Noël Coward: The Playboy Was a Spy

New York Times
April 13, 2008
Essay
The Playboy Was a Spy
By STEPHEN KOCH

“Celebrity was wonderful cover,” Noël Coward said near the end of his life. “My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot ... a merry playboy.”

In 1973, a month before he died, the epitome of flippant British sophistication decided to permit himself a few clipped words about one last secret. In a filmed interview with the biographer of Sir William Stephenson, the spymaster code-named “Intrepid,” Coward made his sole public statement about his wartime espionage work. A scrupulous public servant, he got clearance before discussing how he had been a spy for England, trained (with his friend Ian Fleming) in covert action in the secret headquarters of Bletchley Park, which, as he tossed off with characteristic offhandedness, “I should have thought would be fairly easy to find by any German agent with the faintest enterprise.” Working with Stephenson (among others), he had toured three continents singing, being amusing, acting as a courier, filing eyes-only reports on influential people and probably meeting covert British contacts. “I learned a lot from the technical people,” Coward said, and “could have made a career in espionage” — except, he sighed, “my life’s been full enough of intrigue as it is.”

The revelation did not come as a total surprise. In his autobiography, “Future Indefinite” (1954), Coward had written in a vague way about his war work. The surprise in 1973 was how serious and official it had been. Yet until the recent publication of “The Letters of Noël Coward,” edited by Barry Day, few have had a firm grip on what the man really did as a spy. Now, Coward’s letters and Day’s excellent commentary have pulled a fair amount of the covert nitty-gritty out of the archival murk.

Coward’s spycraft had a Scarlet Pimpernel side. The idea was to use his public personality — the merry playboy, the “don’t ask/don’t tell” gay celebrity — as a mask for his passionate antifascism. By 1936, Coward’s unchic loathing of appeasement and Neville Chamberlain (“that bloody conceited old sod”) was turning him into something of a Churchill bore. In 1938, when his old friend Ivor Novello shed “tears of relief” over Chamberlain’s let’s-pretend peace, Coward threw a punch that nearly decked him. “We have nothing to worry about,” he wrote to another friend, “but the destruction of civilization.” His intense patriotism could get a little thick — “It’s still a pretty exciting thing to be English,” he declared in a 1931 curtain call — but he knew how to give it a comic glow. Perhaps a lifetime of concealing his own private life gave him a knack for the clandestine. In any case, he said, “I wanted to prove my integrity to myself.”

So he played the fool. “I was the perfect silly ass,” he said. “Nobody ... considered I had a sensible thought in my head, and they would say all kinds of things that I’d pass along.”

It was a senior diplomat named Robert Vansittart, routinely dismissed in the Foreign Office as an anti-Nazi Cassandra, who in late 1937 or 1938 spotted how to use Coward’s flamboyance, intelligence and flawless memory to help tend an unofficial, off-the-books anti-Nazi intelligence network he had set up across Europe. Vansittart dispatched Coward on tour in such un-Cowardy places as Warsaw, Moscow and Helsinki, where he sang songs, gauged Nazi influence among star-struck V.I.P.’s and (very likely) contacted sources on the ground. If he fooled the V.I.P.’s, Coward failed to fool the Nazis. He was soon on the Gestapo’s list of people to be “liquidated” when Britain fell.

When war came, Coward was sent to Paris as a figurehead in a propaganda office, where he made it part of his cover to mock intelligence work as childish games carried out by inept duffers. When someone proposed leafleting the enemy with speeches from Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, he recalled, “I wrote in a memorandum that if the policy of His Majesty’s Government was to bore the Germans to death I didn’t think we had enough time.”

Being Noël Coward, he also partied — notably with the recently abdicated pro-Nazi Duke of Windsor and his more intelligent and even more pro-Nazi wife. The Windsors may have looked like Coward’s type, but Coward had always privately despised the former king. In 1936, he wrote, “I’ve known for years that he had a common mind and liked second-rate people, and I am sure it is a good thing for England that he abdicated.”

By 1940, the Windsors had graduated from mediocrity into real menace. One factor in the abdication had been that the prime minister had been told, reliably, that the woman inflaming the king’s already fascistic sentiments was a friend of Ribbentrop and the next thing to a Nazi agent. After the abdication, the Windsors were married in the residence of a Nazi collaborator. As the Battle of Britain approached, British intelligence believed — correctly — that Hitler, assisted by Ribbentrop, planned to restore the duke to the throne as a quisling monarch. Worst of all, intelligence suspected that the couple may have been complicit in this treachery.

Here was a man Coward had mistrusted even before he became an enemy of his country. And yet — hi ho! Off to another Windsor soiree! We can only speculate whether Coward was keeping unofficial tabs on the couple. When the facts started surfacing in the ’60s, his sole comment was two dry lines about the duke in his diary: “Secret papers have disclosed his pro-Nazi perfidy, which, of course, I was perfectly aware of at the time. ... What a monumental ass he has always been!”

Coward’s contacts were at the top. Visiting America in the spring of 1940, he received a surprise invitation to the White House, where he kept the dinner party in stitches singing “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” straight through, very fast, twice. Then, over a private nightcap, Roosevelt discussed his desire to “manage” the march of events toward aid for Britain.

A month later, Coward was invited back. There were no more songs. It was just after Dunkirk, and the talk was grim. Back in London a month later, Churchill’s secretary handed him this memo: “Mr. Noël Coward ... would like to see you tonight if you can spare the time, as he has been staying with the president.” But Churchill had a mixed response to Coward as intermediary. “I had a gnawing suspicion that there was something about me that he didn’t like,” Coward wrote.

Still, Coward’s involvement in secret work deepened. Sometime during that same visit, on an unmarked floor in a gloomy building near Victoria Station, he had his first meeting with Intrepid, who immediately sent him back to the Americas, with a stop in Hollywood. Guided by a fellow celebrity-spy, Cary Grant (!), he was to assess pro- and anti-British opinion. On the right, a minority of stars — Errol Flynn, for example — were suspected of being pro-Nazi. On the left, Stalinists were using fronts like the Yanks Are Not Coming Committee to rationalize Stalin’s alliance with Hitler and the defeat of Britain, while the American Communist Party began a campaign denouncing Coward as an agent of British warmongers.

How important was Coward’s work? We still don’t know the details, but in 1941, Intrepid was sufficiently impressed to propose Coward for a still-mysterious job requiring approval from the top. On April 2, word descended almost certainly from Churchill himself, and the word was “no.” Coward was too conspicuous. He called it the “forbiddance.”

The star was only briefly crushed. “With me,” he said, “everything always turns out for the best, because I am bloody well determined that it shall!!” Looking for another way to fight, he vowed to compose the best patriotic song; make the best patriotic movie; and write the best play. The song was “London Pride.” The movie was “In Which We Serve.” And a week after the “forbiddance,” Coward packed off to a resort on the Welsh coast, where he sat down and wrote “Blithe Spirit” in five days flat. A bit of froth about a man haunted by the ghost of his dead wife, “Blithe Spirit” ran just shy of 2,000 performances. It kept Londoners laughing for the rest of the war.

Stephen Koch’s most recent book is “The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of José Robles.”

Race and Ethnicity: The Doll Test: ‘Which doll is the bad doll?’

See MSNBC for the video and discussion of the doll test
Video: ‘Which doll is the bad doll?’
April 11: The "Conversation About Race" panel talks about the "doll test" — black children's stunning answers when comparing black and white dolls — and how society can begin to correct deep-seated self-esteem problems within the African-American community. Watch the video

David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars

WIRED
David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars
[for additional interview soundfiles see the original Wired story]

By David Byrne 12.18.07 | 6:00 PM

Full disclosure: I used to own a record label. That label, Luaka Bop, still exists, though I'm no longer involved in running it. My last record came out through Nonesuch, a subsidiary of the Warner Music Group empire. I have also released music through indie labels like Thrill Jockey, and I have pressed up CDs and sold them on tour. I tour every few years, and I don't see it as simply a loss leader for CD sales. So I have seen this business from both sides. I've made money, and I've been ripped off. I've had creative freedom, and I've been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will. It saved my life, and I bet I'm not the only one who can say that.

