Sunday in the Park with the UC Davis Riot Police

He's clearly surrounded.

And here are a bunch more along those lines:

Westborough Baptist Church vs. Comic-Con

and Comic-Con wins.

You know the Westborough Baptist Church, the hate group that holds up signs saying "God Hates Fags" as they protest soldier's funerals? Well, they came back to San Diego to protest Comic-Con. And while the best way to deal with these lunatics often is to ignore them, the colorful contingent that met them today was pretty damn excellent. How you gonna win an argument against a cartoon robot, a Vulcan, a princess in a steel bikini, a wizard, an anime nymph, and a Jedi? (Oh, and Robin, who is most probably gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)




More at San Diego Comic-Con and Comic Alliance.

A.N.C. and South African Song Controversy

NYT

pril 7, 2010
A.N.C. Issues Caution in Singing Polarizing Songs
By BARRY BEARAK

JOHANNESBURG — The governing African National Congress on Wednesday told its members to be “circumspect” in singing songs from the anti-apartheid struggle, retreating from its earlier defense of a contentious song — “Shoot the Boer” — that in recent days has become associated with the killing of a white supremacist leader.

The song has enjoyed a resurgence since it became a part of the public appearances of Julius Malema, the president of the A.N.C. Youth League.

Boer means farmer in Afrikaans, the language spoken by the descendants of Dutch settlers. It is sometimes used as a term for Afrikaners. The lyrics include the words “shoot the Boer” and “shoot them with a gun.”

Last week, two judges, in independent proceedings, banned the song. The A.N.C. called these decisions unreasonable, contending that the lyrics were metaphorical and needed to be viewed in a historical context. It said it would try to get the rulings reversed.

For his part, Mr. Malema, an extremely difficult man to silence, vowed to continue his renditions of “Shoot the Boer.” This persistence took on new meaning when the white supremacist leader, Eugene TerreBlanche, was killed on Saturday. The police attributed the crime to a dispute with two farmhands over pay. But some of Mr. TerreBlanche’s followers blamed the song.

There were calls for revenge, but these have been retracted.

Mr. TerreBlanche, 69, the leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, was a prominent newsmaker in the early 1990s. But his influence had waned since then.

On Tuesday, there was a confrontation when the accused first appeared in court. People mourning Mr. TerreBlanche waved flags that signified white rule and sang a racist song. Meanwhile, blacks chanted “hero, hero, hero” as the accused passed by.

The shouting between the groups ended in a standoff. Indeed, though passions run high in Ventersdorp, where Mr. TerreBlanche lived, the events seem merely a matter of conversation around the rest of the nation.

Nevertheless, the statement of the A.N.C. leadership, citing “the environment currently prevailing in our country,” asked its members to “restrain themselves” lest they be used as scapegoats by right-wing troublemakers.

That especially applied to “liberation songs” that can be seen as “contributing to racial polarization of society,” it said.

The statement said the A.N.C.’s executive committee would discuss the appropriate use of liberation songs at a meeting in May.

No mention was made of “Shoot the Boer,” just the euphemism “the song that is hotly debated currently.” Nor was there mention of the song used at rallies by President Jacob Zuma, “Bring Me My Machine Gun.”

See original story of many additional links to previous parts of the story.

In Sierra Leone, pop music is a beat that drives politics

LAT

latimes.com
In Sierra Leone, pop music is a beat that drives politics
Political debate in the African nation often takes the form of protest songs; some have even toppled governments. Mostly illiterate, citizens rely heavily on singers for an independent take on events.

By Scott Kraft

January 3, 2010

Reporting from Freetown, Sierra Leone

Everywhere he went in Freetown's ghettos, a dreadlocked young vocalist named Innocent heard the plea. People were fed up with lies, theft and corruption. This government had to go, they said, and they begged Innocent to speak out.

So late one night, Innocent drove to Forensic Studios, a rundown pair of rooms on a clamorous downtown street. The sound engineer was asleep on an old sofa, and Innocent shook him awake.

"Let's do something," Innocent said, "and release it tomorrow."

The single "Injectment Notice" -- "eviction notice" in the lingua franca of Sierra Leone -- helped spark a ballot-box rebellion in 2007. "I told people: If you don't like this government, vote them out," he said. "And it actually happened."

Sierra Leone's engaging blend of hip-hop, Afro-pop and reggae sounds flourished after the end of the brutal, decade-long civil war in 2002, and the number of radio stations playing those tunes swelled from nine to more than 50.

Today, music here is more than simple entertainment. It has become the vehicle for a decibel-busting national political debate. With the sixth-highest rate of illiteracy in the world and a deep suspicion of the ruling elite, Sierra Leone's 6 million people rely heavily on their pop stars -- often educated and well-traveled -- for an independent take on what's going on.

"These songs are the only way the masses have of expressing what they want to say," said Emrys Savage, a record producer and former DJ who wears Che Guevara T-shirts and goes by the name King Fisher. "For us, it's all about bringing social change."

In recent weeks, though, Innocent, a grandson of Nigeria's Afrobeat mega-star Fela Kuti, has been locked in a musical smack-down with one of the country's most famous singers, Emmerson Bockarie, over a question much of the nation is asking: How is the new government doing?

The answer isn't so clear in a fledgling democracy with vast unmet needs and high expectations, a nation where the new government felt compelled to create an Office of Attitudinal Change to inspire patriotism. "Our goal is to remake and rebrand the image of this country" and encourage Sierra Leoneans to change their "bad attitudes," said Allieu Kamara, a former Washington insurance salesman who runs the office.

Both Innocent and Emmerson had helped light the fire that consumed the last government. Even before Innocent released his protest song, Emmerson had recorded "Borbor Bele" ("Pot-Bellied Boy"), which speared corpulent politicians who sold themselves to the highest bidders.

The protest song industry largely fell silent when President Ernest Bai Koroma of the All People's Congress took office in 2007, riding a wave of promises to end corruption, improve healthcare and bring electricity and clean water to the hundreds of thousands of Sierra Leoneans without it.

Emmerson, for one, had high hopes. "I was confident that this government would bring about change, and that's why I kept silent," he said. "I really believed."

But when he returned from a U.S. tour a few months ago, he didn't like what he saw. "It's been more than two years and we're still not seeing any foundation or any road being built to change," he said. "This government is feeling too comfortable and too loved. They need to work harder."

Emmerson went back to the recording studio and laid down the track for "Yesterday Betteh Pass Tiday" -- "Yesterday Was Better Than Today."

"Whenever we think we have a savior," he sings, "we see a government that betrays the people. Maybe tomorrow will be better, but no one knows tomorrow. I don't know about you, but my yesterday was better than today."

That message of discontent touched off a firestorm.

Emmerson is "simply the best lyrical musician in Sierra Leone," said the editor of the New Citizen newspaper, but to argue that yesterday is better than today "is absurd."

.....

The the full story with images HERE.

Lebanese Rap: Hip-hop's Arabic-language kin

CSM
Hip-hop's Arabic-language kin
Lebanese rap artists take genre back to its socially conscious roots in a society deeply divided.
By Eamon Kircher-Allen | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

from the February 27, 2009 edition
[M&C note: see original for photos and audio file]

Beirut, lebanon - The unusual sound of a hip-hop beat and a funky bass line thudded out of a sandwich shop in a trendy Beirut neighborhood last summer. As one patron bobbed his head and a teenager with slicked-back hair flipped another piece of flatbread onto the sandwich shop's stove, a gravelly voice began rapping earnestly in Arabic.

"Who is that?" a passing foreigner asked. "What's he saying?"

"It's the rapper RGB," said the man in broken English. The song, he explained, was about the situation in Lebanon – the violence, the corruption, and the poverty.

RGB is one of several Beirut rappers whose discs are passed around among a visible segment of Lebanese youth. Unlike most of the flashy pop music that Lebanon exports to the rest of the Arab world – think singers like Haifa Wahabi and Nancy Ajram – these rappers' music usually comes with a social message. Their core fans in Beirut have adopted hip hop, from its music to its style of dress and graffiti, as their chosen mode of expression.

In Lebanon, foreign music is nothing new. The country's huge number of emigrants – far more people of Lebanese descent live outside the country than within – means that music from all over the world finds its way to Beirut, from salsa to samba, jazz, punk, and heavy metal.

