To the Best of Our Knowledge: Authenticity

Authenticity
To the Best of Our Knowledge

There's no question – we crave authenticity. You want "real" Chinese or Mexican food? Then make sure you find a restaurant that makes food the way it's made in the old country. Music lovers are also obsessed with authenticity - from folk and blues to rap...just consider the mantra of hip hop - "keeping it real." It's no different in politics. Think about our insatiable hunger for politicians who are genuine, not packaged. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge we'll explore authenticity.

SEGMENT 1:



Cultural Critic Richard Todd looked at modern life and saw others telling what is and isn't real. He wrote a book called "The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity." He tells Anne Strainchamps that authenticity is less a condition in itself than a desire. Sherman Alexie is a celebrated fiction writer who is also Spokane and strong opinions about what it means to be a real Indian. Steve Paulson asked him to read an excerpt from his story "The Search Engine." And, music critic Yuval Taylor tells Steve Paulson that authenticity in music is a complicated business. Taylor is the co-author (with Hugh Barker) of "Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music." And we hear examples, from Leadbelly to Punk.



SEGMENT 2:



Vikram Chandra touched off a bidding war among New York publishers for his new novel, "Sacred Games." But he writes in English, the language of the colonizer, and faces accusations that he's not really an Indian writer. Chandra talks with Jim Fleming about his personal history and sense of identity as a writer. And don't look for authenticity on your plate, either! That's the message of Barry Glassner's book, "The Gospel of Food." He talks with Steve Paulson about so-called "authentic" Chinese and Mexican food.



SEGMENT 3:



Alan Doyle, Bob Hallet and Sean McCann are the founding members of the band Great Big Sea. Their music has its roots in Newfoundland traditional folk music, but it rocks! They tells Jim Fleming why they combine folk and rock and how they approach their music. And we hear lots of it. The band's new album is called "The Hard and the Easy."

To Listen to the Episode

Nas: Hip Hop is Dead

Seeing Red Radio: Health Care & Financial “Reform”, Stop-Loss Hip-Hop, E. Jerusalem Building Boom and Arizona 2.3

Health Care & Financial “Reform”, Stop-Loss Hip-Hop, E. Jerusalem Building Boom and Arizona 2.3
Seeing Red Radio

Obama’s recently passed Health Care “Reform” Bill, and Christopher Dodd’s proposed Financial “Reform” legislation most recently exemplify the pro-corporate credentials of the Democratic party, solidifying their place as the US ruling class’ Team B. We then offer the hip-hop song that got Spc. Marc Hall imprisoned and facing a court martial, when he dared to call out the US Army’s disingenuous “stop-loss” policy, which forces members of the US Army to remain in the service beyond their contracted enlistments. We expose the the full extent of Israel’s plans for East Jerusalem, which seeks to effectively alter “facts on the ground”, and displace any hope of the “Peace Process”. We highlight the proposed legislation in Arizona which if passed will make every undocumented worker in the state a criminal “trespasser”. Lastly, we feature a day in Revolutionary History, March 25th, and remember the horror of one of America’s worst industrial disasters, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

Music:
Henry Geddes – Waiting for a State of Siege
Destroy Babylon feat. DXA – Shadow Army
Marc Hall – Stop Loss
David Rovics – Building a Wall
Ska P – Intifada
Immortal Technique – The Poverty of Philosophy

Background Music by T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou

To Listen to the Episode

David Sasaski: Hip-Hop as Cosmopolitan Citizen Media

Hip-Hop as Cosmopolitan Citizen Media
by David Sasaski
Idea Lab

Seeking greater social inclusion through new communication technologies is a strategy with a long and accomplished history that has persisted through waves of new inventions including the telegraph, radio, television, satellite, and of course, the Internet. Many such projects are highlighted in Alfonso Gumucio's Making Waves: Stories of Participatory Communication for Social Change, which was published in 2001 and features more than 20 case studies of participatory communication projects that use video, radio, theater, and the Internet. Similar projects are featured every week on the websites of the Communication for Social Change Consortium, Internews, The Communication Initiative Network, Panos, and Rising Voices.

But perhaps the most successful experiment in bringing so-called marginalized communities to the attention of the mainstream came not with community radio or the Internet, but rather the cassette tape and the boombox. With roots in the traditions of griots in West Africa, work songs from the Mississippi Delta, and dancehalls from the Caribbean, the birth of Hip-Hop as we know it today is generally credited to the Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell) who organized parties at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, New York where he joined two turntables to mix rhythmic beats with funk music. Partygoers were invited to grab the microphone and rap on top of the music as a way to creatively express themselves and show off their verbal dexterity. Those early parties on Sedgwick Avenue helped form the sound and community that would influence what are now seen as the pioneers of hip-hop: Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and The Sugarhill Gang.

In the early 1990's hip-hop's center of gravity migrated from New York City to Los Angeles, where N.W.A., Ice T, and others popularized gangsta rap as a genre of hip-hop that focused on the violence, partying, and hustling on the rough streets of Compton, California. It was only with the release of "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)" in 1993 that New York City was once again nationally recognized among hip-hop fans.

From Hong Kong to Staten Island to Liberia

Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman recently caught an interview on Tom Ashbrook's public radio program, On Point with Wu Tang Clan leader Robert Diggs, also known as "the RZA." During the interview we discover an unlikely intersection in the 1980's between the lives of Ashbrook, a Yale graduate and career journalist, and Diggs, a poor, aspiring rapper in Staten Island who sought shelter in a seedy movie theater that specialized in pornography and kung fu flicks. Ashbrook, it turns out, was a foreign correspondent at the time based in Hong Kong where he supplemented his income as a journalist by dubbing kung fu movies into English. It is entirely likely that one of the many kung fu films that influenced the Wu Tang Clan's unique style of hip-hop featured the voice of public radio's effusive Tom Ashbrook.

New York City's outer boroughs today are barely recognizable yuppie incarnations of their former selves. Gentrification has taken over Brooklyn and is increasingly creeping into the Bronx. In fact, a long and costly protest campaign has sought to protect 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the birthplace of hip-hop, from being converted into a new development. But Park Hill, the home community of the Wu Tang Clan, has changed far less than neighboring Brooklyn across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. While tourists often take the free Staten Island Ferry from Manhattan for its uninterrupted views of the Statue of Liberty, rarely do they spend anytime exploring Staten Island itself.

One of the most sudden changes to the island's demographics came in the late 1980's and early 1990's when civil war broke out in Liberia, a West African country that was founded by freed American slaves. Liberian refugees fled violence that was stirred up by the American-educated warlord, Charles Taylor, and arrived to Staten Island by the thousands. They now make up the largest community of Liberians living outside of Liberia and their troubles in assimilating to a New York state of mind have been featured in Mother Jones, The Village Voice, WNET, and twice in the New York Times.

Ruthie Ackerman is a freelance journalist who is currently writing a book about the social impact of the Liberian Civil War and the integration of Liberian refugees in the same Park Hill community that gave rise to the Wu Tang Clan so many years ago. But rather than merely speaking on behalf of Liberians Ackerman decided to launch Ceasefire Liberia, a citizen media project which teaches Liberians living in Monrovia and Park Hill how to use digital media to tell their own stories.

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