What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that's not bad news for music, and it's certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists.

Where are things going? Well, some people's charts look like this:



Some see this picture as a dire trend. The fact that Radiohead debuted its latest album online and Madonna defected from Warner Bros. to Live Nation, a concert promoter, is held to signal the end of the music business as we know it. Actually, these are just two examples of how musicians are increasingly able to work outside of the traditional label relationship. There is no one single way of doing business these days. There are, in fact, six viable models by my count. That variety is good for artists; it gives them more ways to get paid and make a living. And it's good for audiences, too, who will have more — and more interesting — music to listen to. Let's step back and get some perspective.

What is music?
First, a definition of terms. What is it we're talking about here? What exactly is being bought and sold? In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that's not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory.

Technology changed all that in the 20th century. Music — or its recorded artifact, at least — became a product, a thing that could be bought, sold, traded, and replayed endlessly in any context. This upended the economics of music, but our human instincts remained intact. I spend plenty of time with buds in my ears listening to recorded music, but I still get out to stand in a crowd with an audience. I sing to myself, and, yes, I play an instrument (not always well).

We'll always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; to build temples where only "our kind of people" can hear music (opera houses and symphony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs. This betrays an eternal urge to have a larger context beyond a piece of plastic. One might say this urge is part of our genetic makeup.

All this is what we talk about when we talk about music.

All of it.

What do record companies do?
Or, more precisely, what did they do?

* Fund recording sessions
* Manufacture product
* Distribute product
* Market product
* Loan and advance money for expenses (tours, videos, hair and makeup)
* Advise and guide artists on their careers and recordings
* Handle the accounting

This was the system that evolved over the past century to market the product, which is to say the container — vinyl, tape, or disc — that carried the music. (Calling the product music is like selling a shopping cart and calling it groceries.) But many things have changed in the past decade that reduce the value of these services to artists.

For example:

Recording costs have declined to almost zero. Artists used to need the labels to bankroll their recordings. Most simply didn't have the $15,000 (minimum) necessary to rent a professional studio and pay an engineer and a producer. For many artists — maybe even most — this is no longer the case. Now an album can be made on the same laptop you use to check email.

Manufacturing and distribution costs are approaching zero. There used to be a break-even point below which it was impractical to distribute a recording. With LPs and CDs, there were base manufacturing costs, printing costs, shipping, and so on. It paid — in fact, it was essential — to sell in volume, because that's how many of those costs got amortized. No more: Digital distribution is pretty much free. It's no cheaper per unit to distribute a million copies than a hundred.



Touring is not just promotion. Live performances used to be seen as essentially a way to publicize a new release — a means to an end, not an end in itself. Bands would go into debt in order to tour, anticipating that they'd recover their losses later through increased record sales. This, to be blunt, is all wrong. It's backward. Performing is a thing in itself, a distinct skill, different from making recordings. And for those who can do it, it's a way to make a living.

So with all these changes, what happens to the labels? Some will survive. Nonesuch, where I've done several albums, has thrived under Warner Music Group ownership by operating with a lean staff of 12 and staying focused on talent. "Artists like Wilco, Philip Glass, k.d. lang, and others have sold more here than when they were at so-called major labels," Bob Hurwitz, president of Nonesuch, told me, "even during a time of decline."

But some labels will disappear, as the roles they used to play get chopped up and delivered by more thrifty services. In a recent conversation I had with Brian Eno (who is producing the next Coldplay album and writing with U2), he was enthusiastic about I Think Music — an online network of indie bands, fans, and stores — and pessimistic about the future of traditional labels. "Structurally, they're much too large," Eno said. "And they're entirely on the defensive now. The only idea they have is that they can give you a big advance — which is still attractive to a lot of young bands just starting out. But that's all they represent now: capital."

So where do artists fit into this changing landscape? We find new options, new models.

The six possibilities

Where there was one, now there are six: Six possible music distribution models, ranging from one in which the artist is pretty much hands-off to one where the artist does nearly everything. Not surprisingly, the more involved the artist is, the more he or she can often make per unit sold. The totally DIY model is certainly not for everyone — but that's the point. Now there's choice.

1. At one end of the scale is the 360, or equity, deal, where every aspect of the artist's career is handled by producers, promoters, marketing people, and managers. The idea is that you can achieve wide saturation and sales, boosted by a hardworking machine that stands to benefit from everything you do. The artist becomes a brand, owned and operated by the label, and in theory this gives the company a long-term perspective and interest in nurturing that artist's career.

Pussycat Dolls, Korn, and Robbie Williams have made arrangements like this, selling equity in everything they touch. The T-shirts, the records, the concerts, the videos, the BBQ sauce. The artist often gets a lot of money up front. But I doubt that creative decisions will be left in the artist's hands. As a general rule, as the cash comes in, creative control goes out. The equity partner simply has too much at stake.

This is the kind of deal Madonna just made with Live Nation. For a reported $120 million, the company — which until now has mainly produced and promoted concerts — will get a piece of both her concert revenue and her music sales. I, for one, would not want to be beholden to Live Nation — a spinoff of Clear Channel, the radio conglomerate that turned the US airwaves into pabulum. But Madge is a smart cookie; she's always been adept at controlling her own stuff, so we'll see.

2. Next is what I'll call the standard distribution deal. This is more or less what I lived with for many years as a member of the Talking Heads. The record company bankrolls the recording and handles the manufacturing, distribution, press, and promotion. The artist gets a royalty percentage after all those other costs are repaid. The label, in this scenario, owns the copyright to the recording. Forever.

There's another catch with this kind of arrangement: The typical pop star often lives in debt to their record company and a host of other entities, and if they hit a dry spell they can go broke. Michael Jackson, MC Hammer, TLC — the danger of debt and overextension is an old story.

Obviously, the cost of these services, along with the record company's overhead, accounts for a big part of CD prices. You, the buyer, are paying for all those trucks, those CD plants, those warehouses, and all that plastic. Theoretically, as many of these costs go away, they should no longer be charged to the consumer — or the artist.



Sure, many of the services traditionally provided by record labels under the standard deal are now being farmed out. Press and publicity, digital marketing, graphic design — all are often handled by smaller, independent firms. But he who pays the piper calls the tune. If the record company pays the subcontractors, then the record company ultimately decides who or what has priority. If they "don't hear a single," they can tell you your record isn't coming out.

So what happens when online sales eliminate many of these expenses? Look at iTunes: $10 for a "CD" download reflects the cost savings of digital distribution, which seems fair — at first. It's certainly better for consumers. But after Apple takes its 30 percent, the royalty percentage is applied and the artist — surprise! — is no better off.

Not coincidentally, the issues here are similar to those in the recent Hollywood writers' strike. Will recording artists band together and go on strike?

3. The license deal is similar to the standard deal, except in this case the artist retains the copyrights and ownership of the master recording. The right to exploit that property is granted to a label for a limited period of time — usually seven years. After that, the rights to license to TV shows, commercials, and the like revert to the artist. If the members of the Talking Heads held the master rights to our catalog today, we'd earn twice as much in licensing as we do now — and that's where artists like me derive much of our income. If a band has made a record itself and doesn't need creative or financial help, this model is worth looking at. It allows for a little more creative freedom, since you get less interference from the guys in the big suits. The flip side is that because the label doesn't own the master, it may invest less in making the release a success.

But with the right label, the license deal can be a great way to go. This is the relationship Arcade Fire has with Merge Records, an indie label that's done great for its band by avoiding the big-spending, big-label approach. "Part of it is just being realistic and not putting yourself in the hole," Merge cofounder Mac McCaughan says. "The bands we work with, we never recommend that they make videos. I like videos, but they don't sell a lot of records. What really sells records is touring — and artists can actually make money on the tour itself if they keep their budgets down."

