In the early 00s, I was trying to pull together a lot of influences. HEADTUBE [.pdf] was my attempt to return to BMX zine-making while maintaining my other, newfound interests.
The original idea driving HEADTUBE was to unify the bicycle-riding attitude across styles. Cyclists, mountain bikers, fixed-gear heads, and BMX all have different styles and terrains, but there’s still a view they all share. That shared space was where HEADTUBE was going to live.
I started a website for it around the same time as this first issue, and I ran that pretty diligently for a few years, then I moved on to other things. I never made another print issue, so here is a .pdf of the only one.
Inspired by Brian Tunney and his zine Larry’s Donuts is Dead, I’ve been wanting to restage this photo from a year-book shoot in 1986. Though you can’t tell from the background, I went back to the same church parking lot where the original was taken and did the barhop again.
Tunney does this with famous BMX photos and spots from old magazines. Despite my impeccable fashion sense, this picture didn’t even make the yearbook!
I was in the tenth grade when Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way” came out. I remember hearing it and feeling like something truly unique was happening. Raw, raucous, and rocking. It brought together fans of both traditional rock n’ roll and rebellious hip-hop.
Recently, I pitched the song to a book series specifically about individual songs, but they didn’t agree on the impact or the import of it. Well, while I was factchecking my memory, I found out there’s already a whole book about it! There’s no doubt it was a special moment in music, a new node in a burgeoning network of sound.
Notebook cover I made from the sleeve of Run-DMC’s Raising Hell (1986).
Aerosmith’s original version of “Walk This Way,” from their 1975 record Toys in the Attic, starts with a few measures of just the beat. It’s just the kind of clean drum beat hip-hop DJs scour recordings to find. With two copies of the record, one can loop it back and forth, providing a seamless backbeat to rap over. Run-DMC’s DJ Jam Master Jay had already been using the record in this manner.
In 1986, Aerosmith was in shambles. Their 1985 reunion record Done With Mirrors had not met the expectations of their fans or their label, and their personal lives were in decline due to persisting drug problems. Starting with singer Steven Tyler, they would all enter rehab over the next couple of years. If not, they knew they were likely over as a band. After rehab and collaborating with Run-DMC on “Walk This Way,” Aerosmith followed the song with a string of multi-platinum albums and Top 40 hits, entering the most successful era of their careers and becoming one of the biggest rock bands of the 1990s. It was a miraculous turnaround.
Though they hated the idea at the time, Run-DMC’s version of “Walk This Way” is a testament to the ear of their producer Rick Rubin. His production style, which he’d already used on previous Run-DMC records, as well as records for T La Rock & Jazzy Jay, the Beastie Boys, and LL Cool J, was credited as “reduction” instead of production. He stripped their sound down to its basic elements: boom-bapping 808 drums, classic-rock guitar riffs, the shouted voices of Reverend Run Simmons and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, and the nimble cuts and scratches of Jam Master Jay.
As a nascent record label mogul and producer, Rubin was only getting started. The iconic sound he developed with early hits like “It’s Yours,” “Rock the Bells,” “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)” and “Walk This Way” keep him in demand to this day. He’s gone on to produce everyone from Public Enemy, Ghetto Boys, Sir Mix-a-Lot, and Kanye West to the Mars Volta, Metallica, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Lana Del Rey, and Adele, and he’s redone the reduced style of his early work on everything from Jay-Z’s double-platinum “99 Problems” (2003) to Eminem’s Grammy-nominated “Berzerk” (2013), even appearing in the videos for both songs.
Speaking of, the video for “Walk This Way” was as iconic as the song. It starts as a fight, with Aerosmith practicing loudly in one room, disrupting Run-DMC’s session next door. Run-DMC then turns up the volume on their equipment and launches into their version of “Walk This Way,” confusing the aged rockers. By the chorus, the wall is torn down (inviting more than a few interpretations), and the two groups are ripping through the song together. The video was even parodied in 1994 by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion on their song “Flavor” which features Beck in the practice space next door.
For better or worse, “Walk This Way” also sparked the further mixture of rap and riffs, giving birth to collaborations between rap groups and rock groups and a start to acts firmly on the fence in between. Public Enemy and Anthrax covered PE’s “Bring the Noise” in 1991. The two groups even toured together that year. I saw them at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in a chocolate-and-peanut-butter package that also included Young Black Teenagers and Primus. In 1993, the infamous Judgement Night soundtrack featured collaborations between Slayer and Ice-T, Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill, and Dinosaur Jr. and Del the Funky Homosapien, among many other embarrassing pairings. And, as if reading “Walk This Way” as a blueprint to success, acts like Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, and Rage Against the Machine also emerged in the 1990s.
