April 2007 Archives - Peter S. Scholtes

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National Features >

Broward-Palm Beach New Times
Sexual Healing
For Florida's sole remaining sex surrogate, love is a many splintered thing.
By Michael J. Mooney
City Pages
Your Friendly Neighborhood War Profiteer
It's not just giant companies cashing in on America's defense industry.
By Jeff Severns Guntzel
The Pitch
Supersizing Sonic
How a throwaway idea at the Barkley ad agency became the "Sonic Guys."
By Justin Kendall
Houston Press
Temples of Tex-Mex
A diner's guide to Texas's oldest Mexican restaurants.
By Robb Walsh

April 2007

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Holy ghost in the machine

Until a few minutes ago, anyone visiting complicatedfun.com for the past week and a half was directed to an "under construction" banner, though nothing is actually under construction: I forgot to fill in the forwarding part when I renewed this domain name last week through 2011. Now complicatedfun.com should once again take you to blogs.citypages.com/pscholtes/... *. Of course, the mishap took place during the one week when I was mentioning the blog to scores of colleagues and heroes in Seattle, at the Experience Music Project's "Pop Conference 2007: Waking Up from History: Music, Time, and Place." I was similarly technologically impaired at the event, singing my father's hymn a capella in lieu of a tape player, but I had the time of my life. (That's a photo of Dad in the early '60s.) Thank you, everyone who showed up. Thank you, Matos, for the mention in New York magazine. Thank you for the many great presentations, too numerous to list. I learned a lot, and my younger brother says the conference changed his life.

I won't be publishing the paper "Why My Father Wrote 'They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love'" any time soon, but I'd be happy to email it to friends and colleagues, and hope to track down a number of you all in coming days to see if I can't read some of the papers I missed. I've been sick for the past few days, so I'm late on this, but I hope to stay energized off of the experience. As another song in the Christian spirit puts it, I got nothing but love for you, baby.
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*...and so should my old City Pages blog address, babelogue.citypages.com:8080/pscholtes/.
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Recently posted elsewhere:

'Black Monk Time' reading in Minneapolis Saturday (Culture to Go 4/27/07), MN Rock and Country Hall of Fame tonight and tomorrow (Culture to Go 4/27/07), Family Affair: Bassist Larry Graham ear-tests the Sly and the Family Stone reissues (City Pages 4/18/07), Verdict on the Pierces new video: "Boring" (Culture to Go 4/17/07), New Brother Ali video (Culture to Go 4/16/07), Rip It Like Euripides (Culture to Go 4/16/07), Dark Star: Wrong image, wrong religion, wrong city: Meet Brother Ali, hip hop's unlikely savior (City Pages 4/11/07), "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother": More Brother Ali links and photos (Complicated Fun 4/10/07), Dosh on Letterman (Culture to Go 4/10/07), Brother Ali Remix Contest (Culture to Go 4/10/07), Sasha Frere-Jones on Prince in Vegas (Culture to Go 4/9/07), Mikey Dread to play the Cabooze (Culture to Go 4/9/07), Husker Who? (Culture to Go 4/5/07), Local teen club TC Underground closes (Culture to Go 4/5/07), Weekend video: Low's "Breaker" (Culture to Go 3/31/07), previous roundup.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at April 27, 2007 5:50 PM | Comments (0)

Larry Graham on the Sly Stone reissues

It was a pure pleasure to spend a couple hours with Larry and Tina Graham, and I hope to see them again soon. Speaking of pure pleasure, the Sly and the Family Stone reissues, out this month and ear-tested by Larry in this week's City Pages, sound of a piece, to me, with everything else I've been listening to the past couple months, new and old: the King Jammy's collection and Lady Saw, the new Chuck Brown album, Brother Ali, Lily Allen, Little Man, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Hope this reissue campaign brings these albums the wider audience they deserve.

Larry Graham and Sly and the Family Stone links:

"Family Affair: Bassist Larry Graham ear-tests the Sly and the Family Stone reissues" (City Pages 4/18/07)
http://citypages.com/databank/28/1376/article15355.asp

Sly and the Family Stone official site
http://www.slystonemusic.com/

Larry Graham: "Release Yourself"
http://citypages.com/databank/20/972/article7783.asp

Larry Graham Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Graham

Sly and the Family Stone Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sly_&_the_Family_Stone

Larry Graham MySpace page
http://www.myspace.com/grahamfunk

Graham Central Station on Soul Train at Youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1IuD6F3R5I

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at April 17, 2007 5:20 PM | Comments (1)

Brother Ali show review by Chris Godsey in Duluth

Even folks who understand that Duluth has a serious underground music scene might not know the city is also home to some excellent hip hip (like Crew Jones and Ray the Wolf) and pockets of the intense love required to maintain it.

It's also home to a couple colleges filled with (mostly) white suburban kids from the Twin Cities who geek on Rhymesayers--especially Atmosphere, P.O.S., and Brother Ali--as if the label represents them. They're the same kids Brother Ali seems to be talking about in "Daylight," from his recently released The Undisputed Truth: "I don't want the white folks that praise me to think they can claim me/'Cause you didn't make me/You don't appreciate what I know to be great, yet you relate to me/And that frustrates me and what can I say/'Cause I know that I benefit from something I hate/But make no mistake our connection ain't fake."

And they're the same ones who stood on line along a block of East Superior Street for a couple-three hours on Tuesday night, despite a relentlessly numbing wind chill, to see Ali begin his Undisputed Truth tour at Pizza Luce, on the album's official release date.