But unlike much of Beirut's music scene that draws heavily on foreign influences, rappers like RGB are fiercely Lebanese in everything they do. They talk about personal experiences in which they see the same kinds of injustice, violence, and lack of forums for addressing social problems that were the impetus for early African-American rap groups with a political message, such as Public Enemy.

"It's black music, in my opinion," RGB said in an October interview posted to YouTube. "But I feel like it doesn't have to be specifically just for blacks.... It has messages, stories of using your smarts, and a people victimized. It has power."

"I take hip hop like it's a big school and I'm learning from it," he added.

Rayess Bek, who is something like the father of Arabic-language Lebanese rap, helped start the trend of hip hop as social commentary. "I lived the war.... I've been taken advantage of.... I'm speaking in silence," he sang a few years ago over a beat every bit as ominous as the shell-shocked landscapes of some Beirut quarters. A newer music video features him rapping against the backdrop of buildings destroyed by Israeli bombs in 2006.

"Most of the artists here are from the streets, they live in a very unfair system," music producer Zeid Hamdan says by phone. Mr. Hamdan produces and promotes several different acts, including Malikah, Lebanon's best-known female rapper. "They use hip hop more to express themselves than as a source of money," he adds. "[Lebanon] is a good ground for hip hop. The 'bling bling' hasn't arrived yet. The bling-bling scene is in the pop music."

Hip-hop beats, which are quite different from traditional Arabic rhythms, have not caught on with an older crowd. But there are strong connections between hip-hop lyricism and Arabic's heritage of poetry. For centuries, writers who mastered the art of self-expression in Arabic have been folk heroes. According to Joe Namy, a Lebanese-American music producer and a fine-arts graduate student at New York University, that heritage has converged with the current social dimensions in Lebanon.

"Hip hop is becoming more popular now because there's a lot more frustration," he said. "The music lends itself to this need to express yourself. It's a very visual form of expression."

Lebanese hip hop reaches across the sectarian divide as well – no small thing in a country that fought a 15-year civil war along sectarian lines and was rocked by factional violence as late as last May. RGB is Christian, Hamdan is Druze, and there are others in the hip hop collective 961 Underground – named after Lebanon's country code – who are Muslim.

A group that epitomizes that diversity is Katibe 5 (pronounced ka-TEE-bé KHAM-sé), whose members hail from Burj al-Barajneh, a rundown Palestinian refugee camp on the south side of Beirut. Burj al-Barajneh is a warren of ramshackle buildings draped with high-voltage wires, the sort of place that can make some poor American neighborhoods look luxurious.

Katibe 5 member OS Loop says by phone that hip hop in the camps had been born out of an appreciation for the struggles of poor African-Americans. "It's another culture, another style of music, and another people's mind," he says. "But the roots are the same as we have here: the same politics, the same black and white."

Many of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees residing in Lebanon suffer from discrimination.

"For sure, that's why the Palestinians choose rap, because they feel they are like the black Americans," OS Loop says. "They feel like the oppressed."

The group's first album, "Ahlan fikun bil Mukhayamat," ("Welcome to the Camps") was released last year. It tackles social issues head on – and aggressively.

"In the first album, we're talking about the condition of the Palestinian refugees," OS Loop says. "In one song, we are dissing the NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], because in Palestinian culture there are too many NGOs, and they are all thieves.... The same goes for some people who work in the Palestinian [political] parties."

OS Loop follows the American rap scene closely. His favorite artists are KRS-One, Wu Tang, and Paris. Pictures on Katibe 5's Facebook page show posters of rap icon Tupac Shakur.

But it would be a mistake to see Lebanon's rap scene as a form of Americanization.

OS Loop recalls a concert American superstar 50 Cent put on in Beirut in 2006, before the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon that killed more than 1,200 Lebanese. A native of Queens, New York, 50 Cent often raps about how he survived being shot nine times. But OS Loop isn't overly impressed with that – or the commercial turn that 50 Cent's music has taken.

"Now Snoop is coming, and Akon is coming [to Lebanon], but for me they are all commercial," he says. "I wish 50 Cent stayed in Lebanon for the war," he adds with a laugh. "I wanted to tell him what's the true meaning of gangsta."

Bolivian Aymara Rap

NPR
[soundfiles on NPR]

Bolivia's Rap: Protest Songs And Windpipes
By Juan Forero

Day to Day, October 1, 2008 - Visitors to the harsh, cold, windswept Andes of South America are familiar with the traditional music there — it's almost all windpipes, with the occasional haunting lyric. It's been that way for centuries in the remote country of Bolivia, but there are many more kinds of music there, from folkloric to protest to even baroque. The latest trend, generated by indigenous youths, is rap, and it's catching on in Latin America's largest indigenous city.

Bolivian music also comes from the far eastern lowlands — guitar-laden cruceno, music made for dancing. In the south, there's Enriqueta Ulloa and her folkloric songs. Now, a new kind of music has spread across the gritty cinderblock city of El Alto, which is 14,000 feet up in the highlands, home to hundreds of thousands of Aymara Indians.

The music is rap, and it's hard and fast, railing against consumerism and money, and promising to "break the chains of oppression" and spark revolution. The music is, in some cases, sung in Aymara, the predominant tongue among highland Indians in this region of Bolivia.

Newfound Power

The lyrics stem from Bolivia's tradition of protest music — condemning the Yankees, while celebrating the newfound power and influence that have buoyed indigenous people here ever since Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, won the presidency in 2005.

One young rapper is Abraham Bojorquez. Bojorquez explains that one of his songs, "We're Going to Rise Up," tells the story of Bolivia's native people — children of the great warrior Tupacatari — and the Aymara's long struggle. He says that his music tries to speak for the people, to denounce injustice and to honor indigenous communities for what he calls "the recuperation of indigenous identity."

'The Abyss Of Racism'

Alvaro Montenegro, who teaches at the National Conservatory of Music, also produces rap music at his home studio. One song he has worked on, "The Abyss of Racism" by Bojorquez, says that racism is here, there and everywhere — when will it stop? Montenegro says it's a theme familiar to many Bolivians, and that it ranks among the hard social themes that spawned and continue to inspire Bolivian rap.

"The youth of El Alto was looking for a particular personal expression in order to find a vehicle to put forward their own ideas, their own ways of thinking, their own ways of challenging society," Montenegro says.

Montenegro says that young Altenos, as they're called, began rapping in 2003, when Bolivian troops shot several dozen demonstrators. That event helped propel Morales to power.

As Bolivia's first indigenous president, Morales has promised to overturn the old social order. That gave rappers even more to sing about. Many of them fine-tune their work in a radio station in El Alto: Wayna Tambo. Under bare light bulbs, squeezed into a small room, Bojorquez and his two fellow musicians practice. The next day, they're off for a concert in Ecuador.

Freddy Limanchi runs the tracks — the heavy beat at the base of rap music. He says there's clearly American hip-hop in the music, but there's also a fusion with trumpets, bongos and windpipes. That gives it a Bolivian twist.

The Peace Symbol at 50

Washington Post

For 50 Years This Has Been the Symbol Of Peace. Far Out.

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 4, 2008; C01

The peace symbol -- three simple lines within a circle -- turns 50 today. It's had a colorful and often turbulent life, which is odd considering that it's supposed to symbolize, you know, peace.

Unveiled at a British ban-the-bomb rally on April 4, 1958, the peace symbol's peak of potency was in the 1960s, when it was the emblem of the anti-Vietnam War movement and all things groovily counterculture. (Said its late creator, British graphic designer Gerald Holtom: "I drew myself . . . a man in despair . . . put a circle around it to represent the world.") The symbol has marched in service of many causes over the years: civil rights, women's rights, environmentalism, gay rights, anti-apartheid, the nuclear-freeze movement and the latter-day antiwar crowd.

Conservatives once denounced it as a lefty tool ("footprint of the American chicken," etc.), but not all the peace symbol's politics have been so easily classified. During the Soviet era, it was a ubiquitous totem of resistance in such cities as Prague and Berlin.

In its spare time, the peace symbol has done plenty of commercial work, much of which it probably isn't very proud of. Suffice to say, most anything that can been manufactured or marketed has at some point come with a peace symbol. Ben & Jerry's ("Peace Pops") turned it into an ice cream novelty. In 1999 the U.S. Postal Service put it on a stamp.

At least it has always been more serious and thoughtful than its frivolous cousin, the smiley face.

