Anyone who’s been through a serious loss knows about the baffling part: After it’s over, you are still you. You are you, plus the loss, plus the pain and confusion the loss causes. The process of healing isn’t really a matter of “getting over it” — taking it in is what’s necessary, incorporating what’s been felt and learned and figuring out how to be the person you’ve always been is what’s different now.

“The Sea,” Corinne Bailey Rae’s sometimes hard to absorb but ultimately deeply rewarding second album, is about that process. Rae’s husband, saxophonist Jason Rae, accidentally overdosed on methadone and alcohol in March 2008. Rae grieved for him by doing nothing for months, then returned to making music.

Though she’s known for the kind of delicacy that’s often dismissed as “lite” — her 2006 self-titled debut was a careful exploration of the feminine psyche set within arrangements that melded Laurel Canyon folk with early-1970s boho soul — Rae searches for the pinpricks and love sighs that intensify gentle emotions. On “The Sea,” her carefulness complicates what might have been a blunt expression of pain.

The album begins with one of Rae’s patented carefully plucked guitar chords and the line, “He’s a real live wire.” What a way to invoke a ghost. That first song, “Are You Here,” captures the way that a dreaming mind can create its own happiness and how returning to reality is a landing with a thud. It’s one of several songs that move in a circular fashion, like waves, like irresolvable emotion.

Several songs, including “Love’s on Its Way” and “Diving for Hearts,” unfold less neatly. They resist hooks and no one will dance to them. Tapping into elements of soul, jazz and even heavy rock, Rae stubbornly shapes these songs to conform to her wandering, insistent thoughts. They don’t sound like what we’re used to in pop right now; they’re more like the mid-period work of Van Morrison and Nona Hendryx’s songs for Labelle. Those artists formed their musical approaches within the soul idiom but demanded the freedom of voice and the chance to stretch in strange ways that rarely makes for hit singles.

Although Rae is famous for the more marketable charm of bouncy singles like the Grammy-nominated “Put Your Records On,” she told interviewers that she hoped her next work would be more akin to the avant-pop of critical darling Joanna Newsom. It’s cruel to say that her personal calamity might have bought her the chance to take that risk, but it does seem possible.

“The Sea” isn’t a perfect album. The catchiest song, “Paris Nights / New York Mornings,” sounds like an outtake from Rae’s debut. “Paper Dolls” seems similarly out of place — it’s a rocker invoking Rae’s post-punk youth that distracts from the thornier, more expansive songs around it.

Repeated listens might help integrate those sonic sore thumbs into the overall mood of “The Sea.” Even without such closure, though, “The Sea” is a remarkable accomplishment. It’s a step toward something — Rae’s inner peace, and her next artistic breakthrough — that has its own considerable rewards.

–Ann Powers for the Los Angeles Times

Corinne Bailey Rae
“The Sea”
Capitol
Four stars (Out of four)

1. “Feels Like the First Time”

2. “I’d Do It All Again”

The best way to listen to Maxwell’s new “BLACKsummers’ Night” is with the volume turned all the way up. The R&B artist didn’t take a turn toward heavy metal during the eight years he’s spent between releasing albums; this one, like his previous three, is full of meditative jams written on the continuum between ardor and heartache. But as genteel and deceptively traditionalist as is Maxwell’s veneer, he’s always been bent on taking urban music forward: he just takes obsessively careful, small steps, best appreciated through close attention.

And he believes, passionately, in dynamics. Many of the songs on “BLACKsummers’ Night,” the first part of a trilogy Maxwell plans to unfold over the next few years, are structured around a short musical phrase, played on a keyboard or guitar, on which everything else loops and builds. (Doesn’t that sound like Radiohead’s approach? That’s an inspiration Maxwell has cited in interviews.)

These details are different than the hooks usually heard on the radio. They don’t grab; they’re not compressed for maximum brightness. Sometimes one recedes and another momentarily dominates — a horn line might burst through, or a kick drum completes the thought of a bassline.

Maxwell’s vocals move in conversation with these elements, growing into the space above and around them. He sings about relationships — many songs here are about a cherished but disappointing love affair — and the music replicates the experience of an intimate connection, its ebbs and surges, its sometimes frustrating turns.

Compare this sound to the showiness of other current urban hitmakers, like Jeremiah or even the more laid back Trey Songz. Those singers telegraph their moods, whether they’re getting down or opening their hearts. Their music is meant to be catchy and quickly absorbed. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just not Maxwell’s approach. Even when he’s not too proud to beg, he stays true to his own internal clock, timing his pleas as they might unfold in real time instead of on the stage of pop seduction.

This doesn’t mean Maxwell isn’t a great seducer. He’s known as a ladies’ favorite and purveyor of “baby-making” soundtracks, and many songs here, whether the directly seductive “Stop the World” or the mournful but still sexy “Pretty Wings,” drip plenty of candle wax.

But let’s give Maxwell’s female fans a little credit for intelligence. His music is libidinally compelling because it is complex. Following the example of his acknowledged influence Al Green, Maxwell’s singing teases out the subtle gradations of feeling in a lyric — even a dubiously “poetic” one like, “Hell hath no fury like the flurry of your snow” — to express how sexual joy intertwines with loneliness, or anger at a love lost collides with guilt and self-loathing.

“BLACKsummers’ Night” spends much time exploring those less comfortable emotions. For all the talk that Maxwell’s covered in thrown panties wherever he walks, he often sounds somber, resentful and wrecked. Pop doesn’t get much more desolate than “Playing Possum,” an elegy for a sweetheart who’s literally departed. And “Fistful of Tears” is a plea for mutual catharsis that’s so raw it almost fails to communicate.

Maxwell promises more hopeful fare on his next installment, and overall “BLACKsummers’ Night” does seem like the first movement in a larger piece that won’t offer total satisfaction until it’s completed. Still, for those who like their pop delicate and unapologetically deep, this is one for turning up loud and wallowing.

Review by Ann Powers for the Los Angeles Times

1. “Help Somebody”

The Irish diva is soon to go global via her debut album on Atlantic. This album from the young Dubliner was set to be released on Jive Records three years ago, but got shelved. Then, another label, Atlantic, took their time in deciding just when it should see be released. “Let The Truth Be Told” reveals not only that capacious voice, but also a confident commercial songwriter - its collection of wholesome pop being penned entirely by Laura herself.

From soulful ballads through orchestral anthems (all pizzicato strings and sisterhood sincerity) to a clipped and sassy R&B swagger, her take on classic femme soul may not be rocking any boats, but earworms such as “Don’t Stay” and new single “Shine” exude enough crossover familiarity to become retail and ringtone fixtures.

The CD is a glossy-sounding album of funky soul-pop tunes with Izibor’s unique stamp all over them. Her smoky voice rides over the album’s strong melodies and establishes her as one of the current vocalists in today’s soul scene. “…It’s so glossy, however, that there’s no rough-’round-the-edges charm, or distinctive quality about it.” - Lauren Murphy

The first track “Shine” kicks the album off to a slightly energetic start, with a very catchy chorus, but then “Dont Stay”, the second song, takes the tempo down a notch or two, while maintaining a swaying rhythm. In fact she showcases her versatility by switching the tempo throughout the album. “If Tonight Is My Last” is a gorgeous, emotive mid-tempo track whilst “The Worst Is Over” is the album’s big piano ballad, and most beautiful moment.

