Listening Up
D.nok hopes that building an audience for community radio will make corporate stations like KMEL and WILD 94.9 listen up.
by Momo Chang
Colorlines
9.21.06- On a sunny spring day, Abdull Dominguez, aka "Panama," sits inside a black box recording studio at BUMP Records in Oakland, California. On his latest tracks recorded with his cousin, Rico Gilliam, Panama raps in Spanish, reflecting his identity as an Afro-Latino, while Rico raps in English. Together they’re "Los Rakas," and their sound is a fusion of dancehall, reggae and hip-hop.
Panama is 18 years old, and the recording studio is at McLymonds High School. He began writing music when he was 15, a year after he moved to the United States from his namesake country.
In the last five years, music production programs for young people have blossomed. In the Bay Area alone, there are more than 10 bona fide programs, and more seem to spring up each month. At some point in the last 10 years, youth organizers and advocates realized they could address three priorities at once: reach out to urban youth who often disengaged with school, bridge the digital divide and address the ongoing problems in corporate radio such as racism, misogyny and pro-militarism.
"These programs really saved a lot of kids’ lives," says Deangelo Lemmons, or "D.nok," 18, a member of Oakland-based hip-hop group the Faculty Boys. D.nok recently graduated from a continuation high school in Oakland. "Even if not all of them get famous, it’s helped them in some way."
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YouTube in Copyright Cross Hairs?
Reuters
New York 9.14.06- Universal Music Group, the world's biggest record company, is stepping up pressure against popular websites YouTube and MySpace, accusing them of infringing the copyrights of its artists' music videos.
Universal chief executive Doug Morris described video site YouTube and News Corp.'s social-networking site MySpace as "copyright infringers" during a Merrill Lynch investors' conference speech Tuesday that was closed to the press.
"The poster child for (user-generated media) sites are MySpace and YouTube," said Morris, according to a transcript obtained by Reuters. "We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars."
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Consumers Watch Your Backs: CEA: RIAA refuses to cooperate, carries out "thinly veiled attack" on fair use
by Ken Fisher
Ars Technica
8.10.06- Consumer Electronics Association President and CEO Gary Shapiro is frustrated with the music industry. While the consumer electronics industry works to find a middle ground between the interests of electronics manufacturers and rights holders, the RIAA has failed to participate. To make matters worse, despite their lack of participation, the RIAA is currently lobbying members of Congress to push through the controversial audio broadcast flag; its passage would trump the efforts of the Copy Protection Technical Working Group.
The RIAA is a late-comer to the "flag"-method of content control, which can be generically described as follows: mandate all broadcasters to use technology to embed mandated "flags" that are then "respected" by hardware designed under mandate to obey the mandatory behavior. That's a lot of mandates, but that's what the broadcast flag is all about: using the law to first re-define and then enforce a new copyright regime under the guise of digital rights management.
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Mo' Gutta Muzik
Living Proof
8.24.06- This disease seeps out of the crime-heavy, drug-laced urban decay of a passed-by area. It’s not coming from the Inner Harbor or Mt. Vernon. It cracks through the false charm of a city that’s been held under by New York, Philly, and D.C. It slings the dirt and grime of back alleys and boarded-up windows through the speakers, into the club, and onto the dance floor. This is Gutter Music.
Since the nineties, Gutter Music has spliced hip-hop, dance, Miami bass, and crunk with call-and-response, axed-up, sexed-up, drugged-up lyrics. The bass-heavy bangers bring the filth from the streets into the club with break-neck rhythms and ass shakin’ moves that leave pools of sweat all over the dance floor. It’s designed to get you fucked up off the seedy culture of a regional sound.
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Gas, Break, Dance, Crime
An Oakland neighborhood group hates on hyphy dancing
by Eric. A. Arnold
East Bay Express (Oakland, Ca.)
8.09.06- Bay Area hip-hop is back, thanks to the rise of the hyphy movement. So are misinformed critics who have taken issue with some of hyphy culture's more dubious aspects (see "Go Less Dumb," 4/26/06). These critics tend to be predictable in their choice of topics (sideshows, drug use, violence), yet make the mistake of ignoring or completely overlooking the positive aspects of hyphy, such as entrepreneurship and artistic creativity.
The latest such affront to youth culture comes from the Oakland Residents for Peaceful Neighborhoods, a group that recently posted on its Web site a scathing yet factually incorrect attack on East Oakland community center Youth Uprising. The unsigned article claimed that Measure Y — a voter-approved crime-prevention ordinance — "promotes sideshows" because the Oakland City Council gave $1.5 million of Measure Y money to Youth Uprising.
"You may not like hyphy, but you're paying for it," the article sneered, referring to a July 23
Los Angeles Times piece on the movement. It continued, "If you want to know more about hyphy, you can get rapper E-40's chart-topping release, My Ghetto Report Card"; "lurk at almost any late-night Oakland sideshow," or "go to Youth Uprising, a community center next to Castlemont High School, which ... helps teens hire out as dancers for music videos."
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