July 2006

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Dragon's Den reopens in New Orleans

Good news and photos from my friend Machelle in New Orleans:

The Dragon's Den Social Aid and Pleasure Club finally reopened last night! NOLA just got 4.328 percent better. This fact computed using complex scientific formulae.

I really went to see Zydepunks, but I get sleepy, so I had to leave after the "Why are we building such a big ship?" accordian and brass band set. God I love this place. I am 69.469 percent happier today than I was yesterday.

Also, Zotz reopened in the Marigny, but they moved downstairs from Dragon's Den. This also increases the goodness of NOLA, by 3.672%. Their new bathroom is not as cool as their old bathroom, but otherwise bravo, kids.

Later,
Mac

Recently posted elsewhere...

Video: 'Dark Side of the Rainbow,' 'Matrix No. 5' (cpculture.com 7/5/06), Made Out of Babies (cpculture.com 7/5/06), Peter's Grill closes (cpculture.com 7/10/06), Handsome Family (cpculture.com 7/10/06), Greg Norton joins Dave King, Erik Fratzke in new band (cpculture.com 7/11/06), Paul Nelson, 1936-2006 (cpculture.com 7/11/06), A Beautiful Mind: Minnesota-born Paul Nelson was a '60s folk revival pioneer and a founding father of rock writing (citypages.com 7/12/06), Payback Is a Motherland: How African hip hop "gives back" to two continents (citypages.com 7/12/06), End of an era: 'BET Uncut' canceled (cpculture.com 7/12/06), NorShor to become a strip club? (cpculture.com 7/14/06), New Orleans dodges a bullet (cpblotter.com 7/14/06), African hip hop in the park (cpculture.com 7/17/06), 'Driver 23' has a MySpace blog, flooding problems (cpculture.com 7/18/06), Ten Thousand Bullets: D.C. lifer George Pelecanos writes about murder, drug feuds, riots, dog-fighting—and also a little violence (citypages.com 7/19/06), More Tonto, less Lone Ranger (cpculture.com 7/19/06), City Pages ex-employee blogs from Central America (cpculture.com 7/19/06), Lee's gets robbed by masked men with shotguns (cpculture.com 7/20/06), Timely interviews with Mikey Dread, Kevin Smith (cpculture.com 7/21/06), DJ Cecile Cloutier (cpculture.com 7/24/06), The "O Brother effect" (cpculture.com 7/24/06)

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at July 24, 2006 5:46 PM | Comments (0)

 

Complicated Dread: the Mikey Dread interview

The Clash were already toying with dub reggae by the time Mikey Dread produced "Bankrobber" on February 1 and 2, 1980, singing the aaahs and the ooohs of the refrain. But that song marked the legendary band's first full immersion in the depth-probe sonics of contemporary Jamaican music. Joe Strummer had originally written the tune as a rock song, but Dread "persuaded the Clash to push the song in the direction of slow, heavy dub reggae," writes Marcus Gray in Return of the Last Gang in Town (Hal Leonard, 2004). As Dread himself remembers it, in the exclusive Q&A below (in anticipation of his Saturday live show at the Nomad World Pub in Minneapolis; more here), he couldn't understand Strummer's words at the faster pace.

To Bill Price and Jerry Green, who assisted on the two-day marathon sessions at Manchester's Pluto studios (and later worked with Dread apart from the Clash), the deejay-producer brought the jolt of Jamaican authenticity to the band. "Mikey Dread got a really great vibe in the studio," said keyboardist Micky Gallagher in the liner notes of Clash on Broadway. "He knew what he was going for. With all the facilities of the studio, he would make little rhythms by shaking a matchbox, or using a squeaky toy. He would make the hi-hat sound he wanted with his mouth. He would play it back to us on this little cheap tape recorder and everybody would jam along."

According to Kosmo Vinyl in the same liner notes, CBS wouldn't release the single at first. "They said it sounded like all of David Bowie's records played backwards at once." Which suggests how radical roots reggae must still have sounded in the UK Top 20 in 1980.

Dread had only a few years earlier brought the real underground sound to Jamaica's own airwaves. With a voice like Howlin' Wolf on helium, Michael Campbell (born in Port Antonio on June 4, probably in 1948), hosted Kingston's first roots-reggae radio program, Dread at the Controls (a.k.a. DATC, a.k.a. Dread at the Control), late nights on the now-discontinued JBC (Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation) as "Mikey Dread," between 1977 and 1979. Dread played exclusive dub plates out of the studio run by his friend King Tubby (located in Tubby's mom's house, at 18 Dromilly Avenue). Dread mixed his own original radio jingles at Tubby's before dabbling in recording himself, and establishing Dread at the Controls as his record label in 1977.

"It was Tubby who encourage me to get into recording," Dread told Lloyd Bradley in This Is Reggae Music (Grove Press, 2000). "I went to Tubby's in 1977 to cut [a jingle] on a riddim that he had called 'Psalm of Dub' ... Tubby hear it and say, 'Bwoy Mikey. That sound like it longer than a jingle, I feel you're gon' make a record of it. Why don' jus go in there and finish it?' So I go back inside the studio and finish it as a full-length track, and Tubbs tell mi, 'All right! All you need now is to make your own label.'"

Tapes of Dread's show were well-circulated enough in the UK to come to the attention of the Clash, who enlisted the toasting deejay as a live opener and encore guest* in January of 1980 (Dread's warm-up set was later booed in L.A.), and as a collaborator on "Bankrobber" and the triple-album masterpiece Sandinsta!, years before Public Enemy and other rappers began sampling Dread's promos for their records. Dread had studied engineering and physics before radio gained him entry into popular music, and technical mania gave him something in common with Tubby. "Most recording engineers in Jamaica at that time could tell you waht every piece of equipment did and how it would work in your system," Dread told Bradley, "but Tubby went far beyond that because he knew what every component in every circuit in every piece of equipment did. The greatest engineer I have ever known in my life."

Relocating to the UK for the '80s, and later to Florida, Dread put out a series of classic albums, and kept working in television and radio, later acquiring something rare and prized among Jamaican artists--control of his own recordings. (See complete links at the bottom of this post for more.) Speaking with me over the phone from Jamaica, where he's recording away from his home in Florida, Dread says he still tours and performs while working in film and television. He'll be bringing a band to the Nomad on Saturday as part of the Minneapolis club's Reggae Festival, which also features Innocent and the International Reggae All-Stars on Friday.

Let's start at the start. What's your birth date?

Ah, man, that's a hard one. June 4, but I don't want to give my year out. I'm a Gemini.

You were pretty young when you moved to Kingston, right?

Yeah, man, I was in my early early 20s. I came to Kingston to go to college. It's now called the University of Technology, but at that time it was called the College of Art, Science, and Technology, so I was doing electrical and mechanical engineering there, but I really wanted to get into electronics, and they didn't offer electronics. So after two years there I went to apply for a job, like a real hands-on situation with JBC [Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation]. The opening that they had at that time was technical operator, and I just get in by doing that.

Did you learn most of what you learned about electronics there?