The dreamy “Yes (I’ll Be Your Baby)” adds some finger-clicking sass into the mix and has an edgier street sound and you can imagine this ripping up the charts In US, while the likeable “From My Heart to Yours” borrows from the songbook of Lauryn Hill and dramatic piano ballad “Perfect World” from that one of Alicia Keys. Best, though, is the full-blown gospel soul of “Mmm”, which is authentically beautiful. Expressive and powerful, the Rathfarnham singer is blessed with vocals to elevate even the most banal song.

Not that her voice needs to compensate for weak compositions here : the bulk of these 10 soul songs, mainly written by Izibor, are very well crafted. “Let The Truth Be Told” is a promising debut album by anyone’s standards and hopefully it points to a long and fruitful career. She has an incredible voice, a knack for a melody and an album full of potential hits.

Realistically, it’s a very well crafted, inoffensive album which will not break any ground.
There’s nothing particularly innovative, but good music nonetheless. Enjoy this album for the bright songs that will make you smile. Just don’t expect too much from it. It won’t change your world, it won’t make you think deeply about life…But certainly it will ensure a great career ahead of her.

Review by ST “Easy Listener” (New York City)

1. “Yes I’ll be Your Baby”

2. “I don’t Want You Back”

I believe that children our our future.
Most people think Whitney Houston penned the lyrics to the timeless hit “The Greatest Love of All,” or that Randy Watson was the genius behind the words when he led the wildly-famous soul band “Sexual Chocolate.” Actually, the song was originally recorded by George Benson in 1977 for the Muhammed Ali film, The Greatest.

Well, as I watched Sexual Chocolate perform their classic gig the other day, and listened to the simple-yet-oh-so-powerful opening line to that song, I was reminded of a video that I had seen a few months ago. The video: a 12 year-old girl chastising a group of United Nations delegates and government representatives from around the world. She took the time to remind them in a very definitive tone why they were there and what their responsibilities were.

Sometimes, young people say or think things that we adults only WISH we had the wisdom to have thought, and this was one of those moments.

Listen to the speech of young Severn Suzuki at the United Nations Earth Summit in 1992.

ALL of her words still ring true today.

Schools of robotic fish could be sent into the Thames to produce a 3D pollution map of the river.

from Daily Mail UK

Researchers at the University of Essex in Colchester are working on the robofish as part of a £2.5million EU-funded project to find new ways of monitoring water waste.

Each fish will be about 50cm long, 15cm high and 12cm wide. They will be packed with pollution sensors that can electronically ’sniff’ harmful chemicals in the water.

Scroll down for a video of how the robofish swims…

Robofish

Green robofish: The pollutant-seeking robots will be based on this model at the London Aquarium, with sensors to detect contaminants and GPS navigation

Scientists have developed ’swarm intelligence techniques’ which allow the fish to work as a team without humans, according to London’s Evening Standard.

The robots will communicate with each other using wi-fi as they seek out areas of pollution. They work out where they are with inbuilt GPS systems - in effect, mini satnavs - and artificial intelligence software will enable them to move without the need for a human operator: they will only alert staff if pollutants are found.

A fish that finds contamination sends GPS coordinates of the location to others.

‘Each school will contain five fish, and they will constantly monitor for pollutants,’ said Dr Dongbing Gu, who is leading the research.

‘When they find something, they will send a message to the rest of the school, who will then converge on the area to take readings.’

The fish move by undulating their bodies - propelled by motors - and use fins and a tail to change direction. It is hoped they will travel at speeds of up to half a metre per second.

Working prototypes could be available within 18 months. Different sensors will be fitted to hunt for different pollutants. The data could be used to build a ‘real time’ 3D map of pollutants in the water, allowing operators to determine the best way to clean up the area.

The fish will initially be used in ports to monitor emissions and leaks from large ships, but Dr Gu said the same system could be used in the Thames. Researchers hope the robots will be able to spend up to 24 hours in the water before needing to be recharged.

They will be based on a design for robot fish that appeared as visitor attractions at the London Aquarium, swimming alongside living creatures.

Rory Doyle, from engineering firm BMT Group, which is overseeing the project, said: ‘This might look like something straight out of science fiction [but] there are very practical reasons for choosing this form.

‘In using robotic fish we are building on a design created by hundreds of millions of years’ worth of evolution which is incredibly energy efficient.’

* The Thames Whale was effectively ‘killed’ by rescuers as they lifted it out of the water and onto a barge, it emerged today.

Rescuers have admitted that the move caused serious internal injuries, and the animal should have been put to sleep far sooner.

Rules from today mean whales will be killed with a lethal injection as soon as they enter shallow water and beach themselves.

‘Saving whales such as the one that swam up the Thames is not viable,’ said Paul Jepson of the Institute of Zoology, who carried out the post-mortem on the whale and was on the boat when it died.

Tests revealed that the strandings had already caused terminal injuries to the whale.

See how an early model of the robofish swims…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wymrQ966pXo

Q&A with Van Jones Obama’s former ‘Green Jobs Czar’ on gray capitalism and why we’re a long way from a green bubble. —By Jesse Finfrock