“Walk This Way” was an unavoidable song and an undeniable hit, Run-DMC’s biggest, peaking at #4 on the Billboard chart. It was bigger even than Aerosmith’s original, which just broke the top ten. Run-DMC is one of the core groups of the first recorded era of rap music and hip-hop culture. They were successful and respected before and after this song, but they never saw heights like “Walk This Way.” The song was the nexus of several trajectories and the birth of a hybrid new life form that still stomps around today.
The process of writing is one of those things that eludes even those of us who do it every day. Sometimes sentences just pour out of you. Sometimes you go weeks with nothing. When I’m in the flow of the sentences, I’m always trying to figure out how to make them the best I can. When I’m in the nothing of the nothingness, I’m always trying to figure out ways to recalibrate my approach. Maybe if I do that part first instead… Maybe if I sneak up on it this way… Maybe if I have a snack…
Eating and writing sometimes feel inextricably linked. They are both done sitting at a table after all. There are also so many things done in the service of eating that aren’t eating and in the service of writing that aren’t writing. I’m thinking of recipes and cooking done before eating and the cleaning up done after; the planning and research done before writing and the editing done after.
I’m writing about writing here of course, but these ideas are applicable to other creative pursuits as well. So, with lunchtime in mind, here are three food-based tips for research and editing.
Making Waffles Out of Spaghetti
After the success of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (HarperCollins, 1992), the self-help relationship subgenre shelf saw many more man-woman binary metaphors. In one such book, Men Are Like Waffles, Women are Like Spaghetti (Harvest House, 2001), Bill and Pam Farrel argue that men compartmentalize all the things in their lives like the griddled grid-shaped breakfast food, that they think in boxes. And women think of everything as intertwined like so many wet noodles. It’s a ridiculous analogy, but one that I thought about for years.
One day in the library on campus, while tracking down yet another citation for whatever paper I was working on, it hit me: Writing is Like Waffles, Research is Like Spaghetti. When we’re putting together the theses, arguments, paragraphs, and sections of an article, a chapter or a book, we’re compartmentalizing the information into an easily digestible, grid-like structure. The research we do in the service of those waffles is like pulling apart noodles. It’s like we’re making waffles out of spaghetti!
It’s only an analogy, but one that has helped me make sense of some of the research process.
No Brown M&Ms
Arena-rock pioneers Van Halen infamously insisted on M&Ms with the brown ones picked out, as shown below on page 40 of their tour contract. Everyone I heard tell the story accused them of being diva rock stars because everyone knows the M&M colors all taste the same.
In his 1997 memoir, Crazy from the Heat (Hyperion), erstwhile frontman David Lee Roth explains the candy-coated demand:
Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.
It was a colossal production, any mistake pregnant with the potential of not only crippling the show but also destruction of property or injury to person. “So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he continues, “well, line-check the entire production… They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.” It was a test. A brown M&M was an indication that everything might not be up to the requirements of the contract.
If you see a small spelling, grammatical, or factual error in a piece of writing, it makes you wonder if the piece has been edited, copyedited, or even looked over one more time before it reached you. That’s a brown M&M. It casts doubt over the whole thing. As a writer, you want to make sure you remove all of those.
Table Etiquette
Okay, I couldn’t come up with a third food-based piece of advice, but this one is close: Do a table read. One of the most satisfying things about writing scripts is hearing them read aloud by a cast. There’s also nothing more helpful in finding out what’s not working on the page. Awkward dialog, weird phrasings, and unnatural rhythms will all be evident in a table read.
For example, if you write “fill wind” when you mean to write “will find,” you might not see it on the page, and your spell-checker won’t catch it. If you read it out loud, you have a much better chance of catching brown M&Ms like that. You can do this with any kind of writing. Just read it out loud. All kinds of things you won’t catch editing on the screen or page will pop out when read aloud. I can’t recommend this enough.
