I See No Changes: Hip-Hop And Assata

Assata Shakur certainly knows what it’s like to be in the crosshairs. That’s how she’s spent the past forty years. Now she’s the first woman ever to be added to the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists. And in this day and age, calling someone a terrorist is akin to drawing a target on their forehead.

Not that ordinary Black people -- particularly young Black people -- have it all that much better. All the recent reports indicate that African America will be worse off, not better, after eight years of the Obama administration. The daily experiences of Blacks in any city is one where they could be potentially stopped, frisked, arrested and much worse for almost no reason whatsoever. Most African Americans may not be labeled something quite as extreme as “terrorists” across the board, but they certainly remain an object of the mainstream’s ire.

I’m reminded of the "Boondocks" comic strip, released not long after 9/11, when young Huey and Caesar discuss how Black Americans have slid to the “third most hated” ethnic group “behind people of Middle Eastern/Arab descent and people of East Indian descent... because they look kind of like people of Middle Eastern/Arab descent.”

Twelve years later it seems that the sick contest continues. Prior to the Boston Marathon bombings and the unleashing a new wave of Islamophobia, activists in the city were taking on the possibility of a city ordinance that would criminalize the wearing of saggy pants.

Like Yasiin Bey says, “‘hip-hop’ is just shorthand for ‘Black people.’” In other words, policy-makers understand well that if you want to single out African Americans in “post-racial,” “post-Civil Rights” America, then the easiest method is just to go after hip-hop. No longer do we talk about the “natural difference between the races” like Bull Connor or George Wallace did; now it’s about things like “culture” and “way of life.” The fact that most war criminals wear nice suits doesn’t mean that cops are stationed outside Armani. That would just be too consistent.

This reality may provide some insight into the seemingly random choice to “upgrade” Assata’s standing on the terror list in the here and now. Hip-hop may not be the reason for this development, but looking at the state of the culture does give us something of a window.

Chuck “Jigsaw” Creekmur has already pointed out the deep respect that Assata Shakur commands within hip-hop culture. Her name has been dropped in several songs. Common visited her in Cuba several years back where she’s been living in exile -- which in turn provided an in for the Sarah Palins of the world to criticize Barack Obama for inviting Common to the White House.

And, of course, Assata is Tupac’s godmother. Not to mention that her brother was his step-father. There’s something of a crux here; more than just a passing symbolic serendipity. Tupac (rest in peace) was a scion of his mother Afeni’s generation, that generation of Black Americans that had risen up and taken down legal segregation only to have the bigotry of the whole damn system slammed in their face. They were the ones that raised the larger questions that Malcolm and Martin had left unanswered when they were shot; the questions about why capitalism needs racism and why we pay water bills on a planet two-thirds water.

The Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, these were where those like Assata, Mutulu and Afeni ended up, and they scared the hell out of Nixon, the FBI and just about any guardian of the old order. That’s why so many ended up in jail, framed up, in exile or much worse, dead. And this left the next generation -- the hip-hop generation -- once again with dreams deferred. As Sonia Sanchez points out: “Hip-hop emerged because nothing had changed since the 60s.”

It was on the ashes of the Black Power movement that hip-hop took hold in the first place. Communities gutted and abandoned by white flight and the flourishing of drugs and gang wars were the markers of neoliberal Black America. But the ideas of something to be won still persisted, still managed to find their ways into the consciousness of that first wave of heads in various ways -- be that through the Afro-futurist cultural nationalism of the Zulu Nation or the heavy street-truth of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message.”

If, as Yasiin reminds us, hip-hop is "shorthand for Black people,” and if this culture in the matter of a couple decades has become the dominant one among young people (particularly of color), then it’s not too much of a stretch to see how counterintelligence previously aimed at stifling J. Edgar Hoover’s feared “Black messiah” can be translated into the targeting of any artist that might aim to speak truth to power.

This isn’t the stuff of conspiracy theory. Today’s mainstream, auto-tuned studio gangsterism makes it easy to forget that during the years of hip-hop’s “golden age,” many of the art-form’s brightest luminaries were publicly and secretly targeted. Public Enemy’s Black nationalism landed them in more than a few media dustups and political denunciations. Even more to the point, N.W.A and Ice-T were under surveillance of the the FBI and the LAPD in the late 80’s and early 90’s.

