To the Barricades! Or, Barikatlar için!

This is simply moving. There's no other way to describe it. The song is beautiful enough on its own, when sung in English. When the choir start singing it in Turkish it gets almost impossible to remain unmoved. Knowing the context -- a pre-revolutionary situation -- makes it truly sublime.

Over the past thirty some-odd years, "Do You Hear the People Sing?" has become one of the best-known songs from Les Miserables. And likely for reasons that make a great many Broadway producer squeamish. Now, this. But hell, if you spread a song about revolution far and wide into popular culture, you should expect it to be seized upon by actual revolutionaries.

There are a great many examples of this. The Nicaraguan Sandinistas, while under siege from the Contras, reportedly played the BeeGees' "Stayin' Alive" over loudspeakers as a way of keeping the people's morale up. Hardly a revolutionary song, but meanings change with time, especially when the masses are in motion.

This isn't the first example of the Turkish revolutionaries instinctually seizing upon that dynamic either. The whole title of "Chapulling" is a thumbing of the nose to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, who called the occupiers of Taksim Square çapulcu -- looters in Turkish. It didn't take long for the writing to appear on the wall... literally: "every day I'm chapulling." The notorious LMFAO song is just about the epitome of a corporate party anthem, designed for easy consumption. And yet, here it was being literally redefined, given a new context among the streets and barricades.

If the Turkish insurgents can do that, then it's not hard to understand how they could do the same to the famous Les Miz song; it's not as far a reach. Just a reminder that culture more naturally comes from the bottom up. We deserve to run it and own it just like everything else.

Poet Kevin Coval: Young Jews Should Stand With Palestine

Kevin Coval sure knows how to pick the controversial subject matter. His previous book L-vis Lives! dives deep into the questions of race in American music and hip-hop culture. It is impassioned and rebellious without claiming any easy answers.

With Schtick, his newest book of poems, Coval tells his own story through that of others and vice versa. It looks at identity and heritage, oppression and transgression with a frank kind of lyricism and biting wit.

Where it gets controversial is naturally where it gets the most interesting. Coval is Jewish. “If you look at me, you talk to me, you look at my family, it’s just an ‘all-Jew everything’ kind of thing,” he said in an interview with the Electronic Intifada.

Raised in the suburbs of Chicago, hip-hop culture provided a way to find his identity. It’s these struggles -- with his own heritage and his own beliefs -- that lead him to draw some stark parallels between the historic oppression of Jews, the meaning of hip-hop and cultural resistance, and the occupation of Palestine.

“Undeniable”

What drew it all together, though, was watching how things have unfolded in Palestine over the past few years. “The increasing militarization of Palestine, the increased, unabashed colonialism that Israel and America practice on a daily basis; at some point it just becomes undeniable and becomes impossible to talk about anything else,” he said.

The Mavi Marmara [Israel’s deadly 2010 attack on a Gaza-bound humanitarian ship], the bombing of Gaza; if you’re going to be a Jew in this country or in the world, or just somebody who gives a shit about basic human rights, if you’re going to keep your ears or eyes open then it becomes impossible not to point out. All of those things together made it so that this was the moment for this book.

Will this get Coval into some hot water with the bastions of Zionist zealotry which seek to control the parameters of discussion? Quite possibly. Some of the poems themselves seem to pre-empt the familiar tropes many like him are so often subject to: “self-hating jew,” and “what it’s like to be the disagreeable grandson of zionists.” And the Israeli state is built on an intensely selective reading of the history of Judaism, one that quite often glosses over America’s complicity in anti-Semitic scapegoating.

Many of the poems in Schtick delve into this history that is all too often glossed over. Coval reminds us that anti-Semitism still pokes its way into a supposedly liberal Hollywood -- a whole section of the book is dedicated to dissecting the walking crime against filmmaking that is Mel Gibson. Coval reminds us how popes have connections with fascists and war criminals, and of the racist, union-busting Henry Ford’s admiration for Adolf Hitler.

All of this provides background for Coval’s portrayals of his own struggles and the fight for Palestinian liberation today. “For the first time I think in the history of Jews, we’re able to become full-fledged white people,” he says. But, citing James Baldwin’s "The Price of the Ticket," he said that Jews have also sacrificed a great amount of their identity for this privilege, and have gained precious little in return.

“We look differently at the world than we used to,” he said. “We’ve tricked ourselves into believing that just because we live next to Aryans then we’re okay… We are in bed with evangelicals who ultimately think that Jews need to be in Israel -- which helps determine their foreign policy -- for a 'messiah' to come and ensure the erasure of Jewish people. It’s crazy that we would be in the same political action committee as people who think that we are going to go hell.”

