Cultural dissent

The Grammy awards have long been the kind of thing that one simply has to deal with if you're going to approach music under capitalism.

It comes wrapped in all the elitism, commerce and segregation that necessarily has to accompany the music industry, but it's still something of a great salt lake for any artist — even those who are the most socially conscious — if they want to navigate the most treacherous waters of their craft.

Like any money-making venture, it can be just as susceptible to public pressure as it is to the forces of the market.

Face the Fire
Jimblah
Obese Records
Buy now on iTunes
www.myspace.com/jimblah01

If James Alberts, better known as Adelaide-based rapper Jimblah, hadn't discovered hip hop, he could well have ended up serving time in prison.

Instead, he now serves prisoners in prison, by teaching them.

"In my early teens, I just wanted a place to fit and I looked up to the older lads who were [committing crimes]," Alberts, a 27-year-old Larrakia man, tells Green Left Weekly.

When the multi-award-winning journalist John Pilger needed researchers for his latest film,  The War You Don’t See, he turned to David Edwards and David Cromwell. The pair run media-analysing website Media Lens, which turned 10 years old on July 9.

Here, they answer some of the “more interesting” questions posed by their readers, plus a couple from Green Left Weekly’s  Mat  Ward.

Why did you start Media Lens?

Wild International
Art exhibition by Sam Bullock
June 1-July 2
Andrew Baker Gallery
26 Brookes St, Bowen Hills
Brisbane
www.andrew-baker.com

Sam Bullock has a wonderful artistic talent. He is also autistic.

Soccer is the great global game: the closest thing we have to a connective cultural tissue that binds our species across national and cultural borders.

But only in a world so upside down could “the Beautiful Game” be run by an organisation as corrupt as FIFA and by a man as rotten to the core as FIFA President Sepp Blatter.

Only Blatter, whose reputation for degeneracy approaches legend, would hire a war criminal such as former United States secretary of state Henry Kissinger to head “a committee of wise persons” aimed at “rooting out corruption” in his organisation.

Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, who performs solo under the name The Nightwatchman, was inspired by the huge struggle in Wisconsin against a savage anti-union law to release a benefit EP of songs dedicated to workers' struggles. The Nightwatchman's Union Town EP has been released by New West Records and can be bought at iTunes. All proceeds go to the America Votes Labor Unity Fund.

Rebellion runs through pop music, but no performer has ever fused music and radical politics like Gil Scott-Heron, who died on May 27.

In a series of early 1970s albums, Scott-Heron, collaborating with composer/arranger Brian Jackson, made militant funk and soul that remains unmatched. It exploded any idea that art and politics don’t mix, and has been hugely influential.

Scott-Heron has become known as the godfather of rap not just because his spoken word over drumbeats prefigured the genre, but because he used the style to tell of ghetto life and urge resistance.

www.freedomoneworld.com/
www.facebook.com/freedomoneworld
www.twitter.com/freedomoneworld

Pre-order now from iTunes + HMV Digital
http://www.hmvdigital.com/artist/oneworld/freedom-for-palestine
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/preorder/freedom-for-palestine/id439588627

All proceeds go to UK Charity War on Want for projects in Palestine.

info@freedomoneworld.com | (+44) 020 7324 5055

Live at Babeville
Ani DiFranco
www.righteousbaberecords.com

In recent times, there’s been some conjecture over the quality of US singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco’s music.

The much acclaimed, fiercely political folk singer and poet appeared to some to have “mellowed” in topic and tone of her work after having a baby and getting married.

The singer’s latest DVD, Live at Babeville, puts those qualms to rest.

Februrary 14 was "The Day of Rage" against Bahrain's monarchy and dictatorship. As the government shut down radio broadcasters and stopped journalists from reporting on the situation, underground hip-hop artist Elreda wrote a song in dedication to the victims and the continuing protest that was not being broadcast to the western world.