In 1997 I put out a zine called wow&flutter [.pdf]. It was an attempt to merge two of my main musical interests at the time, turntablism and experimental noise. I interviewed DJ QBert, DJ Spooky, John Duncan, and Daniel Menche, and reviewed records from the rapidly expanding releases of ambient, noise, and turntable artists. I lived in Seattle at the time, and there was so much going on in all of these areas. There were regular live events and several specialty stores, and I tried to bring them all together under the banner of sound experimentation.
wow&flutter was intended as part of a series, but the second issue, attack&decay, featuring interviews with Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto and Warren Defever of His Name is Alive, among others, never made it to press. I still love the idea of noise and hip-hop coming together, and there are others who’ve merged them in the meantime better than I could have imagined (e.g., dälek, clipping., Ho99o9, Death Grips, Cloaks, Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin, et al.)
On October 11, 2022, I read the Prologue of my story “Hope for Boats” to the Rotary Club of Elba, Alabama, on which the fictional town in the story is loosely based. You can read the excerpt along with me below.
The town of Elbo was built in a crook of the Pea River. If you think that’s where it got its name, you’d be one of the many that are misinformed about this town’s origins. One of the area’s early residents was reading Herodotus’ Histories, in which he describes an island “ten furlongs by ten furlongs, built of ash and earth.” Elbo is named after this island as it was drawn from a hat before any of the other suggestions.
And if you have a joke about the Pea River, save it. From Linda Blair to urinal cakes, we’ve heard them all.
The water flowing by in that crook in the Pea River sometimes tries to straighten out, flooding the town of Elbo, but not before the area around its original downtown intersection becomes an island. The citizens have built bridges and walls, but when those two sides wish to meet, there’s no stopping them.
Two warring families settled in this area before there was a town. As there often are, a young son and a young daughter from each just had to be together in spite of their families’ differences. That young love, the fires of which have long since ceased to burn, belonged to Fannie Demer and Thomas James Hickok. Theirs was a short courtship, but a long engagement. As Thomas James was fond of saying, “I can put a ring on her finger, but I can’t make her an honest woman.” More than anyone, they are responsible for establishing what we now know as Elbo, Alabama.
Have you ever watched a bird build its nest? They gather pieces of limbs, leaves, detritus, debris, dirt, mud, and plastic—piles of the past culled for a cradle for the future. Birds put all of their eggs in one makeshift basket.
That was him.
Have you ever watched a spider weave its web? They’re as meticulous as they are calculating. Once they pick the right spot between the limbs of trees or fence posts or poles, they spend as much time as it takes building their lattice trap. Spiders then hang in the middle, waiting. The very picture of patience.
That was her.
Today is his funeral.
Today there is a parade in her honor.
Either event would halt the town for the day. Both will bury it. The lines are drawn. Sides must be chosen. Maybe it won’t flood again.
Many thanks to Courtney Pelham for setting this up, the Rotary Club for their time and interest, Malarkey Book for publishing this Prologue, and Cindy Bayer for filming.
Released in 1979, Douglas Hofstadter’s first book, the Pulitzer-Prize winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, is an expansive volume that explores how living things come to be from nonliving things. It’s about self-reference and emergence and creation and lots of other things. It’s well worth checking out.
For the cover of his heady tome, Hofstadter carved two wood-block objects such that their shadows would cast the book’s initials when lit against a flat backdrop. He went the extra step of working in the initials for the subtitle as well.
Earlier this year, I was inspired to emulate Hofstadter’s sculpture. I found a way to put the initials for my media-theory book-in-progress, The Medium Picture—TMP—into a similar configuration. This is one of my early sketches.
The sketches I did at least made the thing appear possible, so I started exploring physical options. After trying different materials and digging around craft stores, I finally found some letters that were about the right shape and would save me a lot of time toward the final object.
I was fortunate to find letters with similar proportions to the ones I’d been drawing. The first thing was to cut the M to make the P the top of the T. Like so:
After some papier-mâché tweaking, calk to round the leg of the M, and a coat of white paint, the object was ready to test.
Now that it physically existed, I knew the real test would be hanging it, lighting it, and capturing its shadows correctly. I built a contraption for just that out of things found around my parents’ house.
It was as sketchy as it looks. The object was suspended with two pieces of fishing line, and I had to turn off the air conditioning to get the thing to hang still for the picture. I found some pieces of foamcore in my sister’s old closet for the backdrop and gathered up tiny flashlights from all over the house.
With the LED flashlights propped and taped in place, this is the final set-up.
And this is the final shot. It’s not quite as intricate or as elegant as Hofstadter’s, but I’m pretty stoked on it. I think it will make a striking cover image and a fitting tribute to his work.
I belabored this process here because about half the people who see the final image ask me what software I used to make it. I know this could’ve been done digitally in any 3-D imaging suite, but I wanted to make it for real, just as Douglas Hofstadter had done.