Such observations don’t just randomly drop out of the historical ether. It’s well-documented that Arthur James Balfour, Winston Churchill and so many other of those most ardent in bequeathing Palestine to the Zionist project also happened to be dedicated anti-Semites.

But over the past sixty years, Jewish identity and identification of Israel have been so deliberately intertwined that any criticism whatsoever of the latter’s apartheid regime is equivocated with anti-Semitism. It’s an accusation that -- as many have pointed out -- is itself anti-Semitic. It’s also unfortunately a tactic encountered by Palestine solidarity activists today.

Deft

Coval’s effort to unpack all of this poetically is at various turns both funny and moving. Even seemingly goofy moments -- such as when he recounts being offered a bacon-infused martini -- delineate the contours between everyday Jewish life and everyday American life in sneaky and deft ways.

At other times, Coval is much more straightforward, especially when profiling his family. “I think of my dad having to work on Yom Kippur,” he said. “You know, my dad having to participate fully in capitalism in a way that was an affront to our Jewish way of life.” These pieces -- related mostly through a much younger Coval’s eyes -- play almost as allegorical dream-states: odd but engrossing all the same.

What’s more, the themes of cultural appropriation and manipulation give the reader a rather unique viewpoint on Israel’s apartheid regime and the need for solidarity with Palestinians.

In a stand-out poem, “portrait with midrash of israel’s favorite rapper,” Coval takes to task Israeli MC Subliminal: “he is trying to make zionism chic / literally paid by the government, a snitch … who is critical of young people resisting / military service.” He describes Subliminal’s music as “c+c music factory meets a minstrel show / meets a zionist separatist rally.”

“The story is what it is,” Coval said. “You know, he got into rap and of course like a lot of white kids was super interested in the criminalized black body and all that image[ry], so he starts to mimic American gangster rap -- but in Israel, and divorced of politics..."

Early on, Subliminal was cool with one of the kids from DAM -- the Palestinian hip-hop group. And then Subliminal’s politics got increasingly reactionary, conservative, racist. And at one point the kid from DAM said he couldn’t go to his shows because they wouldn’t let him across [the checkpoint] and Subliminal was like "yo, fuck you, B." 

It basically fractured that relationship. The irony is clear. How do you take, appropriate, bastardize a culture that is not only about bringing voices at the margins to the center of civic discourse, but also a culture that has used its various artistic and aesthetics innovations to challenge the dominant culture; how do you take that and then use it to espouse a fascistic, pro-militarized, pro-police state ideology? 

It’s the equivalent of a neo-Nazi doing rap, or a Klansman doing rap.

Struggle for identity

The final section of Schtick is pointedly titled: “all the pharaohs must fall.” It explains why the author stands -- as a Jew -- with Palestine. He jumps from pleading with his father to not be mad at him for speaking out against Israel to recounting how the Israeli military shut down the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2009:

students and administrators feelthis presence, this growing masswho knows the hummus in the cafeteriastinks and supports military brigades& knows Finkelstein was deniedcuz of his commitment to rigor & truththis growing mass of Arab youthwho begin to ally with Blackstudent groups.

Coval leaves readers with a powerful notion: that the struggle to forge a new identity, and to win a world where those identities can be worn with pride and freedom, means fighting for others to do so too. More and more, young Jews are showing their solidarity at Palestine demonstrations with messages like: “I am Jewish and I want Israel to stop killing Palestinians,” or “Judaism does not equal Zionism.”

It’s as much an effort to reclaim one’s own heritage as it is to protect another’s. There’s an old saying from the labor movement for that: “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Coval’s book just puts it in a new way.

First published at the Electronic Intifada.

No Longer a Sad Affair

It’s happening again. Another country has been gripped by urban upheaval -- both organized and relatively spontaneous -- against austerity and degradation. Leaders and mainstream journalists wear faces of confusion. Those of us with our ears to the ground have known damn well that it wasn't going to just cease after the protests at Tahrir died down or the Occupy encampments were raided.

And so it is in Turkey. What started as a tent-city, Occupy-style encampment in late May in Istanbul’s Taksim Square was viciously cracked down on. The protests have gotten bigger, more emboldened in the face of police repression (though there have been no deaths, nobody can accuse the cops of going easy on citizens; reports indicate that over a thousand have been hospitalized). Street battles between thousands of protesters and the cops have been daily. On Tuesday, Istanbul’s public sector union went out on strike in support of the uprising.

