http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heOZSUjejoM
The brother NYOIL spitting the truth.
Support this and support your people.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Monday, December 25, 2006
G.O.A.T.!...................James Brown : R.I.P 1933-2006: SAY IT LOUD, I'M BLACK AND I'M PROUD!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKCsUWx-QoA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__eOCQrxnDM
Funk's Founding Father
Born in utter poverty, James Brown became the ultimate self-made man, whose work ethic was topped only by his rhythmic innovations and musical genius
By GERRI HIRSHEY
"A colored is a very frightened-to-death Afro-American. A Negro is one that makes it in the system, and he wants to be white. A nigger, he's loud and boisterous, wants to be seen. Nobody likes a nigger. A black man has pride. He wants to build, he wants to make his race mean something. Wants to have a culture and art forms. And he's not prejudiced. I am a black American man. Now you go ahead and print it." - James Brown, 1982
On Christmas morning, James Brown breathed his last in an Atlanta hospital. For a man whose trademark soul scream -- black, American and proud -- upended a half century of popular music, the end was uncharacteristically quiet. Congestive heart failure and pneumonia conspired to still the self-proclaimed (and undisputed) Hardest Working Man in Show Business. A week earlier, he had been especially reflective when speaking to those close to him, almost as if he were taking stock. And when on December 24th, his worried dentist, suspecting pneumonia, sent him to Emory Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, JB -- a man with incredible tolerance for pain and little patience for doctors -- did not argue. In recent years, he had battled prostate cancer to remission. He tussled daily with diabetes. His legs, scarred by decades of dropping to his knees onstage, pained him greatly. At seventy-three, though he had gigs lined up through August 2007 on his Seven Decades of Funk Tour, it seems James Brown was ready.
"I do think he knew he was going, yes." This from his unofficial son, protege, spiritual adviser and longtime aide-de-camp, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who was calling the day after Christmas from Atlanta, where he had just accompanied three of James Brown's children to view the body. He said that Charles Bobbit, Brown's personal manager of forty years, had been with him in the hospital when, at 1:30 a.m., he complained of a raging fire in his chest. The boss told Bobbit quite calmly that he would be leaving that night. "Three long sighs," reports Sharpton, "he lay back on the pillow and was gone."
Resuscitation was attempted, to no avail. The deeply Christian Mr. Brown would argue anytime, with anyone -- except the Almighty. His stage exits of legend -- the famous triple-collapse, sequined-cape resurrections -- belied a country boy's deeper conviction: "Mortality ain't no big deal," he had assured me more than once. Mr. Bobbit covered the body with a hospital blanket.
James Brown leaves a cultural wake as wide as his dear friend Elvis did. It took three services and as many wardrobe changes to send him to Jesus. The Augusta, Georgia, public funeral, broadcast live on CNN from the recently renamed James Brown Arena, took the form of a soul revue: tremulous thanks from Michael Jackson and dance moves by MC Hammer, along with a cape for the open casket. His singular life, begun in unspeakable Jim Crow-era poverty, careened through phases of great fame, wealth, disgrace and redemption. He saw it this way: "My story is a Horatio Alger story. It's an American story, it's the kind that America can be proud of, but yet if you tell it in detail, if you tell all the things I fought to make it, it's like the Satchel Paige story."
Spike Lee will direct the biopic, slated to begin shooting next year. But can any of us hope to get it right? "He was a very secretive man," acknowledges Sharpton. "The closer you were to him, the less he told you."
knew the Godfather of Soul for over two decades, long enough for him to insist I call him James and well enough to understand that he preferred the hard-won honorific Mr. Brown. The first time I met him on his home turf in Augusta, he drew a line with his shoe in the red dirt outside his office and challenged, "Unless you do puzzles, you cannot hope to understand James Brown."
You would need a bloodhound -- or a hand-held GPS -- to find the precise spot where James Joseph Brown Jr. entered the world on May 3rd, 1933. His father, Joe Brown, told me that it was a while before he could leave work in the turpentine camps and walk out of the piney woods where his wife Susan Brown gave birth to their only child in a shack where "the windas never seen a glass," in Barnwell, South Carolina, to register the blessed event. Joe was twenty, with fewer prospects than a box turtle on a four-lane highway. Having begun his working life at age eleven, struggling to control a four-mule team grading South Carolina roads, he went where the work was: farming, tapping sticky rivers of pine resin. It barely kept them eating, and offered no nourishment for a family life.
Pain was a JB staple from his earliest memory. In conversation and in song, he waxed from his earliest memory about its effects. Peer into his childhood and you hear its conflicted echoes in "I'll Go Crazy": "If you leave me, I'll go crazy," begs the forsaken singer. Then the superbad independent punches back: "You gotta live -- for yourself, for yourself and nobody else!"
"I come up hard," is the way he put it. More than fifty years after he found himself hungry and all but abandoned in the woods at age four, he remembered the worst of times. Susan Brown left. Though he would never discuss her early exit, he recalled, "When my mother and my father broke up, my father had met people who were going to take care of James." They didn't; when Joe found him playing in the dirt hungry and alone one night and James admitted it happened often, he walked the child into town for good. "Eleven miles!" the Godfather recalled, leaping to his feet to mime the woozy feeling of walking in his sleep, waking only when the grassy edge of the road made him correct his course. He couldn't walk the next day, and Joe soaked his swollen legs in milk.