Elreda says he was motivated by Bahrainian citizens overseas to stand up for what they believe in in his song "February 14th".

The song starts:
"Blood splashes Bahrain Labyaka ya Hussein up rise strength February 14th."

Swedish author Stieg Larsson is world famous as a result of his “Millennium series” trilogy of crime novels, all published since his death in 2004.

Less known is that Larsson was also a long-time activist and socialist, who worked as an editor for the anti-fascist Expo magazine. This history is sketched below by Hakan Blomqvist, editor of the Swedish revolutionary socialist paper Internationalen from 1979 to 1999.

It is reprinted from US socialist magazine Against the Current.

When Australian Football League player Nathan Lovett-Murray was growing up, his favourite record was “Black Boy” by Coloured Stone.

“Black boy,” goes the song, “black boy/The colour of your skin is your pride and joy/Black boy/Black boy/Your life is not destroyed.”

Lovett-Murray still marvels at its power.

“So many Indigenous people could relate to that song and just feel proud about being an Indigenous person when they heard it,” he tells Green Left Weekly.

Good politicians are few and far between, but British health secretary Andrew Lansley is among the worst.

In 2008, he was forced to apologise after saying recessions brought "good things" such as people being able to spend more time with their families.

In Britain’s parliamentary expenses scandal in 2009, he was accused of claiming for the renovation of a rural cottage, selling it, then “flipping” his second home designation to a London flat and claiming thousands of pounds for furniture. He said his claims were "within the rules".

Desert Pea Media
www.desertpeamedia.com.au
PI Boyz
www.smugglersoflight.com/AboriginalJustice.htm

Aboriginal man Mulrunji Doomadgee died in custody at Palm Island police station on November 19, 2004. His liver had been cleaved almost in two.

Nearly three years later, senior police sergeant Chris Hurley told Townsville Supreme Court he had come to terms with the fact that he caused the death.

But more than six years after it happened, no one has been convicted of Doomadgee's death.

I’ve never really bought the idea that 17-year-old Canadian-born pop star Justin Bieber is just some harmless, happy-go-lucky teen heart-throb. Anyone who saw the near-riot he inspired in Liverpool can attest to this.

His most recent comments about abortion in an interview published by Rolling Stone on February 16, however, crosses a whole new line.

“I really don’t believe in abortion,” Bieber told the music magazine. “It's like killing a baby?”

Sequences to freedom is a book of short poems written in February by Iranian poet Ali Abdolrezaei that has been translated into English by Abol Froushan.

Abdolrezaei, from Gilan province, is now a refugee living in London.

Abdolrezaei said: “I never thought that one day I would write purely political poetry, but the inhuman atrocity dealt by the Iranian regime nowadays is so beyond proportion that it is politics that is writing these poems.”

Below are two of the translated poems published in Sequences to Freedom.

* * *

Folk music legend Pete Seeger has come out in support of the growing Palestinian movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel and in support of justice for Palestinians and a route to peace in the Middle East.

Seeger, 92, took part in last November’s online virtual rally “With Earth and Each Other”, sponsored by the Arava Institute, an Israeli environmental organisation, and by the Friends of the Arava Institute.

A History of Now
Asian Dub Foundation
www.asiandubfoundation.com

The artwork for A History of Now, the new album from Asian Dub Foundation (ADF), is a set of iPhone apps.

But instead of Apple’s tame applications, the band of British-born Indian genre benders have invented their own parodies.

A typical one, named “Instigator”, features a burning bottle and the instruction: “Stuck for a weapon while protesting against government cuts? Let ‘Instigator’ turn your phone into an instant Molotov cocktail!”

Your Skirt’s Too Short — Sex, Power, Choice
By Emily Maguire
2010, The Text Publishing Company

“Does your boyfriend or brother spend a lot of money on skin and hair care products?”

“Do the majority of fathers you know spend most of their time at home washing, cleaning, cooking and taking care of their kids? Do you often hear mothers refer to looking after their own kids as ‘babysitting’?”

