Hip Hop: The New Rome

[Kanada Kev]

i LOVE to breakdance

[phishtaper]

By the way anyone who knows anything about Pyschiatry or Medicine knows that the DSM-IV is a highly controversial text and one that presumes that there is a pill for every form of conflict under the sun.

that is not true, luke. the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th edition) is a diagnostic tool. it provides no guidelines on treatment or underlying cause. its inherent controversy lays in its classification taxonomies.

Edited April 11, 2007 by Guest

[MarcO]

In this case I'm just taking some time out of a very busy day to share some ideas I believe in.

yes, I imagine writing this would take some time indeed.

The Bookshelf/Ebar/Guelph Jazz Festival

ATTN: Barb Minnett, Doug Minnett, Ben Minnett, staff, volunteers

My name is Luke Bowden and as many of you know I have covered local events as a freelance journalist fairly extensively for the last year or so for the Echo Weekly. Prior to that I was actively involved in the community as the Venues and Hospitality Coordinator for the Guelph Jazz Festival and in a variety of other capacities.

Recently I have put far too much unpaid effort into community building work and arts promotion and have found myself left holding the bag. I draw your attention to a large prominent cover article (a double page feature on Candace Sepulis and Tiiu Millistver) as well as an excellent feature on Geoff Berner which was highly satisfying to both he and his publicist. Berner’s publicist Ken Beattie is the only individual who provided me with any support whatsoever in the writing of my extensive piece on Geoff (the management, bar staff, CFRU and so-called promoter Stuart Duncan were completely useless and thankless). As The Bookshelf/Ebar sells Berner’s book, was a venue for his concert and as artists like Candace hang on your walls these points seem of some relevance.

For a piece like the Berner piece I spent about 40 hours of research, multiple interviews as well as correspondence, writing and editing. I have not been paid by Dynasty Communications yet for this piece nor will I likely any time soon as they are an untrustworthy publisher. Yet books have been sold, covers accepted at the door, CD’s sold, alcohol sales generated, tips pocketed all partly due to where an article like this fits into the promotional mix of for instance your Feb. 15th show at the Ebar.

This brings me to the present and my having been informed that I am banned from the premises of Ebar. First let’s be clear I was already boycotting the entire Bookshelf/Ebar complext because no one in ownership or on the staff (barring my good friend Dan at the Bookshelf) has ever made me feel remotely welcome in this community. That is because this is a hateful, prejudiced, bigoted and stigmatized community. There are far more serious concerns in the downtown core than my petty travails though.

The bulk of my work of late has centred around investigative journalism, something I am suited to as my mothers family was in military intelligence and my father has worked for the best security companies in Canada in positions of high stature. I have ultimately through a network of confidential police and underworld sources come to the conclusion that many have in this community. The bulk of the downtown core is in fact owned or controlled by Organized Crime. As with the suspicious fires recently in the core (Diplomat Hotel and Gummer Building) every property is suspicious to my eye until proven otherwise. Somehow Guelph’s so-called activist community has taken ethical purchasing decisions and documentary film viewing to the most absurd ends- thereby absolving themselves and farming out their social responsibility over the crack epidemic onto policing. This is truly a spiritual crisis not a moral or addiction crisis and requires community leaders with much more expansive compassion to address it.

With regard to the Minnett family proper I would like to say the following things. I have always been very intimidated by Doug Minett and I feel that he verbally assaulted me at the Woolwich Arms once in the fallout from a debacle at the Guelph Jazz Festival. Because I spoke out publicly in the aftermath of an episode involving Sainkho Namtchylak (simply google Luke Bowden it will be your first hit) I was blackballed by the Guelph Jazz Fest community and Doug was brought into scare me alongside Ajay Heble and Julie Hastings the Artistic and Executive Director of the festival. Jesse Stewart who would have sided with me was absent. Stewart is also notably wholly ignorant of Guelph’s vicious crack problem – Hastings as a cab owner simply cannot be.