In the seventh grade, his teacher, Miss Garvin, nicknamed him Robin Hood. It was an open secret that he stole pants and shoes to clothe his more desperate classmates. One day, nearly forty years after he had rooted for spoiled canned goods on a warehouse loading dock, James parked his shag-carpeted Dodge van at the abandoned site to show it to me. His son Larry was along, and he looked stricken at the rusted oil drums. "Daddy, you ate garbage?"
As the young James was made to understand it, there was no such thing as petty crime if committed by a black teen in postwar Georgia. So in 1949, an evening's misadventure breaking into cars conferred a prison sentence for almost as many years as he had been alive. He was shipped to a hot, murderously noisy rural facility, where his fellow inmates called him Music Box. Redemption came with the gospel quartet he formed there. "We sang like angels," he said. "We sang at other prisons. We were just kids and these big tough cats -- even the guards sometimes -- they would cry. We cried when we sang, it was so pretty."
It was sweet enough for early release after three and a half years. He joined the Avons, a group led by local singer Bobby Byrd, and they soon became the Flames. Drummer-harmonizer Brown shot to frontman on the strength of his pleading vocals.
The Famous Flames' 1956 debut single, the raw-as-chicken-guts "Please Please Please," stunned Syd Nathan, owner of the group's first label, Cincinnati-based King Records, by selling a million copies. Nathan hated the thing, two minutes and forty-three seconds of one word, tortured, panted and wailed.
Nathan and Brown often disagreed, but the artist insisted he had no regrets. "Mr. Nathan was the first one willing to take a chance on me," JB recalled. "We had differences. Mr. Nathan never did believe I could play keyboards. Had it in my contract I couldn't play and sing on the same record. And he was dead wrong on that." But early on, the country boy understood he needed Nathan's shrewd business tactics: "I knew how to pick up change when people threw it at my feet. I knew what to charge for a shoeshine. But what do you ask for a song? What's a one-nighter worth?"
Though for a while an appellate court sided with Nathan in forbidding Brown to sing and play on the same record, the ambitious Mr. Brown kept stubbornly, successfully pushing his rhythmic agenda by adopting Nathan's business credo: "You charge! If you run backwards, you get shot in the ass." JB tore up the R&B charts with a still-unmatched 114 single-artist hits. Six of his seven singles to hit Billboard's Top Ten were released between 1965 and 1968. It was never a cakewalk. Though "Please" hit the same year that Elvis howled "Hound Dog," it would be nine years before Brown breached the crossover barrier with "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag." And -- perhaps a measure of his uncompromising and exacting craft -- James Brown died without ever having had a Number One record on the pop charts.
t was 1963's Live at the Apollo -- recorded in Harlem's shrine of soul against his record company's wishes and at his own expense -- that proved career-making. Busting out of the chitlin circuit to a national stage, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business was saleable enough to free himself from any outdated R&B orthodoxies that Nathan might insist on. Believing that "nobody can tell James Brown how to be James Brown," he bulled past Nathan, who told him that no one would want to buy an album full of already released songs. He bet $5,700 of his own money on his hunch that most of black and white teen America might prefer an eleven-minute, tease-and-please version of "Lost Someone" slathered with lubricious audience shrieks and swoon, to tepid Top Forty. Released in January 1963, it spent sixty-six weeks on the charts. Black radio stations played the sides like singles; white fraternity houses wore out multiple copies in quad bacchanals. And from then on, the lines around the Apollo wound for blocks when the self-ordained Minister of Super Heavy Funk was in town....
...Thus, it is impossible to overstate James Brown's musical legacy. For nearly fifty-five years, he made the global soundtrack pop, crackle and ooze, from Astoria to Zaire, live from the bandstand, howling from tinny dashboard radios, still calling stubbornly, slyly from the sampled rhythm tracks of latter-day rappers. But what should never be lost in the translation to postmodern funk is the galvanizing live aspect of James Brown's theatrical, testifying soul: The man could dance. In the Sixties, a decade full of careers that caught fire in live moments -- from Dylan turning electric at Newport to Hendrix at Woodstock -- JB proved it all night, every night. You had to see him to believe him !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__eOCQrxnDM
Funk's Founding Father
Born in utter poverty, James Brown became the ultimate self-made man, whose work ethic was topped only by his rhythmic innovations and musical genius
By GERRI HIRSHEY
"A colored is a very frightened-to-death Afro-American. A Negro is one that makes it in the system, and he wants to be white. A nigger, he's loud and boisterous, wants to be seen. Nobody likes a nigger. A black man has pride. He wants to build, he wants to make his race mean something. Wants to have a culture and art forms. And he's not prejudiced. I am a black American man. Now you go ahead and print it." - James Brown, 1982
On Christmas morning, James Brown breathed his last in an Atlanta hospital. For a man whose trademark soul scream -- black, American and proud -- upended a half century of popular music, the end was uncharacteristically quiet. Congestive heart failure and pneumonia conspired to still the self-proclaimed (and undisputed) Hardest Working Man in Show Business. A week earlier, he had been especially reflective when speaking to those close to him, almost as if he were taking stock. And when on December 24th, his worried dentist, suspecting pneumonia, sent him to Emory Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, JB -- a man with incredible tolerance for pain and little patience for doctors -- did not argue. In recent years, he had battled prostate cancer to remission. He tussled daily with diabetes. His legs, scarred by decades of dropping to his knees onstage, pained him greatly. At seventy-three, though he had gigs lined up through August 2007 on his Seven Decades of Funk Tour, it seems James Brown was ready.
