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“Walk like a Warrior” a breif chat with stic.man of Dead Prez

How do you prevent your self from being too didactic when writing songs so you can reach a listener that normally wouldn’t listen to a Dead Prez record? For example someone like immortal technique who is overtly political, and whom I respect as an artist and for the most part agree with his politics, even at times is not listenable because you feel what he’s talking about you but just don’t want to fuck with it because you feel like your being beaten over the head with the message?

You just have to express yourself honestly and creatively and whoever digs it; digs it. There’s definitely room for various approaches.

Being the author of “The art of Emceeing”, if you were an emcee trying to convey something political how would you approach writing a song without sounding like your giving a lecture?

Include more than one dimension. include the individual perspectives as well as the collective political vantage points. don’t prescribe solutions that you don’t have. you can even use a little humor. Show the reality and not just the ideal. Communicate in a way that invites the listener in as an equal, not like you are talking down on she or he with all your mighty insight. make sure the music got that thang in it! …some shit u can feel right away. Go for the heart as well as the mind so to speak.

You relocated to Atlanta from Brooklyn, are you trying to spread the RBG movement or you just felt like moving to Atlanta to change scenery?

It was a move for both family and business. We must cover more ground if we are to be more effective.

Atl’s got a sizable black population, what are their feelings toward Barrack Obama?

That if he wins he better watch his back and that he’s gonna be held accountable by the shit he’s saying on them podiums. I think many aware Afrikans realize that he will still be representing the capitalistic, imperialistic American system if he does get elected and
that just because he’s black doesn’t mean he will have any revolutionary objectives while in office. But i think the masses of people still would like to see him win as a Black man to see what kind of difference or not he could make…

Bidoun got this magazine thing on lock!

Bidoun has to be one of the freshest magazines out right now-always coming correct with the dope covers and informative articles detailing the happenings in the often overlooked middle eastern art world. I tried to contact editor-in-chief Lisa Farjam-she was busy so her assistant Kate Alberswerth was kind enough to answer a few questions.  Get Familiar!

Among other magazines, Bidoun‘s covers always standout? What is the process like, is it collaborative or do you select a different designer for each cover, who you might feel is well suited for hat particular issue’s theme?

Our covers are designed by Babak Radboy, Bidoun‘s creative director.

In your mission statement you declare that, “While we acknowledge the reductionist tendencies of orientalism, BIDOUNalso resists obsessing over cultural difference”, You guys did that not to be boxed in or ghettoize yourselves, how do you guys maintain that balance?……….in other words, how do you incite readers to take a fresh look at the Middle East and its peoples, often presented in mainstream media as one-dimensional?

We do this by approaching it from a different angle, there’s no Middle Eastern arts magazine that covers the people that live there or here. We also want to look at the Middle East in a positive way without all the pretext or pretenses or politics of what it is to be Arab.

How is Bidoun being marketed in the Middle-East? What is the circulation like in major middle eastern cities?

It’s marketed as an art, cultural and travel magazine and is read by a large range of people. We’ve got good circulation in Cairo, Beirut, Dubai and the UAE. We’re working on Iran.

go to http://www.bidoun.com for more.

check out cover designer Babak Radboy’s wesite:

http://www.babakradboy.com/

Hosay: Caribbean Cultural Expression of a Shi’ite Heritage

Just like to thank Asad Rizvi for his contribution and Nicholas Laughlin (Editor,
The Caribbean Review of Books) for the photos and input.

” I’ve just read the article & it gives an interesting summary of the evolution of Hosay, but there are a couple of points the writer might include or emphasise more; which are, just in case this is useful to him: the way Hosay in the last ten or fifteen years has come to be seen as a community festival linking people of all faiths and ethnicities in St. James & reinforcing a sense of a St. James identity distinct to other districts of Port of Spain; & the many ways that Hosay & Trinidad’s pre-Lenten Carnival have influenced each other over the last century & a half”.

Shi’ite Islam, like many religions, has taken on distinctly indigenous forms in the different lands that it has spread. The practices of “popular Shiism” are where the differences are most pronounced. These popular practices are often the most important agents in spreading a religion in lands where it is foreign and must be understood through a reconstructed native understanding. A very important example of this is found in Iranian history when Safavid rulers sent out Sufis across the vast regions of Iran to proselytize people in the doctrine of Twelver Shiism. Here, we see how the Gnostic inclination of Iranians was reconciled with the charisma of the Twelver Imami line. The Iranian practice of visiting Sufi shrines transformed itself into popular pilgrimages to the shrines of the Imams and their lineage.

Interview with Vijay Iyer

 

Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of jazz at the Lincoln Center, who is known to be a harsh critic of Hip-Hop, recently had another anti-hip-hop episode in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, where went on to call Hip-Hop ‘ghetto minstrelsy’. To an extent, in this day and age, this might be a correct depiction of what one sees on MTV. For the casual viewer/listener of Hip-Hop, such depictions can be perceived as the definitive representation of Hip-Hop. But what really might piss some people off at Marsalis is that he goes on to say that rap music in general is not a credible art form: “It has no merit, rhythmically, musically, lyrically.” The fact that you, as an accomplished Jazz musician, have worked with artists such as Mike Ladd and M-1 of Dead Prez, and based upon several of your past interviews, it seems like you would be on the opposite end of Mr. Marsalis’s argument. Besides the fact that he is rapping on his latest release, do you think there is any validity in his argument? Or is he going senile like Dr. Huxtable?

“It never struck me that Wynton was qualified to speak on the subject in the first place. I don’t know why anyone would listen to his opinion on any music outside of the area where he is a respected practitioner. But one thing that happens to the rich and famous is that they are frequently asked questions on subjects they know nothing about, and their answers instantly enter the global media echo chamber. I’m not here to root for all things hip-hop – certainly there are aspects of it that I am not down with — but at this point hip-hop is so vast that it’s inseparable from mainstream culture at large. Disavowing hip-hop in 2007 is just naive and pointless.Another aspect of his utterance that we can’t deny is that saying extreme stuff like this keeps him in the news, which serves his overall strategy; even my act of answering this question simply fans the flames.Meanwhile, there are numerous historical examples of high-culture individuals saying the same thing (“it has no merit”) about jazz. In fact, jazz once occupied a place in culture similar to what hip-hop did in the 80s and 90s – a supposed “threat” to high culture and all things respectable. One defensive strategy of cultural arbiters in the 1920s was to describe jazz as non-music – sound familiar? Herbie Hancock recently gave it up to Missy Elliot in his iTunes celebrity play list. So obviously jazz today accommodates a spectrum of opinions, and nobody should take one guy’s words as indicative of what all jazz people think.”