I knew a little going in there from what I gathered on my own, but I didn't have any formal training in electronics. I was trying to get to be a transmitter engineer, so that was my entry. But I just stay in radio, man. I didn't go back to the transmitter stuff, because the people who were supposed to get me to begin my training, I don't know what happened to them, they never come back for me. So I stayed where I was because I was happy.

Was it decent money back then?

It was worthwhile. I was doing it because of the love of it, and not for the money.

What was the year you first came to Kingston?

I can't remember. My impression of town started in the '60s, because I came on a school trip, and schools around the country, especially the high schools, they have from the country a busload of kids, maybe 40, 50 kids, going to Kingston. They'd go newspaper companies, they'd go to radio stations, they'd go to ice cream companies, they'd go to the zoo. I came on one of those trips and JBC was one of our stops. And I like what was going on in the studio. They be coordinating the commercials and the music, the time, outside broadcasts, international news. It was chaotic, but it could be coordinated if you knew what you were doing, and that fascinated me. While in school I was focusing on maybe mathematics and physics and chemistry and biology as my primary subjects of interests, because I really wanted to join the technical world. But when I saw what was happening to radio, I did a paper for my college, and I wrote about reggae and the music industry. I went out to interview the artists and wrote a dissertation about where the music was coming from. I was surprised that even though I love it so much, and I used to be a sound system operator, and I had to play certain people's songs to make people want to pay to come in there, I realized that something need to be done for the reggae industry to help it.

So when I got that job, the radio used to sign off at midnight and there would be nothing on the radio until the next morning, like 4:30. They'd have a gospel program and then "The Good Morning Show" start at 5 a.m. to 9 a.m., yah? So my supervisor let me do midnight on because nothing was happening there. So I started working midnight 'til 4:30, Monday through Saturday. Then we also had a lady called Freddie Rodriguez, and she used to work as an announcer. So she was the announcer and I was the operator, and just used to play the music. It was a good thing. This is when I start to make my jingles. People been using my samples from my radio show, like Mobb Deep, Eric B. and Rakim, Public Enemy, all of them borrowed samples from my album, African Anthem, an album with jingles from my radio show mixed in with my music.

Was it called Dread at the Controls right away, or did it have a different name at first?

Well my show was called Dread at Controls. They put on Freddie because they didn't want reggae. They wanted two or three reggae songs, and then you play some other. But I was really focused on helping the Jamaican music industry to grow, and I was targeting a certain kind of audience, an audience like, for example, people coming from the countryside, market people coming in to sell their produce early in the morning, driving overnight, people working overnight, taxi, food stands, people coming from parties. Those people. Because I know that there was a lot of activity going on at night in the country. And my show also cut the crime rate. Because a lot of police and detectives used to come by and say, "Bwoy, Mikey, the streets are quiet because everybody listening to your show." [Laughs.]

This show started in 1977?

I started in '76 but the show started in '77.

Just so I'm clear, the show you started with Ms. Rodriguez was a precursor to Dread at the Controls?

Let me break it down. Me and her would go Monday to Thursday. And then we have two other guys who used to work. One of them would come on a Friday night, his name was Norman Marsh, and he play a variety, like funk and some reggae, but he ain't going deep in reggae like me. And then there was my show on a Saturday night, midnight 'til 4:30. Three of us. So three operators used to do our thing. But I gave mine my own name, Dread at the Controls. So we had little names we used to use. And then another guy came on Sunday and he used to play soul music and rhythm and blues.

Were there any all-reggae shows before yours on Saturday nights in Jamaica?

Nah, mine was the first one. There was no talking, just music, jingles, and sound effects. Brand new music to oldies, this continuous loop going on.

But Jamaican music had been on the radio, right?

So here the deal is now. Within that time, I had to go through a lot of struggle, you understand? Being suspended, being laid off for what I was doing. Because the people who were studying broadcasting, they studied in your country and they studied in the UK. And when you study in those countries, they're going to give you a format, like you play a couple of oldies, and then you go to a current hit, and then you can slash back to something which is obscure. So they come back here, and they play middle-of-the-road music, they play country and western, they play R&B, and then they might play a reggae. But the kind of reggae they would play is not the kind of reggae that my audience would like. Cause there many different kind of reggae. You have a commercial kind of reggae, which is like Top 40-radio kind of reggae. It's something that maybe foreigners can get into, yah? And then you have the roots reggae, which is what we go for as Jamaicans. I don't want to call the names of the bands who make the commercial radio, 'cause I don't want to label them, but I'm saying, I would be listening to some Dennis Brown or some Gregory Isaacs, where other people might be listening to some Fabulous Five or something else. And it's a totally different music. So my show was strictly the other element of reggae that was never being exposed, like the dub, the dub plate. Some people know it, but because I was affiliated with King Tubby, I have direct access to hits that other people couldn't have for a year or six months. Plus I was making artists come along and say their name, and I would make it into jingles for my show, like Big Youth. I'd incorporate artists into my show, and don't charge them. Because we don't believe in payola, so I never charge no man. But the management at my station never liked it. The people who liked it were people from England, and different people in Europe. And they send for me to start training their people to do a show like mine. So I quit my job in '79 and I move on with that, teaching British kids.

Did you start recording yourself while you were hosting the show, then?

Yes, I did a single called "Love the Dread." That was my first song. It's on my album called Dread at the Controls/Evolutionary Rockers. That was the first album I released, in 1978. And it was re-released in England on Trojan in '79, and now it's back on my label, so I just re-released it.

You got the rights back to all your music. What was your first hit record?

"Barber Saloon" was the biggest one. And then there was a famous one called "Friend and Money." You know the Dennis Brown song called "Money in my Pocket"? I did a version of it called "Friend and Money" with him.

You basically came from this academic background into radio, and then suddenly you're talking to all these stars. Was that different for you? Was that exciting?

It was exciting because I love the music. I feel like I should do something for these people in the industry, because they're struggling. Hold on--[inaudible conversation with somebody else]. Go ahead, father.

Had you heard of the Clash before they got in touch with you?

Nah, I'd never heard of them. But I went to England in '79 in November and December, and I did, like, PR in NME, New Musical Express, and Sounds Magazine, and Melody Maker. So I guess those guys may have read about me being there. But by the time they contacted me, I was back in Jamaica. I never know what punk was.

How did they get hold of you?

That's a good question. I still don't know.

Do you remember meeting them?

I remember going into the studio to make this track ["Bankrobber"]. And when I heard the track, I wasn't sure about the track, because it was too fast. I couldn't understand what Joe was saying. So I told him to slow it down, and we could make it reggae style. And I showed him the beat. And then they didn't have a keyboard player, so I asked them, I said, "Reggae has to have a keyboard," it can't just have two guitars and drum and bass. And they get Micky Gallagher, and I used Micky Gallagher to play the keyboard.

So when I met them, I didn't know them, I didn't know their kind of music. [Dread disputes Marcus Gray's account of him meeting the Clash a month earlier, saying he toured with the band only after recording with them.] I just decided that if I was going to do something for them, I wanted to do something that they would be able to play by themselves, and it would be worthwhile for me to sit there for hours and mix it.