4. Then there's the profit-sharing deal. I did something like this with my album Lead Us Not Into Temptation in 2003. I got a minimal advance from the label, Thrill Jockey, since the recording costs were covered by a movie soundtrack budget, and we shared the profits from day one. I retained ownership of the master. Thrill Jockey does some marketing and press. I may or may not have sold as many records as I would have with a larger company, but in the end I took home a greater share of each unit sold.

5. In the manufacturing and distribution deal, the artist does everything except, well, manufacture and distribute the product. Often the companies that do these kinds of deals also offer other services, like marketing. But given the numbers, they don't stand to make as much, so their incentive here is limited. Big record labels traditionally don't make M&D deals.

In this scenario, the artist gets absolute creative control, but it's a bigger gamble. Aimee Mann does this, and it works really well for her. "A lot of artists don't realize how much more money they could make by retaining ownership and licensing directly," Mann's manager, Michael Hausman, told me. "If it's done properly, you get paid quickly, and you get paid again and again. That's a great source of income."

6. Finally, at the far end of the scale, is the self-distribution model, where the music is self-produced, self-written, self-played, and self-marketed. CDs are sold at gigs and through a Web site. Promotion is a MySpace page. The band buys or leases a server to handle download sales. Within the limits of what they can afford, the artists have complete creative control. In practice, especially for emerging artists, that can mean freedom without resources — a pretty abstract sort of independence. For those who plan to take their material on the road and play it live, the financial constraints cut even deeper. Backup orchestras, massive video screens and sets, and weird high tech lights don't come cheap.

Radiohead adopted this DIY model to sell In Rainbows online — and then went a step further by letting fans name their own price for the download. They weren't the first to do this — Issa (formerly known as Jane Siberry) pioneered the pay-what-you-will model a few years ago — but Radiohead's move was much higher profile. It may be less risky for them, but it's a clear sign of real changes afoot. As one of Radiohead's managers, Bryce Edge, told me, "The industry reacted like the end was nigh. They've devalued music, giving it away for nothing.' Which wasn't true: We asked people to value it, which is very different semantics to me."

At this end of the spectrum, the artist stands to receive the largest percentage of income from sales per unit — sales of anything. A larger percentage of fewer sales, most likely, but not always. Artists doing it for themselves can actually make more money than the massive pop star, even though the sales numbers may seem minuscule by comparison. Of course, not everyone is as smart as those nerdy Radiohead boys. Pete Doherty probably should not be handed the steering wheel.



Freedom versus pragmatism
These models are not absolute. They can morph and evolve. Hausman and Mann took the total DIY route at first, getting money orders and sending out CDs in Express Mail envelopes; later on they licensed the records to distributors. And things change over time. In the future, we will see more artists take up these various models or mix and match versions of them. For existing and emerging artists — who read about the music business going down the drain — this is actually a great time, full of options and possibilities. The future of music as a career is wide open.

Many who take the cash up front will never know that long-range thinking might have been wiser. Mega pop artists will still need that mighty push and marketing effort for a new release that only traditional record companies can provide. For others, what we now call a record label could be replaced by a small company that funnels income and invoices from the various entities and keeps the accounts in order. A consortium of midlevel artists could make this model work. United Musicians, the company that Hausman founded, is one such example.

I would personally advise artists to hold on to their publishing rights (well, as much of them as they can). Publishing royalties are how you get paid if someone covers, samples, or licenses your song for a movie or commercial. This, for a songwriter, is your pension plan.

Increasingly, it's possible for artists to hold on to the copyrights for their recordings as well. This guarantees them another lucrative piece of the licensing pie and also gives them the right to exploit their work in mediums to be invented in the future — musical brain implants and the like.

No single model will work for everyone. There's room for all of us. Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine. And that's fine. I like Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man." Sometimes a corporate soft drink is what you want — just not at the expense of the other thing. In the recent past, it often seemed like all or nothing, but maybe now we won't be forced to choose.

Ultimately, all these scenarios have to satisfy the same human urges: What do we need music to do? How do we visit the land in our head and the place in our heart that music takes us to? Can I get a round-trip ticket?

Really, isn't that what we want to buy, sell, trade, or download?

David Byrne is currently collaborating with Fatboy Slim and Brian Eno. Separately.

Chart Sources: Jupiter Research, Recording Industry Association of America, Almighty Institute of Music Retail, Wired Research

The Evolution of Video Game Music

The Evolution of Video Game Music
NPR (with audio examples on NPR radio segment)
All Things Considered, April 12, 2008 - In May 2004, a composer named Nobuo Uematsu joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a single performance of his most famous work. The show sold out in three days. In fact, there was almost a riot at the box office when people couldn't get tickets.

What was the music? Uematsu's soundtrack for the popular video game Final Fantasy.

In the early 1970s, video game music wasn't exactly symphonic. Case in point: Pong. The players hit a ball back and forth across a center line with that now-recognizable onomatopoeic sound.

One of today's top video game music composers, John Wall, spent much of the 1980s pumping quarters into Pac Man machines.

"Playing all those arcade games, I never even paid attention to the music," Wall tells host Andrea Seabrook. "It just sounded like sounds to me. However, you know all the tunes. It's so funny. The bleeps and bloops, they kind of invade your brain."

It's catchy and it's fun, but it's not exactly serious music. However trivial these early video games' soundtracks may seem, they weren't serious for good reason. And there's a study to prove it.

The Function of Video Game Music

Video game composer Tommy Tallarico explains, "If you remember in Space Invaders, you know, as the ships started to come down, the aliens, and as they got closer and closer, the sound got faster and faster. Now, what the game programmers did was that they took the person's heart rate, and as they're getting closer and closer, people would start to panic. Now they'd do the same studies without the sound, and the people wouldn't panic as much. And it goes to show and prove how significant audio and music are."

Like the purpose of all great music, it's supposed to change your heart rate — to move you and make you feel. Video game soundtracks began to take influence from more serious places, like the Russian folk song in Tetris. But still, video game music was limited by its hardware. That changed with the CD-ROM.

As personal computers became more agile and more powerful, suddenly the music track could handle something resembling real music. It was 1993's Myst that made Wall realize the power of music in a game. He says the game actually aided the player through the mysterious worlds, functioning as clues.

Music Enters the Design

The complexity of the music improved to the point where the score of a video game became almost indistinguishable from the music played in the finest concert halls. Wall went on to score the third and fourth installments of the Myst series, and he based the main theme for Myst III on Karl Orff's Carmina Burana.

Tallarico explains that video game music isn't a passive experience, but an integral part of the foreground. "It's for this reason that I've always said that if Beethoven were alive today, he'd be a video game composer."

Laughing, concert violinist and self-described "video game addict" Joshua Bell says, "Uh, well, that's quite a statement to say that about Beethoven. I would not go so far."

"I have a hard time imagining that," Bell adds. "I mean, Beethoven changed the world as we know it, and I doubt he would have done that through video games. Actually, I think one of the problems with video game music is — at least with film music — yes, you have your restrictions, but of course, video game composers have their restrictions, too. They have to write three minutes here or two minutes there or... with video game music, because it's so interactive, it's actually more of a slave to what happens externally, because one doesn't know what's going to happen in a video game. So for a composer, I would have thought it was quite the opposite."

Still, Bell does see the field as becoming "more cinematic and more interesting," and he says he hopes to play on a video game score someday.

Video Games Hit the Concert Stage

Concert halls around the country took note, and in 2005, Wall and Tallarico launched Video Games Live. The event features some of the world's finest orchestras performing some of the world's most popular video game music. For the first time in years, professional musicians are receiving the kind of audience energy they've craved.

"It's like their field day," Tallarico says. "The one day a year where they can kind of loosen their collars a little bit and have fun. And they're playing to a whole brand-new audience, which is great for everyone."

Telmary Diaz: A Cuban (Rhyming) Revolution

NPR
Telmary Diaz: A Cuban (Rhyming) Revolution
By Latino USA
KUT, March 28, 2008 - Telmary Diaz — singer, street poet, rapper — is one of the leaders of the hip-hop revolution in Cuban popular music.