Predictably, some have pointed in not-so-thinly veiled language at Turkey’s ruling party being an Islamic one. But this certainly comes second to the AKP being a neoliberal party that has for the past ten years embarked on schemes privatization and “urban renewal” (read: gentrification) with an ever-tightening and authoritarian grip on power. The country is also, of course, a major recipient of US military aid.

Artists, activists and other working people have been well aware of what Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s policies mean for them. The plans to gut and rebuild Taksim Square -- including mowing down one of Istanbul’s few remaining green spaces -- were the subject of a performance art piece by local theatre artist Işıl Eğrikavuk this past September. The play, Eğrikavuk told Mashallah News, “included Tahrir Square in order to compare it with Taksim Square.” Now those references are proving to be prophetic. Perhaps this reveals why the AKP has such a penchant for repressing and censoring artists.

In mid-April -- six weeks prior to these current uprisings -- Turkish courts handed down a guilty verdict in the trial of composer and pianist Fazil Say for “insulting Islam.” Say, who has been a long and vocal critic of Erdoğan’s government, had tweeted out a quote from Persian poet Omar Khayyam criticizing religious hypocrisy. Though Say was given a suspended sentence, his was hardly the first case like it.

In 2007, a similar case made headlines in alternative weeklies and zines this side of the pond -- likely because of just how bizarre it was. After the head of Turkey’s OSYM (the state examination board) discovered a YouTube video of a 16-year-old singing a song called “OSYM, Kiss My Ass,” the board pressed charges. The song’s authors, a little-known punk band known as Deli (Turkish for “mad” or “crazy”) had written it seven years prior. They faced up to 18 months in prison for “insulting a civil servant,” even though the song had never even been performed in public!

It’s one of those weird dramas that can’t help but provoke sardonic chuckles from onlookers, Turkish and otherwise. And yet, it also cast a light on the wide gulf that has long existed between Turkey’s alienated youth and its over-sensitive (yet comfortable) ruling clique. Much like the American SAT’s, OSYM’s tests are known for their long and tortured length and to favor the privileged; less than twenty percent of those who take them end up going to college anyway. The attitude of young folks toward the exam itself and the system generally might be roughly reflected in the lines from Deli’s song: "I worked day and night / to pass the exam / What's changed now? / My future is unclear.”

Meanwhile, Erdoğan has personally made hundreds of thousands of lira suing cartoonists, student theatre troupes, stand-up comics and others that have “insulted his character.” The disconnect in opportunity is lost on nobody.

A glance at the list of other artists and musicians who have found themselves on the wrong end of the Turkish legal system reveals just who that system fears. Rappers protesting poverty and gentrification facing charges for “praising crime and criminals.” Kurdish music groups serving ten month jail sentences for “making propaganda for an illegal organization” (this refers in particular to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party but also to just about any group advocating Kurdish self-determination). Music teachers who find themselves fired and banned from their profession for comments they made at a performance.

It hasn’t been just artists going to prison obviously, but if a nation’s freedom can be fairly reflected in the freedom of its artists, then one can imagine the dampening effect that these cases of artistic repression can have. For every publicized case of a musician, poet or painter thrown behind bars there may be dozens of radicals or union activists not too far behind.

Supporters of the uprising are right to point out that the current protests are about much more than just a few trees at the center of Taksim Square. Still, there’s an obvious amount of significance for the occupations starting in Gezi Park -- the green space that Erdoğan’s urban plans had placed under the bulldozer’s blade. The park has been a regular location for outdoor music festivals. This includes the annual Taksim Graffiti Festival, which sees taggers, bombers and MCs converge from all over Turkey. What Erdoğan is looking to take from working people isn’t just one of the few green spaces left in Istanbul, but a vital communal and cultural space. Nobody who lives in America’s gentrifying cities, who has seen schools and community centers shut down in the name of “progress,” can deny identifying with this.

There’s a natural connection between the right to free and accessible culture and the right to live with dignity. One isn’t possible without the other. That’s a connection certainly being drawn by the thousands digging up cobblestones and building the barricades across Turkey’s largest city. It’s a long and hard fight, as we are all getting to know quite well. But without it, then freedom of any kind will certainly remain, in the words of the great Turkish poet and communist Nazim Hikmet, no more than “a sad affair under the stars.”

Alexander Billet is an editor for Red Wedge.

A Few Words on Eddie Balchowsky

The following is a transcript (though not word-for-word) of what I said at yesterday's "Radical History Walking Tour" of Waldheim Cemetery. Waldheim is, of course, where many players on the American left were buried, including the Haymarket martyrs, Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and many founding members of the US Communist Party. Balchowsky, a lesser-known figure, is nonetheless notable and fascinating for his own unique story. Readers are encouraged to learn more about him.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The stone here reads as follows:

In Memory of Edward Ross Balchowsky 1916-1989 Artist, Poet, Raconteur, One-Armed Pianist, Veteran of the Spanish Civil War as a Volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Your Friends, Family and Fellow 'Premature Anti-Fascists' Salute You.

