All posts by Indy

>The Demonized Ahmadinejad

>Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, as well as co-author of The New Color Line and The Tyranny of Good Intentions. I haven’t read any of his books, but his article Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran – Why the US Wants to Delegitimize the Iranian Elections, published by Counterpunch, is worth considering.

How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina, or any other country, get from the U.S. media? How many Americans and American journalists even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France, and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Japan, or even China?

Yet, many know of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. The reason is obvious. He is daily demonized in the U.S. media.

The U.S. media’s demonization of Ahmadinejad itself demonstrates American ignorance. The President of Iran is not the ruler. He is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He cannot set policies outside the boundaries set by Iran’s rulers, the ayatollahs who are not willing for the Iranian Revolution to be overturned by American money in some color-coded “revolution.”

Iranians have a bitter experience with the United States government. Their first democratic election, after emerging from occupied and colonized status in the 1950s, was overturned by the U.S. government. The U.S. government installed in place of the elected candidate a dictator who tortured and murdered dissidents who thought Iran should be an independent country and not ruled by an American puppet.

The U.S. “superpower” has never forgiven the Iranian Islamic ayatollahs for the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, which overthrew the U.S. puppet government and held hostage U.S. embassy personnel, regarded as “a den of spies,” while Iranian students pieced together shredded embassy documents that proved America’s complicity in the destruction of Iranian democracy.

The government-controlled U.S. corporate media, a Ministry of Propaganda, has responded to the re-election of Ahmadinejad with non-stop reports of violent Iranians protests to a stolen election. A stolen election is presented as a fact, even thought there is no evidence for it whatsoever. The U.S. media’s response to the documented stolen elections during the George W. Bush/Karl Rove era was to ignore the evidence of real stolen elections.

Full article here.

>Sæterbakken

>


This just might be of interest for those who read Scandinavian languages, but what the hell…
I just finished Stig Sæterbakken‘s novel Osynliga händer [Invisible Hands] (Vertigo Förlag) and I liked it a lot. I aslo read a good article by Oskorei just this very minute, and I hear Stig’s latest novel is supposed to be something very special. Can’t wait for that one.
As for Osynliga händer, I don’t even like crime stories that much, but this is so much more than a crime story. The words in here are words that matter and the eerie atmosphere will stay with me for a long time. This is more about subtle tension and anxiety than regular crime novel suspense.

Check out Sauermugg+ as well, where I contribute with some text alongside Nikanor Teratologen, CJ Håkansson, Stefan Whilde, Anastasia Wahl and Gunnar Blå.

Previous posts related to Stig Sæterbakken
Eldreomsorgen i Øvre Kågedalen
Stig Sæterbakken and Sauermugg

EDIT: Found this English translation of Chapter One in Sæterbakken’s novel Siamese, along with an essay entitled Stig Sæterbakken – Between Good and Evil. The review of Siamese can be read here.

>Ahmadinejad disclaimer

>Earlier on, when I’ve written about Ahmadinejad, I’ve discussed his honest and straight-forward questions to George W. Bush (read his letter to the man here), his thoughts about the Holocaust and his relationship with the United States. I’ve never written about Ahmadinejad and his relationship to his people. It it obvious that he is an asshole opposed by many, and that the election was a fraud (or was it, really?). But he’s also worshipped by many.
However, when seeing what’s going on in Iran right now I hope that people will understand the need of civil rights and use their right to vote. I also hope that people will understand the importance of honest media.

Still, that doesn’t change my opinion about Ahmadinejad regarding what I’ve written earlier, because that’s a whole different ball game.

Click the images to enlarge
Hundreds of thousands of Iranian supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi demonstrate in Tehran on Monday, June 15, 2009.

Supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wave Iranian and religious flags during a victory celebration in central Tehran June 14, 2009.

A supporter of defeated presidential candidate Mousavi is beaten by government security men as fellow supporters come to his aid during riots in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, June 14, 2009.


The best way to get photos and updates seems to be Twitter:
#iranelection
#Tehran
etc…
Nima Dervish updates regularly in Swedish here.

