“True poetry cares nothing for poems” says Raoul Vaneigem, the
Belgium Situationist who taught us that we are creating our lives
twenty-four hours a day, in his book “The Revolution of Everyday Life.”
The act of living is a certain poetry in itself, we have decided.
What is this thing? In essence it’s a festival of art,
amusements and entry-level anarchism. A place where you can get your
counterculture easily available over the counter. A theme park for the
disenfranchised, with franchises available. I guess you’d say its a
theme park whose big theme is – theme parks should have bigger themes.
Where is this thing? It’s situated in a former lido that
stretches across two-and-a-half acres of heavily fortified beachfront
compound, comprising a pool, sun terrace and small amphitheatre. I asked
myself: what do people like most about going to look at art? The
coffee. So I made an art show that has a cafe, a cocktail bar, a
restaurant and another bar. And some art.
Why is this thing? If you’re the kind of person who feels
jaded by the over-corporate blandness that passes for family light
entertainment, then this is the bespoke leisure opportunity that will
connect with your core brand dynamic. It doesn’t so much ask the
question, “What is the point in art now?” as ask, “What is the point in
asking, ‘What is the point in art now?’”
You’ve described low-income families as “the perfect art audience”. Why? “Low-income holidaymakers” are the
perfect art audience. There’s something very evocative about the British
seaside experience. This show is modelled on the failed winter
wonderlands they build every December that get shut down by trading
standards – where they charge £20 to look at some alsatians with antlers
taped to their heads towing a sleigh made from a skip. Essentially this
is a theme park that Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen would endorse. The
advantage of putting art in a small seaside town is you’re only
competing with donkeys.I think a museum is a bad place to look at art;
the worst context for art is other art.
Do you think that the art market poisons creativity? The art market certainly doesn’t
encourage creativity. Like most markets it rewards being able to
reliably deliver recognisable product on a regular basis. Which isn’t
necessarily a recipe for exciting art. I heard someone on the radio, it
might even have been Richard Ashcroft, say: “It’s not art unless it has
the potential to be a disaster.” Which is why I’ve spent months making
distorted fibreglass fairground sculptures to install in a dirty lido
miles from anywhere.
"BANKSY: Thanks for agreeing to play my theme park. Have you ever played in a theme park before?
EL-P I have not yet had the pleasure of playing in a theme park, or enjoying one for that matter.
KILLER MIKE I have not played a theme park. My dream
is to play [US theme park] Six Flags Over Georgia before I check out of
life. Mostly because they used to have a teen nightclub called
Graffiti’s; I was there when I was a kid and that’s where I heard dope
music and danced with girls from the suburbs after we snuck in."
“Ritual baths from that period are not rare in the Holy Land, but they
don't usually feature time capsules in the form of writing and symbols.
The space is highly unusual in featuring inscriptions in ancient Aramaic
– albeit pretty much incomprehensible—on the plastered walls.”
"Although the group often claimed
they were simply “street reporters,” the violent gang- and drug-filled
world of their music ignored more prosaic aspects of Compton, such as
its single-family homes and history as a black, middle-class enclave.
But in segregated Los Angeles, whites often avoided predominantly
black communities and viewed black youth suspiciously. Straight Outta
Compton played to their shrill, pervasive fears about gang violence,
offering outsiders a vicarious look into a neighborhood most had only
heard about on the nightly news.
Music fans ate it up: the album went double platinum and encouraged
music industry executives to focus on developing more hardcore acts.
...
Nonetheless, the larger-than-life personas populating NWA’s recordings spoke to complicated realities.
On tracks like Gangsta Gangsta
Ice Cube might have sounded invincible – “I’m the type of nigga that’s
built to last / Fuck with me, I’ll put my foot in your ass” – but all of
that bravado masked real social insecurity.
NWA’s core members grew up in Compton and South Central neighborhoods that had been devastated by massive deindustrialization.
The resulting poverty and unemployment proved fertile ground for the
influx of cocaine in the early 1980s. They witnessed the dramatic rise
in gang violence connected to it and felt the LAPD’s heavy-handed
response.
