Are The White Media Unfairly Attacking The Latino Men Accused Of Attacking Homosexuals In New York City?

 

I have noticed in the last couple of days the mainstream white media’s discourse around the reporting of the alleged violent crimes against gays is racist.

First, the Latino men in this alleged anti gay crime case are accused they are not  convicted men.

However, the white media have already branded the Latino men as guilty. Is this fair?

Second, pay attention to the YouTube video clip and the language used by the white press.

It is obvious, the white mainstream media outlets are making a racist link between the racial background of the accused men and homophobia.

Men of colour are consistently stereotyped as being violent, barbaric men that are anti gay.

I am not suggesting that the Latino men accused of the anti gay crimes could  be guilty.

I don’t know all the facts that’s why I am not jumping to conclusions.

However, I am suggesting there is indeed an undercurrent of racism in the reporting of this serious case.

Let’s play devil’s advocate, if the accused were white males and they attacked gay men would their race be a factor in the case?

Would the white media reiterate the fact the accused were white over, and over, and over again to make their point?

Would whiteness be stereotyped as being sadistic, evil, and negative in relation to homophobia?

What does race have to do with an alleged violent crime against homosexuals?

Shouldn’t the media and public be outraged that a deleterious anti gay crime took place?

Pay close attention to the reiteration of the fact the accused are Latino men.

Listen to the language the media use to describe the violent anti gay crime. There is indeed a link to white racism and the white press stereotyping

Latino communities as anti homosexual. The reason the white press are jumping on this case is due to the fact they want to attack, malign, and stereotype Hispanics as being anti gay.

Why doesn’t the white media wait until all the evidence is out in the trial prior to playing judge, jury, and prosecutor?

Third, where are the Latino gay activists discussing this case? I am very irritated and annoyed that the white media not doing their homework and ignoring gay and lesbian activists of colour!

Is it too hard to ask the researchers for ABC, NBC, CNN, or FOX News to do a little bit of research? New York City has a huge Latino LGBT population

that has a lot more understanding of race, sexual orientation issues in their community than the white mainstream media.

It is just lazy journalism to have the usual white queer  media subjects discuss homosexuality when race is also a factor in this case.

I  do not  trust the white gay activist  Andrew Sullivan to discuss race in relation to gay and lesbian issues. I am cautious of people like Andrew Sullivan  because some of the white gay activists also have  racist beliefs and stereotypes about people of colour.

This was an opportunity for the mainstream white American media to have a bridge in communication and have queers of colour at the table!

I have a serious problem with Andrew Sullivan and James McGreevey talking about LGBT rights in relation to people of colour.

I want to hear from move diverse voices in the LGBT community and not the usual white ,high profile, queer activist groups as HRC or GLAAD.

I believe this is the quandary, when issues of race and sexual orientation are an issue once again queer activists of colour are displaced for white homosexuals.

Whiteness and gayness are viewed simultaneously as being equal, and queer people of colour are invisible and devalued.

I am certain in New York City there are numerous Latino gay and lesbian activists that could provide their own perspectives to this case.

Hasn’t anyone wondered where are the Latino gay and lesbian activists?

We need more diversity in the media in relation to LGBT issues. I am sick and tired of the mainstream press not doing their homework!

There is the  usual narrative that white queers speak in the media for all gays  in relation to issues around race and sexual orientation.

I believe this is a dangerous narrative because it is also a one-sided perspective from the mainstream white gay community.

More queer activists need to get the message out that LGBT people exist in communities of colour. We cannot allow white gays and lesbians to speak for us!

Jeff Chang & Angus Batley Article: Are Record Companies Racist Against Hip Hop Acts By Refusing To Release Greatest Hits Packages?

Monday, October 11th, 2010

Hip-Hop, Copyright + Cultural Legacy, Part 1 :: A Conversation With Angus Batey

Angus Batey is a one of the most original and thoughtful music critics and cultural journalists I know. Over the past couple of weeks, we had an email exchange that began as an interview for a piece he was doing on hip-hop reissues. That excellent piece was published at The Guardian, where he writes regularly.

That conversation quickly evolved into a broader discussion on what copyrights are good for and bad for, how the record industry handles Black music and artists, and the role that copyright plays in the way we understand musical and cultural history. Here’s Part 1 of the conversation.

Angus: One of the reasons I’ve heard advanced several times for the lack of a hip hop equivalent of the Beatles Anthology series of releases or a big four-disc expanded, remastered box set of a classic rap album is the hip hop audience’s supposed lack of interest in old music and obsession with the new and with what’s coming next. Do you feel this is an excuse for laziness on the part of major labels, or is the average hip hop fan really not that interested in the music’s history?