Right around the turn of the 2000’s, reports started to surface -- in papers from the Village Voice to the Miami Herald -- of law enforcement agencies dedicating significant resources to keeping tabs on hip-hop crews. Six inch dossiers and even whole departments in the NYPD were devoted to tracking the activities of well-known rappers. Even the Wu Tang Clan’s management was infiltrated by a government informant at one point, proving that artists didn’t have to be particularly “political” to find themselves targeted by the feds. Little wonder that so many are convinced that law enforcement was somehow complicit in the deaths of Biggie and Tupac.

Telescope this forward to today. The music industry is more consolidated than it’s ever been and hip-hop and rap, though still vibrant and rebellious in many cases, has a mainstream that is more homogenized and comparatively tame. Richard Wallace, otherwise known as Epic of Chicago juke militants BBU, puts it like this:

The money is all dried up in hip-hop, the Minstrel show is all that's left. The soul of hip-hop was bought and sold by capitalists. Hip-hop, blues, R&B, and jazz are what the effects of oppression sound like. That sound was bottled up and sold by capitalists who made millions by watering down the message and mass producing the product. I don't believe that any one style of hip-hop is better than another, but I do believe that the message we have been socialized to receive from hip-hop has been restructured to benefit capitalism and keep folks oppressed.

It’s important to note that Epic uses the word “socialized” when talking about hip-hop commodification. Because socialization is a process (often quite an unstable one) that has to be conscious on the part of one group of people against another. It also can be undone and pushed against.

That’s precisely what many in powerful places don’t want. Record executives have heart attacks over platinum-selling artists taking militant stances (evidenced by their ongoing troubles with, for instance, Lupe Fiasco). And those at the grassroots level still often find themselves singled out by local authorities. The recent eviction of Bronx duo Rebel Diaz from their community arts space is only the most current example.

Federal obsession with the “Black messiah” is surely easy to overstate; it also underplays the very fact that Dr. King, Malcolm X and others like them would be nothing without a movement at their backs. But the notion of some kind of radical anti-racist leader seizing national attention certainly scares those with reason. The tragic and shocking death of Malcolm’s grandson -- whose own history of activism is being deliberately swept under the rug in favor of his prison record -- is a stark reminder of just how much they fear this.

The best way to hedge against the emergence of a new and radical anti-racist movement isn’t just to pen in today’s potential, but to ruthlessly scapegoat those leaders of the past. And yes, that’s still true with a Black president in power. Again, Epic’s words:

Our government is sold too, when it comes to Assata people say, ‘how could Obama let this happen?’, that seems to be the question instead of, ‘why did Obama do this?’ Obama is owned by the system that made him president. Sister Assata is a symbol of resistance to capitalism... The fact that our (US) government has been sold has to be accepted. Capitalism breeds systems of inequality that stretch far beyond US borders effecting race, gender and class. Assata isn't anti-American she is anti-capitalist, just like the soul of hip-hop.

Reclaiming that soul is something that artists and activists alike need to never forget. It’s a soul that’s been around well before hip-hop itself, and has stayed alive through four hundred years of the Middle Passage, chattel slavery, Jim Crow and violent racist thuggery on the part of the US government. It’s a soul of survival by any means necessary. That soul is something Assata Shakur knows well, and that’s the reason she’s been labeled a terrorist. As she writes in her own poem:

Through the lies and the sell-outs,
The mistakes and the madness.
Through pain and hunger and frustration,
We carried it on. 

Carried on the tradition.
Carried a strong tradition.
Carried a proud tradition.
Carried a Black tradition.
Carry it on.
Pass it down to the children.
Pass it down. 

Carry it on.
Carry it on now.
Carry it on
TO FREEDOM!

Published at Red Wedge magazine. 

And Hell Followed With Him

Maybe we’re all just getting too old, but when some of the most influential thrash musicians kick their way off the mortal coil, it’s easy to get shaken. That’s what it feels like with the death of Jeff Hanneman, one of the founding guitarists of metal gods Slayer, who succumbed to liver failure last week.