The peace symbol became a hieroglyphic superstar because of its simplicity and adaptability, says Ken Kolsbun, co-author of the new book "Peace: The Biography of a Symbol." The symbol can be rendered in a few strokes, even by the least artistically gifted, he points out. What's more, the symbol has never been trademarked (although a shoe company once tried), which means that anyone who wants a piece of peace can have at it.

Peace never goes out of style, but at the half-century mark, Holtom's creation has grown so recognizable, so often replicated and so drearily commercialized that it raises the kind of question they used to ask all the time in the '60s: Has the peace symbol sold out, or is it indeed still "relevant," man?

In Marseille, Rap Helps Keep the Peace

From the New York Times
December 19, 2007
Abroad
In Marseille, Rap Helps Keep the Peace
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

MARSEILLE, France — The other day, a dozen or so teenage rappers in baggy jeans and hoodies gathered outside a community arts center called Le Mille-Patte in Noailles, a poor immigrant neighborhood here, hard by the Old Port.

One of this city’s most successful hip-hop artists, M’Roumbaba Saïd, who calls himself Soprano, lately wrote a track called “Melancholic Anonymous”: “I can’t help it, expressing my feelings, my melancholy in my lyrics,” he rapped. “I can laugh at my sadness. It helps.”

When the slums outside Paris, Lyon, Toulouse and Strasbourg exploded last month, repeating the violence that erupted two years ago, here in Marseille, France’s second-largest city, all remained calm. Back in July, in one of this city’s impoverished northern neighborhoods, a 14-year-old boy named Nelson Lobry-Gazelle was killed by a police car. Four hundred people demonstrated peacefully, so the incident barely made headlines. As it happens, it was also a police car’s killing two teenagers in Villiers-le-Bel, a destitute suburb about 10 miles north of Paris, that sparked the trouble that broke out across France in November. A bus-burning here in October 2006 was considered an isolated incident and failed to ignite a local chain reaction.

The Marseillais have plenty of explanations for this disparity, aside from the obvious one that the poor areas here aren’t segregated on the city outskirts, as they are in Paris — but it is hip-hop, as much a source of local pride as the town’s soccer team, that turns out to be a lens through which to examine why this city didn’t burn.

Melancholy is the word often used to describe the local rap style: melancholy as a reflective state of mind. In contrast to the city’s sun-and-sea context, melancholy actually suits lots of its culture. A Marseille novelist, Jean-Claude Izzo, who died just a few years ago, became famous in France for writing grim, pessimistic detective stories. Robert Guédiguian, also from Marseille, is a filmmaker whose reputation is based on dark movies.

Rappers in Marseille, some of the most original and distinctive ones anyway, compose sad odes to their local neighborhoods and hymns to the whole melting-pot city. The sound of Paris hip-hop, slicker and more aggressive, adopts much from American gangsta rap, as Marseille hip-hop does too, but Marseille boasts a groovier style. It mixes in blues, flamenco, Jamaican ragga.

The number that a decade or more ago helped fixed IAM, the Marseille group, on the French charts, borrows from George Benson to lay down a mellow beat. "Belsunce Breakdown," about one of the city’s downtown neighborhoods, by Bouga, a rapper from there, begins with a hypnotic piano riff, jazzily syncopated — a little Steve Reich crossed with 50 Cent.

Here the basic interconnectedness of all modern music expresses a local truth about the city’s cultural identity. An ancient, gritty seaport, Marseille flaunts its history as an immigrant magnet. Its population of 820,000 includes 200,000 Muslims, 80,000 North African Jews, 80,000 Armenians. One of the largest immigrant groups is made up of Muslims from the Comoro Islands, near Madagascar. Three of the four musicians in PSY4 de la Rime, Soprano’s band, are Comorians who grew up in the northern part of Marseille where Mr. Lobry-Gazelle died. The fourth member of the band, DJ Sya Styles (of Moroccan background, born Rachid Aït Baar), like many of the teenagers at Le Mille-Patte, comes from Noailles.

Marseille lyrics can be full of rage but they’re not violent, the way those of certain Parisian bands are. Two years ago 152 conservatives in the French Parliament brought suit against seven rap groups, but notably none from Marseille, for fostering hatred and racism against whites and for what one politician called “anti-French ” sentiments.

PSY4, by contrast, wrote a rap not long ago called “Justicier”: “I know all the cops are not that bad, but why do you always ask me for my ID? To your violence I prefer responding with my lyrics. Can’t we have a proper dialogue?”

The other evening PSY4 occupied a recording studio in Grottes Loubières, just northeast of the city. During a break the members talked about the way rappers help one another here, and about how success comes not from landing studio contracts but from earning respect, ground up.

“Rap’s not a business here, the way it is in Paris,” DJ Sya Styles said. “It’s not like Paris, where the suburbs are just concrete. Here you first have to prove yourself in the neighborhoods.”

Stéphane Gallard put it another way: “Paris is more hard-core.” He is the quiet, suave young man in charge of music programming for the nonprofit Radio Grenouille, the city’s most popular hip-hop station. “The fact that hip-hop artists sell their music on their own blocks contributes to their identifying with Marseille, and this explains why there’s no car burning,” he said. “Different communities in Marseille are still quite separate, there’s racism here, but it’s a city in which you have the freedom to move among communities if you choose.”

It’s also true that this city has a contrarian streak going back at least 2,000 years, to when it backed Pompey over Caesar. You might say Marseillais rappers reflect the tradition of “pays,” or local communities, to which their inhabitants maintain more powerful loyalties than to France. At the same time, it’s a place proud of its old Corsican and French-Italian mob heritage (a popular downtown clothing store was named for a famous mob boss), and the prevalence of drug dealers and North African gangs does partly explain why there’s relative calm in destitute areas: Calm is maintained for the sake of their businesses.

Unemployment nears 40 percent in those same parts of town among those 18 to 25; it’s 13 percent citywide, much more than the national average of 8 percent. So clearly job opportunities alone, or their lack, don’t account for the absence of urban violence recently.

It helps that an old, Mediterranean-style civic patronage system doles out favors to earn loyalty and keep the peace. And, as everybody says, unlike Paris, where immigrant poor occupy huge concrete blocks cut off from the city center, Marseille has its neighborhoods, like Noailles, that are smack in the middle of town, while the hard-pressed quarters to the north are linked to the center by cheap public transport and remain inside city limits. So residents feel that they belong to Marseille, because they do, and in turn they feel that Marseille belongs to them.

Out of these communities, where musicians have their own version of a patronage system, the hip-hop scene has emerged — besides PSY4 de la Rime, IAM and Bouga, others, like Keny Arkana, FAF Larage, Fonky Family, DJ Rebel and Prodige Namor, have made it big here.

“Marseille rap never integrated violence the way Paris did,” Philippe Fragione told me. He’s Akhenaton, the leader of IAM. He, like other older musicians here, supports younger Marseille rappers. It was his studio in Grottes Loubières that PSY4 was using. Marseille rap is “more socially conscious,” Mr. Fragione added. “That’s because there is a real sense of community.”

I stopped in the waterfront office of Paul Colombani, the deputy director of the redevelopment program Euroméditerranée. With more than $5 billion in public and private investments, it plans, by 2012, to turn some 2.5 miles of downtown into office towers, mixed-income apartments, museums and esplanades. Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and other archistars have signed on. Outside the porthole office window, the Danielle Casanova, an enormous white ferry, waited to carry passengers to Algeria. Passengers coming back often bring knockoff goods that merchants hawk on sidewalks. “Les jeunes errants,” as migrant street children, some as young as 12, are called, hide in boats, then head for Noailles when they land. A few have become aspiring rappers through community cultural centers like Le Mille-Patte.

Mr. Colombani noticed my gaze. “That will be moved out of this area,” he said about the ferry. He meant to L’Estaque, far to the north, “easier for customs,” he explained. Luxury cruise ships will dock here instead.

Marseille can surely use the money, but hardly at the cost of undoing the social chemistry that has kept the peace and fostered, among other things, the city’s musical life. At Le Mille-Patte those dozen or so young rappers outside were a typical Marseille mix: first-, second- or third-generation immigrants from Algeria, Morocco, the Comoro Islands, Eastern Europe, Argentina.

Habib was a skinny 18-year-old with a doleful face and a band called Urban Revolution. “We all get along because we share music,” he explained. Le Mille-Patte had first encouraged him to rap as a young boy: “I didn’t know what to do with my days, so this place was very important.”