"I do think he knew he was going, yes." This from his unofficial son, protege, spiritual adviser and longtime aide-de-camp, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who was calling the day after Christmas from Atlanta, where he had just accompanied three of James Brown's children to view the body. He said that Charles Bobbit, Brown's personal manager of forty years, had been with him in the hospital when, at 1:30 a.m., he complained of a raging fire in his chest. The boss told Bobbit quite calmly that he would be leaving that night. "Three long sighs," reports Sharpton, "he lay back on the pillow and was gone."
Resuscitation was attempted, to no avail. The deeply Christian Mr. Brown would argue anytime, with anyone -- except the Almighty. His stage exits of legend -- the famous triple-collapse, sequined-cape resurrections -- belied a country boy's deeper conviction: "Mortality ain't no big deal," he had assured me more than once. Mr. Bobbit covered the body with a hospital blanket.
James Brown leaves a cultural wake as wide as his dear friend Elvis did. It took three services and as many wardrobe changes to send him to Jesus. The Augusta, Georgia, public funeral, broadcast live on CNN from the recently renamed James Brown Arena, took the form of a soul revue: tremulous thanks from Michael Jackson and dance moves by MC Hammer, along with a cape for the open casket. His singular life, begun in unspeakable Jim Crow-era poverty, careened through phases of great fame, wealth, disgrace and redemption. He saw it this way: "My story is a Horatio Alger story. It's an American story, it's the kind that America can be proud of, but yet if you tell it in detail, if you tell all the things I fought to make it, it's like the Satchel Paige story."
Spike Lee will direct the biopic, slated to begin shooting next year. But can any of us hope to get it right? "He was a very secretive man," acknowledges Sharpton. "The closer you were to him, the less he told you."
knew the Godfather of Soul for over two decades, long enough for him to insist I call him James and well enough to understand that he preferred the hard-won honorific Mr. Brown. The first time I met him on his home turf in Augusta, he drew a line with his shoe in the red dirt outside his office and challenged, "Unless you do puzzles, you cannot hope to understand James Brown."
You would need a bloodhound -- or a hand-held GPS -- to find the precise spot where James Joseph Brown Jr. entered the world on May 3rd, 1933. His father, Joe Brown, told me that it was a while before he could leave work in the turpentine camps and walk out of the piney woods where his wife Susan Brown gave birth to their only child in a shack where "the windas never seen a glass," in Barnwell, South Carolina, to register the blessed event. Joe was twenty, with fewer prospects than a box turtle on a four-lane highway. Having begun his working life at age eleven, struggling to control a four-mule team grading South Carolina roads, he went where the work was: farming, tapping sticky rivers of pine resin. It barely kept them eating, and offered no nourishment for a family life.
Pain was a JB staple from his earliest memory. In conversation and in song, he waxed from his earliest memory about its effects. Peer into his childhood and you hear its conflicted echoes in "I'll Go Crazy": "If you leave me, I'll go crazy," begs the forsaken singer. Then the superbad independent punches back: "You gotta live -- for yourself, for yourself and nobody else!"
"I come up hard," is the way he put it. More than fifty years after he found himself hungry and all but abandoned in the woods at age four, he remembered the worst of times. Susan Brown left. Though he would never discuss her early exit, he recalled, "When my mother and my father broke up, my father had met people who were going to take care of James." They didn't; when Joe found him playing in the dirt hungry and alone one night and James admitted it happened often, he walked the child into town for good. "Eleven miles!" the Godfather recalled, leaping to his feet to mime the woozy feeling of walking in his sleep, waking only when the grassy edge of the road made him correct his course. He couldn't walk the next day, and Joe soaked his swollen legs in milk.
In the seventh grade, his teacher, Miss Garvin, nicknamed him Robin Hood. It was an open secret that he stole pants and shoes to clothe his more desperate classmates. One day, nearly forty years after he had rooted for spoiled canned goods on a warehouse loading dock, James parked his shag-carpeted Dodge van at the abandoned site to show it to me. His son Larry was along, and he looked stricken at the rusted oil drums. "Daddy, you ate garbage?"
As the young James was made to understand it, there was no such thing as petty crime if committed by a black teen in postwar Georgia. So in 1949, an evening's misadventure breaking into cars conferred a prison sentence for almost as many years as he had been alive. He was shipped to a hot, murderously noisy rural facility, where his fellow inmates called him Music Box. Redemption came with the gospel quartet he formed there. "We sang like angels," he said. "We sang at other prisons. We were just kids and these big tough cats -- even the guards sometimes -- they would cry. We cried when we sang, it was so pretty."