It appears that the root cause of Hanneman’s liver problems was necrotizing fasciitis, a condition that took hold after a spider bit him in 2011. According to Slayer’s Facebook page, the bite became life-threatening; Hanneman was in a coma for a few days and there was talk that they may have to amputate his arm. Instead he underwent several surgeries to remove the dead skin and flesh around the bite area. It’s hard to imagine a more sickly appropriate death for a metal musician; even the name of the condition has the word “necro” in it.

Whether or not you’re a metal fan -- and thrash is the only sub-genre I’ve ever really paid attention to -- Hanneman’s death is a big deal. His playing was brutal and artful all at the same time. He did virtuosic things with his guitar that gripped the listener in a kind of chaotic downward cyclone and cast them much deeper than most musicians of his generation dared to go. At its best, metal has always aspired to a kind of post-electronic Wagnerism; sounds that are as epic as they are foreboding. And Slayer helped restore the style to that level at a time when crimped hair and choreographed kicks were threatening to sterilize it.

More broadly, Hanneman was part of a time and place of extreme flux in music. Los Angeles in the 1980’s was a fuck-fest of daring musicians that waltzed easily between the influence of metal, punk, funk, rap and rock. The economic bottom had dropped out of the Reaganite postmodern metropolis (paging Mike Davis) and the kids -- from just about all backgrounds -- were just straight up pissed.

This was a city both able to create standard bearers of gangster rap like N.W.A and be the gestation pod of hardcore punk cholos like Suicidal Tendencies. What’s more, there were so many acts that were effortlessly able to cross-breed it all -- Fishbone, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the list goes on.

Slayer might not at first seem to be close to any of this. Their sound is thought of today as about as quintessentially metal as metal can quintessentially be. In the late 80’s though, they were transgressive and even controversial. Thrash, as a rule, was a stripped down, fast and loud, kick-you-in-the-base-of-the-spine alternative to the pampered glitz of hair metal. The very elements that made it thrash in the first place -- use of power and bar chords, a willfulness to growl and scream rather than sing -- were more punk than anything else, albeit cranked up to breakneck speed. It was ugly, it was even quite macho in its rebuff of the primping and makeup of Poison or Twisted Sister. But nobody could really deny that thrash was a lot more real and raw.

Mainstream America didn’t like this. As their Rolling Stone biography says: “If Slayer did not exist, the tabloid press would have to invent it.” Tipper Gore’s Parental Music Resource Center hated Slayer. Even though they knew really nothing about the band. Here was Gore in a 1988 interview:

Q: Have you ever attended a metal concert?

A: No, I have not.

Q: Is there a particular reason for that? Wouldn't you like to see the stage show of some of these groups?

A: Yes I would. In fact, that's something we've been planning to do. Slayer played here at the Warner Theatre (in Washington, D.C.) and I wanted to go and see that. I had heard reports from some parents in San Antonio who had gone to see their concert and I wanted to go and see if they were doing the same kinds of things. I couldn't make it whenever the date was.

All of this dovetailed with the wave of “Satanic panic” that seemed to seize suburban white people in the 90’s, especially in the case of the West Memphis Three. If Ice-T and 2 Live Crew were excuses for the establishment to single out young Black men as particularly perverse and crime-prone, then the next segment of the slippery slope was portraying otherwise well-behaved white kids in the grip of Satan’s hypnotic rhythms. Today, just about the only people we can expect to take a similar tact are those of the Westboro Baptist Church, whose intentions to picket Hanneman's funeral simply don't pack the same punch as Tipper's witch hunts.

Thing was, all the time and energy being spent on whipping up the cultural blame game was time that wasn’t being spent talking about jobs or education, or providing actual opportunity for young people. It was (and is) the logic of the old divide and rule. It also naturally and intentionally dodged the question of why the kids were so damned angry in the first place! In the face of a scary existence, Gore and company just wanted us to sideline the baddies and act like nothing was wrong.

Hanneman’s lyrics themselves were often at the center of the criticism of the band due to their portrayal of violence, war, chaos, and yes, Satanism. The song “Angel of Death” particularly got the hackles of executives at Columbia up, who refused to release the song or its album because of its references to Nazi torture doctor Josef Mengele. Hanneman, when asked about it stated unequivocally that the song was not an endorsement of Mengele’s actions or Nazi ideology (an important move considering the traction that white power groups have long had in the American metal scene).

