The assignment was simple in its design. BRANDON SODERBERG asked if people would like to create a drop or several commemorating a track from Jay Dee’s album ‘Donuts’. I already knew which song I wanted to discuss. I love the track called ‘Anti-American Graffiti’. I also knew I wanted to make a video that used the song as its soundtrack. I hope I did a good job of transferring my thoughts on the track with the images that I clipped and pasted together.
The song is almost like a marching anthem in the way that the drum kicks keep their time. I see an army stretching across the horizon goose-stepping in time. It isn’t a human army though. Well, not all human. They are cyborgs. Stepping on human skulls strewn about the landscape. Even though the human life has been muted there is still something lively about these man-machines and their march. This is the sad future of this planet.
In the last few weeks my thoughts have been on the war that the U.S. is still embedded in across the Middle East. From Afghanistan to Iraq and the tacit support and endorsement in Gaza there is so much blood on our hands as American citizens. I understand that everything that I enjoy as an American comes from the real sacrifice that is made by the U.S. military personnel. All the while their rate of suicide skyrockets to unimagined heights. Can the president wrest a control of this precedent?
When Jay Dee passed away in 2006 the country was almost three years deep in the tumult of Iraq and only six months removed from the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina. Jay Dee saw a world that was folding in on itself as if it had eaten a cosmic Black hole. Maybe we deserve this fate? At some point someone will have to take the weight and bear the burden for all of our complicit sin. With each generation the penalties and interest increase. Will our grandchildren even know what sunlight looks like?
Rest in peace James J.Dilla Yancey. Donuts forever.
Off the beaten path of the NYC skate and streetwear scene in the Lower East Side there is a tiny little shop off Canal street on the west side called Rival. They are hands down the best skate shop in the city. They are the skateboarders skate shop. They are the BMX riders bike store. They are the real deal Holyfield, never perpetrating the fraud Nike SB dealer.
In the Lower East Side at the East River Park (WildStyle location)
16 of the world’s best snowboarders will compete for their piece of the massive $100,000 prize purse at Red Bull Snowscrapers. Athletes will compete against the majestic backdrop of the New York City skyline in the East River Park from 6-9 pm.
Athletes include iconic Olympic Gold Medalist Shaun White, freestyle / backcountry legend Travis Rice and ultra-progressive phenomenon Pat Moore. World renowned Burton riders for the ground-breaking event include Kevin Pearce, Mikkel Bang, Danny Davis, Kohei Kubo, Kazuhiro Kakubo, and snowboard legend Terje Haakonsen. Other confirmed riders include Nitro’s Andreas Wiig, DC’s Torstein Horgmo, Forum’s Jake Blauvelt and Greg Bretz, along with Rome rider Bjorn Leines and Ride’s JJ Thomas.
Event Schedule
3:00pm – Gates open to the public
3:30pm – Riders open practice – All 16 riders
5:05pm – Valient Thorr Performance
5:45pm – Red Bull Snowscrapers contest starts – 60 minute jam session
7:10pm – Black Gold Performance
7:45pm – Red Bull Snowscrapers Finals – Jam session – Top 8 riders
8:50pm – Awards
8:55pm – Anthrax Performance
Event Format
Red Bull Snowscrapers will utilize a jam session format for both the preliminaries and finals. In this format, a rider is neither dismissed nor defined by a single run or fall—rather, the athlete who consistently lands difficult and creative tricks with skill and style throughout the entire jam session is deemed the overall winner.
It was back during the end of the summer last year that I visited upon Combat Jack and his family in the heart of the new post-riot, post-racial Crown Heights. It was a lovely Sunday afternoon and what could have been a perfect late summer cool out became a fierce yet friendly argument over substance and style.
Our opinions meshed and differed over Hip-Hop and the reasons for its decline and devaluation. At the same time we agreed that Hip-Hop was also alive and well in regions and places that we might have never expected. The arguments centered around old and new rap acts and the classics that are surely Hip-Hop’s legacy. We discussed at length some of the genre’s most influential groups. The Wu-Tang Clan, De La Soul and the most important rap group in the history of Hip-Hop, Public Enemy.
The debate between Combat Jack and I wasn’t about the iconic status of P.E. since C.J. and I both share a mutual respect for the group’s achievements, but about which of their albums is the greatest. If you visit Combat Jack over at his site, Daily Mathematics, I am sure he will tell his side of the story. But before you waste your time over there reading his Rolling Stone hyperbole take my facts with you so that you will have a better understanding of why I chose ‘Fear Of A Black Planet’
If you had spent the majority of the 1980’s in and around the streets of New York City then you would remember that this was a town that simmered with racial unrest right below its glittering surface. NYC was just as populous then as it is today and it still held many elements that made it a cosmopolitan outpost. Though as soon as you left the island of Manhattan you were transported into neighborhoods that still reeled from the blackouts during the 1970’s. Urban blight was entrenched even before they were delivering crack to the ‘hood by the busloads.
Under this environment rap music was beginning to flourish, but it rarely addressed the conditions its artists emerged from with anything more than lip service. Being that was rap music, one might think that all it could bring to the table was words exiting lips. Public Enemy was the force that ushered in a new era of understanding about the urban centers that were being abandoned to poverty and depression. New York City was a focal point because it was not only the birth place of Hip-Hop but was a city where racial tension burst into the spotlight frequently.
None of you will remember the name Willie Turks, or Eleanor Bumpurs, but you probably know of Michael Stewart and definitely Yusuf Hawkins. There was a steady stream of Blacks that were lynched by white mobs or the police and it appeared that there would never be justice for these victims. Oppressed people respond to their aggressors in different manners as you can see from the worldwide newsreels. The disenfranchised express their rage outwardly AND inwardly. Being Black in the center city was rough from all angles. It was the worst of times, yet it was still the best of times.
‘Fear Of A Black Planet’ is a summation of the Black experience during the 1980’s in America. Even more than ‘It Takes A Nation Of Millions’ could have dreamed, ‘Fear’ tackles the issues dealing with the Black experience head on. Where ‘Nation’ makes your body rock, ‘Fear’ makes your brain tick-tock. Public Enemy crafted this masterpiece when they were directly inside the cross hairs, as their classic silhouetted logo suggests. No one has since been so brave and so bold as to stand up to the mainstream media machine as Chuck D did to defend the message of empowerment that his music describes.
‘Brothers Gonna Work It Out’
‘Fear’ gets right in the face of the haters who want to obfuscate what this group really represents. ‘Fear’ is so powerful because it is the last album of its kind. The Bomb Squad easily sampled over 100 songs to make this Public Enemy album. You would never be able to release an epic music disk this dense with how nowadays the industry litigates what artists may use which samples. The clearance costs alone would shelve this album. Public Enemy changed how we heard music on several different levels. Chuck D challenged you with his lyrics, while the Shocklee-helmed Bomb Squad challenged you to name that sample.
Welcome 2 The Terrordome
The main reason I have to place ‘Fear’ over ‘Nation’ is that while ITANOMTHUB is clearly a music rich masterpiece that challenged me to do the knowledge, FOABP was the album that challenged me to be a better man. This was the griot call to take the knowledge of self and use it for good. This was the herald of change almost twenty years prior to Obama. Hip-Hop music in its essence is the sound of the drum and the voice. Ancient and everlasting. ‘Fear Of A Black Planet’ is the zenith of Hip-Hop. Drums, percussion, horn hits, sampled and live, selected for resonance along with the voice of the messenger. Celebrating life.
