Billy Bragg: Ideology

Billy Bragg wrote 'Ideology' 25 years ago, but (sadly) it's as fresh as ever. It was the 4th track on Talking With the Taxman About Poetry.

Stop copying me

Earlier this week, Flavorwire compiled examples of music videos that are influenced by/steal from other sources; Beyoncé-related examples are below. This discussion—where to draw the line between inspiration and theft—spans all forms of art and isn't an argument than can be easily settled. As a consumer of culture, I'm not as interested in the legal squabbles and 'gotcha' comparisons as I am in tracing influences and being led to material I might not have found otherwise.

I appreciate the case fair use advocates make (liberal copyright rules encourages a more vibrant culture), but I also sympathize with lesser-known artists who have their style/moves/riffs/words lifted by mega pop stars. The artists who give credit to their influences (and compensates them when appropriate) are due more respect in my book than those who continue to profess their originality despite evidence to the contrary. Below are a few clips that explore the topic further.

Everything is a Remix is a four-part series; three sections are finished and the final episode is due soon. Donations to the production are accepted here.


Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix parts 2 & 3.


Can I get an 'Amen'? Following the path(s) of the Amen Break, a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969, Nate Harrison contemplates what impact sampling is having on culture and commerce. This video was produced in 2004.




A lot of wisdom has been dropped from dudes sitting on basketball rims. You can hear some more at the beginning of this compilation of dance moves. "Aint nobody here the best b-boy... People were probably doing this shit thousands of years ago... All we're doing is manifesting shit at a different time."




Beyoncé Billboard Awards performance (2011) and Lorella Cuccarini performance (2010)



Single ladies, I believe you know Bob Fossee...





More than any other form of expression, dance seems to be the most difficult one over which to exert some sort of ownership. Beyoncé has acknowledged the influences on in her Countdown video, but that doesn't seem to satisfy everyone.





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Art is either plagiarism or revolution. -Paul Gauguin

Good artists borrow. Great artists steal. -Pablo Picasso

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic. -Pablo Picasso

I see my work plagiarized in gardening programmes and decorating programmes and car adverts, and I suppose I have to accept that's just the way art gets assimilated into culture. -Andy Goldsworthy

Bad Banks on LeShow

On the October 2, 2011 episode of LeShow, Harry Shearer's interviews Yves Smith, a financial expert w/ experience at companies such as McKinsey & Co., Goldman Sachs, and Sumitomo Bank. If you appreciate the smart and straightforward perspective Elizabeth Warren brings to credit- and debt-related issues, you must listen to Smith's insights into the U.S. and European banking crisis. She's the author of ECONned and the blog Naked Capitalism. Her earlier conversation with Shearer about U.S. housing foreclosures ("the new F-bomb") is also worth checking out.

* * *

LeShow has earned a regular spot in my podcast rotation. The weekly radio program occasionally centers on an expert like Smith or perhaps a jazz musician; more often, however, it consist of Shearer reading choice excerpts from the week's news. He's a satirist (not nearly as broad as you'll find on the Comedy Central "news" programs), and has a knack for highlighting details or entire stories that have been given short shrift in the popular press. Two of his regular features are called "The Buried Lead" and "News from Outside the Bubble." KCRW describes the show as a "romp through the worlds of media, politics, sports and show business, leavened with an eclectic mix of mysterious music." LeShow is broadcast on many NPR stations and available on the internet and via podcast.

In addition to LeShow and his roles on The Simpsons, Shearer produced The Big Uneasy, a documentary film about levy system in New Orleans (his adopted home) during hurricane Katrina.

Bad Lip Reading

Bad Lip Reading is nice example of KPV's second definition.

3 artists

There's plenty that distinguishes Vik Muniz, JR, and Ai Weiwei from one another, but what connects them in my mind is their ability to make large-scale, politically interesting art that retains a highly personal quality. Each has an activist streak and a desire to effect change outside galleries and museums.

Waste Land is a documentary about Vik Muniz's collaboration with several people who scavenge recyclable material in Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest trash dump located outside Rio de Janeiro.