Of course, the country's musical past is not forgotten. Diaz and her contemporaries take the rumba and the Son of Cuba, and add in the sensibility and style of hip-hop, funk and jazz.

The Toronto-based artist speaks with host Maria Hinojosa about her latest album, A Diario.

Though Cuba is often viewed as culturally isolated, Diaz's music reflects rhythms from around the world. "You can be surprised how many styles you can find in Cuba," Diaz says. "You can find in Cuba the ska, drum 'n' bass, I don't know, it's so many different kinds of music. ... Even when everybody thinks that Cuba is, you know, salsa, timba, Buena Vista Social Club, there is a lot of different movements of rock and punk. So everybody's open to new music all the time — that's what's happening."

Female rappers are greatly outnumbered in most hip-hop communities, and the Cuban scene is no different. But Diaz has managed to stake a claim, she says, by staying grounded in her identity.

"It's just that it's not easy — it's not easy in Cuba [for women to make hip-hop]," she says. "So for me to make an original hip-hop, a Cuban hip-hop, I think you have to reach in your roots. You have to keep your roots — you have to try to bring to the stage, to bring to your music the feeling of your ancestors, you know."

To match her internationally-influenced beats, Diaz has developed a flexible delivery, capable of spitting powerful, rapidfire verses. But she says she also strives to maintain a slower, more laid-back style.

"I think it's also part of my style to be also slow, to be smooth," Diaz says. "Because one thing that I didn't like from the hip-hop movement sometimes is that they like when women [are] aggressive like them. So what's the point? ... I use my language, I use my soft part also to communicate and to provoke, to transmit my feelings."

Those feelings are often overlaid by socially-conscious messages. Diaz says she wants to convey both modernity and spirituality in her music, as in the song "Spiritual Sin Egoismo."

"How important is it to be spiritual in this world that is so crazy," Diaz says. "I mean, what we are doing with our planet is crazy. So I think the best we can do is try to fix it from inside of ourself, and try to bring our spirit to our life."

Gnarls Barkley Album and "Run" video

"Run" video by Gnarls Barkley (hi-res hosted by NYT). I love the early eighties retro homage intro.

And the New York Times article on the album "The Odd Couple"
April 6, 2008
Music
First Came Crazy, Now Comes Odd
By JEFF CHANG

LOS ANGELES

ON a late February afternoon Gnarls Barkley, the duo known for its funny costumes and psychedelic post-hip-hop sound, was unmasked and at rest at a quiet hotel in Beverly Hills. Cee-Lo Green, the short, heavily tattooed singing and lyric-writing half, had just finished a snack of sushi. Danger Mouse, the tall, scruffy producing half, was wiping sleep from his eyes after a head-down nap on a marble table.

They were pondering how their second album, “The Odd Couple,” then unreleased, might be received, given the buzz that it was a good deal weirder and darker than their million-selling debut, “St. Elsewhere” from 2006.

“It’s going to be a surprise for me,” said Danger Mouse, 30, whose real name is Brian Burton, in a baritone you might hear on late-night soul radio. “It may be really big or really modest, I don’t know.”

Clues came much more quickly than the two probably expected. In early March the album leaked onto the Internet. On March 18 the band’s label, Atlantic Records, rushed it to digital and retail stores, weeks ahead of its planned April 8 release. Fans were notified by an eccentric press release issued just hours before the album became available: “With the shifting seasons, furtive romantic entanglements and fierce college basketball rivalries, the latter half of March can be confusing. People need to be soothed and inspired now.”

The day after its release “The Odd Couple” was atop the iTunes albums chart. But its first-week sales were only 31,000 copies, landing it at No. 18 on the Billboard chart. Jeff Antebi, the band’s manager, said many brick-and-mortar stores did not get shipments until the end of the week.

“No one was looking at extraordinary Week 1 numbers,” he said. Given that the first single, “Run,” received a lukewarm response from radio and that most early reviews bemoaned the lack of a song as infectious as “Crazy,” the band’s smash single from 2006, it appeared the album was not on track to match the success of “St. Elsewhere.”

But Craig Kallman, the chairman and chief executive of Atlantic, remains optimistic. “It’s a fantastic album, and it’s one that’s going to continue to get discovered,” he said.

Mr. Burton, who had been inspired by 1960s psych-rock and his recent collaboration with the Good, the Bad and the Queen, said he wanted to create a more cohesive set of moods with the album’s songs. “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul?” implies the blues through hushed textures and subtle rhythmic disjunctures. In “Open Book” the beat skitters like arrhythmia as Cee-Lo does some not-so-soothing Lennon-inspired wailing reminiscent of “Mother.”

Cee-Lo, 32, whose real name is Thomas Callaway, often flips familiar rap themes like jealousy and rage into close studies of loneliness and connection, darkness and sunshine. “Hurt people hurt people,” he sings on “Would Be Killer.” The album’s pivotal moment may be the slightly ominous ditty “Surprise,” which evokes the duo stumbling down Sunset Boulevard arm-in-arm with Arthur Lee, the leader of the ’60s rock band Love, who died in 2006. In it Cee-Lo sings, or perhaps warns, “If that big old smile ends up being just a disguise, don’t be surprised!”

Cee-Lo, who started his rap career as a member of the groundbreaking Atlanta rap group Goodie Mob, said that Gnarls Barkley “has been my safe haven and my sanctuary to expose or share and bring closure to my own issues.”

He was referring to the deaths of his parents, both ordained ministers. His father died when he was 2. His mother was paralyzed in a car crash and died two years later when he was 18, just as he was beginning to find success. Cee-Lo addresses their passings on “She Knows” and “A Little Better,” from the new album, and speaks of his mother’s presence as that of a lingering friendly ghost. “I want to thank you mom and dad for hurting me so bad,” he sings on “A Little Better,” “but you’re the best I’ve ever had.”

“The first show we did in Atlanta, the day our record came out, his mother died,” said Cameron Gipp, known as Big Gipp, an original member of Goodie Mob and one of Cee-Lo’s closest friends. “We found out as soon as we came off the stage.”

Mr. Gipp said that, devastated, Cee-Lo poured his emotions into the Goodie Mob song “Free,” which implied that he had suicidal thoughts. “His emotions, he really had to learn how to control them,” he said.

When Danger Mouse was a teenager, his parents moved his family from Rockland County in New York to Atlanta. He later worked at the same Athens, Ga., record store where members of R.E.M. and Olivia Tremor Control had worked. Danger Mouse asked Cee-Lo to contribute to a remix for the rapper Jemini in 2003, their first collaboration. At the time Cee-Lo had left Goodie Mob over artistic differences and made a well-received but commercially unsuccessful solo record; Danger Mouse had yet to make his name with “The Grey Album,” the unauthorized mash-up of the White Album by the Beatles and “The Black Album” by Jay-Z, which became a cultural phenomenon in 2004.

In 2005 the duo made a demo for the song “Crazy,” which earned them a deal with the boutique label Downtown Records; the song became a blogosphere favorite and a sensation in Great Britain.

Mr. Kallman was so intrigued by the song that he pursued a joint venture deal with Downtown. He said that when he first played “Crazy” for Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic, Mr. Ertegun congratulated him after the first chorus.

“Crazy” lingered around the top of the charts in 15 countries for much of 2006 and won a Grammy Award, leaving even its creators a bit thunderstruck. They began work on “The Odd Couple” while on tour for “St. Elsewhere,” which also won a Grammy. Afterward Danger Mouse went home to Los Angeles, and Cee-Lo returned to Atlanta. They communicated primarily through the music they sent back and forth via e-mail and Federal Express.

Cee-Lo said they didn’t try to write another “Crazy.” “If there was a formula to it, I would cut this interview short and go to the studio,” he said with a beatific grin in his raspy, reedy Southern drawl.