>The Return……

>I often return to the reggae. It may take months between each listening session, but once the bass kicks in I’m trapped. Since I’m hooked on strange sounds I prefer the most spaced out old school dub, but regular mainstream reggae might work just as good. If I was forced to pick ten albums that I had to listen to for the rest of my life, The Wailers Catch A Fire would doubtlessly be one of them. Just make sure you get the original (previously unreleased) Jamaican versions of the songs, since the remixed English versions suck ass. Trust me. If you want both, then get the Deluxe Edition.

The Wailers – Catch a Fire (1973)
One of the 10 best albums of all time.

The religious and simple-minded homophobic message often present within the reggae culture is fucked up, of course, but stuff like that has never stopped me from listening to good music, and when reggae is good it kills. Too bad 90% of all reggae is crap, though. But that’s the tiresome problem with all music genres: everything sucks, except for that 10% worth of gold.

If you want some heavyweight dub, make sure to check out pretty much everything released by the Blood and Fire label. Instant faves ought to be The Dubmasters remix album X-Ray Music, the first Heavyweight sampler, King Tubby’s Dub Gone Crazy albums, I-Roy’s Don’t Check Me With No Lightweight StuffEverything!

Yesterday my friend David Bock sent me an amazing dancehall mix named Roll Like A Thunder Vol. 1, mixed by the folks at Computer Style. It’s been on repeat ever since. Check out the track list:

01. Scientist – Dematerialize
02. Anthony Johnson – Soundclash
03. Supercat – Dance Inna New York
04. Early B – Bicycle
05. Shabba Ranks – Respect
06. Barrington Levy – Murderer
07. Carlton Livingston – 100 Lbs Of Collie Weed
08. Shinehead – Billy Jean
09. Lone Ranger – M16
10. Tenor Saw – Roll Call
11. Tenor Saw – Golden Hen
12. Sizzla – Blessed
13. Capleton – Weh Dem Go So Fast
14. Elephant Man – How Di Fire Fi Out
15. Lexxus – Quit
16. Michael Palmer – Lick Shot
17. Michigan & Smiley – Diseases
18. Cocoa Tea – Lost My Sonia
19. Josey Wales – Gateman
20. Nicodemus – Boneman Connection
21. Jah Thomas – Dancehall Connection
22. Michigan & Willie Williams – Armagedeon
23. Barrington Levy & Cutty Ranks – You Must Be Greedy
24. Johnny Osbourne – Ice Cream Sound
25. Mega Banton – Sound Boy Killing
26. Cobra – Gundelero
27. Johnny Osbourne – Little Sound Boy
28. King Tubby – Death Row
29. Michael Bitas – Die Yu Die
30. Courtney Melody – This Sound A Dem Trouble
31. Courtney Melody – Ninja Mi Ninja
32. Ackie – Call Me Rambo
33. Lee Perry & The Full Experience – Disco Devil

If you’re the nerd then books about reggae is essential too. Here’s a list of 10 books that I’d like to read. I’ve only read The Rough Guide so far…

>Public Enemy’s Chuck D on how copyright law changed rap music

>Public Enemy were one of the very first – if not the first – groups to release an album on the internet (There’s a Poison Goin’ On was released on May 18 1999, the cd was released on July 20).
Ten years ago!
Since then, band leader Chuck D has been the most vocal supporter of file sharing in the music industry. He even testified before Congress in support of P2P and has been quoted saying “rap is devolving so much into a commercial enterprise, that the relationship between the rapper and the record label is that of slave to a master”.
Speaking of anti-materialism, anti-sexism and politically and socially conscious rap: “A lot of cats are out there doing it, on the web and all over. They’re just not placing their career in the hands of some major corporation.”
Chuck D is also involved in the cd set Let Freedom Sing: The Music of the Civil Rights and the follow-up movie Let Freedom Sing: How Music Inspired the Civil Rights Movement.

Here’s an old interview from the Stay Free Magazine with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee about how copyright law changed rap music and destroyed its creativity, and pretty much turned rap into crap overnight.
Interview by Kembrew McLeod. Original article found here. Swedish translation here.

———-

When Public Enemy released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, in 1988, it was as if the album had landed from another planet. Nothing sounded like it at the time. It Takes a Nation came frontloaded with sirens, squeals, and squawks that augmented the chaotic, collaged backing tracks over which P.E. frontman Chuck D laid his politically and poetically radical rhymes. He rapped about white supremacy, capitalism, the music industry, black nationalism, and–in the case of “Caught, Can I Get a Witness?”– digital sampling: “CAUGHT, NOW IN COURT ‘ CAUSE I STOLE A BEAT / THIS IS A SAMPLING SPORT / MAIL FROM THE COURTS AND JAIL / CLAIMS I STOLE THE BEATS THAT I RAIL … I FOUND THIS MINERAL THAT I CALL A BEAT / I PAID ZERO.”