Mother Jones: Can you briefly explain what “environmental justice” means to you? Van Jones: Environmental justice is the movement to ensure that no community suffers disproportionate environmental burdens or goes without enjoying fair environmental benefits. MJ: What’s the relationship between environmental justice and sustainability? VJ: Well, the only reason that we have the unsustainable accounting that we have right now is because incinerators, dumping grounds, and sacrifice zones were put where poor people live. It would never have been allowed if you had to put all the incinerators and nasty stuff in rich people’s neighborhoods; we’d have had a sustainable economy a long time ago. We’d have had a clean and green economy a long time ago. It’s the environmental racism that allowed the powerful people in society to turn a blind eye for decades to the downsides of the industrial system that got us to this point. So there’s a direct relationship between environmental racism and the lack of sustainability of society as a whole. We were the canaries in the coal mines, crying for relief. Now finally the consequences are affecting everyone, with global warming and everything else. The other thing is that the environmental justice agenda is also changing. Before, it was much stronger on demanding equal protection from environmental bad. Now we are also demanding equal opportunity and equal access to environmental good. We don’t want to be first and worst with all the toxins and all the negative effects of global warming, and then benefit last and least from all the breakthroughs in solar, wind energy, organic food, all the positives. We want an equal share, an equitable share, of the work wealth and the benefits of the transition to a green economy. MJ: How do green-jobs initiatives fit into this picture? VJ: Senators don’t install solar panels. You have to have the right policies, but it’s also a lot of just physical labor to retrofit a whole country. There’s going to be a lot of jobs weatherizing buildings, putting up solar panels, manufacturing parts for wind turbines and wind towers. All that’s work, and we want to make sure that the green economy is an equal-opportunity, diverse economy that can lift millions of people out of poverty. We don’t want it to be an ecoapartheid economy where the vast majority of the owners and workers and consumers and beneficiaries of the green economy are all one race. MJ: There’s been some criticism that the green-jobs movement is overhyped. VJ: It’s easy for people to say that, but it’s a movement that’s two years old. There are movements for education reform that are 30 years old and don’t have a single victory. I guess they’re probably overhyped too. On the one hand, the green-jobs movement has been overhyped if people think that we’re somehow going to have a green utopia, and everybody in America’s going to have a job putting up a solar panel everyday, and that day will be a week from next Thursday. I mean, that’s overhyped. But the reality is that there are either going to be a whole lot more green jobs or we’re going to have a dead planet. It’s become kind of fashionable to pooh-pooh it. I’ve never seen a movement two years old expected to have already changed the country. The civil rights movement took several decades. The women’s rights movement took several decades. Other environmental movements are taking several decades. We need to give the green-jobs movement at least a chance to turn green before we declare it dead. MJ: Some environmentalists argue that the transition to green jobs is not happening fast enough. Does the movement need more energy behind it? VJ: Let’s just quit. I think we should just quit. It’s too late. We should give up. [Laughs.] Look, nothing’s happening fast enough. You may have noticed there’s this jackass in the White House that’s not letting anything happen, whether you’re talking about health care or getting out of the war or fixing the energy crisis or solving global warming or getting the economy to work. So right now nothing’s happening. It’s a tragedy. This is a very new movement. There’s a consciousness changing moment that’s happening right now where people are starting to realize that we’ve got to put these two things together: fixing the economy and fixing the environment. It’s probably been in your mind for a while, but we didn’t even have the language for it ’til three years ago. So, yeah, we need to step on the gas here, or step on the pedal, or whatever you step on in the green economy. MJ: Who in politics understands the green economy, and who is writing some good legislation and moving in the right direction on the green-jobs issue? VJ: Massachusetts just passed something yesterday where they’re moving millions of dollars into green-jobs programs and making sure low-income people and people of color have a real shot. Just to make this perfectly clear, the holdup for green jobs is the holdup for the green economy as a whole, and the holdup for the green economy as a whole isn’t about consumer demand, isn’t about the lack of technology, or anything like that—it’s a political logjam. The rules have to be changed to punish the polluters and reward the problem solvers. It’s still free to dump carbon by the ton even though it’s going to cost us the whole planet. It’s still free to you, it’s still free to ExxonMobil, and it’s still free to the coal plants. As long as that’s true, as long as the rules favor the problem makers, the problem solvers are going to be struggling to break out of very narrow, niche markets. When you’re dealing with the problem solvers in the solar industry, wind industry, organic food industry, still trapped inside of little niche markets. The minute the rules change so that we punish the polluters, so the polluters have to pay, and the people who are doing things in a clean and green way are benefited, which can happen within the year, then you’re going to see a massive transfer of both public and private capital into the clean and green sector. You’re going to see a huge uptick in jobs. Now, the real question is who’s going to get those jobs. Everybody thinks the people who do venture capital are geniuses because they’re making economic bets on the future. Well, the green-jobs movement is doing “venture policy,” “venture politics.” We’re making a political bet on the future. We’re making a political bet that this country is smart enough to change the rules in a sane direction. When the government moves, then capital will move, and when capital moves, then jobs will be created. We want to say very early and very loud, not after we see the big green economic boom, the real boom that’s coming, but before, that the jobs question is critical, justice is critical, equal opportunity is critical, and pathways out of poverty are critical. We raised it early, deliberately, and on purpose. Now people are saying, “Okay, well, you raised it; where are the jobs?” The whole point is that we’re raising it before it’s over, before it’s too late. Why are we so clear about this? We’re so clear about this because with the Silicon Valley tech boom, communities of color, poor people got nothing out of it. By the time we got into the argument, to talk about “Let’s close the digital divide,” the only thing Silicon Valley could think of to do is to give us recycled computers. Wealthy elites and also just good hardworking college kids went on to making billions of dollars, and we got recycled computers. We don’t want, having already fought the digital divide in the ’90s, to now have to deal with an eco divide. MJ: How do we get to the tipping point where the rules change. Does it have to come from the very highest levels? VJ: The change has got to be top down, bottom up, and inside out. The federal government has to get off the bench. Or frankly the federal government has to put down its pompoms for the polluters and put on the cleats and get on the side of our team trying to solve this problem. That’s critical. Otherwise, we’re going to have patchwork solutions, every state, every city going its own way. We’re not going to win with that. We also have to have bottom-up solutions in terms of communities, cities, mayors, community colleges, local labor unions, local business councils, all in their own ways beginning to move to a cleaner, greener, more sustainable economy. But probably the biggest change is what I call the inside-out change. Each individual has got to have a big change of heart here in terms of not only respecting the earth more, but also respecting each other more, and insisting that this green economy not have any throwaway resources, or throwaway species, but also that it doesn’t have any throwaway people or children or neighborhoods. MJ: What are some of the policies that you’re envisioning would create this more level green-jobs market? VJ: It’s a two-part answer. First you’ve got to have a green economy. Then you’ve got to make it just and inclusive. You’ve got to put a price on carbon; that’s got to be a top priority for the new administration. MJ: Do you favor a carbon tax or a carbon trade? VJ: I don’t care. I just say cap, collect, and invest. Cap carbon. We want a radical reduction in carbon. We support Al Gore’s call for 100 percent renewable in 10 years. We think it’s the only call that makes any sense given the science. We want a really aggressive cap. We want to make the polluters pay. We don’t care if they pay by buying permits or paying taxes. It really doesn’t, at the end of the day, matter a whole lot as long as the price is right and there aren’t a whole lot of giveaways. We say take the money from the carbon proceeds, whether it’s carbon taxes or a sale at auction, and a cap-and-trade system and invest that money in jobs, transportation, and new technology via weatherization crash programs, the weatherization and solarization of the country. So people get in a big fistfight about taxes versus cap and trade. We don’t care how the money comes in. We just want to make sure the money comes in and is invested in people and not just handed right back to the polluters. MJ: What’s your take on whether or not buying and producing new things is inherently unsustainable? VJ: It probably is. We are going to have steps and stages here. The first step is going from just grey, dirty, suicidal capitalism that doesn’t even try to take account of any sustainability at all to a form of capitalism that does. But then you’ve still got to have probably growth featured—that’s more quantitative than qualitative and therefore still not sustainable. We’ll have to keep moving from there. MJ: If the green movement gets overhyped, do you think people might lose interest, get sort of burned out? VJ: That’s a valid fear. But it’s mainly a valid fear among people who are into political fads. It’s not a valid fear among people who don’t have a job. It’s not a valid fear among people who would love to have their homes weatherized and solarized and use government programs, or at least a functioning solar company with actually green-collar workers. It’s not a fad or a point of burden for people who need healthy food in their communities. There’s the political class, the political elite, and what they jump up and down about, and then there’s reality. And in reality, if we’re going to get through this ecological and social crisis, there’s a lot of work that has to be done. That’s going to be called “green-collar work” or “green work”—we’re going to fight over the definition. It’s not all going to happen overnight. It’s not going to be distributed fairly. There’s going to be fights over wages, and working conditions, and that kind of stuff. But these issues are not going to go away just because we get bored by talking about them. MJ: With all of the excitement about the green economy, is there a danger we’re creating a green bubble? VJ: The question of the green bubble is objectively overstated right now. There will be a green bubble, in that there will be way too many good dollars chasing green projects and green technologies than there are good projects and good technologies out there. That will happen. That’s a natural part of any of these transitions. You’ll have too much skepticism at first. You’ll have “irrational exuberance,” as Alan Greenspan said, and then you’ll have some kind of correction. But we are far from that. I mean, the entire venture capital outlay last year for all clean tech was about $5 billion. That’s nothing. At the top of the tech bubble you had $100-plus billion a year, every year. So we’re a long way from a green bubble on the tech side. I think that will happen. Hey, everyone wants to fix these problems with the market, and that’s a part of what you buy with that. Otherwise you’ve got the government doing it directly and you’ve got a different set of problems. If you use markets, you’re going to risk bubbles.