"I know why people misrepresent it," he told one radio DJ. "It's because they get a knee-jerk reaction to it. There's nothing I put in the lyrics that says necessarily he was a bad man because to me -- well, isn't it obvious? I shouldn't have to tell you that."

Hanneman wasn't really political. What few political opinions reporters have ever been able to squeeze out of him or Slayer vocalist Kerry King are probably best described as vaguely libertarian: Bush is an idiot, war is stupid, but don’t ever get in the way of what I am as an individual. Metallica have dumbed down their sound and become a parody of themselves while going to entertain the troops; Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine has become a born-again Christian. Slayer have steered admirably clear of this for the most part.

At the core of it, though, their music was firmly in the tradition of the dark romantic. The kind of nihilism that they flagpoled at the center of their sound and lyrics were always intended more as a reflection of a basic fact: the world is often a dark, horrible and unforgiving place. If conservative politicians have proven that life really could be nasty, brutish and short, then Slayer at their peak merely provided an honest soundtrack. The question is, who do you really fear more?

Now, twenty years later, Hanneman’s own death proves in a fairly roundabout way that Slayer have been right all along. And obviously so. Death, much as we would love to ignore it, exists. It is inescapable, its power awesome and absolute. It takes away people we love or admire. It comes too early. It shocks us and causes us to feel all the existential angst that just about every worthwhile philosopher and social theorist has had to reckon with. Political and religious figures tell us to have blind hope, pharmaceutical commercials tell us to pop pills. Nobody tells us that it’s okay to be horrified by forces beyond our control.

The same can be said about human suffering in general. What Slayer’s music held in common with so much else of the music that came out of their time and place was a rather simple reminder: our anger does not deserve to be ignored. If you’re going to light a match, then you’re going to have to admit that the darkness exists in the first place.

First appeared in Red Wedge magazine

The Red Flag

Hoping all friends had a safe and happy International Workers Day yesterday. If you had no choice to work (which of course many of us commonly do nowadays) then here's also hoping that the boss didn't ride you too much. Red Wedge's May Day issue came out on Monday. You should go read it, and also listen to this near-perfect remake that Billy Bragg did of the socialist classic; we posted it as part of the issue too.

Fighting For A Living At Guitar Center

Lately it seems that we can’t get away from the hard, simple fact that art requires labor -- both in the actual creation and in the conditions that make it possible. Where there’s labor there’s normally a lot of hard work and sacrifice. And where there’s hard work and sacrifice, there’s normally some bastard up at the top looking to squeeze as much as they can out of those of us who actually work. Much as some of us would love to act like art exists in a separate realm from all of this, it doesn’t.

Here’s a brief run-down of the past few years. South Korean assembly workers at Cort Guitars, laid off by the company several years ago, have waged an international campaign to get their jobs back. In the UK, retail workers at HMV have not only managed to hijack the company’s Twitter account but barricade themselves in their stores until their paychecks were delivered as promised.

Here in the US, Bay Area staff at the Legion of Honor and De Young Memorial art museums have gone toe-to-toe with management over the introduction of a “two-tiered” wage system. And this is against the backdrop of an apparently never-ending labor disputes involving orchestra musicians from Detroit to New York City, from Chicago back to the Bay Area.

Now, it’s Guitar Center’s turn -- the world’s largest retailer of musical instruments and accessories. In early April, workers at their flagship store in New York City announced their intent to form a union through the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, a subsidiary of the United Food and Commercial Workers.

As recently as a few years ago, employees at Guitar Center believed their wages and treatment on the job to be decent. But something changed in 2007: the chain was bought out, and not just by any old company. It was Bain Capital. The same Bain Capital that became one of Mitt Romney’s many public embarrassments during his presidential campaign, notorious for buying out other companies and gutting standards before laying off workers and shipping things off to other countries.

