "peep" an email from Nasty Nes, who lists the links for the Hip-Hop League of Voter's local voting guides and give a heads up on common practices of disenfranchisement. Young Voters are still makin' it happen... introduces the Hip-Hop Summit and its relationship to the Youth Movement.

Finally, wu ming asks is political hip-hop dead? I think you'll see from the comments that the answer is fuck no it ain't dead. The comments are also a sure spot to score some downloading ideas for your personal library of underground hip-hop.

Let's get one thing straight, though. I'm a Northern European mutt raised in a professional class family in Central Louisiana. I'm a white boy who "likes the style," but I don't copy. I didn't get into hip-hop until I was in college, when I realized the musical eclecticism of Handsome Boy Modeling School samples, the lyrical deftness of Kool Keith, and the powerful simplicity of the politics of Digable Planets. These are the same reasons I listen to independent music (not emo, Chris and Mike) like Pink Mountaintops, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Silver Jews.

I draw power from this music not because of my race or my extra-curricular habits, but because it inspires me and has the potential to focus the revolutionary fervor of my peers. We're not the MTV Generation, we're not Generation Y, we aren't the Generation of Social Values or the Millennial Generation or the Nine-Eleven Generation (maybe the Generation of the Federal Flood, just maybe). I'm not sure what we are, together, though I am certain of one thing: most of us know shit when we smell it.

East Side

After class today I took Cath's camera around campus to take a few photos. This Chinese hamlet near the school is a nice example of the Sichuanese countryside.

I decided to document the few tags around the school. Chinese youths adore hip hop culture these days. My opinion being that when cultural movements are expropriated to non-native places or for materialist reasons, I feel that Chinese hip hop lacks some of the authenticity of the underground movement we (barely) have (left) in America.

Slam, bitches!
I've always been impressed with the Chinese penchant for replacing nature with artifice made to resemble nature.

Yes, that's a Houston Rocket on the left and a concrete ping-pong table on the right. Eminem is tagged at the bottom right, so if that's the level of American hip-hop to which they're exposed, it's no wonder Chinese hip hop seems barren to me.

The Money Shot: MC Death

Basketball is China's most popular sport, and thanks to the NBA, the music industry, and Hollywood, most Chinese kids assume that all blacks in America are basketball players or gang bangers.

These tags suck.

This one sucks too, but hey, it's their second (and sometimes third) language.

Spring is just arriving.

This tag is behind my apartment. I think it says "I'm Tank." Good on ya, Tank.

From what I can tell, the official establishment has nothing against kids expressing themselves in this way in China. I think it's because it never had anti-establishment roots out here in China. Kids tag and dance hip hop because that's what's mainstream and status-quo.

Although they can dress the dress and leave tags, Chinese hip hop dancing is completely choreographed. Noticing that I don't lack rhythm, my students have asked me to teach them to "dance hip hop." I don't really know what the fuck that means. Hip hop moves and rhymes are meant to be improvised, so planning it out ahead of time is antithetical. It's difficult for me to do a real survey of Chinese hip hop, but my impression is that it doesn't come anywhere close to the literary ingenuity of the best in American underground hip hop, and they certainly don't know how to mix dope samples (that's a music term, Mom. It doesn't mean drugs).

Communist China has tamed a number of Western musical styles, including rock-n-roll, punk, and now hip hop. Art has traditionally been used in China to subvert the status quo, from millennia-old veiled political poetry to the allegoric film of the mid-eighties. That was meant to change when Mao declared art to be the tool of the People's Revolution. Hip hop in the People's Republic of China is definitely a tool, but not of Communism: it's a tool of conformity and materialism.

Hip-hop theolo-G

As I was researching liberation theology, which argues that the poor and marginalized are special before Jesus and that the highest moral aim is fighting for them, I stumbled across the Indian theologian Sebastian Kappen.


Kappen (who incidentally looks like a beardless Indian version of my father), published Jesus and Freedom in 1977. The book drew heavily from the Latin American priests and theologians who were experimenting with liberation theology. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of which Cardinal Ratzinger (da' Pope) was a member, rejected Kappen's book and liberation theology as a whole because of the movement's Marxist sympathies and investigation of spiritual matters informed by materialism. Kappen wrote the pamphlet Censorship and the Future of Asian Theology as a reply. I slowly read the following:

Moreover, if God is alive and speaks to humans of all places and cultures, there is no basis for a censorship that evaluates all theology by the standard of one theology, I mean, by the standard of the dogmas and concepts developed in the western historical-cultural context. The traditional mode of thinking in the West is representational.
[...]
As Asians, our mode of thinking is unitive rather than analytic, experiential rather than representational, existentialist rather than essentialist. The dichotomies western thought has thrown up — matter and spirit, faith and reason, nature and grace, temporal and eternal, human and divine, and the like — are foreign to us. For us thinking is communing, not conquering; is being present to what presents itself, not re-presenting it through concepts; is being one with the oneness of all, not exploding the one into the manifold. Our ancient seers would have questioned even the 'and' in the customary formulation, God and man, if taken in the additive, disjunctive sense ; so finely attuned were they to the underlying oneness of the many. These cultural specificities are ignored by the church when she compels us, Asians, to think as do people in the West. What is this but cultural imperialism and colonisation of the mind?

The primary locus of theology, therefore, cannot be the closed community of Christians but the open community of all those who hunger and thirst for justice and freedom.* And if the theology that emerges out of dialogue with the Lord of history bursts the old wineskins of tradition, none need shed a tear over it except the makers of old wineskins!**

Word, Baba Kappen-G. Before I made it to the word "manifold," the prophetic words of Deltron Z's Madness stood up in my mind:

The universe is one and I can see what rap can be glorious
Put in the Smithsonium my podiums for holy hymns
But you see who's controlling them
Fuck myself off cuz of the egotistical mode I'm in
[...]
I'm trapped in a bottle
My music's gettin hollow
That's what happens when humanity you follow
Where every leak or info is hard to swallow
Sell your Marlboros and car insurance
Put niggas on the moon and can't pay your burdens
I smoke herb and rock a turban
Meditate on the world and whats occurrin
A lot of white boys like the style and copy
Dig in something deeper and you'll peep that were not free
It's not about the separation its about the population
[...]
When all paths are intersections
It all depends on the persons perception
[...]
I believe you held something back for too long
It grew strong
And energy has its own will
And people think they make music still
But music is there with out you or me we just manipulate
For better or worse so let it situate
[...]
I'm glad I love music and life
cuz it's easy to see the pain and strife
and end it all tonight.

Exactly like an Aeolian Harp, which "is played not by human hands, but by the wind. Its melodies and harmonies are not those that we have chosen. They are the improvisation of nature itself."

(the remainder of this entry has been moved to immutablefruit.livejournal.com)