Outkast To Deliver Two Solo Albums And Another Group Effort in 2009. ‘Y’all gonna get three records from the ‘Kast next year,’ Big Boi says.

By Shaheem Reid

ATLANTA — Big Boi is getting his second solo album, Sir Lucious Leftfoot: The Son of Chico Dusty, back on the good foot. The street-embedded member of Outkast says that despite a delay, his record is still coming.

“The South got something to say, and we gonna keep on talking,” he told us recently in Atlanta. The roll-out plan for his LP seems to coincide once again with that of his partner, Andre 3000, and the ‘Kast have been putting their heads together in preparations.

“Me and ‘Dre were on the conference call [recently],” Big explained. “He’s working on his album; my album is done. We’re gonna wait until the top of the year — January or February — to put it out. Then ‘Dre is gonna come hit y’all, and [then] we’re gonna do the Outkast album. So y’all gonna get three records from the ‘Kast next year.”

Besides being holed up in the studio working on these records, Daddy Fat Sacks has also been spending time on the set — he’s due to appear on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” next Tuesday, November 25. He plays a rapper — Gots Money — who gets greedy. Instead of just relying on the loot he gets as an artist, he decides to get involved with an animal-smuggling ring — when the cops catch him, he turns sides and works undercover for the authorities.

Now, we have heard about the ‘Kast pulling a trifecta of albums before, and it hasn’t materialized — but it might actually happen this time. Andre 3000 told MTV News’ Mixtape Monday in September he had finally started work on his album.

“To be honest, I work best when people doubt me,” ‘Dre explained. “Our whole Outkast career has been built on people doubting us. [Hip-hop fans] up North hated on us from the get-go. We wouldn’t be Outkast if people didn’t understand what people would call weird. You know, none of that would’ve happened. Actually, if you see me, tell me I’m wack. That’s the best thing you can do for me. You know, if you want a greater album, say that. Say that!”

Straight Outta Mogadishu

Somali-born rapper K’naan on African pirates and the world’s hardest ghetto.
—By Eamon Kircher-Allen for Mother Jones

K’naan’s music sounds a little like Eminem’s, if Slim Shady had spent his childhood dodging bullets in Somalia’s civil war. The 30-year-old hip-hop artist (born Kaynaan Warsame) grew up on the mean streets of Mogadishu and escaped in 1991 on one of the last commercial flights out of the country. Now living in Toronto, he’s just released his second studio album, Troubadour, an addictive blend of African-jazz-infused ballads and rhymes about everything from Somali pirates and the immigrant experience to Iraq. Having survived “the most dangerous city in this universe,” K’naan says he can’t separate his music from his past. “I don’t have the luxury of ignoring myself,” he says. His honesty has resonated with other musicians; he’s collaborated with Damian Marley and Maroon 5’s Adam Levine, and Mos Def has joined him onstage. K’naan talked to Mother Jones while sitting on a bus on his way to a show.

Mother Jones: You said goodbye to Somalia when you were 13 years old. How does your childhood relate to your music?

K’naan: It’s kind of the primary influence. The only way I see the world now is through coming out of and growing up and living in Somalia. In the time of war, everyone was basically trying to live and manage the best they could. But you also had another period which was not a hard time at all—it was just a beautiful time. I lived in both eras. I got to fully experience and appreciate both the tragedy of Somalia and the beauty of it.

MJ: In your music, you talk a lot about being a kid in a war zone. In “People Like Me,” you say you “partook in the gun crimes” and mention a “close call with a grenade.” Did you fight in the war?

K: The idea of child soldiers is different in Somalia. There is no real military to join, nor are there any consistent rebel groups. There is just war. And it’s everywhere; in the hands of adults and in the little hands of children. It is the very survival of the streets that makes children pick up guns in Somalia, not some older, wide-eyed rebel leader. My intimate experiences during these years are something which I have shared with people through my music but am very careful about how they are addressed. I learned to fire guns at the age of nine or so, but luckily was not out killing people. We zigzagged the streets to escape those trying to kill us. I guess it would have been a matter of time till I turned around with a gun myself, to go after those coming for us. But I was fortunate. The grenade incident was about an explosion which destroyed a section of my school, from a grenade that me and my cousin detonated by accident. We both lived to tell about it.

MJ: When you were growing up, were you aware of American hip-hop?

K: Very limited stuff—this one album by Eric B. & Rakim called Paid in Full. That was my first and last interaction with hip-hop until I got to North America.

MJ: Is there Somali hip-hop?

K: No. Somalis really are very musically sophisticated, and they’re about their own thing. They’re not very quick to import.

MJ: What do you think about the situation in Somalia right now?

K: It’s horrific. The UN recently said that it’s the worst humanitarian disaster in the world, more so than Darfur. What can I say, man—it’s a sad situation. It was great to have the fortune to escape what was happening in the country. Of course, the flip side of that is that you’re leaving everyone you love, and you’re leaving the place you love and the things you know.

MJ: How do you feel when people turn Somali pirates into a joke?

K: Well, the pirates are serving a purpose right now. They come from regions which have been completely ignored, and Westerners have tried to destroy these regions by their constant plundering of resources and by the illegal dumping of nuclear waste. The pirates really began in order to discourage these actions—initially. And then the business became lucrative. So I don’t know what to tell these people who want Somalis to condemn them. One man’s pirate is another man’s coast guard.

MJ: You make fun of rappers who have a thug posture. Don’t you think that what people are going through in Oakland and New Orleans and Queens is hardcore enough?

K: I guess it’s hardcore enough—for them. The truth is that everyone’s struggle is legitimate. I understand those ghettos; I’ve lived in them. But there are, in fact, more severe struggles.

MJ: Have you gotten any flak from other rappers about that stance?

K: Actually, rappers understand that more than a lot of people. The same rappers who are the glorifiers of it all, when faced with reality, are like, “Yo, man, you’re right. It’s the truth.”

MJ: So why this obsession with glorifying violence in hip-hop?

K: I think a lot of it has to do with marketing groups, statistics—what works and what doesn’t. If peace began to sell, that would be the norm. But right now the consumer is getting really smart. Extreme exposure no longer equals selling records, which I think is a very good scenario for music. Not so much for record labels.

MJ: In “15 Minutes Away,” about making a money transfer back home, you say, “Generosity is the key.” Are you taking a stance against rappers like Kanye West and Cash Money Millionaires, who brag about how much their jewelry costs?

K: It’s just how I feel. These guys are very hungry for opportunity, and they really try to expose themselves. But I just think that sometimes that might not be the most important thing in the world. I’m not about trying to get and get and get. I feel good when I get, but I kind of feel better when I give.
5 K’Naan Songs You Don’t Want to Miss

1) Wash It Down

2) What’s Hardcore?

3) I Was Stabbed By Satan

4) If Rap Gets Jealous

5) Going Away

K’Naan’s new album, Troubador, is out February 24.

from Mother Jones

She’s Pumped. Your Turn.

By LIZ ROBBINS

THE arms have taken on a life of their own. They have provoked controversy, envy, a bit of backlash, even bad puns about the right to bare them. But enough debate and deconstruction. Now women are talking about construction.