When the duo performed “Crazy” at the MTV Movie Awards in 2006, Cee-Lo dressed as Darth Vader and Danger Mouse as Obi-Wan Kenobi. During the interview, Cee-Lo wore a white T-shirt and black Polo sweat pants, a diamond-encrusted necklace and a sparkling Rolex beneath a tattoo of a laughing clown. Danger Mouse wore a thick camouflage jacket and an ironic rock T-shirt.

He told a reporter that the duo picked a self-explanatory album title so “we wouldn’t have to talk about it.” But then he wondered aloud to Cee-Lo if they should put a question mark at the end to make it more provocative.

“It would change the meaning,” he said. “Like, are we? Are we really that odd, with ourselves or compared to anybody else?”

Few recent groups have so consistently feinted right while going left. In its riotous videos and stylized performances Gnarls has played with what Nate Chinen called a “miserable exuberance” in a review of “The Odd Couple” in The New York Times.

The song “Run” may be about a soldier in Iraq or a heroin dealer (not unlike the way “Crazy” might have been about a spurned lover or a serial killer). But the video is nothing but a party. It is a tribute to Michael Holman’s “Graffiti Rock,” a rap television show from 1984, with a bewigged Justin Timberlake starring as the host and dancers recapping a history of hip-hop dance crazes. For its promotional photos for “The Odd Couple” the duo chose to dress as a bride and groom.

All of this might suggest that the two spend a lot of time devising stratagems. Not so, Cee-Lo said. “As far as songs or albums or concepts are concerned, there’s not ever really a formal conversation about it.”

Neither member had initially figured Gnarls Barkley for a career-making project. Until “The Odd Couple” Danger Mouse had never done a second album for any of his many eclectic projects, including Gorillaz, MF Doom and Beck. His latest credit is “Attack and Release,” the new album by the Black Keys, a hard-rocking duo from Ohio.

“He doesn’t overpower you,” said Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, referring to Danger Mouse’s production style. “He’s just a completely unpretentious guy for somebody who has such a stranglehold on the Top 10 all around the world.”

For his part Cee-Lo has been working on a reunion album with Goodie Mob, buying masters of unreleased Jimi Hendrix recordings, producing an album by a group called the Good Time Guys and gearing up to start his own label, Radiculture.

But both Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo said that the Gnarls Barkley project best captures who they are as artists and as people, at least right now. This project is “pure me,” Danger Mouse, the more private of the two, insisted. “It’s the most me.”

Earlier, while Danger Mouse napped, Cee-Lo made the same point. He said that he grew up listening to funk and hip-hop, and “everybody from ABC to R.E.M., Billy Joel to Billy Idol.” When Danger Mouse first played him sample tracks in 2003, including the strange groove that would become “Run,” he could not believe his ears.

“As soon as I heard the music, it immediately struck me as mine,” he recalled. “I said, I can’t see anyone doing anything to these tracks but me. And I mean the real me, the inner me, the me deep down that nobody knew I was made up of. All of me.”

So finally the duo gave up trying to explain the new album. Instead Cee-Lo puzzled over how these two unlikely musical partners, who seem to be able to communicate a great deal without ever really talking, had even found each other. He first turned to a reporter. “I think I asked him this once, but he never answered it.” Then he looked across the table to Danger Mouse. “Like, did you seek me out?”

Somewhat startled, Danger Mouse answered, “Well, no other singer or rapper ever heard the Gnarls stuff.”

“And how did you know I could do that?” Cee-Lo wondered. “Because I hadn’t really done stuff like that before.”

Now Mr. Burton sat straight up: “I don’t know! I mean, I had his solo record, and it was a great solo record. I knew he could do a lot of things.” He trailed off.

Then he looked straight at Cee-Lo. “But I had been around a lot of rappers with that music and never thought to play them any of it.”

Mr. Callaway nodded slowly and didn’t have to smile. “I got it,” he said.

Shiko Mawatu Using Music to Help Heal the Congo

News & Notes , April 8, 2008 - Music sustained him as his nation went through war. Now, musician Shiko Mawatu is hoping his own songs can help rebuild the Democratic Republic of Congo. He talks with Farai Chideya about his efforts and new CD, Kimbanda Nzila. NPR has the audio.

Hip Hop Finds New Home on the Reservation

Native American hip-hop emerging on Reservations. NPR has the audio story.

2008 Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama, and Music

NYT
April 7, 2008
2008 Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama and Music
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday. Following are the winners in Letters, Drama and Music.

HISTORY: DANIEL WALKER HOWE
"What Hath God Wrought: the Transformation of America, 1815-1848"

Mr. Howe, 71, is an emeritus professor of history at Oxford University and the University of California, Los Angeles. In over 900 pages, Professor Howe creates a panoramic tale of the formative period of American history, when the country expanded and created innovations in communications and transportation.

FINALISTS "Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power" by Robert Dallek and "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War" by the late David Halberstam.

BIOGRAPHY: JOHN MATTESON
"Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father"

Louisa May Alcott is widely known, but Professor Matteson, 47, an associate professor of English at John Jay College in New York City, turned his attention to her father, Bronson Alcott. He was a teacher and lecturer, a friend of both Emerson and Thoreau and the seeker of a utopian community.

“I found him very inspirational,” Professor Matteson said. “He was almost completely self-taught.”

FINALISTS "The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein" by Martin Duberman and "The Life of Kingsley Amis" by Zachary Leader.

FICTION: JUNOT DIAZ
"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

Mr. Diaz, 39, arrived in the United States from the Dominican Republic in 1974, not speaking or reading English. His riotous novel tells the story of a family of Dominican immigrants, both in the present in New Jersey and in the past in the Dominican Republic.

Mr. Diaz said he kicked around the idea for his first novel for about four years and then spent seven years writing it. “In some ways I think that this book waited for me to become a better person before it wrote itself,” he said.

FINALISTS "Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson and "Shakespeare’s Kitchen" by Lore Segal.



GENERAL NONFICTION: SAUL FRIEDLANDER
"The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945"

In his second volume of a history of the Holocaust, Mr. Friedländer, 75, interwove segments from contemporary journals and letters into the more general description of the atrocities. “Usually the history of the Holocaust is written from the viewpoint of German documents and archives,” said Mr. Friedländer, who was born in Prague, escaped to France in 1939 and emigrated to Israel in 1948. He teaches history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

FINALISTS "The Cigarette Century" by Allan Brandt and "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century" by Alex Ross.



DRAMA: TRACY LETTS
"August: Osage County"

FINALISTS "Yellow Face" by David Henry Hwang and "Dying City" by Christopher Shinn.



POETRY: ROBERT HASS AND PHILIP SCHULTZ
"Time and Materials," by Robert Hass and "Failure," by Philip Schultz

In his sixth volume of poetry, Mr. Hass, 67, a former poet laureate, wrote about large subjects of international import, like global warming, as well as more personal verse in an exploration of the role of public and private life. Mr. Hass also won the National Book Award for poetry last year.

Mr. Schultz, 63, found inspiration for his fifth volume of poetry in finally discussing the death of his father when Mr. Schultz was 18 and the family business fell apart. “It was a hole that I was digging myself out of the rest of my life,” he said. Mr. Schultz runs the Writers Studio in New York.

FINALIST "Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2006" by Ellen Bryant Voigt.


MUSIC: DAVID LANG
"The Little Match Girl Passion"

Mr. Lang, 51, is co-founder of Bang on a Can, the boundary-crossing new music collective. His Pulitzer-winning work is for a quartet of singers. It is an eerie, poignant and tragic melding of the Hans Christian Andersen tale of a poor child who freezes to death and the text of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.”

FINALISTS "Meanwhile" by Stephen Hartke and "Concerto for Viola" by Roberto Sierra.


SPECIAL CITATIONS: BOB DYLAN

3 Kurdish teenagers could stand trial for singing rebel song in US

AP/MSNBC

3 Kurdish teenagers could stand trial for singing rebel song in US
The Associated Press
updated 8:44 a.m. PT, Tues., April. 8, 2008

ANKARA, Turkey - A lawyer says three Kurdish teenagers could stand trial for allegedly singing a Kurdish rebel song under rebel flags during a music festival in the United States in October.