With draconian names like C.R.A.S.H. (Community Resources Against
Street Hoodlums) and Operation Hammer, the LAPD criminalized entire
neighborhoods, conducting destructive search and seizure missions with
the dual purpose of finding contraband and intimidating residents.
By embracing the role of the “bad guys,” NWA found a profitable way
to capture public attention and strike back at the system – a musical
strategy I explore in my recent book Sounding Race in Rap Songs."
"An ongoing tension between many communities of faith and activists is
the ability to connect theology with reality. Many clergy leaders
ignore the work of establishing concrete hope in our present realities,
foregoing practical hope for pearly gates. However, Kendrick Lamar's Alright demonstrates how downtrodden people can have hope in a world of violence, tragedy and death.
...
Even in the crux of this chaos, Kendrick Lamar does not turn to despair, but he says:
Alls my life I has to fight, n***a
Alls my life I...
Hard times like, "God!"
Bad trips like, "Yea!"
Nazareth, I'm f*****d up
Homie you f*****d up
But if God got us
Then we gon' be alright
While these words were spoken (at 2:54 in
the video), it appeared that Lamar's dangling legs and boots mirrored
the lifeless legs of lynched victims in the Jim Crow era. When the
video continued, I realized that the legs that appeared to be hanging
like strange fruit from a lynching tree were not hanging, but
levitating.
Seeing Kendrick Lamar fly across the sky like a super
hero was the climax of the video. Like Jesus walking on the waters of
stormy seas, Kendrick Lamar soared above the prince of the power of the
air.
But what does it mean for Kendrick Lamar to fly so high
when people of color are buried so low in our society? For me, it is an
affirmation of the freedom to be superhuman. It is analogous to the
affirmation that Black Lives Matter.
In the gospel of Jesus, the
resurrection is powerful because it demonstrates God's power over the
Roman Empire's power that was sustained by subjugation and violence.
Although the Roman Empire could exert its power through killing
criminals, there was nothing they could do about a criminal being raised
from the dead. This same power appears to propel Kendrick Lamar above
the present subjugation and violence in our world."
"Whether or not you were familiar with Sean’s body of work, hip-hop lost
an important voice this weekend. A voice that was part of the dwindling
chorus that is the music’s consciousness, and what is art without
conscience? Price was a man who placed himself in stark contrast to the
music’s adulation of fame and money, who had no time for its games and
even less for its niceties. The brokest rapper you knew, who could still
split the craniums of the richest rappers everyone thinks they know
while cracking jokes that showed he was human, just like you and me, and
not some unattainable star in the sky." Read rest here
"This “read-and-play-it-to-me-again” collection of poetry with a beat
entertains and educates all ages. The introduction by Nikki Giovanni
recounts the history of rhythm, rap, and hip hop, emphasizing stories of
resistance and creativity during enslavement, including the funding
cutbacks in the 1970s that led young people to invent their own sound in
the absence of school bands and arts programs."
"Bringing together revolutionary political ideas with deeply personal
memories and desires such as these, Riley's new book conveys an
unflinching - if also satirical - anti-capitalist worldview. He wants to
revive historical materialism, and the book is filled with calls for
collective control over the means of subsistence.
"So you know, it's trying to get across the idea that we're talking
about material things when we talk about revolution," he wrote in his
book. "We're actually talking about material resources that are created
by the people but not justly distributed."
In Mexico, we
know that our government is corrupt. So for me to grow up in Mexico, my
mentality was: "why is this happening? Why are we going through this?
Why isn’t this being solved?" That’s what inspired me to write. We need
to see what’s going on around the world, so we can solve these problems
and reveal things being hidden. By expressing that through lyrics,
through song, I’m doing my part as an artist, an activist and a person.
Music talks to people, young and old. They listen more when you’re doing
it in an artistic way.
"As usual with the
Portuguese artist, this piece was built using solely trash and found
materials that he gathered from the streets. After a few days of work,
the end-result is stunning with this beautiful and super cute kitty."