It was sweet enough for early release after three and a half years. He joined the Avons, a group led by local singer Bobby Byrd, and they soon became the Flames. Drummer-harmonizer Brown shot to frontman on the strength of his pleading vocals.
The Famous Flames' 1956 debut single, the raw-as-chicken-guts "Please Please Please," stunned Syd Nathan, owner of the group's first label, Cincinnati-based King Records, by selling a million copies. Nathan hated the thing, two minutes and forty-three seconds of one word, tortured, panted and wailed.
Nathan and Brown often disagreed, but the artist insisted he had no regrets. "Mr. Nathan was the first one willing to take a chance on me," JB recalled. "We had differences. Mr. Nathan never did believe I could play keyboards. Had it in my contract I couldn't play and sing on the same record. And he was dead wrong on that." But early on, the country boy understood he needed Nathan's shrewd business tactics: "I knew how to pick up change when people threw it at my feet. I knew what to charge for a shoeshine. But what do you ask for a song? What's a one-nighter worth?"
Though for a while an appellate court sided with Nathan in forbidding Brown to sing and play on the same record, the ambitious Mr. Brown kept stubbornly, successfully pushing his rhythmic agenda by adopting Nathan's business credo: "You charge! If you run backwards, you get shot in the ass." JB tore up the R&B charts with a still-unmatched 114 single-artist hits. Six of his seven singles to hit Billboard's Top Ten were released between 1965 and 1968. It was never a cakewalk. Though "Please" hit the same year that Elvis howled "Hound Dog," it would be nine years before Brown breached the crossover barrier with "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag." And -- perhaps a measure of his uncompromising and exacting craft -- James Brown died without ever having had a Number One record on the pop charts.
t was 1963's Live at the Apollo -- recorded in Harlem's shrine of soul against his record company's wishes and at his own expense -- that proved career-making. Busting out of the chitlin circuit to a national stage, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business was saleable enough to free himself from any outdated R&B orthodoxies that Nathan might insist on. Believing that "nobody can tell James Brown how to be James Brown," he bulled past Nathan, who told him that no one would want to buy an album full of already released songs. He bet $5,700 of his own money on his hunch that most of black and white teen America might prefer an eleven-minute, tease-and-please version of "Lost Someone" slathered with lubricious audience shrieks and swoon, to tepid Top Forty. Released in January 1963, it spent sixty-six weeks on the charts. Black radio stations played the sides like singles; white fraternity houses wore out multiple copies in quad bacchanals. And from then on, the lines around the Apollo wound for blocks when the self-ordained Minister of Super Heavy Funk was in town....
...Thus, it is impossible to overstate James Brown's musical legacy. For nearly fifty-five years, he made the global soundtrack pop, crackle and ooze, from Astoria to Zaire, live from the bandstand, howling from tinny dashboard radios, still calling stubbornly, slyly from the sampled rhythm tracks of latter-day rappers. But what should never be lost in the translation to postmodern funk is the galvanizing live aspect of James Brown's theatrical, testifying soul: The man could dance. In the Sixties, a decade full of careers that caught fire in live moments -- from Dylan turning electric at Newport to Hendrix at Woodstock -- JB proved it all night, every night. You had to see him to believe him !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Fela Kuti - Music Is The Weapon - Pt.1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW1-8GESFqg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB7jUlS4mNg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB7jUlS4mNg
Fela Kuti - Music Is The Weapon - Pt.2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozGnw9Q261A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URRtk4OQCY4
Fela Kuti was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria to a middle-class family. His mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was a feminist active in the anti-colonial movement and his father, Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, was the first president of the Nigerian Union Of Teachers.
Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti and Olikoye Ransome-Kuti are his brothers and were both well known in Nigeria.
He relocated to London in 1958 with the intention of studying medicine, but he decided to study music instead at the Trinity College of Music. While there, he formed the band Koola Lobitos, playing a style of music Fela called Afrobeat. The style was a fusion of American jazz with West African highlife. In 1961 Fela married his first wife, Remilekun (Remi) Taylor, with whom he would have three children (Femi, Yeni and Sola). In 1963 Fela moved back to Nigeria, re-formed Koola Lobitos and trained as a radio producer for Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1969 Fela took the band to the United States. While there, Fela discovered the black power movement through Sandra Izsadore--a friend of the Black Panther Party--which would heavily influence his music and political views and renamed the band "Nigeria 70". Soon, the Immigration and Naturalization Service were tipped off by a promoter that Fela and his band were in the US without work permits. The band then performed a quick recording session in Los Angeles, which would later be released as "The '69 Los Angeles Sessions".
