Image and text source: National Geographic

April 2007

Photographs by David Alan Harvey

Whether you trace it to New York’s South Bronx or the villages of West Africa, hip-hop has become the voice of a generation demanding to be heard.

This is my nightmare: My daughter comes home with a guy and says, “Dad, we’re getting married.” And he’s a rapper, with a mouthful of gold teeth, a do-rag on his head, muscles popping out his arms, and a thug attitude. And then the nightmare gets deeper, because before you know it, I’m hearing the pitter-patter of little feet, their offspring, cascading through my living room, cascading through my life, drowning me with the sound of my own hypocrisy, because when I was young, I was a knucklehead, too, hearing my own music, my own sounds. And so I curse the day I saw his face, which is a reflection of my own, and I rue the day I heard his name, because I realize to my horror that rap—music seemingly without melody, sensibility, instruments, verse, or harmony, music with no beginning, end, or middle, music that doesn’t even seem to be music—rules the world. It is no longer my world. It is his world. And I live in it. I live on a hip-hop planet.

Read the entire feature at National Geographic

Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 1. (Autumn, 1995), pp. 150-158.

Text source: http://www.jstor.org/view/00931896/ap040085/04a00070/0

(Need to be affiliated with an academic research institution to access)

Image and text source: http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v7is1/desi.htm

Jouvert, Volume 7, Issue 1 (Autumn 2002)

College of Staten Island/CUNY, Staten Island NY

Copyright © 2002 by Ashley Dawson, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. Copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.

1. On a sweltering August afternoon in 1996, New York City’s Summerstage concert series brought the South Asian dance music known as bhangra to Central Park. South Asian families from all over the tri-state area sunned themselves, jostled for room, and danced in a jam-packed sandy space under sun-dappled plane trees. New York turntablist DJ Rekha added some hometown flavor, spinning bhangra remixes to much applause before the Safri Boys, one of Britain’s hottest bhangra bands, took the stage. Although bhangra remix had been transforming South Asian youth culture in the US at least since the release of UK musician Bally Sagoo’s pathbreaking “Star Crazy” album in 1991, the concert in Central Park was a particular milestone. Here, visible to a broad public, was a display of the compelling cultural forms through which South Asians of the diaspora were articulating new, composite identities. The multiple regional contrasts and tensions that define identity within the subcontinent were harmonized in this diasporic context. The result was a powerful sense of cultural unity and pride. Desi (Hindi for “homeboy” or “homegirl”) culture had definitely arrived. [1]

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The Prison Industrial–Complex (Audio CD Recording)

Image source: http://dancedancerevolutionary.org/free.html
Project URL: http://dancedancerevolutionary.org/

Text source: made available by Fereshteh Toosi for Remix Theory

Dance Dance Revolutionary! is pleased to announce that the winner of the Stay Free – Angela Davis re-mix contest is SPINNERTY of San Francisco

Listen to the MP3 at the project website: http://www.dancedancerevolutionary.org/free.html

Dance Dance Revolutionary! is an arts initiative that aims to share information about radical activism through fun, participatory events. The project includes various platforms inspired by the lives of Angela Davis and Emma Goldman, two important figures in U.S. history.

As part of its ongoing activities, Dance Dance Revolutionary! hosted a re-mix contest. The objective was to creatively re-assemble songs written by the Rolling Stones and John Lennon/Yoko Ono about activist Angela Davis around the time that she was acquitted of federal murder charges in 1972.

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Can I Get An Amen?, 2004
recording on acetate, turntable, PA system, paper documents
dimensions variable
total run time 17 minutes, 46 seconds

Image and project source: nkhstudio.com

Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drum beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60’s soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a ‘B’ side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that ‘information wants to be free’- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.

Le Monde Vomissant By Chéri Samba (Democratic Republic of Congo), 2004. Acrylic on canvas.
© Hayward Gallery

Image source: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/gallery/
Text source: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/

There’s plenty to admire in Africa Remix. But Jonathan Jones wonders if a whole continent can really be captured in a single exhibition

Wednesday February 9, 2005

Africa is a scandal,” writes curator Simon Njami in the catalogue for Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent. Not many people would disagree. Africa, the poorest continent, with the most terrible problems of war and disease… But Njami doesn’t mean that. His catalogue essay is written in another language, that of curators: he means “scandal” in a theoretical way. Africa is a scandal because it is “hybrid”, because it is inherently transgressive, because… no, let us leave it there. Suffice it to say that Africa Remix flails around to find an Africa that can claim its place in the world of biennales, glossy art magazines and proliferating theory. That it ends up discovering the same old realities of injustice and poverty probably says more for the honesty of African artists than for the thinking behind the show.

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Douglas Gordon, Self-portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe (detail) 1996

Image and text source: artnet.com

“Douglas Gordon’s The Vanity of Allegory,” July 16-Sept. 10, 2005, at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Unter den Linden 13/15, 10117 Berlin, Germany.

Berlin’s creative world is so compartmentalized that you can be pretty sure you won’t bump into any of your fellow ravers at a museum opening, particularly at the Deutsche Guggenheim. Part of the global expansionist vision of the New York-based Guggenheim Museum, the single-room exhibition space, given a sanitary design by modernist architect Richard Glucksman and located unambiguously in the Deutsche Bank building on Unter der Linden, seems like a commercial box in the heart of a metropolis celebrated rather more for its underground art scene than for its institutional achievement in contemporary culture.

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