Was that you singing in the background of "Bankrobber"?

Nah man. I'm joking, it's me.

It sounds so different from your deejay voice.

I just wanted to be a part of it, man. You ever seen the video?

Yeah.

I'm at the mixing board mixing it, and shaking the tambourine.

What were the Clash like, interacting as people?

They were the nicest people I've ever met. Me and Paul were basically tighter friends than maybe the others, but me and Joe and Paul were cool. Mick was alright, but Mick was not somebody who would go out and socialize. Like, me and Paul would hang out. And then you have the drummer, he was cool. Everybody was cool. But mi feel like, I love the bass thing, so me and Paul spent a lot of time talking or listening to music or practicing some ideas. He's the most talented bass player I've met since I was in London. Yeah, [people] no give him no props, he's very good. And Joe's great, too. Me singing on those songs, that was Joe's idea, like, "Yo, Mikey, come here and sing."

Did you work on Sandinista! in Jamaica?

Yeah, we did one song there, "Junco Partner," in Channel One.

Did you go to Electric Lady in New York to work on the other songs?

Yeah, because after a while in Jamaica, people were surprised to see some white guys playing reggae in Channel One, which is like almost into the ghetto. They could have maybe gone to a different kind of studio Uptown, but the Clash wanted to go to where I was recording, so they came to the ghetto, and the ghetto people go, "Wow, we've got to see this." So they come up in great numbers. I couldn't even see the Clash in the studio, so much people. They sell beer outside.

The Clash told this story about how there were gangsters after them or something. Was that just a lie?

Ha, there were no gangsters after them. There were some rude boys around, but nobody was going to hurt them, because them people I know. Them people know me, but they weren't going to hurt nobody. There were bad boys there, but they just get some beer. It became like a party, where people say, "Yo, Mikey, get me a beer." They were inside the studio, man. The studio can't fit 20 people, and you've got, like, a hundred people.

Had you heard the New Orleans song "Junco Partner" before that?

Nah, I never heard it.

It's interesting to me, because that was an old New Orleans song, a James Booker standard [actually written by James D. Waynes, a.k.a. James Wayne, a.k.a. Wee Willie Wayne], and I know New Orleans radio made it to Jamaica, but I've never heard of a Jamaican version of that song.

Nah, man, I thought it was a Clash song.

Why did they just do the one song there?

There were so many people, the drummer couldn't even lift his arms to play the drums. There were people all around everywhere. And I couldn't go anywhere because each day I leave the studio, and some guys would wash the rent-a-car, and somebody wash them and make them brand-new clean again. And then he came to me, "Yo, Mikey, somebody needs to pay me because I just washed the car." And I'm paying to get the car washed. So I came to the Clash, "Yo, I paid for this guy to wash the car." And then when we're leaving, another guy said to me, "Yo, Mikey, it was me that was watching the car, that nobody break into them. So I need to get some money. You understand?" So each day we had these bills to pay. It was getting too crazy, man.

What were the sessions like in New York?

I can't remember New York. I just remember walking down those streets and seeing what I saw.

Was that your first time in New York?

Nah, it was my first time in that part of New York.

I don't want to comment on the place where I was because I don't want to upset anybody, or people think I'm bashing anybody or nothing. It was just a new experience for me as a foreigner. I'd never seen that before. Because of where the studio was located--I don't want people to think I'm gay-bashing or nothing like that. People are people, people do what they want to do. [Dread is on the record elsewhere saying this was his first exposure to, for instance, a man walking down the street with another man on a leash, though Dread's remarks were hardly homophobic.]

You co-wrote a lot of the songs on Sandinista!

Yeah, man, especially the ones that you hear me on. I have trouble right now from Sony and those people, because from 1980-81, I never got my writer's share, and that's the only thing about the whole Clash thing that really pisses me off. I just sent Mick Jones an email. I'm on the live track of "Armagideon Time" on From Here to Eternity, and I never got paid. My track "Radio One," the Clash used as a b-side for the single "Hitsville U.K." [All in all, by my count, Dread had direct involvement in at least nine Clash tracks in 1980, and his influence is pervasive on Sandinista!, which was also recorded at Wessex in London.]

A couple more questions about Jamaica. You worked at Treasure Isle in the '70s. Was Duke Reid still alive then?

No, he had died before. But I recorded Culture there for the High Note label.

Was there anything else you wanted to say about King Tubby that you haven't said before?

He's a great person, and he was the one who was giving me exclusive dubs, too, to keep me ahead of the sound system people. I had all the dub plates that no sound man could play. Tubby was one of the first person I see with a closed-circuit TV in the studio. He had a camera on the building, and he could see from his room who was at the gate. He had an electric buzzer, he could buzz you in, and the gate would open. The man was advanced. It's just been since the 1990s that people start using the camera. This was a man way advanced of technology. He never came to America, so he never bought it from you guys.

You were working with rappers in Miami, right?

Yeah, but not big-time rappers, just kids who'd come to the studio and need some help. Local talent. Actually, I take that back, I work with KRS-One for Warner Brothers, in about 1990.

How did you come to Florida, was that for school?

No, I had a job to be the program director for a new television network called the Caribbean Satellite Network. And it was like the first Caribbean television channel on satellite, and my job was to program all the music that was on the air. And then after a while it faded out, and I went back to school after that. I live in Florida, still, a place near Gainesville, near the University of Florida. My wife goes to the university and I'm here to support her.

What have you been up to in recent years? Are you still in TV and radio?

Privately. I've been working with a group out of Jamaica called the Maroons. I'm doing a documentary on them. They're from where I am in Jamaica, and I want to share their history with the world. And I'm in Jamaica recording my next album called Backstage Pass. I've got Sly and Robbie working on this. It'll come out on my label. I've had my label since 1977, and I got control of my recordings in 1999. I'm bringing some of the guys who play in the studio in my band to Minneapolis.
_________________________________
*At one recorded show, Strummer introduced Dread as "Dread at the Control Tower, Mister Dread Campbell, Mikey Mis-control Mikey!"

___________________________________

Mikey Dread links:

Mikey Dread
http://www.mikeydread.com/

Dread at the Controls label
http://www.datcreggae.com

Mikey Dread Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikey_Dread

Video: The Clash play "Bankrobber" with Mikey Dread at Youtube.

Audio: Mikey Dread on his production with the Clash

Video: Mikey Dread spinning with the Channel One Soundsystem at Youtube

Audio: Mikey Dread audio samples at www.mikeydread.com

Mikey Dread at Roots Archives
http://www.roots-archives.com/release/1486

Releases by the Dread at the Controls label at Tapir's Reggae Discography
http://www.xs4all.nl/~tapirs/datcalb.htm

Mikey Dread at CD Baby
http://cdbaby.com/found?allsearch=%22MIkey+Dread%22

Clash links at complicatedfun.com
http://blogs.citypages.com/pscholtes/2004/08/25/

The Sandinista! Project blog
http://sandinista.guterman.com/

Sandinista! tribute out in 2007 (MySpace)

"It's just the beat of time, the beat that must go on": London Calling
http://blogs.citypages.com/pscholtes/2004/10/26/

Jamaican music links at Complicated Fun

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at July 21, 2006 2:42 PM | Comments (4)

 

George Pelecanos on 'The Wire' and D.C. pulp fiction

As a bonus to this week's City Pages interview with George P. Pelecanos, the D.C. crime novelist and writer-producer for HBO's The Wire, here are some of the questions and answers that didn't make the cut. (Check out links at the bottom.) The only thriller writer who really matters spoke with me over good food at Vicino Ristorante Italiano in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Martin Luther King Day, 2006.