Fela and his band, renamed "Africa '70" returned to Nigeria. He then formed the Kalakuta Republic, a commune, a recording studio and a home for many connected to the band which he later declared independent from the Nigerian state. Fela set up a nightclub in the Empire Hotel, named the Afro-Spot and then the Shrine, where he performed regularly. Fela also changed his middle name to "Anikulapo" (meaning "he who carries death in his pouch"), stating that his original middle name of Ransome was a slave name. The recordings continued, and the music became more politically motivated. Fela's music became very popular among the Nigerian public and Africans in general. In fact, he made the decision to sing in English so that his music could be enjoyed by individuals all over Africa, where the languages spoken are very diverse and numerous. As popular as Fela's music had become in Nigeria and elsewhere, it was also very unpopular with the ruling government, and raids on the Kalakuta Republic were frequent. In 1974 the police arrived with a search warrant and a cannabis joint, which they had intended to plant on Fela. He became wise to this and swallowed the joint. In response, the police took him into custody and waited to examine his feces. Fela enlisted the help of his prison mates and gave the police someone else's feces, and Fela was freed. He then recounted this tale in his release Expensive Shit.
Zombie (1977)
In 1977 Fela and the Afrika 70 released the hit album Zombie, a scathing attack on Nigerian soldiers using the "zombie" metaphor to describe the methods of the Nigerian military. The album was a smash hit with the people and infuriated the government, setting off a vicious attack against the Kalakuta Republic, during which one thousand soldiers attacked the commune. Fela was severely beaten, and his elderly mother was thrown from a window, causing fatal injuries. The Kalakuta Republic was burned, and Fela's studio, instruments, and master tapes were destroyed. Fela claimed that he would have been killed if it were not for the intervention of a commanding officer as he was being beaten.
Fela's response to the attack was to deliver his mother's coffin to an army barrack and write two songs, "Coffin for Head of State" and "Unknown Soldier," referencing the official inquiry which claimed the commune had been destroyed by an unknown soldier.
Fela and his band then took residence in Crossroads Hotel as the Shrine had been destroyed along with his commune. In 1978 Fela married twenty seven women, many of whom were his dancers and singers to mark the anniversary of the attack on the Kalakuta Republic. The year was also marked by two notorious concerts, the first in Accra in which riots broke out during the song "Zombie" which led to Fela being banned from entering Ghana. The second was at the Berlin Jazz Festival after which most of Fela's musicians deserted him, due to rumors that Fela was planning to use the entirety of the proceeds to fund his presidential campaign.
Despite the massive setbacks, Fela was determined to come back. He formed his own political party, which he called "Movement of the People". In 1979 he put himself forward for President in Nigeria's first elections for more than a decade but his candidature was refused. At this time, Fela created a new band called "Egypt 80" and continued to record albums and tour the country. In 1983 he again ran for President but was again attacked by police, who threw him in prison on a dubious charge of currency smuggling. After twenty months, the regime changed once again and Fela was released from prison. On Fela's release he divorced his twelve remaining wives. Once again, Fela continued to release albums with Egypt 80, made a number of successful tours of the United States and Europe and also continued to be politically active. In 1986, Fela performed in Giants Stadium in New Jersey as part of the Amnesty International "Conspiracy of Hope" concert, sharing the bill with Bono, Carlos Santana, and The Neville Brothers.
His album output slowed in the 1990s, and eventually he stopped releasing albums altogether. This led to rumors that he was suffering from an illness that he was refusing treatment for. It was announced that he died on August 2, 1997 in Lagos, Nigeria and more than a million people attended his funeral. Later, it was revealed that he succumbed to AIDS-related heart failure.
Music:
The musical style performed by Fela Kuti is called Afrobeat, which is essentially a fusion of jazz, funk and Traditional African Chant. It is characterized by having African style percussion, vocals, and musical structure, along with jazzy, funky horn sections. The "endless groove" is also used, in which a base rhythm of drums, muted guitar, and bass guitar are repeated throughout the song. This is a common technique in African and African-influenced musical styles, and can be seen in funk and hip-hop. Some elements often present in Fela's music are the call-and-response with the chorus and figurative but simple lyrics. Fela's songs were almost always over ten minutes in length, some reaching the twenty or even thirty minute marks. This was one of many reasons that his music never reached a substantial degree of popularity outside of Africa. His songs were mostly sung in Nigerian pidgin, although he also performed a few songs in the Yoruba language. Fela's main instruments were the saxophone and the keyboards but he also played the trumpet, horn, guitar and made the occasional drum solo. Fela refused to perform songs again after he had already recorded them, which also hindered his popularity outside Africa. Fela was known for his showmanship, and his concerts were often quite outlandish and wild.
Political views:
The American Black Power movement influenced Fela's political views. He was also a supporter of Pan-Africanism and socialism (although in a 1982 documentary he can clearly be seen rejecting both capitalism and socialism in favour of a third way that he described as Africanism), and called for a united, democratic African republic. He was a fierce supporter of human rights, and many of his songs are direct attacks against dictatorships, specifically the militaristic governments of Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s. He was also a social commentator, and criticized his fellow Africans (especially the upper class) for betraying traditional African culture. The African culture he believed in also included having many wives (polygyny) and the Kalakuta Republic was formed in part as a polygamist colony. Though not part of African culture, it should be noted though that Fela was very open when it came to sex, as he portrayed in some of his songs, like "Open and Close." He also expressed views that could be considered sexist, such as describing women as mattresses
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URRtk4OQCY4
Fela Kuti was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria to a middle-class family. His mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was a feminist active in the anti-colonial movement and his father, Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, was the first president of the Nigerian Union Of Teachers.
Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti and Olikoye Ransome-Kuti are his brothers and were both well known in Nigeria.
He relocated to London in 1958 with the intention of studying medicine, but he decided to study music instead at the Trinity College of Music. While there, he formed the band Koola Lobitos, playing a style of music Fela called Afrobeat. The style was a fusion of American jazz with West African highlife. In 1961 Fela married his first wife, Remilekun (Remi) Taylor, with whom he would have three children (Femi, Yeni and Sola). In 1963 Fela moved back to Nigeria, re-formed Koola Lobitos and trained as a radio producer for Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1969 Fela took the band to the United States. While there, Fela discovered the black power movement through Sandra Izsadore--a friend of the Black Panther Party--which would heavily influence his music and political views and renamed the band "Nigeria 70". Soon, the Immigration and Naturalization Service were tipped off by a promoter that Fela and his band were in the US without work permits. The band then performed a quick recording session in Los Angeles, which would later be released as "The '69 Los Angeles Sessions".
Fela and his band, renamed "Africa '70" returned to Nigeria. He then formed the Kalakuta Republic, a commune, a recording studio and a home for many connected to the band which he later declared independent from the Nigerian state. Fela set up a nightclub in the Empire Hotel, named the Afro-Spot and then the Shrine, where he performed regularly. Fela also changed his middle name to "Anikulapo" (meaning "he who carries death in his pouch"), stating that his original middle name of Ransome was a slave name. The recordings continued, and the music became more politically motivated. Fela's music became very popular among the Nigerian public and Africans in general. In fact, he made the decision to sing in English so that his music could be enjoyed by individuals all over Africa, where the languages spoken are very diverse and numerous. As popular as Fela's music had become in Nigeria and elsewhere, it was also very unpopular with the ruling government, and raids on the Kalakuta Republic were frequent. In 1974 the police arrived with a search warrant and a cannabis joint, which they had intended to plant on Fela. He became wise to this and swallowed the joint. In response, the police took him into custody and waited to examine his feces. Fela enlisted the help of his prison mates and gave the police someone else's feces, and Fela was freed. He then recounted this tale in his release Expensive Shit.
Zombie (1977)
In 1977 Fela and the Afrika 70 released the hit album Zombie, a scathing attack on Nigerian soldiers using the "zombie" metaphor to describe the methods of the Nigerian military. The album was a smash hit with the people and infuriated the government, setting off a vicious attack against the Kalakuta Republic, during which one thousand soldiers attacked the commune. Fela was severely beaten, and his elderly mother was thrown from a window, causing fatal injuries. The Kalakuta Republic was burned, and Fela's studio, instruments, and master tapes were destroyed. Fela claimed that he would have been killed if it were not for the intervention of a commanding officer as he was being beaten.
Fela's response to the attack was to deliver his mother's coffin to an army barrack and write two songs, "Coffin for Head of State" and "Unknown Soldier," referencing the official inquiry which claimed the commune had been destroyed by an unknown soldier.
Fela and his band then took residence in Crossroads Hotel as the Shrine had been destroyed along with his commune. In 1978 Fela married twenty seven women, many of whom were his dancers and singers to mark the anniversary of the attack on the Kalakuta Republic. The year was also marked by two notorious concerts, the first in Accra in which riots broke out during the song "Zombie" which led to Fela being banned from entering Ghana. The second was at the Berlin Jazz Festival after which most of Fela's musicians deserted him, due to rumors that Fela was planning to use the entirety of the proceeds to fund his presidential campaign.
Despite the massive setbacks, Fela was determined to come back. He formed his own political party, which he called "Movement of the People". In 1979 he put himself forward for President in Nigeria's first elections for more than a decade but his candidature was refused. At this time, Fela created a new band called "Egypt 80" and continued to record albums and tour the country. In 1983 he again ran for President but was again attacked by police, who threw him in prison on a dubious charge of currency smuggling. After twenty months, the regime changed once again and Fela was released from prison. On Fela's release he divorced his twelve remaining wives. Once again, Fela continued to release albums with Egypt 80, made a number of successful tours of the United States and Europe and also continued to be politically active. In 1986, Fela performed in Giants Stadium in New Jersey as part of the Amnesty International "Conspiracy of Hope" concert, sharing the bill with Bono, Carlos Santana, and The Neville Brothers.
His album output slowed in the 1990s, and eventually he stopped releasing albums altogether. This led to rumors that he was suffering from an illness that he was refusing treatment for. It was announced that he died on August 2, 1997 in Lagos, Nigeria and more than a million people attended his funeral. Later, it was revealed that he succumbed to AIDS-related heart failure.
Music:
The musical style performed by Fela Kuti is called Afrobeat, which is essentially a fusion of jazz, funk and Traditional African Chant. It is characterized by having African style percussion, vocals, and musical structure, along with jazzy, funky horn sections. The "endless groove" is also used, in which a base rhythm of drums, muted guitar, and bass guitar are repeated throughout the song. This is a common technique in African and African-influenced musical styles, and can be seen in funk and hip-hop. Some elements often present in Fela's music are the call-and-response with the chorus and figurative but simple lyrics. Fela's songs were almost always over ten minutes in length, some reaching the twenty or even thirty minute marks. This was one of many reasons that his music never reached a substantial degree of popularity outside of Africa. His songs were mostly sung in Nigerian pidgin, although he also performed a few songs in the Yoruba language. Fela's main instruments were the saxophone and the keyboards but he also played the trumpet, horn, guitar and made the occasional drum solo. Fela refused to perform songs again after he had already recorded them, which also hindered his popularity outside Africa. Fela was known for his showmanship, and his concerts were often quite outlandish and wild.