Bacariane, a slightly older rapper wearing a New York Yankees cap, its brim pressed down over his eyes, piped in: “This is a rough neighborhood, but there’s not violence here without meaning, like in Paris. I lived there for a while,” he said, meaning in the isolated suburbs outside the capital. He paused to consider the difference. “Here there is a culture of respect,” he said. “We’re all Marseillais.”

In Zimbabwe, dissent wears the mask of theater

In Zimbabwe, dissent wears the mask of theater

In Zimbabwe, dissent wears the mask of theater
A rich culture of protest theater flourishes in the country, despite the constant risk of censorship or arrest from President Mugabe's regime.
By Robyn Dixon
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

9:08 PM PST, November 18, 2007

HARARE, ZIMBABWE — The stage was a small room in the Harare Central Police Station. The audience, about 20 bored policemen and plainclothes intelligence officers.

The two actors were shaking, not with stage fright but the real thing. Anthony Tongani stammered and forgot his lines. Silvanos Mudzvova was so afraid that he didn't dare make a mistake.

They stumbled to the end. Then they were ordered to start again.

And again.

They performed their political satire, "The Final Push," 12 times in two days at the station, while police and officers from the feared Central Intelligence Organization argued over what charges to press against the actors and fired questions about who had funded the show.

"The first time, the officer in charge was not there. When he came, he demanded his own performance. Then the superintendent came, and he demanded his own performance," Mudzvova said. "It got worse when the CIO came in. One of them was actually sleeping during the performance. Then he'd wake up and say, 'Are you through?' "

A rich culture of protest theater has sprung up in Zimbabwe, but artists are under increasing pressure from President Robert Mugabe's security forces as he crushes dissent. In recent years, most independent newspapers have been shut down, opposition parties have been infiltrated by CIO spies, and activists have been arrested, beaten and sometimes killed. The 2002 Public Order and Security Act bans political meetings of more than two people without police permission, outlaws statements that incite "public disorder" and makes it an offense to insult the president.

Mudzvova and Tongani were arrested at the premiere of "The Final Push" in late September. Tongani was arrested before he could take his final bow, and Mudzvova immediately after taking his.

The play, written by Mudzvova, is about the chairman of a building called Liberty House (a thinly disguised Mugabe) and his political challenger (presumed to be opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai) trapped together in an elevator during a power failure. At one point, the two duke it out in a boxing match.

In Zimbabwe's repressive climate, artists and actors find creative ways to protest. People crowd into clubs to drink beer and laugh at stand-up comedy poking fun at Zimbabwe's problems. They turn out for the opening nights of political plays, even though police often raid theaters and close productions before the first lines are spoken.

Zimbabwe's underground arts culture is thriving, taking hard-hitting political messages to the masses in the crowded black townships, the engines of their cars running in case they need to make a quick escape from the authorities. Filmmakers recently secretly shot an underground movie based on a banned political play in Harare, the capital.

The two nights Mudzvova and Tongani spent in custody had elements of the kind of surreal political play in which they might perform. Police laughed in all the right places, especially when the chairman gets knocked out by his opponent. But the CIO men were outraged.

"The CIO guys tried to convince the police that we were actually talking about the president being knocked down," Mudzvova recounted in an interview the day after his release. "But the police did not see it in that way. To them it was just a simple, straightforward story.

"The police did not know what to do with us. But the CIO kept insisting that we be charged. The question was, with what?"

In the end, Mudzvova and Tongani were charged with inciting the masses to revolt, a statute that carries a 20-year penalty. Twice, police modified the charges, first to criminal nuisance, and then breach of the censorship laws.

Mudzvova says that with media freedom hobbled, it is up to artists to take a message of protest to Zimbabweans.

"Artists, like everybody else, fear for their lives. But the moment you have that fear, you won't get anywhere. People are saying, 'If you guys have that fear, where are we going to get the correct information from?' "

The night after their release, the two men were back onstage in the small circular Theatre in the Park, modeled on an African hut, in Harare. But they modified the script to satisfy the CIO: The knockout in the boxing scene was gone. A day later, after debate with colleagues and actors, they restored the scene, without drawing further visits from the police.

An unlikely career

Bulawayo-based satirist Cont Mhlanga grew up in a village with no theatrical tradition. His father expected him to be a farmer. Mhlanga didn't intend to become an actor, because he didn't even know what it was.

Even today in Zimbabwe, the idea of a career in the theater is unthinkable for most people. It is seen as a last resort for beggars and failures, people incapable of producing something real to eat or sell.

He was introduced to theater by accident when a group wanted to hold a drama workshop in the hall where Mhlanga practiced karate. "I said, 'What is theater?' " But he joined in, got hooked and has been writing political satire since Zimbabwe won independence from Britain in 1980.

Stepping into Mhlanga's cluttered Bulawayo office is like visiting the inside of an inspired but chaotic mind, crammed with yard-high stacks of books, yellowing newspapers and scripts, drafts of his latest protest letter to the government, and pieces of old broken, unidentifiable equipment, with a sleek laptop basking happily in the middle of it all.

Wiry, with piercing eyes, he speaks in a tumble of words. He does not look old but declines to give his age, shrugging scornfully at the question.

"Everyone around here calls me Grandfather," he says dryly.

His plays are so bluntly political that he and his actors frequently get into trouble.

In May, the officer-in-charge at Bulawayo Central Police Station went through Mhlanga's play about AIDS, "Everyday Soldier," deleting lines with a red pen, offended because one character disappears as part of the plot.

"He said, 'You can't have this because you are implying that people disappear in Zimbabwe.' I said, 'I'm not going to remove the lines. It will play as it is.' He said, 'It will not play as it is. I'll close it down.' "

He did prevent public presentation of the play but Mhlanga found a way around it: "We started to run the play for closed audiences. We just make sure there are no police in the audience."

Mhlanga's latest play, "The Good President," inspired by beatings and arrests of opposition members in March, was shut down on opening night in June, and riot police surrounded the theater for a week to prevent the actors from staging the play.

To evade arrest or censorship, artists run underground projects. Mhlanga invented what he calls Invisible Theater in bars, trains and the commuter minibuses called taxis.

In Invisible Theater, several actors plant themselves in a group and improvise a conversation.

"People don't know they're actors. The dialogue might be: 'This government is terrible. Look at those kids in the street. They should be in school but they're carrying water.' Then another actor will say, 'Don't start with that. You'll get us all beaten. There are CIO guys everywhere.' Then a third actor will say, 'The way we're living in this country is more than a beating.'

"Then other people will join in," he said, referring to the unsuspecting people around them. "The actors will keep directing the conversation, and the moment they think they've made a point, they will get off the taxi and get onto another one.

"The thing we are challenging is fear, because we know that people are afraid of discussing these things in public."

'Hit-and-run' shows

In Harare, a theater organization named Savanna Trust does "hit-and-run" street performances in volatile areas such as Mashonaland West, where actors risk arrest by police or violence from ruling party thugs.

They're designed to reach people in poor, crowded neighborhoods who otherwise would never see theater. The performance must be quick, sharp and funny, and the actors ready for a quick getaway.

"When you do hit-and-run theater, you beat drums and the people gather. You have a car there with the motor running," Mudzvova said. "Your heart is beating very fast. You are full of fear that you are going to be arrested at any minute. You know the exact message that you want to give. You make sure the people get the message in the shortest time. As soon as you see that people are getting the message, you disappear.

"Afterwards the actors go, 'Phew! That was extreme!'

"We escaped by a whisker in Bindura," he said, referring to a stronghold of the ruling party. "We only escaped because the car we had was far more powerful than the car the police had."

Mudzvova is not the only one producing controversial material. The low-budget underground film "Super Patriots and Morons," produced by British-trained Zimbabwean actor Daves Guzha, was filmed secretly over nine days in Harare. It includes real scenes of Harare street life, bread queues and crushing poverty.

Filming without permission is banned in Zimbabwe, and the filmmakers, questioned by police while they were working, were lucky to escape arrest.

The film's portrait of an isolated, paranoid president haunted by dreams of a bloody hangman's rope is unlikely to hit cinema screens in Zimbabwe. The best its makers can hope for is mass production of DVDs that could be distributed free. But there is no money for that, so the film's future is unclear.

The director, Tawanda Gunda Mumpengo, is critical of what he sees as self-censorship by artists terrified of arrest and violence.