After Hurricane Katrina, I wished there were a New Orleans equivalent to you and your writings about D.C.

It's funny you mention that, because, I don't know if I'm supposed to talk about this, but David Simon [co-creator of HBO's The Wire] just sold a pilot to HBO, and it's going to be in New Orleans. It's going to be about all these musicians after Katrina. Like, "How did they rebuild their lives and still play music?" In other words, the hook is going to be centered around the music of New Orleans post-Katrina. And this guy they brought in this year for The Wire, he has a house in New Orleans. And he's a playwright and a longtime television writer and stuff, and he's going to partner with David on this thing. It's coming, is what I'm saying. I think they're going to start on it after they shoot this season.

Did you know Peter Davis, by the way? The Your Flesh guy? [MySpace page] He's in L.A. now. I saw him out there on my last book tour. Back when he was publishing every month, I wrote a little bit for him. He got the word out on my books early on.

Did you ever play music?

Never. I'm just a fan.

What was your first concert?

I'm 48, so my concerts go back to seeing Thelonious Monk open for Blood, Sweat & Tears at Washington Coliseum in 1969, when I was 12 years old. That was my first concert. I saw Parliament Funkadelic in Park Barren Amphitheater, which is just an outdoor theater on 16th Street, and they played with the Manhattans. So the Manhattans come out in their suits doing the choreographed stuff, and the next thing you know some guy's coming out in a diaper. There actually were a lot of walkouts, because the crowd was mixed with a lot of older people and a lot of people like me, teenagers. Of course "Chocolate City" was written about D.C.

We had a couple radio stations, WGTB, which was Georgetown University. It was an underground station. And then 'HFS was a legendary alternative station. It was real alternative, not what they call alternative now. They brought the music to the public, and if somebody like [Bruce] Springsteen came down to the Child Herald, he had a packed house. Because back then, radio was the only way to find out.

By 1988, when I was living here [in the D.C. area], the Howard station was the college station that meant the most to me.

Right, 'HUR.

As far as alternative stuff, I didn't really remember anything.

'GTB was done by then and 'HFS had become sort of the new Top 40.

You mind if I try that [appetizer]?

Yeah, dig in, man.

Were you ever a punk?

No, I wasn't. Honestly, I felt like dressing a certain way, cutting my hair a certain way, was just another act of conformity. So I never got into that.

Did you go see the Slickee Boys?

Oh, I saw them plenty of times. [Eating] There was that whole era of Tommy Keene [official site]. Tommy Keene was our power pop guy. The Nighthawks was the blues band. We used them in The Wire, because they're heroes around here. The season we did with the dockworkers. There's a scene where they're all drunk and there's a band up onstage. Those are the Nighthawks.

Fort Reno was the place in my youth. It's run by the park service. It's just a big field. And every summer they do this program where bands play out in the open. I've been doing that since I was a teenager, and to this day I still go see Fugazi [watch video at Youtube] play there every year. It's a free show. Thousands of kids show up every year.

You and Quentin Tarantino launched your careers around the same time, and you've since been compared to each other. You both dealt with violence in new ways. You were both big John Woo fans. And you were white guys writing in black American vernacular. Have you ever met Tarantino or talked to him?

Never.

Has there been any interest on his part in doing any of your books?

Not that I know of, no. Many years ago I got hired to write about him for a magazine, and his publicist wouldn't put me through.

You've said that you want to give violence its due horror. He deals with the shock and humor of violence.

I'm not an across-the-board fan of his. I mean, that might explain why we've never hooked up. I think Jackie Brown is his best film, and is a great film. But there's things like, in Pulp Fiction, the guy getting shot accidentally in the back seat of a car, and everybody's laughing in the theater. I don't get it, you know? I mean, I shot somebody when I was a teenager, and it's nothing to laugh about. I shot somebody in the face point blank. And there's nothing to laugh about when you call somebody a nigger. There's just a lot of things that I disagree with. And it's partly the audience.

I remember, when I saw Reservoir Dogs, I saw it in pretty much a white audience. And I saw these young guys in their 20s laughing at "Cut it out, you guys are acting like a bunch of niggers." And everybody's laughing and stuff. And then, I was looking around, and I saw a middle-aged black guy and his son, probably innocently going to check out that crime film. And everybody's laughing at that. I could just see the guy slinking down in his seat. Like, "What are they laughing at? What's so funny about that?"

But Jackie Brown, oddly enough, when he was criticized for that picture because of the use of that word, I felt like for the first time it was completely organic to the Sam Jackson character. That guy absolutely would have been saying that. The question is, Why is Steve Buscemi saying it? Why is Tarantino saying it in Pulp Fiction? Why would that guy be saying it to the Sam Jackson character? Sam Jackson would beat his ass, and instead he just lets it go. Quentin is saying it because it sounds cool, because he thinks it sounds cool.

The argument has been made that he's trying to take some of the sting out of the word.

That's bullshit.

Another figure I wanted to ask you about was Christopher Hitchens [more here]. He's a longtime D.C. resident with roots in the Greek community. His first wife was Greek, and he's written about Cyprus for much of his life. Have you ever met him?

I saw him at a bar. We were both doing this thing. I think it was at the National Press Club, where they have a bunch of authors signing at Christmastime. And I went in there for a beer, and he'd already had a few, and he's sitting at the bar, and I was going to talk to him, and he gave me a look, like, "Don't do it, bud." I don't agree with a lot of what he writes, but it's coming from the heart.

He wrote one of the better articles about the "two Washingtons" back in the '80s.

He ain't never been to the other side of town.

It's interesting that the current war comes up in both The Wire and Drama City as background noise getting louder. Why did you want to deal with the war?

There's this neighborhood that I keep writing about, Park View. You go down there, and it's typical. Everything's run down on the commercial strip. You have bars, liquor stores, urban markets that sell beer and wine, stuff like that. Then the only nice place is the Army recruiting office. The only place that's got clean lights and a clean window, and it's right there in the middle of it. That's pretty much all you got to say, man.

A lot of people were gung ho in the city when the Pentagon was attacked, because they knew people that worked there. People were pretty much on the same page there. The thing is, when there was a reason to fight, all the people in the city, no matter what their economic background, were behind it. And, a lot of guys signed up. One of my many people I've gotten to know--he was a drug dealer, and it's reflected in Drama City. A lot of what that book is about is that you get too old for it. He managed to escape jail, and he just grew past that window. It's a small window. And then you realize, well, what am I going to do now? It's a young man's game. So I knew one guy who enlisted. He was in his early '30s. And he's gone. I haven't heard from him. And he's over there somewhere.