During this period I was the event coordinator for The Ontario Rural Council where I had the original idea of placing Stephen and Avi Lewis on the same podium for the first time ever. I excellently completed this event and received glowing references from Mrs. Lewis and Owen Roberts but tellingly not from TORC who saw fit to distance themselves from the health jeopardy and mental downturn they had placed me in through their incompetence.

The situation with the Guelph Jazz Festival was very similar. Mr. Minnett, who is little more than a petty tyrant and casanova whose picadillos, vices and unorthodox living arrangement are a matter of local legend, was a completely incompetent financial advisor to the festival. As a result it fell to an overly idealistic volunteer like myself to go out of pocket for artists expenses (I had no funds to do such), essentially literally running myself into the ground. The national jazz media largely acknowledged that the Jazz Festival behaved like children that day and typically. Yet there has been no acknowledgment ever of the countless (I am talking hundreds of unpaid hours in a role for which I am clearly highly trained) investments I made into the festival.

None of this matters much to me at all in any case. I cannot care for a community that does not care for itself. I cannot allow myself to be bullied and intimidated by the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industries that would have me submit to the further medicalization of my spirituality. Clearly I am lucid and of a sound mind however I should be clear I am fleeing Guelph for fear of my own life and will likely never return.

I am receiving interest in book proposals particularly one based on my travails in the mental health system similar to Wally Lamb’s This Much I Know Is True. I will never be reading from any of my books at the Bookshelf or Ebar complex. Attached is an open Letter to Minister George Smitherman and a confidential document that is in the hands of Chief Rob Davis, the Police Services Board and the Ontario Civilian Commission on Policing Services.

I am not afraid of the Mob, I am somewhat afraid of Police (as emissaries of the Psyho-Pharmaceutical Complex) moreso I am deeply ashamed of how Julie Hastings, Ajay Heble, Doug Minnett, Vish Khanna and Michelle Lobckowicz have treated me so poorly since starting to volunteer my extensive education to their organization. I am particularly ashamed of Barb Minnett for failing this community so direly and allowing business people in her core to fund raise for groups like the Tamil Tigers, Asian Triads, Hell’s Angels and Afghani Liberation Front in local area high schools and bars. I should note that yes, there is a moderate to brisk cocaine trade in the Ebar itself and of course you’re unaware of this because you’re idea of security is a couple of cooks from the Albion looking gruff.

Doug Minnett, is just an asshole, a bully and a wannabe small town playboy, he did not disappoint me whatsoever he simply lived up to my very low expectations of me.

In any case it has been unlocking my own genealogy that has allowed me to overcome the self-hatred that this community has forced me to internalize. My own grandfather Chuck Bowden played in the Big Bands until he was 30 and played 8 instruments including the oboe. When we pass off the avant garde and emperor’s new clothes wearing bullshit that frequents the Guelph ‘Jazz’ Festival as Jazz we are in fact shitting on the grave of my grandfather and all of his compatriots. Thank you again for that and for never letting me have the dignity of my own voice in an organization to which I donated a subtantial portion of the financially formative years of my life.

The Guelph Jazz Festival is neither a community nor a festival. It is a glorified circle jerk in which Doug Minnett, Ajay Heble, Ellen Waterman and Daniel Fischlin spew forth their completely assinine academic formulations (here akin to jism) upon the expectant mouths of the circled horde.

Once when I despaired at how wretchedly I was treated by the likes of Minnett and the Guelph Jazz Fest ‘community’ I was comforted by MP candidate Phil Allt. He explained that what matters is if you are a good human being or not and that I had a sort of ‘Gramsci thing’ going on. Antonio Gramsci the Marxist scholar was notably beheaded by Mussolini.

“My practicality consists in this, in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall... that is my strength, my only strength.†– Antonio Gramsci

sincerely,

Luke Cathcart Bowden

as for this,

Hell there's a whole one about my 'wedding' that has nothing to do with me, or love, or compassion, or community or anything really.

Actually it's not there anymore. You had it removed. Because you didn't like it.

besides, I thought you weren't posting here anymore, or wasting your time with all of us losers?