“I want Michelle Obama arms,” Julie Eich told her trainer on the Upper East Side of Manhattan two weeks ago, uttering a request echoing off many gym mirrors these days.

In recent months, the first lady has bared her toned biceps, triceps and shoulders at the Inaugural Ball, on the covers of Vogue and People, at her husband’s first televised address to Congress and in her official White House photograph. She does not have Madonna’s sinewy muscles popping out of paper-thin skin. Nor, with her solid 5-foot-11 frame, does Mrs. Obama, who is 45, have a typical runway model body. That makes her image even more admirable to many women, and perhaps even attainable.

“It’s great to see a first lady that looks good, wears great clothes and takes care of herself,” said Guthrie Schweitzer, 34, who has two daughters.

While watching the election campaign — most often, from a treadmill — she could not help mentioning Mrs. Obama’s physique to the director of personal training at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, Keith Gittens, who helped her lose 35 pounds.

“I don’t know anyone who sees her and doesn’t think, ‘That’s the type of woman I want to be,’ ” she said.

It is one thing, however, to emulate Michelle Obama by buying from J. Crew or one of the designers she favors. It is another thing to do some biceps curls and achieve instant results.

“You work hard to look like that,” Simone Scott, 47, said, before adding with a sigh: “I had those arms once upon a time. And then, I fell off the wagon.”

So Ms. Scott called her trainer, Brad Schoenfeld, after a 10-year hiatus, which included the birth of her twins, now 4 years old. A visiting nurse in the Bronx, Ms. Scott has returned to twice-weekly sessions with Mr. Schoenfeld in Scarsdale, N.Y. He is the owner of the Personal Training Center for Women and the author of several fitness books, including “Sculpting Her Body Perfect.”

There is no single, easy route to arms like Mrs. Obama’s (dubbed “Thunder” and “Lightning” by David Brooks, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times). Instead, the trainers recommend an integrated workout that combines weight lifting — working the opposing muscles in the biceps, triceps and shoulders in one session — along with cardio activities, core strength development and, equally important, diet.

“You can have the best muscle definition, but if you have that layer of fat over it, you’ll never see the tone underneath,” Mr. Schoenfeld said.

Mrs. Obama has not revealed details of her workouts, although she has said that she trains in the morning several times a week (before her daughters wake up), lifting weights and doing cardio, and working with a personal trainer who has also guided her husband.

Trainers are careful, though, to warn their clients who choose to emulate a celebrity role model. “You have to have their genetics,” said Mr. Schoenfeld, who added, “That covers about 50 percent, but if you train, everyone has the ability to look terrific within their own genetic framework.”

Putting heredity aside, to build the better arm in the mold of Mrs. Obama, trainers suggest developing one specific shoulder muscle: the medial deltoid.

“The shoulders are important because they create the whole illusion of the upper body and mask flaws below,” Mr. Schoenfeld said. “The side part of the deltoid muscle is what gives you a shapely look.”

Trainers suggest one specific exercise for that: lateral raises. The client, holding dumbbells, raises her arms out to her side, repeating the motion 10 to 12 times, for three sets. For people who want a leaner look, trainers suggest using a lower weight with more repetitions (15 to 20).

To work the biceps, there is the standing biceps curl, flexing at the elbow. That should be paired with triceps kickbacks, either standing or leaning on a bench, extending the arm backward. Triceps can also be developed with a variety of bench presses, or dips using a chair or bench.

The goal? “You don’t want the triceps to wiggle,” Mr. Gittens said.

Traditional pushups, as well as pushups on a stability ball, also engage the triceps and biceps. In fact, for a more comprehensive workout, trainers suggest doing several exercises on the stability ball to develop core strength.

Brad Guzman, the program director of personal training for Method Fitness in Manhattan, is pleased that the first lady has inspired women to take care of their bodies. “From the perspective of sound fitness, though, I’m not going to change my program just to focus on arms,” Mr. Guzman said. “You want to train the body from the inside out, as opposed to doing isolated muscle movements like biceps curls. Now the general movement in fitness tends to be full body and core conditioning.”

Ms. Eich, 28, had some full-body goals, she told her new trainer at Equinox. “I wanted more energy, more endurance for running and most definitely those arms,” she said.

At 5-foot-5 and 125 pounds, Ms. Eich knows she has a different body type than Mrs. Obama, but she wants to achieve the same overall image. “She’s a buff mom,” said Ms. Eich, herself a mother of a 14-month-old son.

Some women fear that lifting weights will lead to bulking, not buffing, but trainers and researchers say many women don’t push themselves hard enough. “You need to challenge the muscles,” Mr. Schoenfeld said. “It should be a struggle on the last few reps.”

Miriam Nelson, the director of the John Hancock Center for Physical Activity and Nutrition at Tufts University, has studied the effects of strength training for women, publishing several books. She has worked specifically with women 40 and older. “In 12 weeks, you see significant gains in muscle strength, and reductions in body fat,” she said.

She was the vice chairwoman for the country’s new physical activity guidelines, written by the United States Department of Health and Human Services this fall, and has been thrilled to have Mrs. Obama and President Barack Obama as fitness role models.

Ms. Nelson said she and her colleagues celebrated Mrs. Obama’s official White House portrait, identifying the sleeveless look as a fitness trend that surpasses fashion.

“I can tell you, over and over again, whether it’s women 45, 65, or 85, when they do strength training and see the results, one of the first things they like to do is wear sleeveless shirts,” Dr. Nelson said. “They are proud of their body.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/fashion/19fitness.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&ref=fashion&adxnnlx=1237464264-mQuu/70kwRzk0rqSv3U2ww

Why Biofuels Are the Rainforest’s Worst Enemy.
By Heather Rogers

Nestled deep in the tropical rainforest on the island of Borneo, Pareh is a collection of about 60 weathered wooden houses perched on stilts and enfolded by coconut palms, banana trees, and the dappled green overhang of the towering forest. Pareh’s inhabitants belong to the indigenous tribes of Borneo collectively identified as the Dayak. They have lived here for centuries, raising rubber trees, pumpkin, cassava, and rice, and harvesting wood for fuel and lumber.

In 2005, a group of village men went hunting in the forest several hours from Pareh and stumbled on a clearing in which the trees had recently been felled. That was how they discovered that Perseroan Terbatas Ledo Lestari, or ptll, a subsidiary of an Indonesian company named Duta Palma Nusantara, was seizing their ancestral land to establish a massive plantation of oil palms, a tree whose oil is rendered and refined into biodiesel. (One of Duta Palma’s major customers is Wilmar International Ltd, a Singapore-based firm in which US agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland holds a 16 percent stake.)

Over the next two years ptll destroyed 15,000 acres, which the Dayak say amounts to three-quarters of their “customary forest”—land that’s vital for their survival and to which they have certain rights under Indonesian law. The plantation also uprooted monkeys and wild boar, which began raiding the community’s food supply. Because ptll replaced diverse forest with a monocrop, pests invaded Pareh’s subsistence gardens. Rice crops failed. The Dayak filed complaints with regional and national officials; at one point they commandeered one of ptll’s bulldozers (an offense for which Momonus, the village head, and Jamaluddin, an elder, served jail time—.pdf). The clearing went on.