There's a sense in both Soul Circus and Drama City that the war piles one more thing on top of everything else.

To spend all the money we're spending when we've got all these problems here is just disgraceful. I think Katrina is actually an opportunity to employ untold thousands of people who need work. If the government did something similar to the WPA program in the Great Depression, if the government put people to work down there, you're not just paying people to work, you're also getting them acclimated to the culture of work. And within that organization, you can start promoting people to management. They can learn how to be managers, and basically you're reeducating people how to go work. And you've got this need down there now to do something. It could be the biggest undertaking this country has ever done, to put people to work for this one specific cause, right? To rebuild that city. And you know, I'd love it if my tax money went to that. I'd write a bigger check. But it's infuriating that I'm writing checks for this war now.

When characters in your books talk about the war or the death penalty or guns, do they express the feelings of people you talk to in D.C., or are those your own?

I'm trying to, more and more I hope, keep myself out of these books. You can be just as misunderstood on both sides of the fence. Just let the characters speak as they would. Because I've been guilty of, in my earlier books, I've been guilty of people hearing my voice, and me getting up on a soapbox. And it's not good for your art. It's not good for your books. Which is why I'm sort of reticent to talk about politics. With Soul Circus, it's the double whammy of the death penalty and also the gun thing. I'm not that anti-gun. If I lived on a farm in the country or something, I'd definitely own guns.

I think you have one of your characters say, "I'm a man, I like to hold a gun."

Exactly, you can't deny it. But people in the city don't want guns, so that's what I was doing. I was, by larger extension, talking about how powerless the people in D.C. are against their government.

How's your food?

I'm enjoying it.

Another comparison made between you and Tarantino is your use of pop culture references. But your characters don't just bring up popular culture to bond with each other, it's more like something they can rely on it, and take comfort in it. What I remembered most from Drama City wasn't any cool pop culture references, but the fact that the main dogcatcher character and his parole officer both like the way they make tuna subs at this one Subway.

Again, doing the research in that book, I was writing with dog police for quite awhile. I also rode with a parole officer on all her routes. The funny thing was that the dog guy and the parole officer, they didn't know each other, but they went to the same Subway, mainly because his calls were in that part of town, and her calls were in that part of town. But I noticed that they both ordered the tuna fish. And it just came up. A lot of times, I don't really have a great imagination, which is why the books are so reality-based. And a lot of the stuff I write, I wish I could say it was me being creative, but a lot of it is just me sitting there and listening to people talk. And doing all this research that I do. The dialogue is something that I invent, and I'm good at that. But these little details, it's all reality-based. And again, I think early in my career, I would have had them go to a place that I wanted to promote, but I'm trying to get away from that.

I disagree with something you said about Martin Luther King, that he would have given up nonviolence. Reading Taylor Branch's new book on King, you get the impression that he became more emphatically dedicated to nonviolent confrontation as the stakes were raised.

In Hard Revolution, when that kid Nick Stefanos, my alter-ego, when he comes out of that Greek Orthodox church, and he walks across to the National Cathedral and he hears King speak? That was me. The Sunday before he was killed in Memphis, he spoke to the cathedral. I came out of church. I heard his voice coming through of loudspeakers. And I walked across the street through the gardens when there was like thousands of people out there outside. They had mounted the speakers on the cathedral walls. I don't remember what he said, but when I looked at his speech, I'm paraphrasing, but he said if nothing is done between now and June to raise ghetto hope, I predict that there's going to be violence in the cities. He was warning people.

The thing that pisses me off in the op-ed pages is people who have an agenda will frequently say, "This is not what Doctor King would have wanted," talking about black people and how they react. Bullshit. How do they know what he would think today? Once people figured out the Voting Rights Act, and what good does that do when you can't put food on the table, once that sank in with people, that's when you have revolution coming. And I believe King would have been behind a more aggressive stance in the Civil Rights movements.

What happened here and in Detroit and a lot of cities was a good thing. It was unfortunate for what it did to a lot of businessmen, and it's unfortunate for what it did to a lot of the neighborhoods, but it speeded things up, there's no question about that.

But don't you think things were speeding up anyway? I guess the question on my mind is: What would have happened if you had that cultural transformation you're talking about, but also with King alive, or with a Democratic candidate keeping the Great Society alive...?

It was killed. When Bobby Kennedy died, that was the end. You had, obviously, Nixon elected because of that. And Nixon was elected for the same reason George W. Bush was reelected. Just making people afraid. And that's what Bush did. Stay the course against these terrorists. And people bought it.

We're both speculating. It's an interesting thing, our mayor at the time of the riots was Walter Washington, the first black mayor. He was appointed by LBJ. And J. Edgar Hoover during the riots called Washington in and said [paraphrasing], "We're going to start firing on these people." And Washington said, "You can replace buildings, sir, but you can't replace people." Basically he said, "Over my dead body." And Hoover said, "Well, I guess this conversation's over." And Washington said, "I was already gone five minutes ago," and he walked out the door. When Marion Barry ran for mayor as a young man, he basically ran on a platform that Walter Washington was a tool of the white man. The irony is that Walter Washington was a great man who saved a lot of people's lives in this city. And Barry was Barry. He's back in the news again, you know. He tested positive for cocaine last week.

The expression you use in your books, and it's on The Wire, too, is: "Same soup, just reheated."

I heard an old guy say it in D.C., and I said, "I'm using that." That's the kind of shit you can't make up in your office. I mean, part of what I do is just going out and hanging out. And people that don't do that, they can't write these kind of books. They can make it up, but it sounds like it was made up.

It's funny, but I don't like the Nick Stefanos books as much because they seem to be more about you. Is that wrong?

No, I think I really started to become a real writer and get better at this after I got away from that. I was learning how to write. Don't forget, when I wrote my first book, I'd never ever tried to write anything before, not even short stories. I never took a writing class. That was me learning to write. But what I'm doing now is a hundred miles away from what I was doing then, and a lot of it is, I managed to put that behind me. Obviously, in Drama City, there's nothing of me in there. There's nothing of my life in there. I don't live in those neighborhoods. I don't have any of that background. It was 100 percent researched and imagination.

There's a little of the D.C. punk scene in the character of Lorenzo's dogcatcher partner, Mark.

You've hit on a good point, because the Humane Society here in Washington employs a lot of people who were at PETA. PETA left town, they moved to Richmond, and these people stayed. And they were pretty radical people about this animal thing, and a lot of them were also heavily involved in the punk movement. So if you go to the office, you see people, they look like punks. They've got tattoos on their faces. They've got piercings everywhere. These are the guys that are going out into Southeast and telling people, "I'm taking your fucking dog away." It's bizarre.

By the way, a lot of those people that came out of the Positive Force thing, the Straight Edge thing, I see now because they're getting up there, they're in their 40s like I am. I see them working for PEN/Faulkner--they're the people that contacted me. I do these programs in the schools, where I work with kids that want to become writers and stuff. And I see them in all walks of life. They've kept up the punk ethos, that what I'm going to do is devote my life to doing something for the community. And it's pretty cool, man. I've never lived anywhere else, so I don't know what happened to people who were into Husker Du back in the day. But these people here, they're actually doing this stuff that they committed themselves to doing when they were young.