[kung]

That's funny Velvet because I have thought the exact same thing about your sad existence like a character in the Wasteland measuring his life out with cat food cans. It's amazing that you have so much time to read shit I've read and I've never even once bothered to read a thing you've written. You're music I presume is really derivative and I also suspect you are some form of compulsive masturbator/sex addict/creepy stalker type (that's more just the look though).

'Love me or hate me that is the question'

Lady Sov

[kung]

To be honest MarcO, guy who calls myself his friend but really just likes to amuse himself at my expense, that took about 20 minutes to write.

Considering that I am literally trying to pull myself out of a self hate nosedive that an entire community has drummed into my head not to mention a lifetime of bullying (and yes I did turn into a bully myself) I think it was a worthwhile 20 minutes out of my day. I also slept for a while, drank a lot of water, exercised, got vegetables, prepared a meal- all those things were just as valuable to my day. Again though it's fascinating that we only have so much time on this planet and our life could be taken away at any moment and yet you all have so much time to troll the internet and read things I've written and comment on them.

It seems like an excellent use of your ephemeral time on the planet.

[kung]

I admit I'm just as addicted to this place, to the ensnaring processes of ego, as anyone else.

[Velvet]

Aw shucks man, that hurts.

Doesn't ANYONE recognise parody anymore?

[YearsAlongTheSea]

This took a lot of time, hate, negative energy, apathy and drugs, but....

[AD]

If it weren't Luke's exclusive intellectual property, I'd jump all over his line "here akin to jism" as a band name.

And Todd's travel / show writings could actually be published, unlike anything Luke has written for the past few months.

AD

[kung]

You guys don't read my articles. I keep my shit to myself this is just, well jism.

...and no, people don't seem to appreciate parody anymore.

[NewRider]

The thing is I have a daily moment by moment meditative practice that allows me to just abide in bad feelings I have about myself and negative feelings I internalize from others.

Don't try to church it up Kung. It's smoking pot.

[djmelbatoast]

The bulk of my work of late has centred around investigative journalism, something I am suited to as my mothers family was in military intelligence

Hilarious.

Comic gold.

[NewRider]

"Do you understand that the world does not revolve around you and your "do whatever it takes, ruin as many people's lives, so long as you can make a name for yourself as an investigatory journalist, no matter how many friends you lose or people you leave dead and bloodied along the way, just so long so you can make a name for yourself as an investigatory journalist, no matter how many friends you lose or people you leave dead and bloodied and dying along the way"?..."

[StoneMtn]

I keep my shit to myself

I, for one, wish that was actually true.

[kung]

Frankly its scary how much I keep to myself. You just think because I seem to be so forthcoming with personal info that I'm being totally straightforward.

Who the fuck are you Stone Mtn. so-called caveman lawyer. Your shit is weak. You in all likelihood like many in your field knowingly represent foul and corrupt individuals and though I would have made a good barrister it is not for me. My legal career would have ended much like Pacino's in In Justice For All (get it Injustice For All). The legal system, the one you make your livelihood off of, has perverted the medical delivery community, made laundering money and international terrorist fundraising into a breeze in this country not to mention the countless corporate crooks who destroy entire livelihoods with no retribution.

In any case Stone Mtn. you didn't need to open this thread did you? Nor did you need to respond. This isn't about me, or about you.

I was really just trying to say that since there are industries hell bent on FUCKING KIDS OVER perhaps young people could use a dose of self esteem, build efficacy (the ability to produce impacts) and perhaps hip hop culture with its inclusivity and ADAPTABILITY (remember kids, improvisation, 'all my gangster friends and all my skater friends they all want the same thing' - well one thing they want is LOVE and another is to ADAPT TO THEIR TERRAIN).

I don't see a lot of adaptation in this music community. In fact this music community died a long time ago and a hodge podge of limp bands have been rehashing the sounds of five years ago ever since.

Edited April 11, 2007 by Guest

[SmoothedShredder]

Some people say, "someone should check out the 'secret'"!

