Phenix City?

When i was a teenager, impelled by the highwater mark of the third wave ska revival in the mid 1990s to rediscover (a problematic term) the sounds of Jamaica's first pop music, one of my favorite such "first wave" (an anachronism, obvsioulsy) tunes was The Skatalites' "Phenix City." I always thought the song was a reference to Phoenix, Arizona, a city with which i have a slightly troubled past which is obliquely referenced way back here. But if i'd been from Georgia or Alabama instead of Pennsylvania and NYC, or if i'd ever been stationed at Fort Benning. perhaps i would have known that the song, a Roland(o) Alphonso instrumental whose only lyrics are the repetition of the title after each refrain of the main melodic figure, actually references Phenix City, Alabama, a notorious den of iniquity just across the river from the aforementioned fort, which General Patton once threatened to raze with tanks. I'm not familiar enough with Alphonso's life to know if he ever went there - though i did get to see him play four times before he died. But that the Skatalites would name a tune after the Sin City of the southeast rather than a not-yet of of a not yet booming not yet sunbelt makes things way more interesting.

Rewatched season four of the wire. Perhaps the best single season of episodic television ever. Incredibly moving and powerful, and deeply keen. Plus, Donut is the best source of cheap jokes and sight gags since Ziggy's duck.

All the world that's manned by idle drones

This morning, listening to the Almanac Singers (or possibly The Weavers') recording of Ralph Chaplin's 1915 syndicalist anthem Solidarity Forever, i noticed that like most recent versions (since the CIO era) of the song, Seeger et al omit two of Chaplin's original six verses:

Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.

and

All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.

I'd noticed this before, but never really thought about why its these two verses that get cut. I don't think they're aesthetically superior to the ones that stay in - the incredible line about standing "outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made ," nor do these verses, intriguingly, speak of the dependence of capital on both "brain and muscle," as does another verse which remains in the Almanac Singers' recording. Still these two redacted passages are certainly no less radical or expressly syndicalist than the song's final verse

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.

So why leave them out?


I'm on a serious Woody Guthrie kick.

Expect a longer, thought piece on academic labor sometime soon. Have good goyishe holidays.

All Your Emails Are Belong To Us

The NLRB strikes again:

The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that employers have the right to prohibit workers from using the company’s e-mail system to send out union-related messages, a decision that could hamper communications between labor unions and their membership.

In a 3-to-2 ruling on Friday, the labor board held that it was legal for employers to bar union-related e-mail so long as employers had a policy barring employees from sending e-mail for “non-job-related solicitations” for any outside organization.

Thank god we have democrats in congress now. Oh, wait.

Menahan Street Band, 2006. (Bunch of people from Brooklyn retro soul bands like Dap Kings, El Michels Affair, Budos Band.) "Make The Road By Walking." Named after the community organization? Or the Paolo Freire/ Myles Horton book? Who knows.


Jay Z. 2007. Produced by Sean Puffy Combs.


It's pretty interesting that Puffy's mining the Brooklyn retro-soul folks for beats. And they're both great tracks. El Michels Affair put put a faux-isntrumental version of Wu-Tang's "C.R.E.A.M." They've also backed Wu-Tang live.

Also, because i'm still in writing withdrawal after having finished my field exam on thursday, I give you part 2 of adventures in "serious" hair metal:



and finally, because this block is actually supposed to be about, like, labor, and casualization, voila.

I have 8 hours to write 2 sections!

fuck!

bad bob dylan covers

Blackamore's Night: "The Times They Are a Changing".

The guitarist from deep purple or whatever takes a song about revolution and turns it into renaissance fair schlock. Although the guitar is nice, the song loses all its meaning.

Me First and The Gimme gimmes, "Blowin in the wind."

Crappy novelty punk, crappy cover.

u2, "Maggie's Farm."

I appreciate the sentiment, but The Specials did the whole "Thatcher as Maggie" thing long before Bono, and i think the song loses a lot of its harshness here. Plus, i hate u2.

Ok, enough with the bad.

This is much more interesting


While this is totally punk rock. Singing "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll on live network TV..."


If you want to hear some good dylan covers, check out Steven Malkmus's versions of "Ballad of a thin man" and "Maggie's Farm," Cat Power's take on "Stuck Outside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again," and Yo La Tengo's deeply Yo La Tengoish "4th Time Around" from the I'm not there soundtrack.

Also when i was 11 i thought this was brilliant.

Hmm.

Wait... Are we pretending that NYU values labor rights now?

Putting affordable public education on ICE...

So, the cat (not Spooky) is out of the bag, and Sexton's self-important, self-congratulatory ICE "idea" is really just, after all is said and done, self serving.

One of Sexton's main points is that funding should be spread less thinly and given mostly to private universities, with a caveat that they must partner with other institutions, like public colleges and K-12 schools, to use it.

He used the analogy of science grants, where funding would be given to a "principal investigator" - in this case, the private university - who would be required to work alongside a "secondary investigator," a public university.