Political views:
The American Black Power movement influenced Fela's political views. He was also a supporter of Pan-Africanism and socialism (although in a 1982 documentary he can clearly be seen rejecting both capitalism and socialism in favour of a third way that he described as Africanism), and called for a united, democratic African republic. He was a fierce supporter of human rights, and many of his songs are direct attacks against dictatorships, specifically the militaristic governments of Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s. He was also a social commentator, and criticized his fellow Africans (especially the upper class) for betraying traditional African culture. The African culture he believed in also included having many wives (polygyny) and the Kalakuta Republic was formed in part as a polygamist colony. Though not part of African culture, it should be noted though that Fela was very open when it came to sex, as he portrayed in some of his songs, like "Open and Close." He also expressed views that could be considered sexist, such as describing women as mattresses
Gil Scott-Heron interview
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbnBafZnNUIIn 2001, Gil appeared on a "Charlie Rose meets Bill O'Reilly" style BBC TV interview show called HARDtalk. Fascinating stuff as Gil gets asked point blank about his drug issues. Fascinating also in how brilliant a man Gil is no matter his state of mind, body, and voice.
Bio
Gil Scott-Heron stands as a towering figure of black popular music. With a masters in creative writing from Johns Hopkins, the writer, poet, composer, pianist, and modern-day griot is a true artist in an industry lacking true artistry.
Scott-Heron emerged in the early 1970s with albums such as What’s Going On and There’s A Riot Goin’ On. By 1970, there was a profound shift in the struggle for equality as the fight for civil rights gave way to the demand for Black Power. The Civil Rights Movement had lost its focus, being ripped apart by differing interest groups and ignored by a wartime US government. The voices of its leaders were silenced by jail or bullets.
Black popular music reflected this change. The voices on the radio stopped preaching brotherhood and togetherness and started reporting the facts, and the music got more aggressive. Leading the new attack was a new voice: articulate, uncompromising, and enraged. The voice held the light up to the country’s missteps and shook up an apathetic audience. The voice was Gil Scott-Heron’s. Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949. He grew up in Lincoln, Tennessee and later the Chelsea neighborhood of the Bronx.
As a student, he admired the poetry of Langston Hughes and followed his footsteps by enrolling in Lincoln University. By age 20, he completed the novel The Vulture and the book of poetry, Small Talk At 125th & Lenox. The Vulture was an auspicious beginning, heralded by Essence as "a strong start for a writer with important things to say." In the 1970’s, Scott-Heron hooked up with Flying Dutchman records to produce several important albums including Pieces of Man and Free Will.
During the 1980s, for Arista label, Scott-Heron released twelve albums. Then, after a twelve-year break, he signed with TVT Records and released Spirits in 1993. The first cut of this album, "Message To The Messenger," is a warning to today’s rappers, urging them to take responsibility in their art and in their communities. Since then, he has played to sell-out crowds all over the world, performing at major festivals in England and the United States, including New York’s Central Park.
In 2001, Gil appeared on a "Charlie Rose meets Bill O'Reilly" style BBC TV interview show called HARDtalk. Fascinating stuff as Gil gets asked point blank about his drug issues. Fascinating also in how brilliant a man Gil is no matter his state of mind, body, and voice.
Bio
Gil Scott-Heron stands as a towering figure of black popular music. With a masters in creative writing from Johns Hopkins, the writer, poet, composer, pianist, and modern-day griot is a true artist in an industry lacking true artistry.
Scott-Heron emerged in the early 1970s with albums such as What’s Going On and There’s A Riot Goin’ On. By 1970, there was a profound shift in the struggle for equality as the fight for civil rights gave way to the demand for Black Power. The Civil Rights Movement had lost its focus, being ripped apart by differing interest groups and ignored by a wartime US government. The voices of its leaders were silenced by jail or bullets.
Black popular music reflected this change. The voices on the radio stopped preaching brotherhood and togetherness and started reporting the facts, and the music got more aggressive. Leading the new attack was a new voice: articulate, uncompromising, and enraged. The voice held the light up to the country’s missteps and shook up an apathetic audience. The voice was Gil Scott-Heron’s. Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949. He grew up in Lincoln, Tennessee and later the Chelsea neighborhood of the Bronx.
As a student, he admired the poetry of Langston Hughes and followed his footsteps by enrolling in Lincoln University. By age 20, he completed the novel The Vulture and the book of poetry, Small Talk At 125th & Lenox. The Vulture was an auspicious beginning, heralded by Essence as "a strong start for a writer with important things to say." In the 1970’s, Scott-Heron hooked up with Flying Dutchman records to produce several important albums including Pieces of Man and Free Will.