"It's up to us as citizens of this country to demand our freedoms if we feel they are being curtailed and to assert ourselves," he said, "because no one will do it for us."

In his jumbled office, Mhlanga gestured at the mountains of papers around him, the fruit of 27 years of labor. "No one will shut me up," he said. "There's only one option to shut me up and that's to kill me. But they can't kill what I stand for."

A Dylan on the Persian Lute, With a Songbook of Sly Protest

September 1, 2007
A Dylan on the Persian Lute, With a Songbook of Sly Protest
By NAZILA FATHI

TEHRAN

He plays the setar, a traditional Persian lute, and is a master of classical Persian literature and poetry. But the sounds he draws from the instrument, along with his deep voice and his playful but subtly cutting lyrics about growing up in an Islamic state have made Mohsen Namjoo the most controversial, and certainly the most daring, figure in Persian music today.

Some call him a genius, a sort of Bob Dylan of Iran, and say his satirical music accurately reflects the frustrations and disillusionment of young Iranians. His critics say his music makes a mockery of Persian classical and traditional music as he constantly blends it with Western jazz, blues and rock.

Mr. Namjoo, 31, is a singer, composer and musician, but most of all, his fans say, he is a great performer.
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“I wanted to save Persian music,” he said in an interview at one of his studios in Tehran. “It does not belong to the present time and cannot satisfy the younger generation. The fact is that Persian music is very close to other styles, and it is possible to mix in other styles with a little shrewdness.”

His blending of Western and Persian music produces unexpected moments that jar the traditionalists but are thrilling to his fans, who are mostly young artists and intellectuals. His music sounds Persian, but the melodies take away the melancholy that often suffuses classical Persian music.

But it is Mr. Namjoo’s lyrics, his fans say, that make his music so important. He sings old Persian poetry, such as works by the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi or the 14th-century poet Hafiz, with its connotations of love and lust. But with his mastery of Persian literature, he is able to write his own lyrics into the accepted forms, adding layers of meaning.

“The first time I listened to his music I found it unexpected,” said Mahsa Vahdat, a 33-year-old singer. “It started with a laugh for me and ended with a cry. His music and his lyrics express the bitter situation of my generation and they represent the society we live in.”

Defying Iran’s cultural police, he does not shy away from contemporary issues.

“What belongs to us is an apologetic government,” he sings in a song called Neo-Kanti. “What belongs to us is a losing national team.” Those were references to the widespread disappointment with the government of the former reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, and the constant losses of Iran’s soccer teams.

“What belongs to us, maybe, is the future,” he adds, in a voice that is more resigned than hopeful.

In another popular song he sings, “One morning you wake up and realize that you are gone by the wind, there is no one around you and a few more of your hairs have gone gray, your birthday is a mourning ceremony again.”

After throwing in an unexpected Western melody, he goes on in a lower voice, saying, “that you are born in Asia is called the oppression of geography, you are up in the air and your breakfast has become tea and a cigarette.”

Atabak Elyassi, a musician and a professor of music at Music College at Art University in Tehran, said there was protest and satire in Mr. Namjoo’s music. “In the meantime, it is very Iranian,” he said, “because he constantly points to issues that are about the lives of Iranians.”

Mr. Namjoo was raised in the religious city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, where he started learning classical Persian music when he was 12.

As he grew older, he said, he listened to Western music and became interested in Jim Morrison, Eric Clapton and the Irish pop singer, Chris de Burgh. He read philosophy and Persian literature, and developed a fondness for a strain of modern Persian poetry that stresses phonetics over the meanings of words.

But what changed his approach more than anything, he said, was his experience in the theater. When he was admitted to the University of Fine Art in 1994, he was told that he had to wait a year before starting classes. So he decided to pass the time studying theater.

“A musical instrument is a medium for a musician to play music,” he said. “So is the voice of a singer, it is like a medium to sing through it. But neither of them is involved in building relations with a living creature.

“But when I studied theater I learned to connect with my audience, and that was when my poems changed,” he said.

It is hard to gauge Mr. Namjoo’s popularity, for he has come of age in a time of intense pressure on Iranian music.

Most music was banned after the 1979 Islamic revolution, with only religious and revolutionary songs deemed appropriate. To this day, women are not allowed to sing. Over time the restrictions were eased, first on classical Iranian music and then, in the mid-1990s, on pop music. But after the election of Iran’s current, conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, music came under a cloud once again.

The authorities canceled a concert of rock and jazz music in Tehran in July. In August, more than 200 people who attended a private rock concert in Karadj, 30 miles west of Tehran, were arrested. The public prosecutor in Karaj, Ali Fallahi, called the concert “satanic,” local news agencies reported.

Mr. Namjoo himself has not yet been able to give a live, public performance, and he has not received a government license to sell his CDs. But he is able to perform privately, his CDs are sold on the black market and, in an inexplicable twist, his songs are played on Iranian radio stations. As of three weeks ago, his manager said, 1.6 million people had downloaded his music from YouTube.

In July, he did receive an invitation to a government ceremony to sing a few songs in praise of Imam Ali, the martyred son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and the man whom Shiite Muslims consider Muhammad’s legitimate successor. Yet, the room was filled with artists and musicians, rather than government officials.

Because of his cutting-edge style, Mr. Namjoo is under another kind of pressure. Most classical musicians are purists, insisting that the music not be altered in any fashion. They dismiss Mr. Namjoo’s music as absurd because of the way he has incorporated Western influences.

If you take Iranian classical music on one side, and Western music on the other, said one critic, Reza Ismailinia, who runs a small art gallery in Tehran, “then I think Mr. Namjoo’s music is like a caricature in between, or a kind of fantasy.”

But many disagree with Mr. Ismailinia.

“I think he will be remembered as a courageous artist who opened a window toward creating something new and for going beyond traditional barriers,” said Alireza Samiazar, the former director the Contemporary Museum of Art in Tehran. “I think his contribution to our music will be great.”

Undeterred by the critics, Mr. Namjoo says his next ambition is to study music abroad.

“I want to be challenged and get acquainted with Western music,” he said. “I was accepted too easily here.”

China's Latest Export: Anti-Establishment Music

Morning Edition, August 17, 2007 · China, the world's top exporter of laptop computers, T-shirts and toys is now trying to export indie rock. The country's largest independent record label has just released its first album in the United States, by a band called Rebuilding the Rights of Statues.

The band toured the United States before the album's release, performing at the South by Southwest musical festival in Austin, Texas, and several shows in New York.

The art of making anti-establishment music in a non-democratic state can come in the translation. The three members of Rebuilding the Rights of Statues, or Re-TROS for short, compose in English.

The band is required to translate all of its lyrics into Chinese and submit them to the government for approval.

Meng Jin Hui is a manager at Modern Sky, China's largest independent record label.

"Maybe sometimes when we translate, it might be wrong," he says.

For example, the band translated the title of its song "Hang the Police" as "the police are laughing."

Often they'll translate literally. As is the case with any language, the literal translations sometimes don't make sense. And that can work to the band's advantage.

Still, lead singer and guitarist Hua Dong insists he's not intimidated by the government censors.

"It's like a game of cat and mouse to see who can win," he says.

Hua says that dealing with the government forces his band to be subtler in its lyrics.

"It's just different from the West, where people are very direct with what they say," he says. "They just say what they want. But in China how we say things is not very direct. I think this adds depth to what we're doing, and it's fun."

Hua's pragmatic view is typical of many rock musicians in China who grew up in the '80s and '90s during the country's rapid economic boom.

Shen Li Hui founded the Modern Sky label 10 years ago when his own band wanted to record an album.

"Actually the Chinese government is not really that bad," he says. "Within the last 10 years, it has changed quite a bit. Of course, the situation is still not ideal, but the government is more open and liberal than before."

China's first generation of rock bands emerged a few years before the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Those groups focused more on politics. Today's bands are more interested in art, Shen says.

But the art still needs some work, says Trey McArver. He traveled to China four years ago and discovered an indie rock scene in Wuhan, a grimy industrial city of more than 8 million people, where he now owns a club with a Chinese partner.

McArver says his first encounter with the music captured the excitement of shows in the United States.

"It was in this abandoned building on the fifth floor," he recalls. "It was dirty. And there were all these kids there with mohawks and tight, black jeans, and just something I had not seen in China at all."

Then, the music started.

"They couldn't even play their instruments," McArver says. "They would play for 30 seconds or a minute and they would have to stop and they would start over, or try to go to the next song."