Even if you're trying to take yourself out of your books, I think it's possible get few things about you from them. Like, you're a sports fan.

Right.

And I take it you don't own a Toyota Camry.

I had a lady at a book signing tell me that she sold her Camry after reading one of my books. I told her, "Don't do that. I could tell you to wear a banana peel on your head."

Have you had experiences with fighting?

For many years I kick-boxed here in the city. But that was just a sport to me. Matter of fact, after I trained for many years doing that, I never got in another fight in my life. Before that, I'd get in bar fights. So I don't want to project myself as really badass.

But you've been in bar fights?

Yeah, who hasn't?

I haven't. Well, I've tried to break up bar fights.

I did a lot of stupid things. It's all stupid stuff.

So how do you feel about your kids and violence? There's this whole spectrum, from shoving somebody to bullying, and then there's entertainment, playing Grand Theft Auto. And you wrote that World War II book when you were a eight years old...

That's from being the son of a marine, so that's where that came from. I have two sons and a daughter, and I assume we're talking about my sons now. One of them's 15, the other's going to be a teenager soon. They're very street-smart young guys. They're tough. I don't have a problem with that. My youngest son is on the wrestling team. He's very tough. He can handle himself in the street. He wouldn't bully anybody, but there's people that don't even want their kids to know how to fight, and I don't think that's helping them any.

I'm a little different. I mean, for example, the word "fuck" to me is four letters randomly arranged. It doesn't bother me if I hear somebody say it. And I've told my kids that, too. People will look at you a certain way if you say it. They're going to judge you. But the fact is, just think about it, man. There's nothing wrong with it. They know everything that I've done, all the drugs I've used, and everything. I try to tell them, look, smoking pot, it's your choice, but personally, from my experience, as an older guy, I think it's a waste of time. It's not a moral thing. Just think about it. Why waste the time? I try to give them something from my experience. I've wasted a lot of time doing that kind of stuff. And the violent games, again, it's a game. It's not going to make you go outside and shoot anybody. I'd rather you go outside and shoot buckets.

The way your characters use drugs, it's a way of not dealing with what's going on in their lives.

So you know what I'm saying. As you get older and older, you see this is a great gift that we have to be sitting here enjoying this meal together and everything, just breathing the air and all that stuff. Why put something in between there to make it foggier? 'Cause you're not going to remember whether it was any fun or not.

Are you no longer a producer at The Wire?

I didn't do it this year because it was gonna interfere with my novel writing.* I had a new contract with Little, Brown, and it was very important that I fulfill it. And I wanted to write a book. Writing for television is rewarding on a lot of levels, but it's never as rewarding as writing a novel with your own pen, and creating it all yourself. And truthfully, a lot of what people like about writing for TV, I didn't like. I loved the writing part of it. I hated being on the set for 12 hours a day or 16 hours a day, just a lot of sitting in a chair watching other people work. You know, the guy's hauling cables around and lights and stuff, and here you are with your name on a stupid little chair. It's embarrassing to me. 'Cause I'm a guy who's worked my whole life. All of a sudden I'm sitting in a chair with my name on it.

But didn't you write your forthcoming book while doing The Wire?

I did, but it just caught up with me. It's basically seven months out of the year to write. And it's 12 to 16 hours a day, so you're not doing anything else.

And you would drive from D.C. to work on The Wire, right?

Yeah, I was commuting. It was a hundred miles a day. And I was well paid for it. But that leaves five months in a year, and I can write a book in five months, but on the front end I gotta do a bunch of research, and then there's the promotion of it, which is usually a month out of the year, I do a tour of the States and I go overseas. And that's like a 15-month year, which I don't have.

What was the atmosphere like with other writers on The Wire? Was it like a bull session, or you come in with a finished script and then they go over it? How did you interact with them?

There's a couple parts to that. Before the season, we'd get together, usually we'd go away somewhere for a week.** And we'd brainstorm about the generalities of it in terms of what this seasons going to be about, what are we trying to say, the character arcs, where's he going to start, where's he going to end, who the characters are. Then you get back, you start meetings again, and you start what they call beating out the show, which is a scene-by-scene diagram of each show. Usually it's about between 30 and 35 scenes in 58 minutes, and that is just two or three days in a room with all the writers mapping it out on a board, with different colors for the police, the politicians, the drug boys, the corner kids, and you map the colors out, day one, day two, day three, and put them in order.

So when we're done, before the season starts, you've got four shows like that, so you could send the writers off to do four scripts before we start shooting. You can't knock out the whole season beforehand, because things change. Things aren't working, or they're working better than other things, and you don't know that until you start looking at dailies and things like that. What happens is that as the season progresses, it gets more and more intense, because you're trying to beat out these shows and give them to writers to write like a week before the show starts to shoot. The pressure mounts and mounts, and tempers flair, and there's a lot of arguing and things of that nature. But I believe that that's why the show's so good. A lot of the arguments were about the good of the show. And then you got other stuff, too. You've got egos.

Would, say, for Season 3, Dennis Lehane be in the room?

Yeah, we brought him down. We brought Richard Price down.

What would a specific argument be about?

It was different for different guys. Like Ed Burns, he knows the streets better than any of us do, and Baltimore specifically. So he would be the guy arguing, "This guy wouldn't do this. You're making him too soft. He's like a suburban kid." And I would go for consistency of character. "Why is he saying this now when in episode three he was talking totally different?" And David was the guy in charge, so he would often come in late in the process and say, "No, you guys gotta start all over again. You fucked it up. This isn't what I want."

But he's got a track record. The reason I came onto this thing was because of [HBO miniseries] The Corner. I enjoyed Homicide, but The Corner to me was something I've never seen done on television before.

How has Baltimore changed since The Wire began shooting parts of it?

The dock locations were literally disappearing as we were shooting. There is no working class anymore. The working class is a myth that people use to sell Ford trucks. There's no jobs for those people anymore. That's why you've got these cities with no industrial base for young people. It used to be, traditionally, in Baltimore, for example, if you work for U.S. steel or whatever, wherever your dad worked, and you weren't the type of person that's going to go on to college, your dad got you into the union. Whatever you think of it, it's a living, and then your kids go to college. There aren't those jobs, anymore. So those kids either did pull themselves up, or, you know, that's why you see these kids selling drugs openly. And Baltimore is a way tougher town than Washington in a lot of ways. We shoot in the neighborhoods. Those aren't sets. They're acres and acres of row houses with plywood in your doors, and people are living in these places. There's no work. And the school system, 75 percent of kids don't get past the tenth grade.

You and David Simon and other people from the show are saying some of the more radical things in entertainment media about where the country is going. You're not just saying that the country has changed, you're saying people changed it for the worse.

That's David. David is more of an intellectual than I am. I'll go into a neighborhood and see kids on the corner selling drugs. What I want to do is I want to go home with them and find out, "Why?" in a microscopic way. David will say, "Well, what can we do about that?" I don't have that kind of head.

Do you think being a salesman helped you be a better reporter?