[Velvet]

Nobody cares Luke. You're wayyy too misunderstood. Don't worry, eventually all the fuckers will get a life, read a book, and realise just how brilliant you are. Unfortunately 'til then you'll just keep looking like a whining infant who thinks he's important.

It's hard for me to wrap my head around how difficult it must be for you.

[ollie]

Don't let the bastards get you down Luke.

[djmelbatoast]

and though I would have made a good barrister it is not for me.

Do you do stand-up?

[kung]

I KILL at standup and I'd have Stone Mtn. settling after opening arguments.

[allison]

what I am calling Hip Hop is really living life like a hustle

Isn't that what I said way back when when you were saying Hip Hop was Rome, a nation,you living by the sea, a spiritual discipline etc etc?

You are a middle class white kid with basic entitlement angst , who is admiring a so called community or lifestyle because they have adapted to accumulating material wealth in the way they are able against obstacles, and identifying because you value materialism but haven't been able to ride your own hustle.

Hip Hop as a community isnt any more adaptable than the next.Thats the crisis- if you've hustled the last hustler and all your left with is a pile of goods, what do you do?What do you stand for?

Hip Hop is an artform.Jambands are an Art Form.Culture/Lifestyle is both built around them and reflected within them.Communities adapt by people adapting. Art Forms lose and keep adherents.New ones emerge that more clearly reflect the needs of people and new cultures are built.Its cyclic.

Culture/Art Forms/Lifestyles dont always last longer or gain prominence because they are BETTER.Often they just suit the particular mores of the majority in a time and perhaps place.

Whats harder or more spiritual Luke? Adopting a lifestyle that emphasizes (in your words) material accumalation and "getting your own" or one that embraces whatever consciousness you want to hang on jambands?

The answer is NEITHER (In my opinion).

djmelbatoast-you make me laugh.

[allison]

so-called activist community has taken ethical purchasing decisions and documentary film viewing to the most absurd ends- thereby absolving themselves and farming out their social responsibility

This was funny.Through all the crap thats why I actually value you.

[M.O.B.E]

This one is for everyone to read and applies to anyone who is posting in any of these threads either by or about Luke. Luke I don't know you at all and Ive stayed out of this until now. Im not judging you but since this topic is about Hip Hop, Ive used Hip Hop to remind you. Thanks Gang Starr.

No matta wat we face

We mus face de moment of trut baybe

Chorus:

They say it's lonely at the top in whatever you do

You always gotta watch motherfuckers around you

Nobody's invincible no plan is foolproof

We all must meet our moment of truth

Verse One: Guru

The same sheisty cats that you hang with and do your thang with

could set you up and wet you up nigga peep the language

It's universal, you play with fire it may hurt you

or burn you, lessons are blessings you should learn through

Let's face facts, although MC's lace tracks

it doesn't mean behind the scenes there ain't no dirt to trace back

That goes for all of us, there ain't nobody to trust

It's like sabotage, it's got me ready to bust

But I can't jeapordize, what I have done up to this point

So I'ma get more guys, to help me run the whole joint

Cultivate, multiply, motivate, or else we'll die

You know I be the masterof the who what where and why

See when you're shinin, some chumps'll wanna dull ya

Always selfish jealous punks, will wanna pull ya

down, just like some shellfish in a bucket

cause they love it, to see your ass squirm like a worm

But just as you'll receive what is comin to you

Everybody else is gonna get theirs too

I ain't no saint, therefore I cannot dispute

That everyone must meet their moment of truth

Chorus: Guru

Actions have reactions, don't be quick to judge

You may not know the harships people don't speak of

It's best to step back, and observe with couth

For we all must meet our moment of truth

Verse Two: Guru

Sometimes you gotta dig deep, when problems come near

Don't fear things get severe for everybody everywhere

Why do bad things happen, to good people?