During the 1980s, for Arista label, Scott-Heron released twelve albums. Then, after a twelve-year break, he signed with TVT Records and released Spirits in 1993. The first cut of this album, "Message To The Messenger," is a warning to today’s rappers, urging them to take responsibility in their art and in their communities. Since then, he has played to sell-out crowds all over the world, performing at major festivals in England and the United States, including New York’s Central Park.
posted by Conscious check him out@
http://www.utoobeen.blogspot.com/
Bio
Gil Scott-Heron stands as a towering figure of black popular music. With a masters in creative writing from Johns Hopkins, the writer, poet, composer, pianist, and modern-day griot is a true artist in an industry lacking true artistry.
Scott-Heron emerged in the early 1970s with albums such as What’s Going On and There’s A Riot Goin’ On. By 1970, there was a profound shift in the struggle for equality as the fight for civil rights gave way to the demand for Black Power. The Civil Rights Movement had lost its focus, being ripped apart by differing interest groups and ignored by a wartime US government. The voices of its leaders were silenced by jail or bullets.
Black popular music reflected this change. The voices on the radio stopped preaching brotherhood and togetherness and started reporting the facts, and the music got more aggressive. Leading the new attack was a new voice: articulate, uncompromising, and enraged. The voice held the light up to the country’s missteps and shook up an apathetic audience. The voice was Gil Scott-Heron’s. Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949. He grew up in Lincoln, Tennessee and later the Chelsea neighborhood of the Bronx.
As a student, he admired the poetry of Langston Hughes and followed his footsteps by enrolling in Lincoln University. By age 20, he completed the novel The Vulture and the book of poetry, Small Talk At 125th & Lenox. The Vulture was an auspicious beginning, heralded by Essence as "a strong start for a writer with important things to say." In the 1970’s, Scott-Heron hooked up with Flying Dutchman records to produce several important albums including Pieces of Man and Free Will.
During the 1980s, for Arista label, Scott-Heron released twelve albums. Then, after a twelve-year break, he signed with TVT Records and released Spirits in 1993. The first cut of this album, "Message To The Messenger," is a warning to today’s rappers, urging them to take responsibility in their art and in their communities. Since then, he has played to sell-out crowds all over the world, performing at major festivals in England and the United States, including New York’s Central Park.
In 2001, Gil appeared on a "Charlie Rose meets Bill O'Reilly" style BBC TV interview show called HARDtalk. Fascinating stuff as Gil gets asked point blank about his drug issues. Fascinating also in how brilliant a man Gil is no matter his state of mind, body, and voice.
Bio
Gil Scott-Heron stands as a towering figure of black popular music. With a masters in creative writing from Johns Hopkins, the writer, poet, composer, pianist, and modern-day griot is a true artist in an industry lacking true artistry.
Scott-Heron emerged in the early 1970s with albums such as What’s Going On and There’s A Riot Goin’ On. By 1970, there was a profound shift in the struggle for equality as the fight for civil rights gave way to the demand for Black Power. The Civil Rights Movement had lost its focus, being ripped apart by differing interest groups and ignored by a wartime US government. The voices of its leaders were silenced by jail or bullets.
Black popular music reflected this change. The voices on the radio stopped preaching brotherhood and togetherness and started reporting the facts, and the music got more aggressive. Leading the new attack was a new voice: articulate, uncompromising, and enraged. The voice held the light up to the country’s missteps and shook up an apathetic audience. The voice was Gil Scott-Heron’s. Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949. He grew up in Lincoln, Tennessee and later the Chelsea neighborhood of the Bronx.
As a student, he admired the poetry of Langston Hughes and followed his footsteps by enrolling in Lincoln University. By age 20, he completed the novel The Vulture and the book of poetry, Small Talk At 125th & Lenox. The Vulture was an auspicious beginning, heralded by Essence as "a strong start for a writer with important things to say." In the 1970’s, Scott-Heron hooked up with Flying Dutchman records to produce several important albums including Pieces of Man and Free Will.
During the 1980s, for Arista label, Scott-Heron released twelve albums. Then, after a twelve-year break, he signed with TVT Records and released Spirits in 1993. The first cut of this album, "Message To The Messenger," is a warning to today’s rappers, urging them to take responsibility in their art and in their communities. Since then, he has played to sell-out crowds all over the world, performing at major festivals in England and the United States, including New York’s Central Park.
posted by Conscious check him out@
http://www.utoobeen.blogspot.com/
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Saturday, June 24, 2006
THE WORLD IS A GHETTO...CHECK US OUT @ WWW.MYSPACE.COM/GHETTOSOUNDTRACKRADIO
CHECK US OUT @
WWW.MYSPACE.COM/GHETTOSOUNDTRACKRADIO
http://www.hiphopcrack.com/USUALSUSPECTS
WWW.MYSPACE.COM/USUALSUSPECTMOVEMENT
http://www.hiphopcrack.com/two-30
STAY TUNED...........
WWW.MYSPACE.COM/GHETTOSOUNDTRACKRADIO
http://www.hiphopcrack.com/USUALSUSPECTS
WWW.MYSPACE.COM/USUALSUSPECTMOVEMENT
http://www.hiphopcrack.com/two-30
STAY TUNED...........
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