Muniz and his crew work with the recyclers/models to create large mosaics which are photographed and auctioned off, the proceeds benefiting each model or an organization connected to that model. The story of how folks earn a living at Jardim Gramacho is, on its own, worthy of your attention, but add to that the impact of Muniz's intervention in the their lives and the film becomes extraordinary.


TED Prize winner, JR explains how his 'sidewalk galleries' evolved into a wish to change the world in the clip blow. In 2009 he told Beaux Arts Magazine, "I want to try to create images of hot spots such as the Middle East or Brazil that offer different points of view from the ones we see in the worldwide media which are often caricatures." The result of JR's TED wish is the Inside Out Project. 




Ai Weiwei is an artist and activist from China whose output includes sculpture, installations, photography, architecture, not to mention his prodigious blogging and tweeting. Frontline's short documentary, Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?, provides an excellent overview of his art and activism, particularly how he organized an investigation into poorly constructed school buildings following the Sichuan earthquake. (Why PBS doesn't enable users to embed clips baffles and frustrates me.)

A week ago, Weiwei was detained by authorities in Beijing as he was attempting to board a flight to Hong Kong; as of today, his whereabouts are unknown. Before his arrest, Weiwei described his work and the challenges he faces as an artist in China in this clip.

Take This Hammer

The documentary film Take This Hammer follows James Baldwin's tour of San Francisco in the spring of 1963 and features his thoughts on race in America. It includes conversations he had with residents in the Bayview-Hunters Point and Fillmore Districts. Thanks to the San Francisco BayView for featuring the film in a post earlier in the week.

Much of the anger expressed by locals in Take This Hammer shouldn't come as a surprise: in 1963 SF's Redevelopment Agency announced its plan to raze 60 square blocks and displace 13,000 residents, a large number of them African-American, not to mention the national headlines of racially-charged bombings and riots in the South. Keep in mind, the MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had yet to occur.

The film looks low budget by today's standards, but I enjoyed seeing a bright, sensitive, passionate social critic like Baldwin speaking about issues while visiting the community he's discussing.

Baldwin's jujitsu-like handling of the term "nigger" in the film's final scene contains a practical kind of wisdom that is still valuable today. This transcript begins at the film's 40:30-mark.

One of the great American illusions, one of the great American necessities, is to believe that I, the poor benighted Black man whom they saved from the elephant-ridden jungles of Africa and to whom they brought the Bible is still grateful for that.

And people say, in many, many ways, not only in the South, all over this country, in effect you should be grateful. Even slavery--they released you from that. You’re no longer dodging tsetse flies in some backward country.

While I know this, and anyone who has ever tried to live knows this, that what you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you. What I think of you as a being is dictated by my own necessities, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you; I’m describing me.

Now here in this country we have something called a ‘nigger’, who doesn’t in such terms, I beg you to remark, exist in any other country in the world. We have invented the ‘nigger’. I didn’t invent him. White people invented him.

I’ve always known, I had to know by the time I was 17-years-old, that what you were describing was not me, and what you were afraid of was not me. It had to be something else. You had invented it, so it had to be something you were afraid of and you invested me with.

And if that’s so, no matter what you’ve done to me, I can say to you this, and I mean it, I know you can’t do any more and I’ve got nothing to lose. And I know, and I’ve always known, and really always, that’s part of the agony, I’ve always known that I’m not a ‘nigger.’

But if I am not the ‘nigger', and if it’s true that your invention reveals you, then who is the ‘nigger’?

I am not the victim here.

I know one thing from another. I was born, I’m gonna suffer, and I’m gonna to die. So the only way you can get through life is to know the worst things about it. I know that... I was personally more important than anything else, anything else. I learned this because I had to learn it. But you still think, I gather, that the ‘nigger’ is necessary. But he’s unnecessary to me, so he must be necessary to you. I give you your problem back. You’re the ‘nigger’, baby, it isn’t me.

Background on Take This Hammer: here.

Photos of protests in the Fillmore District against Southern segregation: here.