In the mid- to late 1980s, hip-hop artists had a very small window of oppor-tunity to run wild with the newly emerging sampling technologies before the record labels and lawyers started paying attention. No one took advantage of these technologies more effectively than Public Enemy, who put hundreds of sampled aural fragments into It Takes a Nation and stirred them up to create a new, radical sound that changed the way we hear music. But by 1991, no one paid zero for the records they sampled without getting sued. They had to pay a lot.

Stay Free! talked to the two major architects of P.E.’s sound, Chuck D and Hank Shocklee, about hip-hop, sampling, and how copyright law altered the way P.E. and other hip-hop artists made their music.

* * *

Stay Free!: What are the origins of sampling in hip-hop?

Chuck D: Sampling basically comes from the fact that rap music is not music. It’s rap over music. So vocals were used over records in the very beginning stages of hip-hop in the 0s to the early ’80s. In the late 1980s, rappers were recording over live bands who were basically emulating the sounds off of the records. Eventually, you had synthesizers and samplers, which would take sounds that would then get arranged or looped, so rappers can still do their thing over it. The arrangement of sounds taken from recordings came around 1984 to 1989.

Stay Free!: Those synthesizers and samplers were expensive back then, especially in 1984. How did hip-hop artists get them if they didn’t have a lot of money?

Chuck D: Not only were they expensive, but they were limited in what they could do–they could only sample two seconds at a time. But people were able to get a hold of equipment by renting time out in studios.

Stay Free!: How did the Bomb Squad [Public Enemy’s production team, led by Shocklee] use samplers and other recording technologies to put together the tracks on It Takes a Nation of Millions.

Hank Shocklee: The first thing we would do is the beat, the skeleton of the track. The beat would actually have bits and pieces of samples already in it, but it would only be rhythm sections. Chuck would start writing and trying different ideas to see what worked. Once he got an idea, we would look at it and see where the track was going. Then we would just start adding on whatever it needed, depending on the lyrics. I kind of architected the whole idea. The sound has a look to me, and Public Enemy was all about having a sound that had its own distinct vision. We didn’t want to use anything we considered traditional R&B stuff–bass lines and melodies and chord structures and things of that nature.

Stay Free!: How did you use samplers as instruments?

Chuck D: We thought sampling was just another way of arranging sounds. Just like a musician would take the sounds off of an instrument and arrange them their own particular way. So we thought we was quite crafty with it.

Shocklee: “Don’t Believe the Hype,” for example–that was basically played with the turntable and transformed and then sampled. Some of the manipulation we was doing was more on the turntable, live end of it.

Stay Free!: When you were sampling from many different sources during the making of It Takes a Nation, were you at all worried about copyright clearance?

Shocklee: No. Nobody did. At the time, it wasn’t even an issue. The only time copyright was an issue was if you actually took the entire rhythm of a song, as in looping, which a lot of people are doing today. You’re going to take a track, loop the entire thing, and then that becomes the basic track for the song. They just paperclip a backbeat to it. But we were taking a horn hit here, a guitar riff there, we might take a little speech, a kicking snare from somewhere else. It was all bits and pieces.

Stay Free!: Did you have to license the samples in It Takes a Nation of Millions before it was released?

Shocklee: No, it was cleared afterwards. A lot of stuff was cleared afterwards. Back in the day, things was different. The copyright laws didn’t really extend into sampling until the hip-hop artists started getting sued. As a matter of fact, copyright didn’t start catching up with us until Fear of a Black Planet. That’s when the copyrights and everything started becoming stricter because you had a lot of groups doing it and people were taking whole songs. It got so widespread that the record companies started policing the releases before they got out.

Stay Free!: With its hundreds of samples, is it possible to make a record like It Takes a Nation of Millions today? Would it be possible to clear every sample?