Many bands, McArver says, are simply copying things they've heard from Western acts.

Re-TROS' musicians say they're influenced by groups like Interpol, Gang of Four and Joy Division.

McArver says that while Re-TROS' songs aren't completely original, the band still has something to say.

"It's a little bit more thoughtful and it's very sincere," he says. "They're not making music to be cool."

A steady performance schedule earns Re-TROS the equivalent of $300 dollars a month, barely enough for the three musicians to live on in Beijing. But right now, they say their main goal is to make music.

Re-TROS bass player Liu Min says that one benefit to releasing an album in the United States is to show Americans a side of China they might not have heard before.

"We don't expect it will be a big seller," she says. "But of course, we are excited to come to the U.S., the most developed rock 'n' roll market in the world. And if Americans hear us, they might see the progress that rock 'n' roll music in China has made."

Defacing Street Art as Protest

NYT
June 28, 2007
As Street Art Goes Commercial, a Resistance Raises a Real Stink
By COLIN MOYNIHAN

The covert campaign targeting street art began about seven months ago, with blobs of paint that appeared overnight, obscuring murals and wheat-pasted art on walls in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. Arcane messages were pasted at the sites, but it was difficult to ask for an explanation. The author was never identified.

Then in November, during a panel discussion on women and graffiti that included a street artist called Swoon, a figure wearing a hooded sweatshirt flung a sheaf of fliers using similar language from a balcony overlooking an auditorium at the Brooklyn Museum. Swoon was among those whose work had previously been struck by paint, and some couldn’t help wondering whether the person who threw the fliers was also the Splasher, as the perpetrator of the paint attacks had come to be known.

Web sites, magazines and newspaper articles reported about the splatterings. Some wondered about the motivation and identity of those responsible, but the Splasher — or Splashers — remained anonymous.

The most recent episodes came this month, in two incidents involving what seemed to be stink bombs lobbed at shows of street artists on the Lower East Side and Dumbo. And some in the art world believe the identify of the Splasher may have been revealed. Last Thursday night James Cooper, 24, was arrested at the Dumbo show after witnesses accused him of attempting to ignite a homemade incendiary device in a metal coffee canister.

Mr. Cooper was charged with third-degree arson, reckless endangerment, placing a false bomb, criminal possession of a weapon, harassment and disorderly conduct. He was arraigned and released on his own recognizance, a spokesman for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office said.

That show featured works by Shepard Fairey, who had been one of the prominent targets of the street splatterings. Mr. Fairey said there wasn’t yet enough evidence to tie Mr. Cooper definitively to the paint blobs, but acknowledged apparent parallels.“Maybe the stink bomb thing was their way of being disruptive without using paint and while penetrating a more controlled atmosphere,” he said.

Two days after Mr. Cooper’s arrest, a group of people showed up at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in Chelsea, where a reception was being held for Mr. Fairey. Without identifying themselves, they distributed copies of a 16-page tabloid with the title “If we did it this is how it would’ve happened,” with a cover photograph of an image created by Mr. Fairey defaced with paint.

Inside were reproductions of the communiqués that were pasted next to the sites of many paint attacks and appeared to draw inspiration from the writings by the Situationists, a group of political and artistic agitators formed in the 1950s, and a 1960s anarchist group called Black Mask.

In often bombastic language those fliers condemned the commercialization of art and included statements saying that the wheat paste used to affix the fliers had been mixed with shards of glass. An essay in the paper given out at the gallery scoffed at those who had difficulty understanding the fliers and added footnotes clarifying parts of them. One footnote stated that the tabloids had been dusted with anthrax.

In a series of essays and in text that appeared under the headline “Interview With Myself” the anonymous authors said that the splashings were committed not by an individual but by a group of men and women, and offered some explanation of their motives.

The authors wrote that street art was “a bourgeoisie-sponsored rebellion” that helped pave the way for gentrification, and called it “utterly impotent politically and fantastically lucrative for everyone involved.”

The writings also criticized people prominent in the world of street art, including Mr. Fairey and Swoon, the art collectives Faile and Visual Resistance, and Marc and Sara Schiller, who run a Web site about street art called the Wooster collective (woostercollective.com).

“There is a very strong viewpoint there, and there’s an element of interest I can’t deny,” Mr. Schiller said. Still, he said, “I don’t agree with the perspective and I don’t think the assumptions are accurate.”

Previous incidents of agitprop were described, and the authors claimed responsibility for assailing a mural in Williamsburg by the reclusive British artist known as Banksy, and for hurling paint at a billboard advertising sneakers on Lafayette Street made by an artist called Neckface. Because the authors are unidentified, it isn’t known for sure whether they are indeed the Splashers. An e-mail address was published in the paper but a message sent by a reporter to that address on Tuesday night went unanswered.

The distribution of the paper at the gallery and its mailing to two Web sites that write about street art has stirred speculation, but many artists remain focused on Mr. Cooper, who so far is the only person who has been publicly identified as having a possible connection to the art attacks.

In a brief interview on Tuesday morning conducted near his home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Mr. Cooper declined to discuss details of his case but said that he was not guilty of wrongdoing and that he was not the Splasher.

Still, Jonathan LeVine, a gallery owner who was at the Dumbo show, insisted that Mr. Cooper was one of two men seen trying to light a device and who fled when approached.

“One of the two people came back and guys I know grabbed him,” Mr. LeVine said. “The two people were together by all accounts.”

The man who was grabbed was Mr. Cooper. He waited, crouched in a corner of the 6,600 square-foot space, as some of the 14 security guards hired for the event stood nearby. Then the police arrived and arrested him.

The man who was said by witnesses to be with Mr. Cooper made it out of the show. But people involved in street art said that detectives are searching for a second suspect and are also inquiring about the newspaper.

Although the paint splashings have been viewed with a mixture of aggravation and amusement, Mr. LeVine said that the attempt to light an incendiary device during a crowded art show was foolish and reckless.

“They could’ve killed someone,” he said. “It’s not O.K. to jeopardize people’s lives.”

The earlier suspected stink bomb attack took place June 7 when a show in an exhibition space on Chrystie Street displaying work by a two-man street art collective called Faile was disrupted by a noxious odor that witnesses said smelled like sulphur. Firefighters arrived, said a member of Faile, and said that somebody had called in a report of a gas leak.

“This kind of thing is silly,” said the Faile member, who declined to give his name. “They’re hiding themselves so you can’t have a discussion with them.”

Perhaps the street artists will eventually have a chance to confront their antagonists directly. One of the last pages of the newspaper published by the self-proclaimed Splashers sounded a note that could be interpreted as ominous, or optimistic, depending on your point of view.

“Don’t worry,” it read. “You’ll be hearing from us again.”

Al Baker contributed reporting.

Rappers in Iran

from WORLD MUSIC CENTRAL
The Loneliness of an Iranian Rapper
05/31/2007 01:11AM
Contributed by: WMC_News_Dept.

Articles Contributed by Amir Azizmohamadi

[Warning: This article contains sexually explicit language. If you are offended by such language, please do not continue reading the rest of the article]

Why d'you hate my guts?
'Cause I'm a rapper?
'Cause my voice is not tame?
Or 'cause the streets' deed's in my name?
Gotta mind your business
'Cause in this wilderness
The rule's hard and fast:
"The ones with power
Will the weak devour." (rap singer Hichkas)

About two hundred years ago in Iran, Moshtagh Ali Shah, a mystic musician, was stoned to death when caught singing the Koran to the tunes of his setar, a traditional Iranian musical instrument. Trying to digest the shock of listening to the noise that Iranian rappers call "Rap-e Fars" (Persian Rap), you are doomed to ask whether the climate is any better today for a musician fiddling around with musical and social norms. Their message is no softer than Moshtagh Ali Shah's heretical combination of music and the Koran. Erfan in "One Hundred Oaths" sums up their manifesto:


Gonna make mock of every limit.
Gonna overstep every mark.
Yes, after two millenniums
It's time we broke the cast.

To date no "rap kown" (Iranian rapper) has been stoned, tortured, flogged, or jailed. But only these are what they haven't been going through. Iranian society has employed all the means of silencing and all the silence of indifference to fight back Iranian rap. From every direction all sorts of knives are out against these street bards.