Jeff: The people arguing this are either being disingenuous or stupid. The primary market for hip-hop reissues is not the 18-24 year-old demographic, it’s the 35-50 year-old demographic, just as it is for the rest of the reissues market.

Where I go off the rails is when I begin to hear such arguments as a cover for not treating Black music acts in the same way that others are treated. Most Black music tends to fall behind the copyright fences about 10 years after it’s been released.

There’s a cycle that happens to Black music. About 20 years after the music has been released, hipsters and DJs rediscover the music–and champion it once again, oftentimes rewriting the history that comes with it. It happened with jazz, the blues, soul, free jazz, funk, fusion, and now it’s happening again with hip-hop. Hipsters and DJs do two things–they create audiences for previous musical genres and they recontextualize the music at the same time.

This underground economy of hipster rediscovery has lots of upsides to go with its downsides, and it’s worth a longer separate discussion. But let’s focus for a minute on the question of impact. I find it infuriating that right now it is impossible to find De La Soul’s first 6 albums for legal download on iTunes in the U.S. The last one came out in 2001!

Yet major labels would never let a Jackson Browne album or an obscure new wave band with primarily local appeal, like Translator, go out of print. That’s not to diss Jackson Browne or Translator, both of whom I’ve liked, it’s to make the provocative argument that major labels place a low value on Black music not currently on the pop charts.

Angus: Why, do you think, hip hop history has been so neglected by the same music business institutions that are so very alive to the commercial up-side of exploiting their catalogues in other genres?

The reasons I’ve been given, at various points, include the questionable legality of reissuing material based on samples that probably weren’t cleared properly at the time and the ruinous costs involved in going through that process for a reissue; the lack of interest of the hip hop audience in old music; the lack of interest from artists in helping compile and promote reissues of their old records; the collaborative nature of a lot of rap records – guest emcees, various producers, etc. – and the lack of a watertight set of paperwork to ensure someone involved won’t sue over their share of reissue royalties; the pointlessness of doing a reissue when there may not be out-takes or other material to add to it which would increase its value to the potential purchaser.

Jeff: There are three broad reasons as I can see:

1) Structural Change
First off, the irony of global consolidation is the birth of the corporation as oversized amnesiac baby. It’s a big, slobbering toddler that can’t walk or even remember what it learned just yesterday. In real terms, corporate consolidation means that vast libraries of music are now behind copyright fences. But most of the institutional memory in these companies has long been downsized amidst corporate mergers and restructuring. The folks left–or the unlucky ones coming in–have no clue as to what is in the vaults or how to put it to use.

2) Market Failure
The reissues business remains overly fixated on white Baby Boomer tastes. The industry either ignores or condescends to post-Boomer tastes. It’s left up to indies and enterprising artists and managers who figure out how to make it work–like Traffic Distribution, Universal Sound/Soul Jazz, Stones Throw, or even Duck Down.

3) Copyright Hysteria
The Public Enemy Def Jam boxset is a perfect example. Their catalog remains influential, they still demonstrate proven commercial potential, and they did all the work of putting together their own boxset, only to have Universal nix the project presumably because they were worried about publishing and sample clearances.

What we are left with is not quite a racist conspiracy. But the accumulated devaluing of Black music works like institutional racism–all of the little things add up to a vast and widening hole in the American memory about the cultural legacy of Black artists.

Angus: When I see phrases like “copyright fence” they’re so often being used by people who seem to want the dismantling of copyright law in its entirety that I suppose I instinctively move to shore up some elements of those fences. That said, I always wince when I hear a copyright defender claiming that sampling is parasitical of “real” creatives. There’s so much misunderstanding and consequent mistrust in this debate that even working out what the middle ground might look like is hellish difficult.

Robust copyright law, interpreted logically and with understanding of different forms of creativity, is surely the least we have a right to expect in the 21st century. Creators need not only to have the rights to their work, but access to the legal mechanisms that exist to defend those rights adequately.

The main problem as I see it at present – and this goes across the board, it’s not just about sampling – is that access to those mechanisms is restricted by economics to conglomerates and wealthy individuals; this perpetuates the division by allowing a group of folks that the British technology writer Andrew Orlowski calls the Freetards to continue portraying copyright as an exploitative tool by which corporations ring-fence their profits.

All that said I really do feel for the original artists and wouldn’t want to ride roughshod over their rights. I just think there has to be a sane middle-ground between this “don’t do it just in case” over-caution and the “there shouldn’t be any laws preventing sampling, all music ought to be fair game” postures of the Freetards.