I am stoked to announce that my new book, Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future, is now available for preorder! Dead Precedents uses the concerns and conceits of cyberpunk to thoughtfully remap hip-hop’s spread from around the way to around the world. Its central argument is that the cultural practices of hip-hop culture are the blueprint to the 21st century, and that an understanding of its appropriation of language and technology is an understanding of the now. This book is about is the many ways that the foundations of hip-hop appropriation—allusions and creative language use, as well as technology and sampling—inform the new millennium.
Here’s the cover:
Here are some nice words about it:
“Hip-hop has been around for well over forty years now, and in many ways, it has been absorbed into mainstream culture. Roy Christopher argues, however, that its radical practices still contain untapped possibilities. Dead Precedents shows how this cultural movement opens new hope for the future by changing our understanding of the past.” — Steven Shaviro, author of Discognition
“It’s exciting to be quoted so close to the beginning of a book with so much energy and passion in it… a lively screed.”
— Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgren
“This book dives into the essential nature of hip-hop re-invention and cyberpunk’s relationship to our web2.0 construct. Roy extracts detail after detail on these two topics and gracefully weaves together a clear and fresh perspective of these genres and their impact on where we are today. Such a refreshing nonstop read!”
— M. Sayyid, Antipop Consortium
“An intellectual hornet’s nest, buzzing with ideas. The canon of hip-hop crit welcomes a bold new entry, calculated to blow the doors off the usual moribund academic fare. Theory finds its own uses for things.” — Mark Dery, author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts
Dead Precedents comes out March 19, 2019 on Repeater Books.
My essay, “The Memes is Dead, Long Live the Meme,” argues that Dawkinsian memes have been supplanted by internet memes and are therefore dead. Here’s an excerpt:
If memes are indeed analogous to genes, then the real power of memes is that they add up to something. I’m no biologist, but genes are bits of code that become chromosomes, and chromosomes make up DNA, which then becomes organisms. Plants, animals, viruses, and all life that we know about is built from them.24 “The meme has done its work by assembling massive social systems, the new rulers of this earth,” writes Howard Bloom. “Together, the meme and the human superorganism have become the universe’s latest device for creating fresh forms of order.”
Perhaps that was true two decades ago, when Bloom wrote that, or three decades ago when Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene, but the biases and affordances of memes’ attendant infrastructure has changed dramatically since. After all, memes have to replicate, and in order to replicate, they have to move from one mind to another via some conduit. This could be the oral culture of yore, but it’s more and more likely to be technologically enabled. Broadcast media supports one kind of memetic propagation. The internet, however, supports quite another.
Once a member of the brain-forward UK crew New Flesh for Old, Juice Aleem has long since stepped out on his own. Griff Rollefson writes in his book Flip the Script that on Juice’s first solo record, Jerusalaam Come (Big Dada, 2009), Aleem “recuperates universalism by locating and privileging a pre-Enlightenment performative linguistics” (p. 196). In other words, he uses his lyrics to go back in time in order to envision a better future. His latest record, Voodu StarChild (Gamma Proforma, 2017), continues his quest to create not just better visions of the future but also better futures for real.
I first met Juice when on the Infesticons tour in the UK in 2001, I think. We didn’t have enough money to bring over the whole band so Juice filled in. Rob Sonic and I were so drunk every show that Juice did all the rapping. Mostly freestyle, I think. Since then, Juice has been a consummate collaborator and best friend. I know few emcees personally who are as introspective thoughtful and as studious as Juice. This man has volumes of knowledge at his disposal and dispenses them with a gentlemanly generosity… Juice will blow your mind on stage as a performer and off stage as a friend. Every time. Without fail.
I’ve been in touch Juice for the past few years, and I concur with Mike Ladd: He has always been genuine, generous, and supportive. Juice’s old crew, New Flesh, did some tracks and shows with the god Rammellzee back in the early 0s, so I had to ask him a bit about that as well.
Roy Christopher:Your first solo record, Jerusalaam Come, goes back to a precolonial time in order to imagine a better future. Is there an underlying aim with Voodu StarChild? If so, what’s the story?
Juice Aleem: Yeah, there are several themes and aims within Voodu StarChild. A lot of it is about people being aware of the magic inside themselves and understanding how that is under attack. How that hidden Self is dark, female energy, and it’s questioned at every moment. Our original selves are out of equilibrium in regard the male and female balance, and this album is a play on that. It’s not only a critique, but it has a few answers within on how I address certain parts of this for myself and those around me in regard to things like diet, family, love, and when to go to war.