That same M.O. had shown its ugly face at Guitar Center. Hence the drive to unionize in New York. And once again, true to form, Bain are doing everything they can to prevent this from happening. Here’s what the workers’ petition (which you should sign right now) has to say about conditions at the NYC store:

Now, those of us who are non-sales workers barely get paid more than minimum wage and rarely get raises. Guitar Center doesn't offer part time workers health benefits and we almost never receive paid sick days or vacation time. The sales workers amongst us used to have decent commissions and benefits but now our commissions have been cut. We also don’t get paid sick days and we can make as little as 7.25/hr. We have ever increasing mandatory sales requirements but we are being forced to do more and more non-sales work that makes it harder to reach those requirements. If we don’t sell enough Pro Coverage (aka “extended warrantees”), our commissions take a hit.

Nobody can live on $7.25 an hour. And that’s one of the reasons behind the appearance of the “Fight For 15” campaign and the uprising of low-wage workers in New York and Chicago. Though theres no indication (at least yet) that the workers at Guitar Center are connecting themselves to this new movement, it seems hard to separate from this overall context. Would these folks -- who make their bread by suggesting the best pick-ups and can string a guitar with their eyes closed -- have had the courage to step up and demand dignity if they hadn’t seen hundreds of burger-flippers and stock-jockeys do the same? One can imagine.

There is a shift taking place right beneath our feet in how young people conceptualize work. For some time, retail and fast food gigs have been thought of as stop-gap jobs -- the kind of thing you do until something better, something more “career-worthy,” comes along. After all, very few musicians start plucking at a guitar or toying with the decks because they want to work in a store.

This train of thought regarding low-wage work was never quite as true as we might make it out to be, particularly for immigrant workers and young people of color. But for in the past five years it’s sunk in: this is all that society has to offer us. And if it’s going to be anything close to a fair living, if any of us are ever going to have enough security to pursue any of the joys of life, then we’re going to have to fight.

On Wednesday, April 24th, halfway across the country in Chicago, several hundred of these low-wage workers did just that, walking out from their jobs at McDonald’s, Subway, Victoria’s Secret, Macy’s, Nordstrom’s and a slew of other chains. For FF15 and the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago, the 24th was a turning point.

Among the strikers was Whole Foods employee and Red Wedge editor Matthew Camp (that’s right, we have day-jobs). Speaking with Huffington Post, Camp -- who by all accounts deserves to be spending his time on the writing and art history I know he loves -- brought up the bygone days of decent-paying working class jobs. "The reason those jobs paid so well is that people got together like we are now and stood up for themselves.”

He’s right. Each and every struggle that won anything meaningful for working people took the kind of creativity that left the one percent flummoxed. John Mackey, Whole Foods’ CEO, may act the part of the benevolent and caring boss, but he cares not a whit for the aspirations of employees, ground out by back-breaking and degrading conditions. Just the same, Mitt Romney and his ilk haven’t a clue about the precision that goes into making a guitar shop work.

These, dear readers, are the enemies of a free and vital culture. If we want to even come close to fulfilling our creative potential as a class, we’re going to need them out of the way.

First published at Red Wedge magazine.

Tumbling Into The Electronic Void...

Readers may notice that it mentions on RF's bio page that I also identify as an artist as well as a writer and editor. So where's the art? Truth be told, until rather recently, it hasn't been much of anywhere. High school and college were really the last time I sketched, drew or painted with any kind of regularity. But as Red Wedge got off the ground, myself and the other editors found ourselves in need of illustrations. So, I've stepped into the fray; most of them I'm fairly indifferent to, but some of them I quite like.

I've also been thinking quite a lot lately about the relationship between artistic movements and musical movements. There's a lot of this obviously. The surrealists loved blues and jazz, bebop and abstact expressionism walked hand-in-hand for quite a while after World War II, and the way that various kinds of street art have bobbed and woven through punk, hip-hop and rave scene isn't hard to pinpoint. And hell, how many times have we heard a song and thought of how the sound looks, or vice versa?

To this end, I've gone ahead and ventured into the dreaded, hipster-infested waters of Tumblr. As it says on the newly-launched page itself, it will be dedicated primarily to my own art with a bit of other works that I happen to be digging on any given day. This means that Rebel Frequencies has been firmly integrated into all aspects of the web-o-sphere, with a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and now a Tumblr. Something about this reminds me of the climax of The Lawnmower Man. Ah well, probably best not to think of it...