Rap-e Fars is underground, unofficial, and illegal. It is uncompromising, vigorous, and prolific. It is frank, fresh, experimental, and, most of the time, musically stunning. Even if it sometimes has its musical imperfections, Rap-e Fars is still unbelievably popular. It is everywhere in the Iranian teenage world. Pouring out of the windows of cars speeding on Tehran motorways, brightening up teenage parties, and palely leaking out of teenage headphones where there are infidel ears around. The music and words of Rap-e Fars flow quite audibly in most teenage conversations.

Yet even if it were not popular, Iranian rappers would still have to be given the right to produce and sell their songs freely. The right to be watched and heard and talked about publicly. Their failure would have to be left to the public to decide about and to best-seller lists. The prospect of a boisterous rap vanity fair, however, is what dramatically disturbs the inscriptions carved deep in the Iranian psyche.

The Iranian government has never had a brilliant track record in its dealings with music in general. During the Islamic revolution in Iran, pop singers accounted for a big proportion of political exiles and escapees. Over the last three decades, not even once a musical instrument has been displayed on the state TV. More socially accepted forms of music than rap, like pop and rock, are aging in lengthy queues "before the law" for concert permits. No. The government does not seem to be willing to even start flirting with the idea of legalizing rap even in the far future.

And indeed, the words that Iranian rappers are penning make the prospect of an official rap in Iran out of the question. In an interview with Article 19, a London based human rights organization, Sefryan, an Iranian writer, explains that one of his philosophical works "was rejected because of its failure to reference Islam as a factor in the attainment of human happiness." An Iranian national newspaper, the Hambastegi reported on 18 Jan 2007 that the Farsi translation of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying had been denied a publication license and considered "unpublishable." Meticulous censorship has, edition after edition, replaced the word "breasts" with ellipses in the line "I'll hide you between my …," from a poem by Forogh Farokhzad, one of the biggest names in contemporary Persian poetry.

Such a system will never tolerate the lyrics of Rap-e Fars, whose dictionary does not contain the word "taboo."

Hichkas, one of the founders of Iranian rap addresses the issue in "The Law":

There is an unwritten law
That no one recorded, no one saw:
"Silently silence the bad voice
Voicelessness is the only choice."

Rap-e Fars, however has broken this law. They "won't stand ceremony," says Yas, an outspoken critic of the follies of society, in a podcast interview mushrooming on fan blogs. Shayan in "Lord" sings: "Let's define a young Iranian: Prison, stick, and flog." Nor does Shayan shy away from singing about alcohol and teenage parties and the consequent punishment:

It's evening and party starts
You get drunk and they flog out
All the booze you had tonight.

And Tigheh in "From Yesterday Until Today" shouts:

You, God.
It's time you stepped down
It's time, the turn is mine

Iranian rappers do not really bite their tongue when it comes to sexual taboos either. Canbean in "Hey, Hooker" advises Tehran prostitutes:

They'll tear your cunt
Rip open your bum
Feed you a pecker
But won't give you a penny.

The unofficial nature of Iranian rap will keep it financially vulnerable and half dead. According to Wikipedia, Zed Bazi, one of the most popular Iranian rap bands, has had more than eight million free downloads. The money they could have made would be enough to revolutionize Iranian pop culture.

However, to consider the government as the only hindrance Iranian rap has faced is an error. Next to "the oppressor's wrong" and "the insolence of office," one should not underestimate "the proud man's contumely."

A respected pillar of traditional Iranian music, Majid Kiani, in his article "A Comprehensive Categorization of Different Types of Music in Iran," published on the official website of The House Of Music—a union-like gathering of influential musicians—does not even make a passing reference to anything called Persian Rap. Ironically, if googled in Farsi, his name will be found on 1680 websites, which in comparison with Zed Bazi's google results, 12500, is not very impressive.

Ali Reza Hejazi, one of the managers of Neinava, a prosperous traditional music school in Tehran, does recognize the existence of Iranian rap but calls it "a load of crap" and labels its fans as "music-illiterate." "It's a silly imitation of American rap and nothing else," he asserts. I remind him of the attempts Iranian rappers have made to Iranify their tunes, for example using traditional instruments in their pieces. Indignation runs all over his face: "These instruments deserve reverence. This is musical blasphemy." I ask him if they should be allowed to have a music school like Neinava to teach their music and make money. He bursts laughing: "Teaching what? Yelling and swearing?"

Rap kowns are well aware of this criticism. In "I Said" Hichkas raps:

People who know about rap zilch
But keep wagging their chins
Make me feel sick, sick, sick.
Some of these bastard masters
Have called my rapping artless.
So please rap for us once
With my voice and my style.

Surprisingly, the members of the political opposition's musical wing, based mostly in Los Angeles with a dozen of international TV channels, who sometimes dabble in making anti-government political songs apart from bad quality pop they mass produce, have not been eager to welcome Rap-e Fars either, even to exploit their anti-system potentialities.

In a massive Las Vegas concert for the Iranian diaspora in December 2006, not even one single Iranian rapper was given the chance to appear on stage. Their music videos are not broadcast on their channels and no interviews are granted by their patriotic hosts.

An exiled pre-revolution pop star, Sattar, in an interview on Voice of America Persian on 20 January 2007, while admiring the music his generation produced, did not hesitate to attack the music made in Iran stating that in Iran anybody could sing. "What they need in Iran is an experienced committee to approve of the music and lyrics of every song before their release," he prescribed. I ask Ali Reza Hejazi, the traditionalist teacher at Neinava, why he thinks Los Angeles producers have ignored Persian rap. "As soon as Hichkas and Zed Bazi are established on TV screens, they'll have to kiss show business goodbye," he puts it bluntly.

Disappointed with musicians, one might as well try to see if anybody else in the Iranian elite has taken any notice of Persian rap as, to say the least, a cultural or sociological phenomenon. You flip through piles of writings by critics, intellectuals, thinkers, philosophers, and you are only stranded in deafening silence. Iranian thinkers have turned a deaf ear to their children's heroes.

On a chat show broadcast on 16 Jan 2007 by Jam-e Jam, a state run international TV channel, Reza Kianian, a praised Iranian film star and a respected academic teaching theatre and cinema gave a description of Iranian underground cinema which could also echo what he might have said about underground rap too. He said, "They are a bunch of opportunists who stir the filth in society to make a name. It's not difficult to criticize. A true artist would show a gem in squalor."

Ali Zarnegar, 25, a young poet whose book was not given a publication license by the government, doe not see any literary merit in the rappers' lyrics. "If I were to give them a mark, it would be 1 out of 10," he speculates. I ask him if he would let them sell their music freely, and he answers "only under a strict word-by-word supervision of their lyrics."

Despite all the venomous self-righteousness around them, these teenage songsters—in the claustrophobic room they live—are fostering some precious values that their critics and oppressors have hardly happened to respect—some values desperately needed in today's Iran.

Apart from their party raps, songs about their everyday life, and descriptions of their neighborhoods, which are a rich source of detailed documents reflecting the true picture of daily life in Iran—including details as minute as the brands of bootlegged booze Iranian teenagers consume—Iranian rappers enjoy the possession of a sensitive social conscience and determined moral commitment, and at the same time, the bravery of expressing what they are concerned about. They have sung about poverty, unemployment, addiction, prostitution, child labor, economic corruption, homelessness, Iran-Iraq war and the soldiers killed in the fronts. They have also been quick to react to what is happening around them in the world; they have rapped about George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, terrorism, 9/11, the massacre of civilians in the Middle East, peace, and strong defense against possible American military measures against Iran.

They are honest. They are democratically frank in their dialogues and criticism of one another's rap. They gang up, pan each other in their songs, go solo, and come together again. Their supremacy in rap and credit in society, when claimed in their songs, stem from the power of people and their popularity among their zakhars and baks (fans and friends), not a big boss or a guru. They are self-assertive and individualistic and there is nothing humble in their ways, nothing meek and obedient.

Rap-e Fars has been round for about seven years now with rap kowns struggling underground. It is difficult to predict what future holds for Iranain rappers. They are realistic. Pishro in "Prisoner" weighs the situation: "They stroked me with nightsticks / A rapper with a blind and deaf audience." But he is still optimistic: "You will crowd me some day soon for autographs." So are Hayoola & Felakat:

Let me tell you what the truth is
My rap is not gonna cease.
No one can crack Persian rap
It will aspire like a firm spire.

Hichkas also echoes his fellow rappers:

There will be a day
When cover captions say
The biggest rapper of the world
Is rapping in the third world.