"If NYU were going to get a grant, it'd be the principal investigator," Sexton said. "It might get 60 percent or 70 percent of the grant, but 30 or 40 percent would have to be with a partner that was in the public sector - so City University [of New York] or [State University of New York] Stony Brook."

You read that correctly. the state should funnel massive amounts of public money to private, union busting, real estate speculating, second tier institutions, which we should then trust to dispense for the public good because NYU has such a great track record on such matters.

Oh wait. No they don't.

But last year, WSN spoke with adjunct professors who criticized NYU for overinvesting in high-profile, "celebrity" faculty instead of the rest of its faculty.

The adjuncts complained that higher-profile faculty worked fewer hours, had longer sabbaticals and are often busier doing research than teaching classes, leaving most of the grunt work to graduate students and adjuncts.

Sexton called the argument a "false dichotomy built on a false premise." He said NYU does not engage in free agency, nor does it pay premiums or set markets to attract faculty.

Ha. It'd be too gauche to name names here, but this is one of the more ridiculous Sexton claims the WSN has ever been dumb enough to print.

George H.W. Bush might have called all of this voodoo academics, but he would have been racist to do so. It's neoliberalism, pure and simple. Slash public education, give the money to undeservedly elite private universities, and let the wealth trickle down!

Oh, and it's totally connected to the university's global geography of expansion and real estate speculation!

"We'd rather have you say, 'Wow, this is one of the ICE capitals of the world - I'm looking out at these places, I don't feel like moving to the two in China, I'm not ready to move to Abu Dhabi, I don't want to move to Paris. I want to stay in the United States, so it's a choice between New York and a couple other places and this ICE stuff is good," he said.

Sweet!

Also...

I'm interested to hear what folks think about Cam'ron's new mixtape track "Just Us," which , obviously, (and awesomely) samples the piano riff from the intro of "Don't Stop Believing." You can download it here, and The Village Voice's Tom Breihan calls it his best in years.

Alright. Back to the grind, streetlight people.

gone writing.

I'm off working on my feidl exam, so this blog is going to go on hiatus, Or, if i indulge in procrastination, which is pretty much a given, it'll be sporadic at best. I'll post if i see something worth posting about. But i may pop up every now and then anyway to share music i would be listening to if i weren't reading or furiously writing. In that vein i give you two tracks from youtube from artists you've probably heard me rant about before. The first, the honey cone, were one of the best bands signed to Holland/Dozier/Holland's Hot Wax and Invictus labels. "Innocent 'Til Proven Guilty" got sampled recently by Kanye West on Common's "Testify," but I like the original song more than I like that particular moment in Common-Kanye collaboration.
The second track i'll leave you with today is a video from a french TV show of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings performing "Hod Do I Let A Good Man Down," which generally vies with "How Long Do I Have to Wait for Your Love" for my favorite song off Naturally. I have reservations about this band. I've written about this before here. Briefly, i'm extremely uncomfortable with the ways in which a hipster "revival" of sixties and seventies funk and soul fetishizes authenticity and a supposedly unmediated musical neo-luddism. I'm leery of the racial politics of some of Jones's international fandom - the comments on Youtube that try to read her as a mute reincarnation of Marva Whitney or Aretha, or worse as a museum artifact demonstrating the "natural" musicality of black womanhood. I wonder if the retro chic of the band's self-marketing and self-framing erases some of the ways in which the frames the band uses were problematized by the very figures it seeks to conjure. Which is not to say that there's an erasure of politics going on here - the radical, fierce reworking of "This land is your land," on Naturally and several of the songs on the new record attest to the particular ways in which this project is evoking the political. (On NPR's Fresh Air this week Gabriel Roth explains that "When the other foot drops, Uncle," with its refrain of "You better pack up and run," is about Bush and Cheney.) A cynic might argue that this occurs in ways which don't disrupt or problematize the troubling politics of the band's self-representation or consumption. I will not make that argument here. Anyway, the songwriting's often very sharp and the band is fantastic. But i would like to see more of a dialogue on the blogosphere and among critics (and perhaps it happened five years ago before Dap-dipping and i just missed it because i was too busy storming Woodbridge) about these concerns, not only with regard to the Dap-Kings, but concerning "retro-soul" more broadly, (which means you, Amy Winehouse.) Anyway, here.

omg electoral politics

Frank Rich:

Even Tom Tancredo, the most virulent immigration demagogue of the G.O.P. presidential field, has spoken warmly of Mr. Obama.

Well, let's think about this a little bit. Some of Obama's immigration stances are progressive - or, at least, "liberal," but others are indefensible and right up Tancredo's alley, most notably and egregiously Obama's vote to support the wall along the Mexico-U.S. border, which forces migrants further out into the desert and will only further increase the sharp spikes in migrant deaths we've seen in the last half decade, as well as cause significant environmental problems.

quickly

As the NYU student senate, spurred on by the Take Back NYU Coalition/Students Creating Radical Change, demands disclosure of the university's budget, Sexton gets a big pay raise.

And an update on the anthropology and secrecy controversy.