The funds for the stone were raised by Balchowsky’s cousin twice removed Jeff Balch. His actual ashes are buried elsewhere in the cemetery so that there might be a place for his family to pay respects differently from his comrades. But in his effort to raise the funds Balch was able to gain the support quite easily of some other well-known radicals, among them the great singer, storyteller and Wobbly Utah Phillips.

By the time he died he was a local fixture in the Chicago nightclub scene, he had published countless poems, his art had become part of the permanent collection at Art Institute of Chicago and he had even been the subject of a Jimmy Buffett song, “He Went to Paris,” which none other than Bob Dylan has ranked as one of his favorite songs.

He was one of those people who despite not even making it into the footnotes of the history books, lived those remarkable lives. And I think there’s something about his story that reflects a very deep and personal connection between the political and the creative.

Balchowsky was born in 1916 in the Chicago suburb of Frankfort. His family was the one and only family of Jews in the whole town. As one might expect, he and his family were frequently the target of discrimination. While in college he was never himself a part of any political group; he described himself as able to be close variously with Communists, socialists and Trotskyists, no mean feat considering the American left’s history of back-and-forth sniping.

By the early thirties everyone, including Balchowsky. was aware of what was happening in Germany with the rise of the Nazis. But in ‘36 with the rise of Franco in Spain Balchowsky saw an opportunity to do something about it. Even though he openly admitted to not being as politically committed as all the different party members around him, the spectre of fascism and oppression of Jews hit him in an obviously personal way.

So, Eddie went to Spain and joined up with the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. He became one of the three thousand or so “premature anti-fascists,” those who opposed fascism well before American empire deemed it expedient. In Spain, during basic training, when Paul Robeson came to perform and announced he needed a piano player, it was Balchowsky who jumped up and volunteered. After finishing basic training, he went to the front, and was there for about a week before his weapon jammed and backfired, shattering his right forearm.

Eddie came back home and went through what we now see far too often in wounded war vets: battles with depression, alcoholism, heroin addiction. Nobody acknowledged him as a hero; after all, his side had lost the war and it wasn’t like the US government had sanctioned his decision to fight anyway. What enabled him to finally pull out of it after decades was, by his own admission, his art. Both his painting and his poetry carry a kind of jagged, chaotic and untempered beauty. You can almost see him working through his demons when you read them or look at them.

As for his piano playing, it’s remarkable considering that he was playing with only one hand; he was also known to occasionally use his “stump” to hold root notes on the piano. Many people -- friends and audience members at clubs like the Quiet Knight in Lakeview -- would remember being shocked when they realized that the beautiful Beethoven they were listening to was being played by a fellow with one hand.

He died, tragically, not from old age but from being hit by an El train after falling off the platform in ‘89. I’d say his story isn’t just that of another “Chicago character,” though he certainly was that. I’d say in some ways, there’s a poetic lesson in Eddie Balchowsky’s life, a lesson of why we fight. It would be overly simplistic and honestly perhaps a bit insulting to say that his love of human creativity was the reason he went to fight in Spain. But when we talk about a life of freedom, a life of dignity, there’s no way for us to deny that the right to create and express one’s self is an essential part of that. It’s why we talk about the bread but the roses too.

And, I think, it’s one of the reasons why despite all the torture that a society of neglect, oppression and inequity put him through, despite having the worst thrown at him, he couldn’t help but let the best come through. It’s worth fighting for a world where that isn’t such a tall order.

Hop On Over to Red Wedge...

We took a couple weeks to figure out a new publication schedule for the summer and possibly permanently. These are always those moments of nerve-wracking limbo for editors -- when you realize something major needs to change in order for things to move forward, and yet in order to make those very changes you need to put your present set-up on hold. When nothing is being published, you feel precariously close to, as the adage goes, perishing.

We've breathed a sigh of relief today, however, as the new schedule (a rolling one) is in full swing. We've inaugurated it with an article from one of our two recently joined at-large editors Adam Turl. In it he looks at the life and work of the recently deceased Cuban revolutionary filmmaker Alfredo Guevara. Good stuff, worth checking out.

Other inbound posts will be the new video from former Prayers for Atheists singer Jared Paul and a piece from yours truly on what the economic decline of the suburbs is going to mean for American culture (particularly through the lens of punk and hip-hop). And with things running and rolling at RW, it's likely there'll be more activity at this blog too.

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