Yeah, I was a good listener on the sale floor. I was very quiet. I'd just listen to people, and I'd look for buying signs and then I'd go in for a kill.

So you really got it down.

Oh, yeah, I never understood when people would say, "You're just trying to sell me something." I'm like, "Yeah, that's what I'm doing here. That's my job, of course I am." But it's about being a good listener more than anything.

Former Howard University student Sean Combs bought the rights to your book King Suckerman for a while and took it to Miramax, but you've said the rights have been returned to you. What happened?

I wrote the script. I liked what I wrote and Bob Weinstein didn't like it, and we ended up parting ways.

Do you feel better about not adapting this new script, for Right as Rain?

At this point, time is moving faster. As a lot of writers are, I'm hyper-aware of my mortality, so to go and spend six months or eight months rewriting something that I've already written, I'm not going to do it anymore. I'd rather write a script for The Wire than adapt my books for the screen.

And what's the status Samuel L. Jackson starring in Right as Rain?

You never know what's going to happen, but it's all ready to go. It's not in pre-production yet, but the script's written.

Why were you drawn to this genre of fiction in the first place?

I wasn't much of a reader, and then I took this class, Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction at the University of Maryland. The reason that I wasn't a reader was that none of the books that were put in front of me in high school were relevant to my world. Because I do sort of come from a working-class background, and the books were about people like that. Crime novels, to me it's the people's literature. Not so much Chandler, 'cause that's really about a guy floatin' above everything and looking down on it. But Hammet, and then the pulp writers were really down there in the gutter with these people, and without judgment. It's not just them, but Steinbeck. That's the kind of book I want to write. Where crime comes into it for me is that I need a narrative engine to strap myself onto so I can write the book. 'Cause otherwise, I feel like, "Oh, fuck, where's this going." And then he's in the room thinking about things and the dust is blowing in the sunlight.

Well, one of my favorite parts in a couple of your books is that you take long breaks from the action so that your characters can go visit parents. Do you worry about leaving the narrative too much sometimes?

I'm not a hugely successful writer, and there's probably a reason for that. I certainly don't think of these things as mysteries. I mean, the book that I just turned in that's coming out later this year [The Night Gardener, on August 8] is really about this cop's family, like what happens when he goes home at night, and what it's like to be a father of a teenage son, with all these challenges out there in the world. It's certainly not a traditional crime novel.

(Center: Anwan "Big G" Glover of the Backyard Band as Slim Charles on the third season of The Wire; watch video of the Backyard Band here)
______________________________________

*[first follow-up question via email:]

What's your job title on the fourth season of the Wire now that you aren't a producer?

I'm writing episode 12. No producer title this year. I was involved in the story meetings before the season began, where we figured out the arcs, but pulled back from the other duties. When I was a producer I was in charge of a little bit of everything. Now I'm just a lowly writer again, in charge of nothing.

**[second follow-up question via email:]

Where did the writer-producer meetings where you hashed out stories physically take place during work on season three?

A couple of months before we shot we went up to a kind of inn in upstate New York (I think it was Tarrytown; I sorta remember that because of the Steely Dan tune off Pretzel Logic) and spent the better part of a week discussing/planning the story lines and arcs of Season 3. The place was empty. It was me, David Simon, Ed Burns, Richard Price, and Robert Colesberry, who passed away a few weeks before we began to shoot. For the record, Bob was more than a nuts and bolts producer, he was a creative guy as well. And a good friend to us all and the show. Anyway, the inn was kinda empty, and remote, so there wasn’t much to do but work, which I suppose was the idea. But they had a bar, and I did manage to take some money from those guys at the house pool table. We also played racquetball. Price had game, and so did Burns.

__________________________

George Pelecanos
http://www.georgepelecanos.com

Audio: Pelecanos and David Simon on NPR in 2004

Audio: Pelecanos on Tavis Smiley in 2005

Pelecanos wrote the lyrics for a recent Steve Wynn song, "Cindy, It Was Always You"
http://stevewynn.net/

Pelecanos Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pelecanos

Pelecanos interview in City Pages: "Ten Thousand Bullets: D.C. lifer George Pelecanos writes about murder, drug feuds, riots, dog-fighting--and also a little violence"
http://citypages.com/databank/27/1337/article14551.asp

Pelecanos interview with Robert Birnbaum in 2004

Pelecanos conversation with Dennis Lehane in 1999

Link Wray: Armed to the Teeth (in fact and fiction)

More on Katrina's aftermath in City Pages: "Juvenile's New Orleans, the ghost town America made"

HBO's The Wire
http://www.hbo.com/thewire/

HBO's message board for The Wire

Members.aol.com/TheWireHBO
http://members.aol.com/TheWireHBO/

The Wire Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_%28television%29

Ed Burns interview at The Wire's site in 2006

David Simon interview in the Baltimore City Paper in 2003

David Simon interview in Salon in 2002

Book: Hey Cabbie! by Thaddeus Logan

Book: Samaritan by Richard Price

Richard Price interview at Identity Theory

Book: Homicide by David Simon

Book: Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones

Edward P. Jones Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_P._Jones

NYT: "Baltimore Streets Meaner, but Message Is Mixed"

Baltimore City Paper: "A Guided Tour Of The Wire's East Baltimore"

Links page for Homicide and The Wire
http://members.aol.com/hlotslinks/

City Pages review of The Wire: The Complete First Season

Video: Omar on The Wire at Youtube

Video: Backyard band from 2001 on Youtube

Take Me Out to the Go-Go
http://www.tmottgogo.com/

Online book: Caroline Street, NW Washington, District of Columbia: The first 125 years, 1879-2005
http://www.gamber.net/caroline/

Baltimore City Paper: Top 10 Reasons to Not Cancel The Wire

The Wire discussion at ILX

Positive Force D.C.
http://www.positiveforcedc.org/

Dischord Records
http://www.dischord.com

Washington City Paper
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/

Baltimore City Paper
http://www.citypaper.com/

Republic Gardens
http://www.republicgardens.com/

Book: A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone

Baltimore hip-hop trading cards

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at July 19, 2006 6:49 AM | Comments (3)

 

Scholtes Scholtes Scholtes

Scholtes Auto World in Worthington, Minnesota. A family-owned business that it turns out I'm related to through my great-grandfather Peter Scholtes.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at July 13, 2006 8:32 PM | Comments (1)

 

African Hip Hop, A to Z

Is hip hop African? I interviewed everyone from old-school Bronx rap legend Love Bug Starski to touring West African hip-hop trio Daara J to find answers in today's City Pages feature "Payback Is a Motherland," which also looks at the Minnesota African hip-hop scene (including Baraka, above, and M.anifest and DJ Xpekkt, below). Curious consumers might want to skip straight to Keith Harris's handy CD sidebar "Africa's Ultimate Beats and Breaks" (or listen to mp3s by M.anifest and local Kenyan R&B singer Fadhil, a.k.a. Fadhili, collaborating with Kenyan rap legend Hardstone). More discussion at DUNation.