Increasingly desperate, in 2007 the people of Pareh offered ptll a drastic compromise. The villagers would surrender every acre the plantation had illegally seized if the company agreed to take no more land. There was no response. Soon after, a villager obtained a ptll map showing the company’s long-term plan: It aimed to clearcut 50,000 acres, more than three times as much land as it had already taken. On the map, both Pareh and its sister village, Semunying, were gone.

Later that fall, a hunting party was searching for wild boar when the men heard the unmistakable whine of chain saws. This time, they didn’t write up a complaint—they assembled a posse. More than 60 people from Pareh and Semunying descended on the site. They found a clearcutting crew in action, protected by Indonesian army troops; by way of protest, they seized 11 chain saws. “If we didn’t do anything, our land would be gone,” a defiant Jamaluddin told me.

with governments and consumers scrambling for alternatives to fossil fuel, worldwide demand for biofuels has gone through the roof; in Europe, where more than half of all automobiles run on diesel, consumption of biodiesel is set to triple by 2010. US subsidies for biofuels, mostly ethanol, will add up to $92 billion between 2006 and 2012, and producers in developing countries like Indonesia are often eligible for millions of dollars in development money from the World Bank.

But amid the hype, problems have emerged. Biodiesel emits less than one-quarter the carbon of regular diesel once it’s burned. But when production—and the destruction of ecosystems in the developing countries where most biofuel crops are grown—is factored in, many biofuels may actually emit more carbon than does petroleum, the journal Science reported last year. Because oil palms don’t absorb as much CO2 as the rainforest or peatlands they replace, palm oil can generate as much as 10 times more carbon than petroleum, according to the advocacy group Food First. Thanks in large part to oil palm plantations, Indonesia is now the world’s third-largest emitter of CO2, trailing only the US and China.

Yet Indonesia aims to expand these plantations from 16 million acres currently to almost 26 million by 2015. If deforestation, which is due largely to oil palm, continues at the present rate, 98 percent of the country’s forest—one of only a handful of large rainforests remaining in the world—will be degraded or gone by 2022. And although Indonesia has strict environmental regulations and formally recognizes customary land rights, those laws are only as effective as the local bureaucrats enforcing them. “For the permit certification, a guy just comes to your office and you just pay him off,” explains Ong Kee Chau, a former Wilmar executive who was responsible for most of the company’s operations on Borneo. “This is how it works.” For everyone from national politicians to struggling villagers, biofuel represents opportunity. “Oil palm is one of our areas of competitiveness,” explains Herry Purnomo, an Indonesia-based forestry researcher. “We can’t compete with information technologies or in auto manufacturing, but we have plantations.”

the only way to get to Pareh is to travel up the Kumba River, typically in a traditional wooden boat fitted with an outboard motor. When I make the trip with a researcher from Friends of the Earth-Indonesia, we arrive about two hours after sundown. Momonus and his wife, Margareta, receive us in their home. (The people I meet in Pareh all go by single names.) There is no furniture; we sit in flickering candlelight around plastic tablecloths spread on the floor. Pages of newspaper have been pasted over gaps in the walls, and in one room I read a story about girls being kidnapped and used as sex slaves by plantation workers.

After a meal of fiddlehead ferns and banana flowers, the front room begins to fill with village men who spill out onto the porch and linger in the doorway. All wear freshly washed T-shirts and jeans or khakis, and all of them smoke except Momonus, a 38-year-old with a low, solid build, dark hair, and a thin mustache. The men tell me that if the government and Duta Palma continue to rebuff them, they will resort to their machetes. (The Dayak have a history of head-hunting, although nowadays they mostly use that reputation to inspire fear.) As the meeting winds down, Julian, a young father of two, asks if anyone has been to the boundary between the forest and the plantation. Another young man speaks up. Yes, he was recently there, and didn’t see any logging.

The next day, I go with Momonus, Julian, and two other villagers to see for ourselves. On motorbikes, we navigate the ribbon of slick mud that passes for a road. After two perilous hours, we reach the land Duta Palma has seized.

The contrast between past and future is extreme. The ancestral forest is carpeted with ferns and flowers; monkeys swing from branches of wild mango, teak, and ironwood trees, and soaring above it all is a majestic canopy of dipterocarps. One of the rainforest’s iconic treasures, dipterocarps bloom just once every four years but do so in unison, their vivid red flowers erupting over millions of acres.

Across the road is a moonscape. Charred trunks lie prone as far as the eye can see. On the horizon we can make out a thin emerald seam—the encroaching column of palms. Duta Palma has also planted seedlings in a narrow band along the border of the community’s land, like a message written in green: The forest belongs to the palm.

We pass the area denuded last fall, and the empty military guard post set up to protect the loggers. Farther along we find a camp. A blue tarp is pitched over a platform covered with bedding and folded clothes. Momonus lifts the lid on a pot of rice; it’s still warm. He takes a stub of wood from the cooking fire and writes on the platform in thick black letters: Stop destroying the ancestral forest!!!

We hit the road again. After a few miles, we come to an abrupt halt—several recently downed trees are blocking the way. As the drone of chain saws reverberates, a few workers emerge from the trees. Unlike the people of Pareh, they have tattered clothes and black teeth. Momonus calmly exchanges words with one of them and heads into the forest to see what’s going on. When he returns 10 minutes later, his eyes shine with rage. Then another man, better dressed than the laborers, comes barreling toward us on a white motorcycle. He, too, looks furious. Momonus orders us on the bikes, and we speed away. When we finally stop, Momonus reminds me where I’ve seen the man before. He was the villager at the meeting last night who said the clearing had stopped. He is Momonus’ brother-in-law.

I have just witnessed the palm companies’ modus operandi in miniature. Operatives will proposition community members to assemble a logging crew in return for a sum that is insignificant to the company and a fortune to a villager. Some people will say no—Julian refused $6,000. But the company will keep trying until someone says yes, and someone almost always does. This helps the plantations expand into the forests, but, even more important, it sows betrayal and division that undermine the opposition.

A few days later, I get a text message from Momonus saying that the community went back to the clearing and confiscated 20 chain saws.

is there any hope for Indonesia’s rainforests—and the people who depend on them? To answer that question, I visit an older oil palm plantation, Perseroan Terbatas Bumi Pratama Khatulistiwa. It’s owned by Wilmar and located in the coastal district of Pontianak, near the village of Mega Timur. This terrain used to be tropical peatland forest, but in 1996, Wilmar began razing the groves and digging deep canals to drain the soil. Now the land is a uniform grid of oil palms. According to Greenpeace (.pdf), the destruction and degradation of Indonesian peatlands releases 4 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Unlike the Dayak of Pareh, the peasants of Mega Timur welcomed the plantation, seeing it as their ticket to a better life. Many families agreed to surrender their land to Wilmar; each received in exchange a smaller plot sown with palm, with the cost of the planting passed on to the family in the form of a loan. This is a common arrangement that somewhat resembles sharecropping: The peasants are obliged to sell their harvest to the company at a set price, regardless of the market rate. The Wilmar plantation siphons off half the money as payments on the planting loans; it also deducts fees for roads and drainage systems, fertilizer and pesticides, harvest collection, security and administrative charges, and a deposit into a mandatory savings account. After almost a decade of working with the company, none of the smallholders I talk to know how much they’ve earned, how much they’ve saved, or what portion of their loans they’ve paid. They do know, however, that floods are common now that the wetlands are gone. Several times a year their fields are submerged, sometimes for weeks on end.