Seems that life is just a constant war between good and evil

The situation that I'm facin, is mad amazin

to think such problems can arise from minor confrontations

Now I'm contemplatin in my bedroom pacin

Dark clouds over my head, my heart's racin

Suicide? Nah, I'm not a foolish guy

Don't even feel like drinking, or even gettin high

Cause all that's gonna do really, is accelerate

the anxieties that I wish I could alleviate

But wait, I've been through a whole lot of other shit, before

So I oughta be able, to withstand some more

But I'm sweatin though, my eyes are turnin red and yo

I'm ready to lose my mind but instead I use my mind

I put down the knife, and take the bullets out my nine

My only crime, was that I'm too damn kind

And now some skanless motherfuckers wanna take what's mine

But they can't take the respect, that I've earned in my lifetime

And you know they'll never stop the furious force of my rhymes

So like they say, every dog has it's day

And like they say, God works in a mysterious way

So I pray, remembering the days of my youth

As I prepare to meet my moment of truth

("You should know the truth

And the truth shall set you free" --> from _Who's Gonna Take the

Weight?_)

Verse Three: Guru

Yo I got one lyric pointed at your head for start

Another one, is pointed at your weak ass heart

Now if I pull the trigger, on these fully loaded lines

You're gonna wish I woulda pulled a black nine, I mack dimes

Crack the spines of the fake gangsters

Yeah the bitin triflin niggaz, and the studio pranksters

Yo lookin at the situation plainly: will you remain G?

Or will you be looked upon strangely?

I reign as the articulator, with the greater data

Revolvin on the TASCAM much doper than my last jam

While others struggle to juggle, tricky metaphots

I explore more, to expose the core

A lot of MC's, act stupid to me

And we have yet to see, if they can match our longevity

But anyway it's just another day

Another fake jack I slay with my spectac' rap display

Styles, smooth but rugged -- you can't push or shove it

You dig it and you dug it cause like money you love it

The king of monotone, with my own throne

Righteously violent prone my words bring winds like cyclones

Stormin your hideout, blockin out your sunlight

Your image and your business, were truly not done right

Throw up your he-Allah-I now, divine saviors

You got no hand skills there's no security to save ya

No pager, no celly, no drop top Benz-y

I came to bring your phone hip-hop, to an ending

My art of war will leave you sore from the abuse

Cause you must meet your moment of truth

[kung]

I know where Allison is coming from but she's actually off base here. I do have some class and societal angst, I'm a true Marxist, like the Cambridge Spies revolutionary group of five - I put my education into social and personal dismantlement rather than material accumulation.

The reality is that I am a White Nigger. I literally am. I have no right to my background, entitlement, cultural status. I'm just a fucking Honky Nigger. Read Norman Mailer's White Negro for more on this line and how Black culture and moreoever the appropriation of black culture is omnipresent in the modern age (ie. Jazz, Beats, Hip Hop etc.). Greg Tate, who personally mentored me somewhat, has a very influential collection of essays Everything But The Burden that revolve around Mailer's essay.

Tate wrote the incendiary Nigs R Us on this line of thinking.

The White Negro: Norman Mailer's racial bodies - Jewish - Critical Essay

MELUS, Summer, 2003 by Andrea Levine

Related Results: The White

Negro Norman Mailer...

Norman Mailer

Mailer speculates on

Hitler's evil... More

Norman Mailer's 1957 essay "The White Negro" has long been regarded as a paradigmatic example of the white male investment in African American masculinity. Few contemporary discussions of the meanings that white men make of 'blackness' fail to invoke Mailer's essay; (1) indeed, his work often serves to name a whole US tradition of interracial desire and fantasy, from nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy and the white romance with Harlem Renaissance 'primitivism,' to Elvis Presley and the countless interracial male 'buddy' films that Hollywood continues to produce. (2) "The White Negro" is certainly a part of this genealogy, as Eric Lott reminds us when he calls Mailer's essay "the twentieth century reinvention of [the] ... homosocial and homosexual fascinations" that animated minstrel performance (Love and Theft 54). But critical attention to the continuity of this tradition has been perhaps too insistent, working to obscure a central historical referent of Mailer's famous piece. The white preoccupation with black masculinity takes on new resonances, I will suggest, when a Jewish writer begins his 1957 essay with an allusion to the "psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb" (338).

