Putting Out The Call!
Archive for September, 2006
Sleepers Awake! – Bigg Jus Interview
Sep 30th
Sleepers Awake!
Bigg Jus and Nikola Tesla and the Lunar Hip-Hop Robot Camera
By CHRIS ZIEGLER
Thursday, August 24, 2006 – 3:00 pmEditor’s note: This is an expanded version of the Q&A that appeared in print.
Bigg Jus stated in 2006 that he is currently working on material for a new Company Flow album, suggesting the possibility of the group re-forming.Desperate times call for productive men: NYC-born rapper Bigg Jus was a ward of the state who helped make Company Flow one of the definitive independent hip-hop groups of the back end of the 20th century, and from there, he never took a rest. Now—older, wiser, featured on NPR—he’s still the kind of guy just who works a little more when he needs a break from all his work. Currently: working on a collaboration with Shape Shifter Existereo, working on a new solo record to follow-up his airtight Poor People’s Day, working on shooting videos for the new De La Soul and (listed last just to tease the fans) working on material for the first new Company Flow record since 1997. Plus there’s the coming war to end all wars, the sadly endless source for much of Jus’ inspiration—lyrics about “a killing machine so perfect at first they couldn’t intellectualize it/and they were afraid to ask too many questions†make him a rapper a lot closer to Alex Jones than Mike Jones. California might be a long way from the Tribeca record company he lost on Sept. 11, but the songs remain the same: “It’s not like I’m gonna run off and start partying,†he says. “There’s way too much on my mind.â€
OC Weekly: Were you ever a lazy guy?
Bigg Jus: I’m the quintessential New Yorker—I kind of had a hand in everything from the get out. That’s the hustle mentality. I pretty much had a rough childhood and I had to get down. That’s how Company Flow and the independent thing started—us saying, ‘Fuck it, we don’t need any labels. We can just do it ourselves.’
How much time do you think big labels as we know them have left?
How many are even left? Like three? All they did was absorb people’s catalogs, and now they’re not even people—they’re just on a ledger sheet somewhere. The whole thing will disintegrate. The only real growth is in digital sales, and as we move toward that, the game will turn to people putting out digital singles first. It’s a beautiful thing—you check your online sales and find out where the most people buy your stuff. “I’m hot in Sri Lanka? Let me get on the phone to the poppin’-est promoter in Sri Lanka!” It couldn’t be better for artists.
Did your NPR profile get you in good with the commuter-progressive crowd?
It got me into a couple of things—I hooked up with a guy who was doing an economics documentary with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, and they had a little segment at the end where the filmmaker just talked to me, and I ended up being the whole end of the movie. Probably the highlight of my year last year! And I worked with some guys who created this kind of robotic platform with a gyroscoping camera—one was a guy who developed the lunar rover for NASA’s Apollo program. And I shot the Rock the Bells concert with that.
New compilation coming Monday: Break Chains
Sep 30th
From: AT.O.M. tha Immortal
Featuring:
Lord Metatron, Shadcore, Odd Thomas, Legion of Prophetz, Redeemed Thought,
Eleazar the Last Testament, SUN: Scientific Universal and Atom tha Immortal.
Compilation also includes:
“Freedom (Hasta la Victoria)”
“The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire”
and “Los Pobres” by Atom tha Immortal.
Includes snippets of rare recordings of the great civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois.
Monday is the day. Spread the word.
circa 89 & on
Sep 25th
awoke feelin nostalgic…
atcq – scenerio
atcq – 1nce again (video) something more recent, oh yeah… produced by dilla …1
prt – easy star
mainsource – peace is not the word to play
black sheep – flavour of The month
kool g rap & dj polo – road to the riches
U.S. gets ‘Sovietized’
Sep 25th
By ERIC MARGOLIS
In the late 1980s, I was the first western journalist allowed into the world’s most dreaded prison, Moscow’s sinister Lubyanka. Muscovites dared not even utter the name of KGB’s headquarters, calling it instead after a nearby toy store, “Detsky Mir.â€
I still shudder recalling Lubyanka’s underground cells, grim interrogation rooms, and execution cellars where tens of thousands were tortured and shot. I sat at the desk from which the monsters who ran Cheka (Soviet secret police) — Dzerzhinsky, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria — ordered 30 million victims to their deaths.
Prisoners taken in the dead of night to Lubyanka were systematically beaten for days with rubber hoses and clubs. There were special cold rooms where prisoners could be frozen to near death. Sleep deprivation was a favourite and most effective Cheka technique. So was near-drowning in water fouled with urine and feces.
I recall these past horrors because of what this column has long called the gradual “Sovietization†of the United States. This shameful week, it became clear Canada is also afflicted.
Gilded Age
Sep 24th
Todays Homework (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) the Gilded Age
The Wealth Gap: A Second Gilded Age?
The economic boom of the 1990s was highly uneven. Most people’s wages remained flat or failed to recover the ground lost since the 1970s. The United States is now the most unequal society in the industrialized world.
Wealth ownership is more concentrated now than at any time since the 1920s.
Our state governments are in serious financial trouble after a decade of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. Vital public services are at risk.
Our democracy has been weakened because of the power of accumulated wealth. Sometimes our government seems most concerned with writing rules and administering regulations to serve the interests of its paying patrons.
This concentration of political power directly and indirectly undermines equality of opportunity in America. Too much economic inequality also undermines economic stability and growth, threatening prosperity for all.
As there is greater distance between haves and have-nots, we behave more like people in an apartheid society. For example, more people than ever are living in “gated communities†with entrances patrolled by armed guards. Is this the kind of nation we want to become?
Since it was enacted in 1916, the estate tax has helped to limit the concentration of wealth, making it easier for Americans to educate themselves, innovate, build new businesses, and prosper.
Repealing the estate tax will reverse that progress. We should strengthen the estate tax, not eliminate it.
Over the past two decades, the income gap
in the U.S. has grown dramatically.
http://www.faireconomy.org/estatetax/ETWealth.html
Capturing Terrorists Vs. Preventing Terrorism
Sep 23rd
—————– Bulletin Message —————–
From: Plant Seeds! – Net Neutrality, Prop 89 & Peak Oil
Date: Sep 23, 2006 4:38 PM
I posted the text for this one a couple days ago and finally got around to uploading the video version, which you can rate by clicking here.
Feedback always welcome! The best place to do so is in the blog I created for the video.
Peace and health,
Derek
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