Then on Monday, July 17, in Minneapolis, Daara J perform for free in Loring Park at 7:00 p.m., with KFAI's Salif Keita (not the singer, as previously posted) DJing before and after the set (more information here and here). My hope is that African rappers will use this event as an open-air networking session, further linking the various communities. (It's followed by a free screening of the movie Sullivan's Travels at dusk.) And speaking of links...

African Hip Hop in Minnesota, A to Z

4 Shades MySpace page
http://www.myspace.com/4shadesmusic

African Rhythms on KFAI-FM (90.3/106.7)
http://kfai.org/programs/african.htm

Blade Brown MySpace page
http://myspace.com/bladebrownmusic

Jazio Blaque (a.k.a. Knotty)
http://www.backstagecommerce.com/cgi-bin/artisthome_db.cgi?1240948

Blue Nile Restaurant and Lounge
http://www.bluenilempls.com/

Egypto Knuckles
http://www.myspace.com/EgyptoKnuckles

Eritrian Community Center of Minnesota
http://www.nitesoft.com/eccm/

K-Stringz (circa-2000 Tripod site)
http://k-stringz.tripod.com/

Kilimanjaro Entertainment
http://kilimanjaroentertainment.com/

Knotty (a.k.a. Jazio Blaque) MySpace page
http://www.myspace.com/knottymon

M.anifest MySpace page
http://www.myspace.com/manifestations

Mezeshae Entertainment
http://www.mezeshaentertainment.com/

Mo-Man: "Mo Money, Mo Problems"
http://citypages.com/databank/25/1210/article11882.asp

The Red Sea
http://www.redseaclub.com/

T&J Entertainment
http://www.tnjentertainment.com/

Umunne Cultural Association of Minnesota
http://umunne.org

Waberi Studio
http://www.asoftnet.com/wb/index.html

Wahomeskenya
http://www.wahomeskenya.com

Xpekkt official site
http://www.tuffstorm.com

African Hip Hop in the World, A to Z

Africa Hi-Fi
http://www.prescriptionworld.org/ahifi.html

Africa Raps CD at Trikont
http://www.trikont.com/catalogue/294_africa_raps/294_africa_raps.html

African hip hop at Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_hip_hop

Africanhiphop.com
http://www.africanhiphop.com

Africanhiphop (MySpace)
http://www.myspace.com/africanhiphop

Africanhiphopradio.com
http://africanhiphopradio.com/

Africasgateway.com
http://www.africasgateway.com/

Afrolution
http://www.afrolution.com

Akon
http://www.akononline.com/

Amuse Africa (South Africa)
http://www.amuseafrica.com/

Ancient Meets Urban
http://www.ancientmeetsurban.com/

Awesome Tapes from Africa blog
http://awesometapesfromafrica.blogspot.com/

Babkubwa.com
http://www.babkubwa.com/

Benn Loxo du Taccu blog
http://bennloxo.com/

Black Mango Music
http://www.blackmangomusic.com/

Bongo Flava page at Calabash Music
http://bongoflava.calabashmusic.com/

Calabash Music
http://calabashmusic.com/

Jeff Chang on the history of "Che Che Cole"
http://www.cantstopwontstop.com/blog/2004/01/che-che-cole-to-future-just-want-to.html

Johari Cleff Studios in Nairobi
http://www.jcleff.com/jcmusic/

Daara J MySpace page (pictured above)
http://www.myspace.com/daarasenegal

Daara J at Rock Paper Scissors
http://www.rockpaperscissors.biz/index.cfm/fuseaction/current.press_release/project_id/179.cfm

DJ / rupture MySpace page
http://myspace.com/deejayrupture

Hardstone MySpace page
http://www.myspace.com/hardstone

Hip Hop Headrush
http://www.hiphop.co.za/

The Hiplife Complex Blog
http://thehiplifecomplex.blogspot.com/

Hiphopcolony.com
http://www.hiphopcolony.com/

J-deGuvna MySpace page
http://www.myspace.com/jdeguvna

Emmanuel Jal MySpace page
http://www.myspace.com/emmanueljal

K-Melia
http://www.kmelia.com/

K'Naan official site
http://www.thedustyfoot.com/

K'Naan MySpace page
http://www.myspace.com/knaanmusic

Kalamashaka
http://www.angelfire.com/wa/kshaka/kshaka2.html

Matsuli Music blog
http://matsuli.blogspot.com/

MF Doom
http://www.mfdoomsite.com/

Mzibo
http://www.mzibo.net/frame.html

Naiha Jams blog
http://www.naijajams.com/

Nomadic Wax
http://www.nomadicwax.com/

Nomadic Wax MySpace page
http://www.myspace.com/nomadicwax

Ntama Journal of African Music and Popular Culture
http://ntama.uni-mainz.de/

Nubian Underground
http://www.nubianunderground.com

Omzo
http://www.omzomusic.com/

Omzo MySpace page
http://www.myspace.com/omzo

Prophets of Da City
http://www.rucus.ru.ac.za/~eitan/poc/poc2.html

Shadow Zu MySpace page
http://www.myspace.com/shadowzu

The Suburbs Are Killing Us blog
http://www.christopherporter.com/

Senerap.com
http://www.senerap.com

Stern's
http://www.sternsmusic.com/

Union Square Music
http://www.unionsquaremusic.co.uk/

Unitednationsofhiphop.com
http://www.unitednationsofhiphop.com/

Universal Zulu Nation and Afrika Bambaataa
http://www.zulunation.com/

World Music Network
http://www.worldmusic.net

X-Plastaz at Calabash Music (pictured below)
http://xplastaz.calabashmusic.com/

X-Plastaz MySpace
http://www.myspace.com/xplastaz

Yellogate Studios in the Gambia
http://www.yellowgate.gm/

Zhalman
http://www.zhalman.com

Updates:

African hip hop in the park today (cpculture.com 7/17/06)

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at July 11, 2006 6:06 PM | Comments (10)

 

Happy 4th of July

(photo at graffiti.org by Lady Pink and Smith)

Sarah Vowell on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution:

I forget that there are eleven years between them, eleven years of war and the whole Articles of Confederation debacle. In my head, the two documents are like the A-side and B-side of the greatest single ever released, recorded in one great drunken night...

Mark Twain on patriotism:

There are two kinds of patriotism--monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism; in the other, neither the government nor the entire nation is privileged to dictate to any individual what the form of his patriotism shall be. The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: "The King can do no wrong." We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: "Our country, right or wrong!" We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had--the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong.

Martin Luther King on the American dream:

It wouldn't take us long to discover the substance of that dream. It is found in those majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, words lifted to cosmic proportions: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by God, Creator, with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." This is a dream. It's a great dream.

The first saying we notice in this dream is an amazing universalism. It doesn't say "some men," it says "all men." It doesn't say "all white men," it says "all men," which includes black men. It does not say "all Gentiles," it says "all men," which includes Jews. It doesn't say "all Protestants," it says "all men," which includes Catholics... It doesn't even say "all theists and believers," it says "all men," which includes humanists and agnostics.

Then that dream goes on to say another thing that ultimately distinguishes our nation and our form of government from any totalitarian system in the world. It says that each of us has certain basic rights that are neither derive