“Let us go on outdoing ourselves; a revolutionary man always transcends himself or otherwise he is not a revolutionary man, so we always do what we ask of ourselves or more than we know we can do.” –- Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

What We Want, What We Believe: The Black Panther Party Library (AK Press), taking its name from the two categories that Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale divided their ten-point program into when forming the Black Panther Party in 1967, is a four-disc set of short documentary …

I don’t normally comment on such things, but watching news coverage of the horrible scene in New Orleans got me thinking about loss. I pictured my house underwater and realized that I don’t own much of value.

Several years ago, my friend Greg Sundin gave me Mike Ladd’s Welcome to the Afterfuture (Ozone, 2000). I was instantly hooked. Ladd’s spaced-out beats and intelligent wordplay push the limits of hip-hop until they break into noisy splinters. Genre distinctions can’t hold the man. He’s been performing in every possible way since age thirteen, but his body of work reflects the very best that hip-hop can be. After digesting Afterfuture, I simply had to hear more.

Having grown up watching shows like Sanford & Son, Good Times, What’s Happening!!, Diff’rent Strokes, etc., I didn’t start to think hard about the typical representations of race on television until I heard Public Enemy’s “She Watch Channel Zero” (and their follow-up response aimed at movies, “Burn Hollywoood, Burn”).

Music transcends all boundaries. And where music fans are generally open for anything engaging, the music industry is constantly segregated by its own marketing terms. They draw lines, set up demographics, and distinguish target markets.
Caught somewhere in between these lines, dälek have been victims of this segregation since their inception. Their first record Negro, Necro, Nekros (1998) was on independent rock label Gern Blandsten Records (the folks who brought you the brilliant, indie avant-garde act Rye Coalition), but they do hip-hop. This put the record in a crack in the …

If ever there were a postmodern-day Renaissance man, he is Paul D. Miller. Painter, philosopher, social scientist, DJ, author, and producer (among others) are all hats that fit snugly on his head. He is probably best known as “DJ Spooky aka That Subliminal Kid,” but this is only one of many roles he has taken on and made a success of in a process he calls “social sculpture.” He’s also the only DJ I’ve ever seen cut up a Marshall McLuhan record, closing the loop in more ways than one.