I wrote some sleeve notes for the DVD release of Shadow and Cut Chemist’s The Hard Sell a couple of years ago and found myself arguing for a kind of airplay-like system of royalty payment/compensation based on giving the original artist a cut that was a function of how many seconds – or fractions of a second – their work appeared in a piece like that.

Certainly the way things currently work, where the figure that will permit clearance isn’t based on anything other than the number the original artist’s publisher has in their head, isn’t doing anyone any favours. Here we have potentially new income for the original artists that won’t ever materialise because the law as it stands doesn’t make it worthwhile for someone like Chuck D to jump through the various hoops and thus the music never comes out. Though I realise that I’m arguing here for changes to the laws of many different nations, not merely for record companies to work harder.

Jeff: I agree with you regarding compensating the original artists. I think one thing everyone who cares about artists and creativity—whether you’re an ethical intellectual property lawyer or you are a hip-hop artist who not only samples but is being sampled as well—agrees upon is that a balance needs to be struck between allowing creativity and compensating creatives.

The solution that you proposed are what are called compulsory licenses out here—they would work exactly like mechanical royalties, on a fixed basis. Everyone on the panel agreed that’s what we need—but I expressed huge pessimism about getting such a policy passed. In the current situation there’s no incentive for the publishers and labels to fix the problem on behalf of the artists. They make too much money exploiting the situation now.

It’s the usual market-gone-crazy stuff. Artists are often left out of the deals that get cut, and at the same time, labels and publishers are only working on the 0.5% of copyrights that are worth a fortune. Included in all the rest of it is the landfill stuff—the records no one wants to ever hear again, including the artists who made them!—but also what I was calling cultural legacy. Cultural legacy is piled up with the garbage behind the copyright fence.

Government is the only place where this stuff can be worked out to the benefit both artists and the public. But the only time this stuff gets taken up in Congress is when corporations want to extend the copyright fencing or when publishers, radio and media companies, and labels can’t work out a price agreeable to all sides to do the business. It’s fucked!

And the point you make about this being a global situation is serious. Culture is one of the places countries are still waging huge battles in international bodies that don’t get talked about. But in this new economy, the debates over cultural things like movies and music are related to and just as important as, say, the debates countries are having over plant seeds.

Hip-Hop, Copyright + Cultural Legacy, Part 2 :: A Conversation With Angus Batey

Photo by the great Glen Friedman.

Here’s Part 2 of my conversation with the fine journalist Angus Batey of The Guardian. (Part 1 is here.) Angus was pulling together material for a piece that came out last Friday on hip-hop reissues.

In this clip, we get deeper into the lost Public Enemy Def Jam boxset, geek out on what hip-hop boxsets could include, and speculate on what this all means for how we pass on our shared musical and cultural history.

Angus: Public Enemy has got a box set out now, but it’s just of the post-Def Jam material. I imagine those issues over clearances for previously unreleased material will remain an issue for Universal. Chuck D has told me that it would have been easy to do under the Def Jam/Sony relationship because there was – to paraphrase him – a very different set of corporate instincts regarding the risk inherent in that kind of project; but after Def Jam was bought out by Universal there was a change in attitude.

He also talked about something he called “new discovery” which would happen if and when anyone went back to the original PE master tapes and remixed or remastered them: there are sonic elements on those records which are unidentifiable, and indeed pretty much inaudible, in the finished and originally released versions, but without which the tracks don’t work – yet the legal onus would be on the company releasing a remaster to go through the multitracks and ensure every last thing was cleared. Chuck said those PE albums didn’t just contain samples from hundreds of records – they came from thousands.

Full clearance would be impossible under the present free-for-all rules; and there is absolutely no incentive for any of the people in the clearance industry to have those rules changed — unless, of course, it could be definitively demonstrated that a flat-rate clearance system would enable so much more sample clearance to take place that the overall sums involved would mean the whole pot of money accruing to each entity along the chain would be greater than that generated through the present system.

Here’s a different question: As a music nerd I yearn to be able to buy something like a box set of “3 Feet High and Rising” that includes all the b-sides and remixes but also the out-takes, the demos, the failed skit ideas, and has a big booklet with new interviews with the band and Prince Paul about how they made the record and what was going on in their heads at the time.