Iranian rappers are as lonely as the last minutes of Moshtagh Ali Shah. But they won't give up without a fight. They have a dream.

Cuban Rapper: Fight the Injustice

Cuban Rapper: Fight the Injustice

By Morgan Neill
CNN

HAVANA, Cuba (CNN) -- Working on an old computer with a burned-out monitor, Cuban rapper Aldo Rodriguez painstakingly lays the tracks for his next song.

Sitting shirtless on the edge of his bed, tattoos up and down both arms, the 23-year-old says he's not afraid to speak his mind in the communist country run by Fidel Castro for decades. His lyrics are punchy and edgy, tackling issues that the state would prefer not to be aired.

"I've pointed out the things that seem wrong to me, and the people like it," he says. "They like to hear it because they identify with what they hear in the songs.

"It's not anything bad. It's just the truth, and the people aren't used to hearing it." (Watch a Cuban rapper speak his mindVideo)

His group -- Los Aldeanos, or "The Villagers" -- is one of Cuba's best-known underground hip-hop acts. It's earned credibility with lyrics that condemn racism, police harassment, prostitution and inequality -- criticisms often heard in Cuba's streets, but controlled by the state in the media.

For example, in their song "Ya Nos Cansamos," roughly translated "We're Fed Up," you'll hear these lines:

"They're always saying we're all equal
But you tell me if the doorways are crumbling in the generals' houses.
Of course all the hospitals in Cuba are free
But who do they treat better, the officers, or me?"

Rap has a small but devoted following in Cuba. But driving through Alamar, the neighborhood outside Havana thought of as the birthplace of Cuban rap, it's reggaeton, not rap, that's blaring from the dilapidated apartments these days.

Reggaeton is a danceable mix of rap and reggae. Its thumping, bass-heavy rhythms and often sexually explicit lyrics prove an irresistible combination in Cuba, where dancing sometimes seems the national pastime.

But among young men in particular, rap's aggressive stance has a unique appeal: No other form of music takes on the country's problems so directly. (Watch a Cuban rapper bust a funky beat at a concertVideo)

In an effort to exert its influence over rap, the Cuban government created the Cuban Rap Agency in 2002. The agency promotes about a dozen rappers and produces their albums, but you won't find government critics like Rodriguez on their roster. These underground rappers say they won't be silenced or co-opted by the government.

So, they work out of their homes and distribute their music by hand on homemade CD's copied over and over again.
Rap organizer: State shouldn't meddle with rap

Last year, the nation's Rap Festival was canceled amid uncertainty surrounding Castro's health. The Cuban Rap Agency began co-sponsoring the event in 2002 to the angst of many.

Rodolfo Rensoli organized the rap festival before the state stepped in. He says government limitations have made groups and their fans more rebellious.

"Since the state took over managing the festival, brothers are coming out carrying signs calling for 'social justice' and other demands," he says.

He says it would be a major mistake to try to set limits on the rappers: "Censor them or cut them out, intimidate them or limit the expression of these kids -- that would be horrible."

CNN asked to speak with the director of the Cuban Rap Agency, but was told there is no director of the agency currently. (In fact, it's difficult to get anyone in the government to comment about rap.)

As for Rodriguez, he says he just wants to rap for himself. "I'm one of those who thinks that once you're part of a business -- not just in Cuba, but anywhere in the world -- they make you a slave."

Speaking from the house he shares with his mother and siblings, he assures us he's not opposed to the government, but he won't keep quiet about injustices he sees.

"I'm not against the commandant, or Raul [Castro, in charge since his brother's illness], or any of those people," he says, "I'm young and I've got a right to express myself. Like all the young people in the world, I see something wrong, and I point it out."



Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/04/11/cuba.rapper/index.html

Peter Norman: Third Man on the Podium

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-adande22oct22,0,1869393.column?coll=la-home-headlines

M&C note: this article is a great example of why this blog exists. This was an illuminating story, an excellent article, and I cannot find online anymore, anywhere. I think it deserves to be read. If anyone finds an updated link, please let me know.

LA Times

J.A. ADANDE
His place in history went hand in glove with theirs
J.A. Adande

October 22, 2006

Have you ever watched a movie for the 10th time and noticed something that you've never seen before? Did you wonder how you possibly could have missed it?

That's the way I felt when I learned that John Carlos and Tommie Smith flew to Australia to serve as pallbearers in the funeral of Peter Norman, the third man on the medal stand with them in that iconic photo of their black-gloved protest at the 1968 Olympics.

I'd stared at that photograph until its image was burned onto my retinas and I never registered Norman. I'd read every article I came across about Smith and Carlos, including an exceptional two-part Sports Illustrated series by Kenny Moore in 1991, and I didn't have a clue about the Australian sprinter who won the silver medal in that 200-meter race.

"Then you don't really know about the story," Carlos said.

It's a lesson in how a single moment of solidarity can lead to a lifetime bond. It's an inspiring example of how people from different races and different countries can find unity in what is right.

"It's important for this story to be told," Carlos said. "Regardless of what your ethnicity is, you have to play and will play a very important part of what this society is."

It started after the 200-meter race, which was won by Smith. Smith and Carlos, the bronze medalist, wanted to use their moment in the spotlight to protest discrimination against black people in America. They would wear black socks to the medal stand to symbolize the poverty afflicting so many black people. They wore gloves to symbolize black power and unity. They also wore buttons with the logo for activist Harry Edwards' Olympic Project for Human Rights. Norman wanted to be involved.

"I merely asked Mr. Norman, 'Do you believe in human rights?' " Carlos said. "He said, 'Yes.' "

Carlos borrowed an OPHR button from American rower Paul Hoffman and gave it to Norman. Norman wore it during the medal ceremony and stood still, arms by his side, while "The Star-Spangled Banner" played in honor of Smith's victory. As the song started, Smith's right arm went up, straight as a flagpole. Carlos raised his left arm, bent slightly at the elbow.

It's one of the enduring images of the 1960s. Today the picture can be found on posters, on T-shirts and all over the Internet. Before Norman died on Oct. 3, it wasn't so easy to find an accompanying caption that included his name. Sometimes he's cropped completely out of the photo.

When San Jose State, the alma mater of Smith and Carlos, commissioned a statue to honor the moment, Norman wasn't included. His spot on the platform was left empty. That didn't keep him from joining Smith and Carlos on campus for the unveiling last year.

Of the 13,809 words in that Sports Illustrated series, only 96 were used in sentences about Norman.

But to Carlos, Norman's show of support was an integral part of the experience. For a white man from Australia to figuratively stand beside two black Americans who were sure to catch fire went "beyond" the average individual, Carlos said.

"It was about having an understanding as to who we are and where we were trying to go as men," Carlos said.

At Norman's memorial in the Melbourne suburb of Williamstown, Carlos expressed admiration for Norman's resolve, even when facing criticism in Australia. Like Smith and Carlos, Norman's post-Olympic life was challenging: His first marriage ended, an infection nearly led to amputation of a leg and he battled alcoholism.

"He never flinched," Carlos said. "He never reneged. He never denied us. He never said, 'Ouch.'

"He was stern about what he stood for. I respect him and love him for the rest of my life, as much as I did the first time I looked in his eyes. I think it was a divine moment, a spiritual moment from God to set a precedent for the world to see — even though they have never told the story."

Norman's nephew, Matt Norman, is bringing the tale to the big screen with a movie called "Salute — The Peter Norman Story" that he hopes to get into the Sundance film festival. (Carlos said he has met with Imagine Entertainment regarding a movie about his and Smith's saga. Through an intermediary, Imagine President Michael Rosenberg said he had not heard of the project.)

Matt Norman said that he would honor his uncle's memory by donating a portion of his movie's profits to Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans. You've seen those New Orleans pictures. You know most of those faces look nothing like Peter Norman.

It's not always about making decisions based on surface similarities. It's about looking deeper and doing what's right. That's what we can take from Norman's 64 years on the planet. That's what inspired the 61-year-old Carlos to take time off from his counseling job at Palm Springs High and take a 14-hour flight to Australia for the funeral.

"I think Peter would have done no less had it been John Carlos in that box," Carlos said. "I was compelled. I had to be there."

He and Smith helped carry Norman's coffin out of the service, and said a final goodbye.

"You say, 'Man, that's the end of Peter Norman's life on this earth,' " Carlos said. "His history will go on."

For people like me, it's just beginning.