When critics do locate Mailer's essay within its historical moment, (3) they tend to align it with other 1950s expressions of "generational rebellion" that appealed to the presumed authenticity of blackness to deliver white hipsters from the bleak conformity of the nuclear age. (4) Mailer's celebration of the downtown hip subculture does recall, for instance, Jack Kerouac's paean to the "life, joy, kicks, darkness ... night" he believed were the province of the "Negro" (181), while Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" suggests as well that the beats looked to black culture to "fix their needs" (Lhamon 72). But it is the specificity of Mailer's racial fixation that I want to examine here, precisely because it has so often been called upon to describe a collective or a generational desire. When Mailer recoils from the "stench of fear [that] has come out of every pore of American life" and when he declares that the "heart of Hip is its emphasis upon courage at the moment of crisis" (355), he seeks to vanquish something more particular than the generic postwar anomie he invokes. Mailer's effort to appropriate a powerful phallic 'blackness' for the white hipster functions in part to mask the presence of another racial body: the Jewish victim of the Nazi Holocaust.

Mailer's project here is of course by no means an unprecedented one. As Paul Breines and others have amply documented, there is a long history of efforts by Jewish male writers in the US--such as Mike Gold, Gerald Green, and Irwin Shaw, among many others--to "remasculinize" (5) the Jewish body, both before and after World War II, according to dominant notions of physical courage and heterosexual virility. (6) And as 1 suggest below, critics have paid ample attention to those Jewish male writers, ranging from Norman Podhoretz on the right to Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce on the left, who have worked prolifically both to worry about and to celebrate their own presumed linkages to African American masculinity. Mailer's essay occupies a peculiar place in this history, however. Ritually invoked in academic discussions of Jewish masculinity, "The White Negro" is at once read as a Jewish literary production by a Jewish male writer and, as Jeffrey Melnick suggests, simultaneously repositioned as a symptomatic expression of white male desire and anxiety. While Melnick aptly reminds us that "the history of white Negroism in the American twentieth century is a cultural field defined primarily by middle-class Jews engaged in significant acts of individual and group identity formation" (120), I argue here that the essay's own systematic occlusions have functioned successfully to re-write white Negroism as exactly that--white Negroism. My focus on Mailer here, then, does not reflect an effort to position him as the singular creator of a refurbished Jewish masculinity in the postwar era. Rather, I seek to illuminate, through close readings of the tortured operations of "The White Negro" and Mailer's other contemporaneous fiction, the problematic silences, both in terms of gender and race, that the essay and its dominance within a particular academic discourse, continue to perpetuate.

Reading the specter of a vulnerable Jewish body back into "The White Negro" allows us to understand Mailer's construction of the virile white hipster as more than just another episode of predictable macho posturing. Instead, his preoccupation with the masculinity of the "psychopathic" African American serves as a defense against the taint of femininity often imputed to the male Jew. Recent work in Jewish cultural studies foregrounds the central role of gender in shaping images of the Jew; Sander Gilman, for instance, has documented the feminizing rhetoric of anti-semitic discourse in Western Europe around the turn of the century. (7) As Ann Pellegrini writes, "the feminization of the Jewish male body was so frequent a theme in this period that Jewishness--more precisely the Jewishness of Jewish men--became as much a category of gender as of race" (108). In Tough Jews, his study of images of Jews in American culture since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Paul Breines maintains that the "body of ... a victim," with its "'narrow shoulders ... shallow chest, and knobby elbows and knees,'" is the "body [that] crystallizes the history of hapless Jewish suffering." Breines points out saliently, "the most potent Jewish bodily image of all [is] the Jewish corpse in the Nazi death camp" (16). Breines, then, explicitly links representations of Jews killed in the Holocaust with a long history of associations between the weak, defective, feminized body and the Jew.

[Cully]

wow, a new low for this board.

I think that you should watch Malibu's Most Wanted.