[...] What’s kept me out of the blogosphere is that I’m launching a Black rock music series here in Brooklyn. Called BoldasLIVE, it’s a new live event platform for Black rock. I call it a platform because I envision the output of BoldasLIVE taking many forms: innovative discussion forums, panels and, yes, even full-on shows. The goal is to provide an experience that will create a richer context for some of the discussions taking place on this and other blogs.
The first offering is a Sunday afternoon series that starts on July 22. These will have the following format: artist sits for a 30 or so minute interview with a music journalist or cultural critic followed by a 20-30 minute acoustic/electro-acoustic set. The artist returns for a few more questions from the interviewer and Q&A with the audience. [...]
Bold As Love: "New live event platform for Black rock launches!"
[...] I would be overwhelmed with a barrage of all of those things everytime I wanted to go out and have fun seeing a band I liked. None of my friends liked the music I did so there was usually no one to go with. And no one to start bands with. I decided that there needed to be a place, a "scene", if you will, were Black people who were into more than hip-hop and r&b and didn't have lame issues like "Omg I like Belle & Sebastian ~~**am ai stil blak o noezz~~**!!!11" could go and love music and see themselves onstage as well as in the crowd and dress like they wanted to and talk how they wanted and hang out with who they wanted and just be who they were without having to deal with the "Filthy 4" above.
BLUCK YOU! is that place. Just a night of all Black or Black fronted bands that are outside the more palatable "thug and hoochie" theme of mainstream music these days. If you support our scene, ADD US AND COME TO OUR SHOWS!!! If you want to play a BLUCK YOU! night, well here are the d's:
Douglas Martin of Fresh Cherries From Yakima wields a guitar and wears a TV On The Radio T-shirt.
Not too long ago, I was asked by a listener of Fresh Cherries from Yakima if I thought there was an African-American Indie-Rock Scene developing that people are starting to catch wind of. For starters, a "scene," in my opinion, are a bunch of people who live in a close proximity, who play on each others' records, come to each others' shows, and open for each other at shows. Seattle had a scene during the grunge days, where Kurt Cobain and Mark Lanegan would chill and play Leadbelly covers. Saddle Creek is a scene, with members from virtually the same bands will show up on each others' recordings. It would be tough for this "Black Indie-Rock Scene" to exist, unless we black people get ourselves into some deep shit and end up getting relocated like the Japanese during World War II, and I don't have to insult your intelligence by saying how difficult that would be.
But when you think about it, indie bands with black members are pretty varied and across the board as far as aesthetics go. You have the two Big Draw Bands with the enormously popular experimentation of TV on the Radio and the widescreen post-punk of Bloc Party, but there are countless other notable styles: scruffy, Guided By Voices-inspired garage pop (Cocker Spaniels); epic, anthemic, ready-for-arena-rock (The Dears); soulful noise-rock (Dragons of Zynth); meat-and-potatoes rock 'n roll (Earl Greyhound and Thee Emergency, the latter being an awesome band from my hometown); singer/songwriterly baroque-pop (Lightspeed Champion); and, of course, lo-fi experimental folk also on the singer/songwriter side of things (Fresh Cherries from Yakima, my own band). So, if there were an actual "scene" that included all of us, there would be enough variety to cater to all types of Indie-Rock fans.
A long-running fantasy of mine has been to be featured in an "Indie-Rock Issue" of Vibe Magazine. Although it would be nice for people like myself to be recognized by the biggest African-American music magazine in the world (as sort of an acknowledgment: "Hey, you guys exist, and although you're not really our cup of tea, we got your back"), I'm fairly sure that an "Indie-Rock Issue" would generate a slightly-larger-than-normal (but not unprecedented) flow of hate mail from the people who laugh and point when they see us walking down the street. But editors of Vibe, don't you think we deserve more than a 50-word review of our records?
I would hope that this fantasy-issue of Vibe wouldn't be some sort of chest-thumping triumph of people who have been soapboxing like a few black guys with guitars are going to save the world (although I would love to call out names, the parties whom I am referring to will remain nameless), and focus more on the musical aspect than the sociological impact, because I get sick and tired of explaining how I don't feel as though I'm fighting any sort of good fight, or explaining that I have more black friends now than during my ill-fated foray into rapping. In all frankness, I get weary of talking about being a Black Indie-Rocker; I just want to talk about the music.