For years we have been taught that Voodu is a bad thing, when it is our own personal rituals and practices that will do a better job of saving us than the politicians and the religious have done so far. There is nothing to fear in the dark.
N_AvAbu9er0
RC:In your book Afrofutures, you talk about hackers and whistleblowers. What do you see as the connections between them and hip-hop?
JA: To me there are many connections between them all. The hacker is the most obvious though with the wiretap on all the juicy insides of whatever tech is already out there. Using everything from drum pads and samplers to magpie the last few centuries of speeches, music, and commercials and turn them upside-in for the betterment of the practitioner and listener. Hip-hop is hacking.
The whistleblower is also well seen in hip-hop form, from P.E. telling us “Don’t Believe the Hype” to Kanye telling us “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” The moments are loads with little between. Hip-hop traditionally has been one of the biggest whistleblowers out there till recent years. I’m sure the new gen can get there too in between the adverts for big Pharma opiates.
RC:You’ve been organizing and hosting festivals and workshops and such. Tell me about those.
JA: Workshops have been a thing on and off since Lord Redeem started the Ghetto Grammar sessions back in the mid-90s. I helped out, then he and myself took it London and UK wide. Since then I’ve worked and tutored in many places including schools, youth centres, Uni’s, and even a few prisons. Even got caught up doing work in France in a prison outside of Paris.
It’s not sumthing I do everyday, but I like to bring it back now and then for certain projects such as my lyric-writing workshop as part of this year’s AfroFlux events within the B-SIDE Hip-Hop Festival here in Birmingham, UK. B-SIDE has been running three years now, and this year had around 10,000 visitors over the weekend in May.
I’m one of the core artistic directors of B-SIDE and the main person behind AfroFlux: It’s a concept where we look to celebrate the Black and brown thinkers and makers who don’t usually get the accolades while also applying hands on practical applications of cultural markers such as Afrofuturism. We have had a few stand-alone events and plan to expand on that with our partners in other parts of the globe.
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RC:You and I were talking before about Rammellzee. Did his work influence your own?
JA: In a way, but similar to other’s in his kind of cultural echelon, you don’t always realise till looking back, and also seeing that part of the reason you like them and their art so much is due to the parts of self that have a resonance within the artist you look at. Ramm is a perfect mirror for the things you’d never think would be reflected and magnified. There are things I had thought before I ever knew of Ramm, and to see a person not only having a knowledge of things but living them to the full is his real influence on me. Not just on my art but the living of it, being all aspects of my thoughts and creations.
— New Flesh Plus One: The Rammellzee as Crux (the Monk)
RC:You recorded a song with him with your old crew New Flesh for Old. What can you tell me about that session?
JA: We did a few songs, two of which made it to the Understanding album. They were a little out there, ‘cause those were the days of still recording songs in the same studio with people actually being there. So, having these songs come from Ramm rambling down the phone at all hours and us making sense of it was a real new thing. Then he sent tapes over to Part 2, and we edited the pieces we liked best. There was intended to be a whole series of stories from his Cosmic opera. “Mack Facts” was cool ‘cause we had a theme of this whole future arena style thing with us being the gladiators and Ramm as the announcer. Think of an intense episode of that Gwar, Mad Max show starring Sonny Chiba and Sho Kosugi as Nuba warriors on Plutonia. Speaking with him and listening to him so much on those tapes was kinda trippy, and how he’d take any little idea and run with it creating a session’s worth of vocals. This wasn’t your average 16 bars, but reams and reams of classic adventure rasped in an intense style that fully drew you in. We still have a few bits and pieces from those sessions.
RC: What’s coming up?
As per usual there are a lot of things happening. My three main things I’m gearing up for right now are a new festival in Birmingham by the name of High Vis Festival. It’s a bunch of art loving heads such as myself and graffiti writers like Mose, Panda, and Wingy who have decided to put on a festival highlighting comics, Street Art, Graffiti, Zine culture, and other visual movements with a strong ethic in serious Street Culture.
A couple of gigs with the Exile All Stars, which is myself, Mike Ladd and TIE. We have all been friends for a while and have promised to take new music and perform it. This is the promise.
The number three is from even longer ago, and it’s all about new music from Shadowless. We took the passing of one our brothers by the name of Defisis to cement the call for new tunes. Watch this space.
RC: Is there anything else you’d like to throw in?