Yet when I’ve talked to them – and other artists behind similarly iconic releases – they often say that there wasn’t anything left over, that what went on the record was pretty much it. I don’t get the sense that there’s something sitting there in the vaults waiting to be discovered, like Joel Dorn did with the Coltrane box set when he found all those alternate takes of Giant Steps on the master reels and you can get to listen in on the masterpiece taking shape – but I also don’t get the sense that anyone in the labels, or indeed often anyone in the bands, cares about finding it if it does exist. Was hip hop so different from every other musical form that we need to find new ways of thinking about its history, of re-telling its canonical stories? Or do you think there’s an untold history out there that hasn’t been excavated properly yet?

Jeff: The first part of that question has to do with the process and technology of hip-hop production post-mid 80s. I believe Prince Paul if he says that there’s not much left. It just goes to the fact that most jazz needed to be recorded live in a single take and that artist improvisation was the standard. With hip-hop production everything is structured, written or mapped, then delivered, punched in and fixed in the mix. What might be revealing is, say, if groups recorded freestyle sessions for practice, or kicked 16 on a radio show. But there is a vast—I mean endless—amount of documentation to be done on the pre-mid 80s live performances. I mean like club shows or battles or community center jams. Those tapes do exist and there is a market for those, but I know of only a few people who have even thought about trying to go there.

Angus: Over the years, talking with artists who are very aware of the wider historical context of their music such as Chuck D or ?uestlove or Shadow, it’s become apparent to me that the job of curating hip hop’s on-record history seems to have fallen squarely on their shoulders. I don’t get the feeling this is the case with other genres – we don’t expect Ornette Coleman to be the driving force behind a retrospective box set of his Atlantic recordings, or rely on Paul McCartney to kick-start a Beatles reissue program. Whose job is it, ultimately, morally, actually, to maintain hip-hop’s history? And what does and should that job entail?

Jeff: I guess the job has been left to us—the folks who sit at the intersection of being artists, DJs, historians, and—uh—hipsters all at once. I don’t think this is optimal at all. We need curators, musiciologists, recording and sound technicians, and yes, label execs and marketers to do this project properly. I would love to make the argument for government support but the political climate is sour and the lack of capacity on the part of our national cultural institutions is dispiriting.

Angus: Are concepts of “history” when it comes to recorded music now just so much hot air? When I was a teenager, once a record was no longer a current release and had disappeared from shops, that was it – there was no way of getting it, so it might as well not have existed. Today, pretty much the whole of recorded sound is available to anyone at any time, instantly – so someone who’s 14 and has just heard about this band Public Enemy for the first time can go to the website and read all about them and what they did and why they were important, can instantly download all of their back catalogue, can see their videos on YouTube, and browse collections of cuttings, features and write-ups that help explain their context.

So to today’s audience it’s almost like there’s no distinction between “catalogue” and “new” material, because it’s all out there and easy to access and available if you want it. Does that mean that the “traditional” record industry construct of repackaging the classic album on the 20th anniversary, etc., is now redundant and irrelevant in terms of the ongoing life of the culture?

Jeff: First off I don’t believe that all of recorded sound is available, although certainly a 14 year-old like mine can be up on many kinds of music in ways we never could have imagined. But I don’t think that—whatever you want to call it, call it the wiki age or the condition of postmodernity—means that a classic album, like a classic book, is any less important as a cultural thing.

It is certainly true that the way that thing is approached and used is different, and that is a real problem for marketers and especially for artists who seek some sort of compensation for their work. It may mean something different as well to the 14 year-old, and that is a lesser problem for anthropologists to solve.

But to get back to the point I began with, most of recorded sound is not free—and there are good reasons why they shouldn’t, ask the artists. The social problem here is the question of cultural memory. Why do we privilege certain forms of cultural memory over others? And what does that privileging do to both the memory and the society that countenances that inequality?

LA Times Blog: What Are Record Labels Going To Do About Declining Album Sales?

On the charts: Toby Keith’s No. 1 debut sets record low

October 13, 2010 |  2:02 pm

A Pop & Hiss look at what’s selling — and what isn’t.

At the top: The U.S. pop charts have had an influx of country the last two weeks, as Toby Keith‘s “Bullets in the Gun” is the second-straight Nashville representative to lead the tally. “Bullets” hits with about 71,000 copies sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan, a celebratory landing that comes with an asterisk.

The number, according to Billboard, is the lowest-ever debut for a No. 1 album since SoundScan began tracking data in 1991. While there have been smaller sales tallies posted by albums that rose to the pole position — including 60,000 copies sold by Justin Bieber‘s “My World 2.0” earlier this year — Keith’s figure is a new low for an album that debuted in the top spot.