Naturally, this fantasy-issue would include lengthy cover stories from the Big Ticket Bands, but I hope that Vibe would have enough foresight to put nice little features on the up-and-comers. It would be a great idea, wouldn't it? And even though great ideas don't sell magazines, it would be a nice gesture towards a term endlessly thrown around the black population: Unity.
Djevara: Official site
The Gig Reviewer: Michael Freeman's "Interview with Bass from Djevara"
Wikipedia: Djevara
MurdochSpace: Djevara
Picture by joguldi under Creative Commons license
[...] But the seemingly obligatory question I have to ask is - can negroes be hipsters? I don't think so, right? I mean the whole point is for hipsters to condescend and be hipper than everyone else. But they can't do that with negroes, because they'll get their skinny asses kicked (post-ironically of course), plus to be negro is to be inherently hip/cool (not to stereotype or anything) ... if there are negro hipsters out there, please come by TAN and make yourself known, I want to explore the negro-hipster phenomenon more if such people actually exist.
Gawker's "Are you a hipster? (Valid Only 12/05)": The mighty, mighty The Assimilated Negro comments and follows up a month later.
Photo by fatal Cleopatra under Creative Commons license
[...] Even today, the news media are inclined to assume that popular musicians have something to say about serious matters — and many of them do. But the fragmentation of mass culture has meant that they are able to say it to smaller and smaller portions of the population.
The fate of hip-hop may be the best illustration of the increasing marginalization of popular music and its impact on American culture. Hip-hop is arguably the last great innovation in popular music, the successor to ragtime, jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock 'n' roll. All of those forms emerged out of African-American culture and changed the tastes of Americans of all races. Hip-hop also attracted a large audience of young white listeners, but it did not come to dominate public consciousness the way its predecessors had. That has less to do with the particular qualities of hip-hop than with the fragmentation of the market. Most Americans didn't hear the music routinely, so it remained foreign to their ears.
Early hip-hop stars like Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy were at least as critical of American society as Dylan ever was, and they led some commentators to imagine hip-hop artists as authentic and politically significant spokespeople for poor, urban African-Americans. But in the last 10 years or so, even though hip-hop artists like Jay-Z are popular music's most innovative contributors, the form has become less political, and its performers seem less culturally central.
In a different, more unified market, hip-hop stars might have become leaders like James Brown. As it is, popular music seems headed back to the margins of cultural life, and that is a loss for all of us.
| Chronicle of Higher Education: David Shumway's "Where Have All The Rock Stars Gone?"
Nothing much here, really, just a couple of things I liked reading: Ph.D candidate and author Ken Mondschein's Nerve.com essay "History of Single Life: The birth of the urban hipster" and PopMatters blog Crazed by the Music post "Betty Davis and the black rock freak show."
Photo by RobK under Creative Commons license
[...] Under the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity. Those 18-to-34-year-olds called hipsters have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge. Hungry for more, and sick with the anxiety of influence, they feed as well from the trough of the uncool, turning white trash chic, and gouging the husks of long-expired subcultures—vaudeville, burlesque, cowboys and pirates.
Of course, hipsterism being originally, and still mostly, the province of whites (the pastiest of whites), its acolytes raid the cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity in the pot. Similarly, they devour gay style: Witness the cultural burp known as metrosexuality. As the hipster ambles from the thrift store to a $100 haircut at Freemans Sporting Club, these aesthetics are assimilated—cannibalized—into a repertoire of meaninglessness, from which the hipster can construct an identity in the manner of a collage, or a shuffled playlist on an iPod.
All isms seek dominance of human affairs, and in this, hipsterism in New York City has proved more virulent than any of its forebears. (Punk, after all, never really broke—except in the form of hipsterism.) At last there was nothing left for hipsters to do but to convert the squares, take them to the bar and let them pick up the tab. Secrets were shared. The hipster hooked up with the common consumer; he woke up a zombie.
How can this be undone? I propose that the only hope for a reanimated bohemia, if not a dezombified hipsterdom, is civil war. [...]