Defense lawyer Baran Pamuk says the teenagers were part of a 15-member chorus that allegedly sang a song called "Enemy" during a tour of San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. He says an indictment demands their prosecution on charges of spreading the separatist propaganda of the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party, which is fighting the Turkish state.

Pamuk said Tuesday a court will decide whether to hear the case. The three are aged between 16 and 17.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Pavarotti lip-synched last performance

AP/Yahoo Music
Pavarotti lip-synched last performance

04/07/2008 9:11 PM, AP


Luciano Pavarotti, in severe pain months before his cancer diagnosis, lip-synched his last performance, according to the maestro who conducted the aria at the opening ceremony of the Turin Olympics. The late tenor's manager said Monday the bitter cold made a live performance impossible at the 2006 Winter Games.

The conductor, Leone Magiera, reveals in a book that the rousing rendition of "Nessun Dorma" ("Let No One Sleep") was prerecorded because "it would have been too dangerous for him to give a live performance in that physical condition."

Magiera, who worked with Pavarotti for years, said the tenor was suffering from sharp pains months before being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was using a wheelchair. Pavarotti died in September 2007. He was 71.

"The orchestra pretended to play for the public there, I pretended to conduct and Luciano pretended to sing," Magiera writes in "Pavarotti Visto Da Vicino" ("Pavarotti Seen From Close Up"), which was published last month. "It came off beautifully, no one was aware of the technical tricks."

Pavarotti recorded the famed aria from Puccini's "Turandot" in a studio in his hometown of Modena a few days before his February appearance in Turin, Magiera said. The orchestra prerecorded its part separately.

"His voice was nearly intact," Magiera recalls in the book, published by Ricordi. "He found the strength to repeat it until he was completely satisfied. Then, he fell back on his wheelchair and closed his eyes, exhausted."

Magiera did not elaborate on why Pavarotti was using a wheelchair. He stood during the Turin performance.

Pavarotti's former manager, Terri Robson, said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that the decision lip-synch was made because of the cold during the outdoor evening event.

The singer was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the summer of 2006 as he was preparing to leave New York to resume a farewell tour. Pavarotti underwent surgery in New York in early July, and his remaining 2006 concerts were canceled.

Earlier that year, Pavarotti postponed five June dates because of what was described as complications from back surgery. He canceled eight concerts in April, saying he had been advised not to travel or perform while undergoing back treatment.

Robson said the tenor's voice was "in great shape ... but because of the extreme late-night temperature in Turin in February, for both him and the orchestra, it was decided that the only way to make it work was for him to pre-record."

Pavarotti lip-synched a performance in 1992 in Modena, drawing heavy criticism.

His charismatic persona, ebullient showmanship, and powerful voice made him the most beloved and celebrated tenor since the great Caruso and one of the few opera singers to win crossover fame as a popular superstar.

He appeared in television commercials and sang in hugely lucrative mega-concerts outdoors and in stadiums around the world, also mingling with pop stars in his series of charity concerts, "Pavarotti & Friends."

'Why?': Remembering Nina Simone's Tribute to the Rev. Martin Luther King. Jr.

NPR

Visit NPR for the audio of the story, including clips of Simone's performance.

'Why?': Remembering Nina Simone's Tribute to the Rev. Martin Luther King. Jr.

Weekend Edition Sunday, April 6, 2008 - Three days after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, performer Nina Simone and her band played at the Westbury Music Festival on Long Island, N.Y. They performed "Why? (The King of Love is Dead)," a song they had just learned, written by their bass player Gene Taylor in reaction to King's death.

Simone's brother, Samuel Waymon, who was on stage playing the organ, talks with Lynn Neary about that day and reaction to the civil rights leader's assassination.

"We learned that song that (same) day," says Waymon. "We didn't have a chance to have two or three days of rehearsal. But when you're feeling compassion and outrage and wanting to express what you know the world is feeling, we did it because that's what we felt."

Waymon and the band's performance of "Why? (Then King of Love is Dead)" lasted nearly 15 minutes as Nina Simone sang, played and sermonized about the loss everyone was feeling.

The song later appeared on several greatest-hits collections, most recently on the Anthology release from RCA.

Here's a YouTube video:

Scarface in Miami (25 years ago)

Miami New Times
Scarface in Miami
Twenty-five years ago this month, the gangster epic caused a local stir.
By Francisco Alvarado, Frank Houston, Tamara Lush, and Amy Guthrie
Published: April 3, 2008
News
The Day Scarface Came to Town
Twenty-five years ago, politics derailed De Palma's Miami plans.

BY FRANK HOUSTON

Brian De Palma's Scarface might hold a record for the movie with the most fucks per minute. The gangster epic, parts of which were shot in Miami Beach 25 years ago this month, includes 223 variants of the word fuck, according to the DVD release. That's an average of 1.3 per minute.

Scarface defined excessive. In addition to Al Pacino's wretched Cuban accent, the machine-gun-happy flick sprayed 2,048 shots across its 170 minutes — or a bullet every five seconds.

A few of those blasts were captured in snapshots by Bill Cooke, who in April 1983 was employed as a valet at a condo building in Miami Beach. He was working the day shift one Saturday when he heard from a co-worker that cameras would be rolling on Ocean Drive.

Click here to see some of Bill Cooke's Scarface pictures

"I hurried down and parked a block away," Cooke recalls. Nikon in hand, he headed to a spot filled with spectators, across the street from the Beacon Hotel. "I'd been on a couple of movie sets before, and when you are uninvited, you really have no clue about what's going to take place."

Over and over again, Cooke recalls, an armed Pacino chased another actor into the street, shot him, andbolted in a beat-up Chevy.

In fact much of the production crew had already ditched town. It turned out the politics surrounding the filming were even more extreme than Scarface's violence. Months before De Palma yelled "Action!" on the Beach, screenwriter Oliver Stone's story of Tony Montana — a Marielito turned coke smuggler — had rankled the Cuban exile community.

"The basic message of the movie seems to be drugs, killing, and criminal activities. That does not represent the majority of hard-working and law-abiding Cubans," Miami Dade College president Eduardo Padron, who was then head of the Spanish-American League Against Discrimination, told the Miami Herald in August 1982. Then-Miami city Commissioner Demetrio Perez Jr. threatened to deny film permits unless Montana was recast as a Communist agent who infiltrated the United States at Castro's behest.

"We are not doing a film about Cubans in Miami. We're doing a picture about one gangster," producer Martin Bregman told the Herald. "The movie has more crooked Jews than crooked Cubans." Bregman, who helped with Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, promised to "make an idiot" out of Perez. Later he declared the movie would be shot elsewhere.

"He was a very stupid man," Bregman says of Perez in a telephone interview from his New York office. "And I told him that."

Despite the intervention of then-Florida Gov. Bob Graham, the $15 million production decamped to Los Angeles. Bregman estimates that, at most, 20 percent of the film was made in Miami. "We had intended to shoot the whole film there," he adds. Bregman says he was visited by Cuban-Americans from Union City, New Jersey, who "were convinced this film was being financed by Fidel Castro. It was beyond silly."

Cooke, who went on to a career in photojournalism, also fell victim to the politics of the day. Though a Herald photo editor had told him the paper would publish his pictures that Sunday, none appeared. "The higherups had killed the photo," Cooke says. "It seems that Sunday was the third anniversary of the Mariel boatlift."

Pirouettes and Street Cred: Atlanta’s Hip-Hop Ballet

NYT
April 6, 2008
Dance
Pirouettes and Street Cred: Atlanta’s Hip-Hop Ballet
By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO

ATLANTA

THE rapper Antwan Patton was sitting in the sleek black Courvoisier Lounge tucked into the back of his recording studio here. Mr. Patton, better known as Big Boi, one-half of the progressive hip-hop duo OutKast, was taking a break from finishing his debut solo album, due out this summer. But he wasn’t talking music. He was talking ballet, zeroing in on its image problem.