Shocklee: It wouldn’t be impossible. It would just be very, very costly. The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that the people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout–meaning you could purchase the rights to sample a sound–for around $1,500. Then it started creeping up to $3,000, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this thing called rollover rates. If your rollover rate is every 100,000 units, then for every 100,000 units you sell, you have to pay an additional $7,500. A record that sells two million copies would kick that cost up twenty times. Now you’re looking at one song costing you more than half of what you would make on your album.

Chuck D: Corporations found that hip-hop music was viable. It sold albums, which was the bread and butter of corporations. Since the corporations owned all the sounds, their lawyers began to search out people who illegally infringed upon their records. All the rap artists were on the big six record companies, so you might have some lawyers from Sony looking at some lawyers from BMG and some lawyers from BMG saying, “Your artist is doing this,” so it was a tit for tat that usually made money for the lawyers, garnering money for the company. Very little went to the original artist or the publishing company.

Shocklee: By 1990, all the publishers and their lawyers started making moves. One big one was Bridgeport, the publishing house that owns all the George Clinton stuff. Once all the little guys started realizing you can get paid from rappers if they use your sample, it prompted the record companies to start investigating because now the people that they publish are getting paid.

Stay Free!: There’s a noticeable difference in Public Enemy’s sound between 1988 and 1991. Did this have to do with the lawsuits and enforcement of copyright laws at the turn of the decade?

Chuck D: Public Enemy’s music was affected more than anybody’s because we were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn’t have been anything–they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall. Public Enemy was affected because it is too expensive to defend against a claim. So we had to change our whole style, the style of It Takes a Nation and Fear of a Black Planet, by 1991.

Shocklee: We were forced to start using different organic instruments, but you can’t really get the right kind of compression that way. A guitar sampled off a record is going to hit differently than a guitar sampled in the studio. The guitar that’s sampled off a record is going to have all the compression that they put on the recording, the equalization. It’s going to hit the tape harder. It’s going to slap at you. Something that’s organic is almost going to have a powder effect. It hits more like a pillow than a piece of wood. So those things change your mood, the feeling you can get off of a record. If you notice that by the early 1990s, the sound has gotten a lot softer.

Chuck D: Copyright laws pretty much led people like Dr. Dre to replay the sounds that were on records, then sample musicians imitating those records. That way you could get by the master clearance, but you still had to pay a publishing note.

Shocklee: See, there’s two different copyrights: publishing and master recording. The publishing copyright is of the written music, the song structure. And the master recording is the song as it is played on a particular recording. Sampling violates both of these copyrights. Whereas if I record my own version of someone else’s song, I only have to pay the publishing copyright. When you violate the master recording, the money just goes to the record company.

Chuck D: Putting a hundred small fragments into a song meant that you had a hundred different people to answer to. Whereas someone like EPMD might have taken an entire loop and stuck with it, which meant that they only had to pay one artist.

Stay Free!: So is that one reason why a lot of popular hip-hop songs today just use one hook, one primary sample, instead of a collage of different sounds?

Chuck D: Exactly. There’s only one person to answer to. Dr. Dre changed things when he did The Chronic and took something like Leon Haywood’s “I Want’a Do Something Freaky to You” and revamped it in his own way but basically kept the rhythm and instrumental hook intact. It’s easier to sample a groove than it is to create a whole new collage. That entire collage element is out the window.

Shocklee: We’re not really privy to all the laws and everything that the record company creates within the company. From our standpoint, it was looking like the record company was spying on us, so to speak.

Chuck D: The lawyers didn’t seem to differentiate between the craftiness of it and what was blatantly taken.

Stay Free!: Switching from the past to the present, on the new Public Enemy album, Revolverlution, you had fans remix a few old Public Enemy tracks. How did you get this idea?

Chuck D: We have a powerful online community through Rapstation.com, PublicEnemy.com, Slamjams.com, and Bringthenoise.com. My thing was just looking at the community and being able to say, “Can we actually make them involved in the creative process?” Why not see if we can connect all these bedroom and basement studios, and the ocean of producers, and expand the Bomb Squad to a worldwide concept?

Stay Free!: As you probably know, some music fans are now sampling and mashing together two or more songs and trading the results online. There’s one track by Evolution Control Committee that uses a Herb Alpert instrumental as the backing track for your “By the Time I Get to Arizona.” It sounds like you’re rapping over a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass song. How do you feel about other people remixing your tracks without permission?

Chuck D: I think my feelings are obvious. I think it’s great.