Wilmar is currently under scrutiny for illegalities at three other plantations, including logging protected areas, using fire to clear trees, forcibly removing peasants and indigenous people, and operating without proper permits. These activities violate Wilmar’s own social responsibility policies, as well as the standards of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, an industry-led oversight group the company belongs to, and the International Finance Corporation, a World Bank agency that has provided Wilmar tens of millions of dollars. After considerable pressure from Indonesian activists, both agencies have launched investigations. The industry group’s probe ended last year after Wilmar promised to make improvements.

My last stop in Indonesia is the Center for International Forestry Research, a serene, wooded compound where more than 100 top scientists are working out ways to protect the world’s forests and their peoples. Researcher Herry Purnomo is part of an international team that has devised a plan to pay developing countries to leave the trees standing. Known as the Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation initiative, the program is projected to cost a mere $12 billion annually worldwide—not bad considering that the US government has spent $126 billion on post-Katrina reconstruction. But international agencies and Western governments have promised only $1 billion so far—”nowhere near what there needs to be,” Purnomo says with frustration.

While I was in Pareh, some village men asked if I wanted to see the 11 chain saws they’d seized the previous fall. They led me to a hiding place and took out the orange-handled saws one by one, carefully placing them in a straight line on the ground. A few minutes later they meticulously arranged them in a circle. I could tell how proud they were: The chain saws were trophies of their bravery. I also realized that despite all they’d been through, the villagers continued to see the saws as bargaining chips, a monumental misperception of the size and scope of their opponent.

Study: Lots Of Red Meat Increases Mortality Risk

CHICAGO — The largest study of its kind finds that older Americans who eat large amounts of red meat and processed meats face a greater risk of death from heart disease and cancer. The federal study of more than half a million men and women bolsters prior evidence of the health risks of diets laden with red meat like hamburger and processed meats like hot dogs, bacon and cold cuts.

Calling the increased risk modest, lead author Rashmi Sinha of the National Cancer Institute said the findings support the advice of several health groups to limit red and processed meat intake to decrease cancer risk.

The findings appear in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine.

Over 10 years, eating the equivalent of a quarter-pound hamburger daily gave men in the study a 22 percent higher risk of dying of cancer and a 27 percent higher risk of dying of heart disease. That’s compared to those who ate the least red meat, just 5 ounces per week.

Women who ate large amounts of red meat had a 20 percent higher risk of dying of cancer and a 50 percent higher risk of dying of heart disease than women who ate less.

For processed meats, the increased risks for large quantities were slightly lower overall than for red meat. The researchers compared deaths in the people with the highest intakes to deaths in people with the lowest to calculate the increased risk.

People whose diets contained more white meat like chicken and fish had lower risks of death.

The researchers surveyed more than 545,000 people, ages 50 to 71 years old, on their eating habits, then followed them for 10 years. There were more than 70,000 deaths during that time.
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Study subjects were recruited from AARP members, a group that’s healthier than other similarly aged Americans. That means the findings may not apply to all groups, Sinha said. The study relied on people’s memory of what they ate, which can be faulty.

In the analysis, the researchers took into account other risk factors such as smoking, family history of cancer and high body mass index.

In an accompanying editorial, Barry Popkin, director of the Interdisciplinary Obesity Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote that reducing meat intake would have benefits beyond improved health.

Livestock increase greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to global warming, he wrote, and nations should reevaluate farm subsidies that distort prices and encourage meat-based diets.

“We’ve promoted a diet that has added excessively to global warming,” Popkin said in an interview.

Successfully shifting away from red meat can be as easy as increasing fruits and vegetables in the diet, said Elisabetta Politi of the Duke Diet and Fitness Center in Durham, N.C.

“I’m not saying everybody should turn into vegetarians,” Politi said. “Meat should be a supporting actor on the plate, not the main character.”

The National Pork Board and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association questioned the findings.

Dietitian Ceci Snyder said in a statement for the pork board that the study “attempts to indict all red meat consumption by looking at extremes in meat consumption, as opposed to what most Americans eat.”

Lean meat as part of a balanced diet can prevent chronic disease, along with exercise and avoiding smoking, said Shalene McNeill, dietitian for the beef group.

By CARLA K. JOHNSON | March 23, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/23/study-lots-of-red-meat-in_n_178169.html

___

Can “megawatersheds” save Africa from drought? Or is explorer Robert Bisson all wet?

By Bruce Falconer

Spend any time with Robert Bisson, and conversation will eventually turn to the tiny island of Tobago. Bisson loves the place, and with the enthusiasm of a travel agent raves of its friendly people, its pristine beaches, and its lush tropical rain forest. But the real source of his boosterism runs deeper, down to the bedrock that underlies the tourist haven. There, a few years ago, Bisson demonstrated a discovery that he claims has the potential to solve the looming global water crisis—which according to the UN could leave 2.7 billion people facing severe shortages by 2025—by bringing forth a steady flow of untapped freshwater from the geologic depths.

Not everyone agrees with his grandiose claims. Bisson is a controversial figure who has transferred his experience scouring the earth for oil and minerals to the field of hydrology. His unorthodox theories on the volume and dynamics of the world’s freshwater supply go against the scientific current. Even so, Bisson has confounded his critics, who can’t deny that he has an unnatural knack for finding water—hundreds of millions of gallons of it—in places where none was thought to exist.

Such was the case with Tobago, a 120-square-mile sliver of land in the southern Caribbean. By the summer of 1999, a historic drought had nearly exhausted the island’s supply of freshwater. Hotels ran dry, turning on their pipes only a few hours a day. A new, $100 million Hilton resort sat empty for about six months as its owners debated whether to install a desalination plant. That June, a European firm, commissioned by the island’s government to survey groundwater reserves, reported that no significant sources existed. Instead, it recommended damming a local river to create a reservoir—a major infrastructure project that would have cost an estimated $60 million and taken up to eight years to complete. In desperation, the government turned to Bisson, whose Virginia-based EarthWater Technology International (now called EarthWater Global) drilled a series of wells deep into the underlying bedrock. Within a year, at a cost of less than $20 million, the wells were drawing 5 million gallons a day of previously undiscovered groundwater, with the possibility of upping the sustainable yield to a daily 50 million gallons—10 times what the dam had been expected to produce. Eight years on, the wells are still flowing at capacity.

At the root of Tobago’s success, says Bisson, is the presence of what he calls a “megawatershed.” He coined the term himself, and for the last several decades has been leading a crusade for broader acceptance of his idea, one that he claims could revolutionize how the world thinks about water. According to Bisson, far more precipitation falls at high altitudes than most hydrologists have been able to measure. It then seeps deep into the ground, penetrating the fractured bedrock along fault systems where it streams through fissures in the rock, sometimes for hundreds or even thousands of miles. Contrary to what most scientists believe, Bisson says, many of the most drought-prone places on earth—Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia—actually sit atop a constantly recharging supply of freshwater. All we need to do is drill for it.

On a hot day in July, I met Bisson at his office on a leafy, cobblestoned street in Alexandria. A short man with a gray mustache and the weathered face of an outdoorsman, he sat in a chair of finely carved wood near a fireplace while his dog, a white teacup Maltese named Lexi, sniffed at my leg.