“I’ve always seen the ballet as being, ‘Here’s a little tea pot, short and stout,’ ” he said, singing and miming the typical gestures of the nursery rhyme with his heavily tattooed arms. “Very, very step-by-step.”

Mr. Patton’s unassuming brick studio is on a sleepy side street, just a short drive from the Atlanta Ballet’s midtown headquarters. But judging from the glass-encased bottles of Cognac that stud his dimly lighted lounge or the OutKast posters trumpeting platinum-selling records and Grammy Awards, the cultural distance is immeasurable. What could tulle-clad classical dancers and a rap superstar possibly have to say to one another, after all?

On Thursday Atlanta will find out. That night, at the fittingly grandiose, neo-Moorish Fox Theater, Mr. Patton will perform with the Atlanta Ballet, the first major collaboration between a hip-hop luminary and a ballet company. The name of the production, of course, is “big.”

The title refers to the show’s star, but it could just as easily apply to its mission. Mr. Patton and the Atlanta Ballet say they are seeking to expand the horizons of their respective forms, without compromising them. It’s a tall order, and it comes as ballet companies and the hip-hop industry are casting about (not always gracefully) for new directions and new audiences.

On paper this mixed-media spectacular, which includes local children, video and a series of complicated set pieces, and integrates the loose narrative of a child named “Little big” with mythic characters like Theia, seems like a recipe for disastrous cultural misunderstanding. After all, before “big” Mr. Patton’s ballet experience began and ended with an elementary school outing to see “The Nutcracker,” and the new work’s choreographer, Lauri Stallings, had never listened to hip-hop.

But Ms. Stallings and Mr. Patton, who have bounced ideas off each other throughout the process, share an exploratory sensibility. He, with his OutKast partner, André Benjamin (better known as André 3000), has been expanding hip-hop’s boundaries since the early 1990s through musically omnivorous, intellectually curious songs and in their 2006 movie, “Idlewild.” And she is a ballet-company resident choreographer whose major dance-making influence is the contemporary Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin.

So when John McFall, the ballet’s artistic director first approached Mr. Patton with the idea of a collaboration, the rapper said, “I’m down to try anything once.” (Except, he later added, wear tights; he may be a progressive, but he’s still got some street cred to maintain.)

Unless the spirit strikes him Mr. Patton will not be doing any jetés either. Instead he and a coterie of local musicians attached to his Purple Ribbon Entertainment label will weave among the dancers, performing tracks that include OutKast’s “Liberation,” Janelle Monáe’s “Metropolis” and “Sir Luscious Left Foot Saves the Day,” an unreleased song from Big Boi’s new album.

And, unlike some fusion ballets of the past, the dancers will not be performing half-baked hip-hop moves but Ms. Stallings’s earthy, syncopated choreography, which, as the company veteran Christine Winkler said, in some ways works better with hip-hop than with classical music.

Hip-hop and dance fans alike expressed hope that the work would have an impact beyond a spotlight for its weeklong run.

“My gut reaction is ‘bravo,’ ” said Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at Georgetown University and the author of, most recently, “Know What I Mean?,” a critical examination of hip-hop music. He said with a chuckle, “Even if it falls on its face.”

Professor Dyson, echoing several young Atlanta artists who weighed in on the project, sees in “big” an opportunity for hip-hop to re-examine some of its more self-destructive tendencies, including violence and “the blitzkrieg of misogyny that passes for commentary on gender.” If anyone could get hip-hop to open up, he said, it would be one of the adventurous stars of OutKast.

For a venerable but struggling regional company like the Atlanta Ballet, meanwhile, “big” is an impressive coup and a chance to reach an audience that has typically stayed away from ballet.

“Ballet doesn’t have a choice, other than to let people in,” Ms. Stallings said. “It’s been exclusive for so long. But dance started under the stars. That’s the dance I want to connect America to.”

These are perilous times for the classical performing arts, and many regional ballet troupes have been forced to fold or downsize. The Atlanta Ballet shed its orchestra in 2006 and recently sold its midtown offices to erase a $2.75 million accumulated debt. A result of insufficient fund-raising, that debt points to a larger problem: a difficulty connecting with local constituencies. While hip-hop has developed distinct regional flavors, ballet companies are still grappling with how to remain relevant. The racial makeup of a Southeastern city like Atlanta presents a particular challenge.

“You have to face the truth that basically it has been art for white people,” said Dorothy Gunther Pugh, the founder of Ballet Memphis. “Then you have to say, ‘How can we take the best of who we are and say it’s art for everyone?’ ”

While ballet is more likely to be viewed as an elitist oddity than a part of everyday life, hip-hop is woven into the cultural fabric of the urban South. Atlanta has been regularly turning out stars like Ludacris, T. I. and Jermaine DuPri. Although hip-hop sales, along with those of the rest of the music industry, are sagging, its presence is visible everywhere, from the music throbbing out of open car windows to the giant So So Def Records billboard that greets drivers heading into the city’s downtown.

One week after a tornado tore through the commercial center of downtown Atlanta, the area remained a glass-littered warren of barricaded streets. But close to 800 people found their way to Georgia State University’s Rialto Center for the Arts, where Ms. Stallings had choreographed a 20-minute site-specific preview of “big” for the lobby. The OutKast hit “Ms. Jackson” boomed onto the street, where a line of people, mostly young and mostly black, looped around the corner.

Mr. Patton was not billed to appear, but several members of the Atlanta music scene were there, including Joi Gilliam, a local favorite who has appeared on most of OutKast’s albums and will perform in “big.” “I don’t want to be pigeonholed,” said Ms. Gilliam, who studied ballet as a girl. “The blending of these things is important to me as a woman. I am hip-hop and I am classical ballet.”

People clustered around the lobby’s center platform, only to turn (some with jumps and startled yelps) as a group of children banging on the windows and dancing on the sidewalk signaled the dance’s start. More performers followed, threading their way through the crowd, dancing everywhere but onstage.

After this surprise came another: Ms. Stallings’s visceral, kinetic brew of ballet and modern dance that does not fit stereotypical expectations of a decorous, feminine tradition.

Many ballets have been choreographed to popular music, from the 1993 Joffrey Ballet work “Billboards,” set to Prince songs, to Ballet Memphis’s “Mercurial Balance,” a nod to that city’s hip-hop scene that featured the local spoken-word duo Brotha’s Keepa.

Too often the results have been ghastly, insulting the integrity of both ballet and the popular art form in question, as well as the intelligence of the very audiences that ballet desperately wants to attract. When it comes to hip-hop, everything from the disparate movement styles to the polar-opposite portrayals of women would argue against the two forms’ happily coexisting. Still, for many, the significance of these efforts lies in the attempt.

“It offers a sense of hope,” said Nate Wonder, one of the singers of Deep Cotton, for a musical industry that has grown stagnant.

If younger musicians are impatient to subvert what they describe as hip-hop’s overly rigid rules of behavior, dance artists like Ms. Stallings and Nicole Johnson, in her first season with the Atlanta Ballet, are equally frustrated by classical ballet’s cloistered strictures.

“I’d be happy never doing” another story-ballet, Ms. Johnson said during a rehearsal break. “I want to be doing something new, instead of something that was edgy 150 years ago.”

Ms. Johnson and her colleagues spoke with wonder about performing with a local giant like Mr. Patton. At a rehearsal Mr. Patton, dressed in baggy black clothes, crouched low, then struck a typical macho pose, arms crossed over a thrust-out chest. Instead of the adoring, scantily clad women found in OutKast videos, he was haloed by a balletic swirl of taut extended limbs. The contrast was alien, yet oddly compelling. A seemingly absurd prediction that the ever-confident Mr. Patton had made earlier about the impact of “big” on ballet came to mind:

“They might say, ‘Hey, we’re going to have the New York ballet with Mary J. Blige, or we’re going to have Ludacris perform with Miami,’ ” he said. “This might start a trend. You never know.”

