Category Archives: African American culture

World music classics #16

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpWeV4Kfyb0]

“Girl You Need A Change Of Mind” (1973) Eddie Kendricks

It would  have been Eddie’s 68th birthday today had he not died 15 years ago. “Girl You Need A Change Of Mind” is an example of what I would call proto-disco.

Proto-disco = disco before the twelve inch, disco avant la lettre.

See previous entries in this series.

World music classics #15

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kphP-YDwE8Y]

Juxtapoem: Sylvester James‘s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and Pierre Janet‘s reality principle. An interesting side effect of the common mental illness known as falling in love is the feeling of recapturing a sense of reality.

Nineteen years ago today, Sylvester died aged 40 of complications from AIDS.

See previous entries in this series.

Hear it and weep

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNGvlWHQCwc]

Elevator to the Gallows (1957) Louis Malle

The Miles Davis score to Elevator to the Gallows was recorded 50 years ago. It has been described by jazz critic Phil Johnson as “the loneliest trumpet sound you will ever hear, and the model for sad-core music ever since. Hear it and weep.”

Previously on this blog: As she stalks through the night …

World cinema classics #26

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSho9nlXRkk]

The Intruder (1962) – Roger Corman

The Intruder is a 1962 American film directed by Roger Corman, after a novel by Charles Beaumont, starring William Shatner. Also called Shame in US release, and The Stranger in the UK release. The story centers around the machinations of a racist named Adam Cramer (portrayed by Shatner), who arrives in the fictitious small southern town of Caxton in order to incite townspeople to racial violence against the town’s African-American minority and court-ordered school integration.

The Intruder is the greatest irony of Roger Corman’s film career, after cranking out dozens of exploitation films he put up his own resources to produce a serious work of drama on the explosive issue of racism and integration. The film went on to win rave reviews and film festival prizes but became Corman’s first film to lose money.

Similarly themed fiction includes I Spit On Your Graves.

Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.

World music classics #13

Runaway Love (1978) – Linda Clifford

Linda Clifford’s 1978 album, If My Friends Could See Me Now produced two of Clifford’s biggest hit and put her on the music map. The first single, Runaway Love became an R&B hit peaking at #3 for two weeks. It was released as a 9:44 twelve inch on Curtom Records, written produced and arranged by Gil Askey, mixed by Jim Burgess. The lyrics (in the twelve inch version, not on the album version) dealt with female liberation.

Introducing Pete Rock

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQWxrWSsI2k]

I’ve been listening to Pete Rock (born 1970) since he’s been releasing records with British label BBE, and it’s the most accessible route to date to his music. This video shows you how he makes his laid back beats. He uses this machine to “chop up” records:

“Sometimes … I’ll take something that’s a quarter of a bar, like a kick and a snare, that goes boom bap, but there’s enough air between it so that it sounds like it was just played together …”

Free Radicals

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaYi6FlB4cw]

Scrub to 3:30 for immediate access to Free Radicals (an instant dance music classic)

The phrase “free radical” got stuck in my head, and Googling for it brought up a 1958 film by New Zealand experimental filmmaker Len Lye, titled Free Radicals. The film features white ‘chalk’ lines constantly moving on a black background with African drums (‘a field tape of the Bagirmi tribe’) playing throughout. The film won second prize out of 400 entries in an International Experimental Film Competition judged by Man Ray, Norman McLaren, Alexander Alexeieff and others, at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. In 1979 Lye further condensed this already very concentrated film by dropping a minute of footage. Stan Brakhage described the final version as “an almost unbelievably immense masterpiece (a brief epic)’. I could not agree more.

World cinema classics #17

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwUuEN2NTts]

Bamboozled (2000) by Spike Lee

It has been a while since we featured an American film. Although almost all of Spike Lee’s films are better than 97% of American cinema, I chose Bamboozled, a 2000 satirical film about a modern televised minstrel show featuring black actors donning blackface makeup and the violent fall-out from the show’s success. A hilarious film.

Did you know that whiteface is also a comic trope?

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