“Are you sick of hearing men go on about how hard it is to balance work and parenthood?”

Over the decades that have marked the tenure of Egypt's “President for Life” Hosni Mubarak, there has been one consistent nexus for anger, organisation and practical experience in the ancient art of street fighting: the country's soccer clubs.

During the current pro-democracy uprising, the most organised, militant fan clubs, also known as the “ultras”, have put those years of experience to ample use.

This went up on IS singer Macy Gray's Facebook page on January 17:

"I'm booked for 2 shows in Tel Aviv. I'm getting a lot of letters from activists urging/begging me to boycott by NOT performing in protest of Apartheid against the Palestinians. What the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinians is disgusting, but I wanna go. I gotta lotta fans there I don't want to cancel on and I don't know how my NOT going changes anything. What do you think? Stay or go?"

Based on Psalm 137

By the waterholes of Mother Country we slung down our yidakis, and cut our bodies and drugged our minds in grief, as we remembered the dreamtime.

And the settlers demanded from us a corroboree performance and a jail sentence, mutual obligation and a souvenir boomerang for the gift shop.

How could we dance and perform sacred traditions for their markets? We have become aliens and inmates, invisible in this eternal land.

iNTervention Intervention
Curated by Teena McCarthy & Brendan Penzer
The Vanishing Point gallery
565 King Street, Newtown, Sydney
January 13-30

“The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future....

“We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country....

This year marks the 30th anniversary of rock star John Lennon’s assassination. Lennon was also an anti-war activist and, in the most radical period of his life in the early 1970s, an unashamed socialist. (You can read an interview given by Lennon and his partner Yoko Ono to British revolutionary socialist magazine Red Mole in 1971 here.)

It should come as no surprise that Latin America, a region converted into a laboratory for ongoing experiments in social change, has increasingly become the topic of discussion and debate among the broader left.

Latin America has not only dealt blows to imperialism but also raised the banner of socialism on a global scale. It is of strategic importance for those fighting for a better world, especially at a time when capitalism is in systemic crisis.

United States Republican representative from Ohio John Boehner is feeling pretty full of himself nowadays. Little wonder. With the Republicans winning back in control of the House of Representatives in the November 2 elections, Boehner looks set to be the next Speaker.

And like any pompous career politician who fancies himself cock-of-the-walk, he seldom lets facts get in the way.

The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome
by ROLAND CHAMBERS
Faber & Faber, 2010,
$24.99
390 pages, (pb)

Arthur Ransome was a popular children's author in England who counted the offspring of A. A. Milne and J. R. R. Tolkien among his millions of devoted young readers.

Made in Dagenham
Directed by Nigel Cole
Starring Rosamund Pike, Bob Hoskins, Miranda Richardson
In cinemas nationally

Review by Jeff Sawtell

Given the advance publicity, I was looking forward to Made in Dagenham. It is based on the 1968 strike of women sewing machinists at Ford Motors, which was supposed to have inspired the 1970 Equal Pay Act.

Maya
M.I.A.
N.E.E.T. Recordings
www.neetrecordings.com
Big Day Out tour
January/February 2011
www.bigdayout.com

It created a buzz well before its release date. For months, every pop music outlet speculated on its content. It provoked fervent anticipation among fans, censorship from the internet, and derision from elitist establishment journalists.

When Sri Lankan-born Tamil musician M.I.A.’s Maya finally arrived in July, it predictably polarised critics.

US teenage pop star Justin Bieber released a book on October 12. First Step 2 Forever: My Story is supposed to be his autobiography.

The notion that a 16-year-old has been through enough turmoil to merit an autobiography is bewildering, but then, I suppose only something his ghost-writer had to worry about.

The book comes on the heels of Bieber releasing his own line of nail polish. Yes, nail polish. At least the marketing team behind “The Bieb” knows the target audience.