Guitarist-activist Vernon Reid on how MLK's death affected black music

THE ROOT
King: The Soundtrack
A conversation with guitarist-activist Vernon Reid on how MLK's death affected black music.
By Martin Johnson
TheRoot.com
Updated: 12:55 PM ET Apr 3, 2008

April 4, 2008--If you liked music, then the Johnson home was the place to be in the late '60s. My brother Phillip always had the latest Motown or Stax singles. My sister Phyllis (yes, they're twins) played the Beatles, and the Stones, and of course Sly and the Family Stone. When he was home from college, my eldest brother, Byron, listened to blues and this guy with an especially raspy voice that he just called Bob (as if he was a friend from around the way). In addition, my Dad liked to play his Miles Davis, Lambert Hendricks and Ross or Duke Ellington records whenever possible, while my mother seemed to know the words to every Burt Bacharach-Hal David song (or at least every one sung by Dionne Warwick).

The South Side of Chicago had lots of great music pouring out of its homes, but I'm sure we ranked near the top of the charts.

Music added an ever-playing soundtrack to what was already a lively place. Our kitchen doubled as a salon where my parents, siblings, and their friends, held forth on a variety of issues of the day: the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, the latest goings on with Mayor Daley and what not. I didn't watch much TV growing up; listening to the discussions in the kitchen was much more interesting. I felt like I was privy to a very cool scene.

The events of April 4, 1968 struck us like a ton of bricks. I was only eight and still sorting out the vernacular of violence. I needed to know if shot meant killed and if killed meant dead. I thought these were simple yes or no questions, but I got mostly anguish in response.

We used to turn off the music to listen to Dr. King's speeches. That night we turned off the radio.

Eventually music came back on in the Johnson household, and as the weeks and months began to pass, even my young ears could discern a change in the sounds. The happy, optimistic sounds that had characterized much of my sibling's playlists had become wary, stern and borderline confrontational.

What would soon follow the harrowing days of April 1968 was an era of black self determinism in popular music that remains unparalleled. The line between musician and activist blurred.

I recently discussed this era with guitarist/activist Vernon Reid. He started with the groundbreaking electric jazz group, Ron Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society and went on to form the pioneering rock band Living Colour. In 1985, he cofounded The Black Rock Coalition, an organization that helped pave the way for artists of color to resume a more self deterministic path for their music. His work over the last decade has created dynamic fusions between rock and electronic music.

Reid is also an enthusiastic student of music and culture and a critical thinker. We exchanged e-mail recently about the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's assassination and the effect it had on the evolution of black popular music:

MJ: Where were you on April 4, 1968, how did the news of Dr. King's assassination hit you, and what was the reaction in your Brooklyn neighborhood?

Vernon Reid: It was one of the darkest days of my childhood. Both my parents were very distraught. My father was furious. My mother was as sad as could be. I remember people shouting in the streets--The public rage and sorrow was palpable. My aunts were very upset.... My Catholic Middle school was very quiet too, everyone acknowledged the seriousness of the event. There was a palpable sense that White America itself had done it. Of course, most white folks were deeply ashamed and horrified at the crime too, but these were extremely polarized times. President Johnson, for all his flaws, set the right tone when he addressed the nation at the time of the tragedy, thinking back.

MJ: By most accounts, the '60s were part of a golden era for black music, as styles evolved rapidly in many different places, especially Detroit and Memphis, but elsewhere too and sometimes on black-owned labels. However, with the exception of songs like "I'm Black and I'm Proud" and the work of Nina Simone, Charles Mingus and Max Roach, before King's killing most music engaged in little social commentary.

Vernon Reid: Black People have always had to watch "what we say" for fear of the consequences and repercussions of our speech. From the Republic's earliest days, the poet, the pundit, the wit, and the troubadour of African descent have always been acutely aware of the expectations and temperament of audience they've faced, very careful to conceal the reality of the lives we've been forced to live, while simultaneously bearing witness to the myriad joys and sufferings of life under varying degrees of constant oppression.

It's a neat trick. Part of the genius of Institutional Racism is that long after Ol' Massa's Gone Away and The Last Overseer hung up his whip, fear has been a constant companion of the African American, justified or not. Black performers are uniquely vulnerable to that fear, because the stage exposes and further objectifies. The safest route then is to merely entertain, to make and keep people "happy" (unchallenged and unchanged, but edified). Not to take anything away from the skill and talent required. This is a long and powerful tradition, subverted, raged, and signified against, but potent nonetheless.

The `60's Era was a massive turning point in Black popular culture with regards to social commentary---incendiary change was in the air; the fiery rhetoric of X and King among many others was not to be ignored-while pop music like Motown's was in denial, folk singers like Odetta and Richie Havens heard it all loud and clear, as did jazz artists like Coltrane, Max Roach, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus... In a supreme irony, Hoover's F.B.I. was searching for the seeds of revolution in Martha and The Vandellas.

MJ: A Change Was Gonna Come, however. What impact do you attribute to the death of great leaders like Dr. King and Malcolm X?

Vernon Reid: The words and subsequent deaths of King and X had a tremendous effect on a wide range of African American musical artists--the civil rights movement was a motif in much of the work of Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, The Isley Brothers, War, Mandrill, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, etc.

In jazz, the evolution of Coltrane's journey into freedom and abstraction was arguably of a piece with the progressive and radical social movements of the time. The screaming saxophone became synonymous with the idea of international black self-determination. With that said, the Deaths of X and King were designed to send another message--this is what happens to Dreamers and Malcontents who step out of line--once again The Fear made flesh asserts itself- Watch your step- It's as current as the unarmed deaths of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell.

MJ: In the years that followed the King assassination, it seemed that black popular music moved toward social commentary and a mood of self determinism took root. Marvin Garye made his opus, What's Going On. Edwin Starr's "War" was a pop hit. The Temptations Masterpiece, and oodles of songs by Curtis Mayfield, Gil Scot-Herron and others laid bare the truth about life on the streets and discontent in the community.

What changed and how? Was an iconoclast like Jimi Hendrix influential in his style, if not the way that he brought a new level of virtuosity to music?

Vernon Reid: I believe that Hendrix represented the pinnacle of the American Drama--an unruly avatar who heedlessly commingled tradition and anarchy to radically re-invent the role of electric guitar, and radically expand the notion of Black Identity by exploring it's outer reaches.

MJ: For you, what were the highlights of this era?

Vernon Reid: Jimi's version of the "Star Spangled Banner" during the final set of Woodstock was a defining moment, as was The Band Of Gypsies second set version of "Machine Gun" on New Year's eve 1970. Marvin's "What's Going On" is a masterwork, Miles' work from "In A Silent Way" on into the `70's. Gil Scott Heron's "Winter In America" and "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." War's "The World Is A Ghetto." Sly's "There's A Riot Going On." JB's "A Revolution Of The Mind." "We People Who Are Darker Than Blue" by Curtis Mayfield. "To Be Young Gifted And Black" by Nina Simone. Fela' Kuti's "Expensive Sh*t." The very first rock concert I ever saw was Funkadelic at Madison Square Garden supporting Cosmic Slop-now that was a highlight!

MJ: Why did it end?

Vernon Reid: A decade of war. upheaval, and assassinations from Kennedy to King had exacted a generational toll. It's instructive that Marvin Gaye's next big single after "What's Going On" was "Let's Get It On"- no less of an iconic song, but a harbinger of the Me Decade to come.

MJ: Was reviving the latitude of this era, one of your principal motives in starting the Black Rock Coalition in 1985?

Vernon Reid: The BRC was the start of a community of outsiders who refused to know their expected place. We were certainly influenced by a powerful and courageous legacy of activists like Medgar Evers and Angela Davis on the one hand and artists like Hendrix, Miles, Sly, Ornette, Coltrane, Simone, Mayfield. It was also influenced by the then current artistry of artists like Prince, Fishbone, AR Kane, and Bad Brains who lit the way forward.

Martin Johnson is a New York-based writer.