Ben Sisario of the NY Times reports on the . Gee, I can't wait to see the reports from the New York and New Jersey based hip hop news sites that sent somebody over for this historic event. They should be great!
It looks like the got some more facts wrong since Sisario reports that Brent D. Glass, the director of the museum, said the project was begun in recent months with seed money from Universal Records.
Although I know I give Russell Simmons a hard time, I also have respect for many of his accomplishments and for his intelligence so I find it incredibly hard to believe that he actually said that hip hop is the only real description of the suffering of our people.
Assuming he means African Americans, as opposed to rich men with expensive wives, he just dissed a lot of great black artists, including numerous writers whose work will tower over even my favorite hip hop lyricists long after they're dead.
Yeah, back that azz up, I'm suffering!
But, man, I wish I could have been at the conference.
I know I would have met some great writers from all the news sites we all follow on a daily basis. I'll be sure to add their eyewitness accounts as soon as I track them down!
Posted by Clyde on March 1, 2006 in Joseph Patel has a nice piece on the development of from DJ Screw to Michael Watts to David Banner.
It's nice in that it traces a little more of the evolution from cassettes to the current releases of chopped screwed albums as followups to initial releases from major labels.
Although Patel says that no one's sure when DJ Screw first slowed or screwed tracks, DJ Screw actually discusses this on the dvd, , from which the still photos for the MTV article are taken. According to Screw, he was messing around with the turntables and started slowing stuff down when somebody in his crew said, if you put that on tape I'll pay you for it.
Screw identified that as the originating moment. And, in fact, he made a tape for his friend that led to making screw tapes on a regular basis.
DJ Screw also discussed the eventual creation of the Screwed Up Records Tapes shop in Houston.
Basically, more and more people were coming by to get him to make tapes, which he made individually. It got so busy that he then gave a specific time in the afternoon or evening when folks could come by. That led to lines of cars outside his house and the cops coming by to see what's up with what they thought was a dope dealer.
So Screw had to start the shop which is apparently .
And who said history was boring?
The UK's Observer has a piece in which Nelson George reflects on the past and sketches out the widespread influence of hip hop while overstating his theme of the monolithic rap industry followed by Steve Yates on 30 years of hip hop.
I really like Nelson George and, perhaps, the experience of cutting and pasting transcriptions of interviews with Russell Simmons for Life and Def, in which RS defends his use of "bitch" as a term of respect for women (WTF!), left George with a serious need to reflect on his own choices. I think soul searching is important, but I also think that critics from within hip hop are undermining their ability to make change by painting the bad things as monolithic without pointing to the good things.
Nelson George should be able to do better than that. Hip hop culture and rap music are complex. For example, to say that, "the black church is now rife with Christian MCs, who have adopted its form and style, even if they substitute a love of God for references to women and cars," as if that was inherently negative does violence to the honest development of Christian hip hop (no, not Kanye West, silly).
As E.R. Shipp concludes in a column about Harlem's , "using rap as a lure to exploring broader issues, including the moral life, seems a no-brainer.
" Although I think that hip hop is much more than a lure, to bemoan the problems of hip hop without attending to artists working against those problems is to cripple efforts at real change.
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