As he always does, Ali showed love to the folks who were showing it to him. In fact, there was also a fair amount of reciprocated love between the crowd and DJ BK-One, host Toki Wright (who rapped a couple very tight songs of his own), and Psalm One. (A dude from Queens named Trama opened the night, but I didn't get to see the crowd's reaction to him or vice-versa, because I was out on the sidewalk learning why Chuck Taylors aren't good cold-weather footwear.)

"All right," Wright said at one point during BK-One's set after Trama, and before Psalm One. "Duluth is still the shit." The crowd of three or four hundred roared. "Duluth still loves hip hop." More roaring.

When Psalm One said she'd never been to Duluth before, she was warmly welcomed, and anyone who didn't know she was a supporting act would have been justified in thinking she was the headliner, based on her energy and the crowd's. Even during her last few songs, there was no sense that she was being merely tolerated. No one was impatient. She was being loved, and she deserved it, because her tight flow and high energy did exactly what they were supposed to do: hype the headliner.

Ali went on around midnight and commanded the room with a perfectly paced set of songs from Shadows on the Sun (2003), The Champion EP (2004), and Truth.

The first time I saw Ali in Duluth was a week or so before Shadows was released. He opened for Slug, being backed by the Heiruspecs band, at UMD's Kirby Ballroom. Even during perfect sing-along songs like "Forest Whitiker," he almost had to give his audience lessons in hip-hop-show crowd participation etiquette. They were there to see Slug, and few things are more difficult than trying to impress or engage children of the entitlement generation with anything they don't already think is cool.

A little more than a year ago, Ali packed Pizza Luce, but didn't sell it out, and the crowd was a more willing and sophisticated.

Tuesday, it was obvious that he had grown in prominence, and that his audience had figured out how to behave properly when someone like Ali is on stage. On command, all hands were thrown in the air and waved as if their owners didn't care, and everybody, anybody, screamed. Loudly. Frequently. We were all in a pizza restaurant in downtown Duluth--families with little kids had been eating there just a few hours earlier--but from the back of the room, with all those arms waving side to side, BK-One's bass resonating in our collective chest, and Ali working hard enough to have taken off his jacket before the first song, sweated through his t-shirt by the second, and needed to towel his shaved head every few minutes after that, it felt like a gritty basement, a grimy underground club, or any other hip hop womb.

Many of the kids packed up front and standing on counters and ledges rapped along with every lyric Ali spit--even the stuff on the record released that day; they'd either done some quick studying, spent many hours at Ali's MySpace page, or downloaded the whole Truth, which was leaked to the Web by some jackass member of the music media the day after promotional copies went out to elite journalists.

Live music thrives in Duluth, but like anywhere else, there's a concert every few years that's superior enough to seem surreal. Wilco did that every-few-years thing last summer at the Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center auditorium; Al Sparhawk always has the potential to do it with one of his bands; Ali did it Tuesday night. -- Chris Godsey

Read more about Brother Ali in City Pages and below.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at April 13, 2007 3:59 PM | Comments (4)

He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother

"Dark Star"--my article about Brother Ali--is live at City Pages. Don't miss the online extras: two new mp3s, a video gallery, a photo gallery, and rare audio of Brother Ali's 2004 radio spots for Marshall Field's. Below is a selection of Ali links, including previous articles about Ali and Rhymesayers. (Above: Ali at the Hip-Hop Congress in Moorhead, Minnesota, February 17, 2007. Below: Meeting KRS-One in 1990 [photo courtesy of Nick Newman]; with Eyedea, Felipe, and Slug at the Triple Rock in 2004--click for larger image [photo by Tony Nelson].)

Note: The print version of the article contains an error: It correctly paraphrases Ali saying one of his releases "was funded by a friend who was beaten by Minneapolis police and settled out of court," but the release in question was 2000's Rites of Passage, not 2003's Shadows on the Sun. A correction will run in City Pages April 18.

Brother Ali links (A-Z)

Brotherali.com
http://brotherali.com

"Brother Ali Remix Contest" hosted by Run Ya Jewels Tuesday, April 17 at the Dinkytowner; 21+, 10:00 p.m. $3 admission; $10 to enter contest. Pick up the a capella version of Brother Ali's "Original King" at Fifth Element or Dinkytowner. Special Rhymesayers guest Judges.
http://www.myspace.com/runyajewelz

Burlesque Design
http://www.burlesquedesign.com/

City Pages article: "Dark Star; Wrong image, wrong religion, wrong city: Meet Brother Ali, hip hop's unlikely savior"
http://citypages.com/databank/28/1375/article15315.asp

City Pages "Best of the Twin Cities" item
http://bestof.citypages.com/2007/sex-drugs-rock-roll/70154/

City Pages "Best of the Twin Cities" on Fox
http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/myfox/pages/InsideFox/Detail?contentId=3023582&version=2&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=VSTY&pageId=5.2.1

The Current interview and performance at SXSW
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/03/15/brother_ali/

El-Amin's Fish House
http://www.efishhouse.com/

Fifth Element
http://www.fifthelementonline.com

Haystack Brother Ali page
http://www.haystack.com/brotherali

Hype Machine Brother Ali audio
http://hypem.com/artist/brother+ali

Masjid An-Nur (Ali's mosque)
http://masjidannur.org/

MNStories video of Brother Ali on 89.3 at SXSW
http://www.mnstories.com/archives/2007/03/sxsw_brother_al.html

More Scholtes articles about Brother Ali and Rhymesayers
http://blogs.citypages.com/pscholtes/stories/014806.asp

MP3.com video interview at SXSW
http://www.mp3.com/brother-ali/artists/603691/summary.html

Mpls-St. Paul Q&A
http://www.mspmag.com/features/features/67060.asp?ht=