The Billboard archives reveal that Keith’s 2009 effort entered at No. 3 with 90,000 copies sold. His latest sells just a few thousand more than Kenny Chesney‘s “Hemingway’s Whiskey,” which in its second week moves down to No. 2. The latter’s two-week sales total now stands at 249,000.

Weezy’s big drop: Though it may be unfair to consider Lil Wayne‘s “I Am Not A Human Being” an official follow-up to mega-seller “Tha Carter III,” it’s still a release that merits some close watching. The album was first issued only to online retailers, who had a two-week head start on the effort, which supposedly consists of tracks intended for the indefinitely postponed “Tha Carter IV.” Thus far, “Human Being” has sold 133,000 digital copies, and falls from its No. 2 position last week to No. 16.

The online-first experiment, however, arrives with a caveat. The physical CD release, which was unleashed to stores yesterday, carries with it an additional three tracks, and how sales play out over the next couple weeks should indicate how willing or unwilling consumers are open to such tiered projects. An even bolder experiment will come this holiday season, when Kanye West releases his “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” in November after giving away much of it for free.

The next pop star? The debut from young R&B crooner Bruno Mars, “Doo-Wops & Hooligans,” lands at No. 3, having sold 53,000 copies in its first week. The artist went into the sales week with the No. 1 single in the U.S., and his “Just the Way You Are” has sold more than 1.7 million downloads, according to Billboard. The producer/artist won a mainstream audience after offering vocal turns on songs from the likes of Far East Movement, Travis McCoy and B.o.B., among others, but is entering a market that’s increasingly uninterested in translating smash singles into big-selling albums. For instance, Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” has spawned hit after hit, but after seven weeks has sold just 470,000 copies — no slouch, of course, but not a runaway sure thing.

— Todd Martens

Guardian Article: New British Lesbian Drama Lip Service Has Huge Ratings Over 600,000 Brits Watch The Show!!!

Lip Service is groundbreaking – whatever its star says

BBC3’s new drama, Lip Service, at last shows that lesbians can be just as cool, sexy, funny – and normal – as straight women

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  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 October 2010 14.00 BST
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BBC3’s Lip Service portrays the day-to-day lives of British gay women. Photograph: BBC/KudosAfter watching the first episode of the hot new lesbian drama Lip Service last night, I think the star of the show, Ruta Gedmintas, has underestimated what a programme like this means for gay and bisexual women. 

The actor, who plays bad girl Frankie, said in Saturday’s Guardian that the programme is not groundbreaking.

Queer As Folk had a groundbreaking status because there hadn’t been a show like that before. But we’re not trying to do anything that hasn’t been done before. We’re just making a relationship drama,” said Gedmintas.

But the fact that it’s “just a relationship drama” is exactly the point – our lives being normalised and turned into one of these twenty/thirtysomething dramas is hugely significant.

Lesbians make up a significant proportion of the female population but it is still pretty rare to see ourselves as regular characters onscreen.

Tipping the Velvet was lovely as a historical fantasy, and the wonderful Sugar Rush or Corrie’s coming-out storyline are important, too, but this is a whole series dedicated to the day-to-day lives of grownup lesbians in the UK. And, judging by the first episode, it’s as good as the straight versions of itself, such as This Life, which is the series it’s drawing comparisons with.

I know that a lot of gay women will say this is gay life with a gloss on it, that the women are too glam. But that’s TV and you probably wouldn’t see many Mileses or Annas down your local Wetherspoon either.

In truth, there are plenty of Lip Service-esque girls on the gay scene if you hang out in the right places. And I, for one, am pleased that this is the side of our scene that the British viewing public is now seeing.

For too long, lesbians have been perceived as unfashionable, miserable and ugly. Those types do exist, of course, just as they do in the straight world, but they should no more define us than they do straight girls.

If I were to make one criticism based on the first episode, it’s that perhaps the most frequently seen type of woman on the gay scene, the sexy butch – think Rhona Cameron – is not represented at all. I know Lip Service’s lady-loving writer Harriet Braun has said she wasn’t trying to represent all lesbians, but modern butches like this are very popular in the lesbian world and if we don’t see any in the first series it will show a lack of guts. It will also annoy lots of gay girls.

In the meantime, it’s important to recognise Lip Service for the great service it’s doing to British lesbians. As brilliant as Queer As Folk was, it was about gay men, who in recent history have had more representation in the media. The latest study of BBC programming showed that lesbians were given only two minutes of airtime in a random selection of 39 hours of programming.

So, well done to the BBC for giving us Lip Service, we’ve waited long enough. And here’s to a new era of appreciating that lesbians are normal and, yes, can be very cool, sexy and funny, too.