RIP Richie Havens

Watch this video. Then watch it again. It was posted last night as part of the new issue of Red Wedge. Everything about Richie Havens -- his percussive, oddly-tuned style of guitar playing, his gravelly voice and wild gyrations on stage -- were of a certain time and place. That time and place was, of course, America in the 60's, and Havens' stylistic signatures reflected a widespread visceral urge to break the mold and rise above all the violence and repression that the era seemed to have on offer. Vietnam and Dr. King's assassination sure as hell don't make sense, so what does? Sometimes it's just the primal wail for nothing more than "freedom." It's really not hard to figure out how this performance at Woodstock -- the opening performance, three hours long because so many of the other acts were running late -- became Havens' turning point. His passing yesterday leaves us with one less living connection to that iconic musical era.

Rhymes For Land And Rights

When First Nations activists in Canada took the streets against the government of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper this past winter, it touched off something big. These weren’t flash-in-the-pan demos or token showings of opposition; the demonstrations grew, touching off solidarity actions across North America and well beyond. Harper and his cronies in Parliament had evidently thought it would be easy to swipe land and resources from under Indigenous people’s nose and hand them over to private interests for exploitation. He was wrong.

Spin the globe around to Australia, to that nation’s thriving Aboriginal hip-hop scene. The story of the Aborigines unfortunately treads a similar path to native peoples in North America: colonization, systematic genocide and transfer, repeated robbery of land, water and natural resources, and a historic marginalization that continues to this very day. It wasn’t even until the 60’s that Aborigines were allowed to vote in elections! Perhaps it’s old hat to point out that communities such as these have a certain affinity with hip-hop’s potential for empowerment. That doesn’t make it any less true.

Naturally, Aboriginal activists -- themselves engaged in hard struggles for land rights -- have looked at the Idle No More movement with a great amount of hope. As a show of solidarity, MC and producer K-Otic 1 stepped up this past Invasion Day (known as “Australia Day” to the apologists) and dropped Idle No More (Invasion Day) the Mixtape.

The mix includes a great many of Australia’s best underground MC’s, all of them -- at least to the best of this writer’s knowledge -- are Aboriginal. Darah, one of the MC’s involved in the project, says it was a rather quickly assembled operation, but very collaborative:

Everyone was in open communication with each other in the development of the mixtape and in supporting each other getting our verses and tracks together... For me personally, I was more than happy to be part of this project, because there are so many talented Aboriginal MCs out there and I feel that its important that we work with each other rather than compete with one another and on this tape everybody was on their A-Game.

It’s the kind of immediacy and collaboration that’s unique to the very format of the mixtape. And, of course, it wouldn’t be truly radically democratic unless it was free to download too. Rather fitting isn’t it?

There’s a distinctive feeling on this tape from the very outset: not so much explosive as steadily creeping up, rising like a slow tide. The first track, aptly named “Sovereign,” features a long line of indigenous rappers laying it out over a smoldering, fairly minimalist beat -- counterpointing the fury that sometimes boils to the surface against poverty, addiction, depression and all the other evils that 200 years of colonial domination have brought.

“Freedom,” which Darah lists as one of his favorites when speaking with Green Left Weekly right after the tape’s release, employs a swaggering beat that could have come straight from the RZA. Its thrust, again, assembles a slew of rappers crying out for the justice their communities have so long deserved. Notably, as with “Sovereign” and many other tracks on this mixtape, it includes at least two female rappers -- Teila and Kaiyu, who arguably provide some of the best rhymes on the song. A notable inclusion given the paternalistic way that the Australian government can often paint Aboriginal women.

There’s a real shame in the fact that most westerners haven’t heard of K-Otic 1, Darah, Felon, Teila, Triks, Kaiyu or most of the other rhymesmiths appearing on this mixtape, because most are of exceptional talent. We all can point to the kind of grimace-inducing “political rap” that comes off like a history lesson crammed into 75 bars; none of these songs come close to that awkward category. Instead, it’s all integrated -- the determination, the sadness, the anger, and yes, the pride -- into the overarching message. That message is a straightforward one: slow tides may be slow, but just try and stop them from rising.

Originally published at Red Wedge magazine