The People Speak

Historian and activist Howard Zinn died a year ago today, 1/27/10.

The People Speak is a film inspired by his essential books A People's History of the United States and Voices of a People's History of the United States.

Noam Chomsky said, "Howard Zinn's People's History molded the perceptions and conscience of a generation by bringing from the recesses of history those unknown and remarkable people who were often its most influential agents. In this new film we can hear their voices, and the messages they offer to us about the path to a better future, a most rewarding experience."

The film includes appearances by: Matt Damon, Marissa Tomei, Viggo Mortensen, Josh Brolin, Danny Glover, David Strathairn, Benjamin Bratt, Darryl "D.M.C." McDaniels, Rosario Dawson, Sean Penn, Sandra Oh, Kerry Washington and others. Music contributors include Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder and John Legend.



Here's the beginning of the Bill Moyers interview with Zinn just before the film premiered on the History Channel in 2009. The complete conversation is available here.

Henry Miller's Bathroom

Henry Miller covered his bathroom walls with images--sculptures, paintings, photos of those he admired and, of course, a touch of porn. Miller rattles off the stories behind many of these pictures in Tom Schiller's short documentary Henry Miller, Asleep and Awake (1975).

Preview (1:59)

Henry Miller, Asleep and Awake (34:32)

If you're looking for a serious or academic look back on Miller's life and work, this isn't it. Asleep and Awake is a free-flowing monologue of reminiscences with a few hokey moments. Miller was in his early 80s when the film was made and hearing him causally free-style in his bathrobe and gruff Brooklyn accent will be fascinating for any devotee.

I believe that cyborgs are the future...

...teach them well and let them lead the way. OK, perhaps we're not ready to sing inspirational songs about cyborgs yet, but they do occupy a special place in our imagination.

Let's define a few terms: robots are mechanism that can move automatically; androids are robots that have a humanoid form; and cyborgs, or cybernetic organisms, are beings that have biological and artificial parts.

In science fiction, cyborgs seem determined to subjugate humanity, make us more machine-like, or destroy us outright (see: Darth Vader, the Terminator, the Borg, and the most recent Cylons).

While menacing, I don't believe the fear we have of these characters springs from concerns about technology. Sci-fi cyborgs are stand-ins for humans who slavishly embrace a belief system or a cause, especially one that requires them to keep compassionate impulses in check. In other words, it's the absence of something distinctly human, not the addition of technology, that makes them villains.

Technology does play an interesting role in these stories, though. Mechanical enhancements give cyborgs physical and mental prowess that can't easily be matched by (puny) humans. Vipers, phasers, and blasters are useful (and cool), but the successful human heroes also need the right psychological (or spiritual) tools to be successful. Sure enough, many of popular cyborg stories conclude not with the physical defeat of cyborg enemies but a cyborg breaking from an oppressive system and sometimes sacrificing themselves for humans.

In reality, tech-enhanced people fill an aspirational space instead of an anxiety-filled one. Their augmentations address disabilities and compliment their humanity rather than threaten it. This is why I suspect we will take to (or physically take in) cybornetic technology as it becomes more advanced and accessible.

I wonder how long it will be before technology reaches a point in which robotic body parts become an attractive alternative to what we're born with. I'm not talking about replacements for injured or missing pieces. For better or worse, I can imagine a time when we begin to trade in healthy features for 'enhanced' versions. What do you think? Does this sound believable or too creepy to come true?

Related video:

From TED: Athlete, actor and activist Aimee Mullins talks about her prosthetic legs--she's got a dozen amazing pairs--and the super-powers they grant her: speed, beauty, an extra 6 inches of height... Quite simply, she redefines what the body can be.


From EYBORG: Take a one eyed film maker, an unemployed engineer, and a vision for something that’s never been done before and you have yourself the EyeBorg Project. Rob Spence and Kosta Grammatis are trying to make history by embedding a video camera and a transmitter in a prosthetic eye. That eye is going in Robs eye socket, and will record the world from a perspective that’s never been seen before.