In some ways, Bisson doesn’t seem the type to lead a global water revolution. For one thing, in a field dominated by PhDs, he has only about four years of college, spread across seven universities, and never earned an undergraduate degree. He considers it a badge of honor. Above all, Bisson thinks of himself as an explorer. He’s a fellow at the elite Explorers Club in New York City, and when we met he pointed to the window and said with a smile, “Exploration is out there, not in here.”

Born in 1946 in Laconia, New Hampshire, Bisson took an early interest in underwater exploration. By the mid-1960s he had joined Jacques Cousteau’s crew in the Mediterranean. He later got into the oil, natural gas, and mineral exploration business, founding his own company, bci-Geonetics, in 1972. It was then, while drilling for minerals, that he began to encounter groundwater in fractured bedrock. “Virtually everyone on the planet who’s looking for economic minerals, oil, and gas has found tons of freshwater in places where it shouldn’t be according to what they learned in school,” he explains. Puzzled at the sheer volume of water he was finding, Bisson built some test wells and began pumping them. “It kept on coming. When you stop pumping, the water’s at about the same level,” he says, an indication that new water was flowing in. But from where?

What Bisson believes to be the answer occurred to him in 1987, while he was exploring for groundwater on a usaid contract in Sudan. “The eureka moment was when I realized that the Great Rift systems of East Africa”—a 4,000-mile fault zone spanning from Jordan to Mozambique—”were leading to regional collection and transmission of water, not by a few miles, not just going outside a few local boundaries, but going hundreds or even thousands of miles all over these vast desert terrains of East Africa.” Bisson was unable to continue drilling in Sudan due to the country’s political instability, but since then has conducted groundwater surveys all over the world. In the places his megawatershed wells have gone online—including Seabrook, New Hampshire, Somalia, Tobago, and Trinidad—groundwater has flowed from previously undiscovered sources. More contracts are pending in South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Bisson now talks of augmenting the world’s freshwater supply 100 times over, effectively ending the global water shortage and, by extension, improving the health, economics, and security of nations around the world. Best of all, he says, drilling for water is cheaper, more sustainable, and more environmentally friendly than alternatives like desalination plants and dams.

There’s one problem, though: As Bisson freely admits, most hydrologists think his megawatershed theory is unproven, if not dead wrong. The debate centers on whether wells drawing groundwater from deep, fractured bedrock are accessing a renewable flow of freshwater, or just stagnant pools that will ultimately run dry for lack of recharge. The latter is known as “fossil water,” and the current scientific consensus is that Bisson’s megawatersheds are brimming with it. “It’s very unlikely that the volumes of water he argues are in these megawatersheds can actually be coming from renewable resources,” says Peter Gleick, a water expert and president of the Pacific Institute, a sustainability think tank. Bill Alley, chief of the US Geological Survey’s Office of Ground Water, labels the term “megawatershed” as “an advertising scheme…There are some very large groundwater resources around the world that are being tapped and used, but a lot of them are in arid or semiarid areas that were recharged during a different climate period. They’re effectively nonrenewable.”

Even Claude Cormier, a groundwater specialist who worked with Bisson briefly on the Tobago project, steers clear of using the term “megawatershed.” But with regard to Bisson’s groundwater wells in Tobago, he says, “I guess the proof is in the pudding there.” Utam Maharaj, the former director of water resources at the Water and Sewerage Company of Trinidad and Tobago, which contracted Bisson’s firm to explore for water, says that the projects “had dramatic impacts on the water needs of both islands,” and characterizes Bisson’s methods as “totally revolutionary.”

Bisson acknowledges that “there are challenges to be met if one is going to be exploring for something that (a) no one believes exists, (b) they believe exists, but only as fossil water, not replenished, and (c) challenges the entrenched interests that make so much money off of capital works.” But as time goes on, he remains convinced that opposition to his idea will fade. “It’s like cold fusion,” he tells me. “If somebody actually does it in the laboratory and it stands up to scrutiny, and if someone is able to do it in another laboratory, then you’ll have General Electric doing it. That’s what I’m hoping for. This is one of those things where you contribute something that starts as a footnote in history and maybe grows into a page, then a chapter.”

Bruce Falconer is a reporter at the Mother Jones Washington, DC, bureau.

Illustration: Peter Hoey

Todd Chretien reports on the outpouring of anger after Oakland police killed an unarmed man on the platform of a transit station.

January 7, 2009

In the Age of Obama, Still Playing the Race Card

By William Jelani Cobb
Sunday, January 11, 2009

Here’s what hasn’t changed in America. In the past week or so, we’ve seen a threatened Senate stand-off, hyperbolic historical references, an alleged case of stonewalling by the Illinois secretary of state, lawsuits and rumors of lawsuits, a wild-card nominee for the Senate first turned away from that body and then perhaps accepted by it, and that same nominee called upon to testify in the impeachment hearings of the man who nominated him — all tied together by the complicating factor of race.

Former Illinois attorney general Roland W. Burris may well be qualified to serve as the junior senator from Illinois, but his path to office demonstrates not only that cynicism is alive and well but that the politics of racial divisiveness remain with us too. With one stroke, public attention shifted away from a corrupt governor’s attempt to auction a public office and onto the reliably controversial terrain of race.
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In pushing the case for Burris, Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.), who is black, made inflamed references to lynching — arguing that criticizing Burris was akin to lynching a black man — and to the “plantation politics” of the Senate. Rush illustrated perfectly the kind of cynical manipulation of race that President-elect Barack Obama rejected throughout his campaign, especially in his speech on race last March. But Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s gambit worked. The Illinois House voted overwhelmingly to impeach him on Friday, but it does appear as though whatever else happens, on the point of Sen. Burris, he will prevail.

Thus, on the cusp of a historic inauguration, one Illinois politician has dared us to believe that we can see beyond our racial divisions, and two others have shown us precisely why those divisions have endured for so long.

In the buffet of absurdities surrounding the Burris nomination, Rush managed to distinguish himself for verbal audacity. Between 1880 and 1910, more than 3,000 African Americans were lynched in the United States. The brutal rites involved shooting, dragging, castrating and frequently setting fire to blacks who violated the Byzantine social code of the Old South. A black candidate being damned by his connection to a corrupt governor just doesn’t fall into the same category — which is perhaps why Rush made the comment in the first place.

What makes Rush’s statements even more egregious is the fact that representatives from 49 other states could credibly make the argument that blacks stand little chance of being elected to the Senate. The track record is dismal: Only three blacks have served in the Senate since Reconstruction — two of them elected in the past 20 years, both from Rush’s home state of Illinois. In short, Rush complained about an all-white Senate in the only state with a track record of electing black senators. But this is what makes race-card politics so intractable: In the high-decibel discussions that follow any racial reference, we seldom include the actual details. The card grants its dealer immunity from his own record (for all his indignation, Rush did not even initially support Obama’s 2004 Senate bid). It’s difficult to assess how big a role Rush’s comments played in the Burris affair because the Senate Democrats were on shaky legal footing, but the race card is there — a potent ingredient in the brew of law, political calculation and spin.

While most of the country spent the past year pondering Obama’s relationship with white voters, it was his relationship with black leaders that held my attention. Last year, during the primaries, I talked to an old-school black politician who complained that the Obama campaign had not provided him with any “street money” — cash traditionally paid to local leaders and community organizers to get people to the polls. This would inevitably hurt the senator’s chances of winning because, he said almost gleefully, “The change Obama wants is not here yet.” The very fact of Obama’s election in a country that once denied blacks the right to vote is a barometer of change. But in other ways, the old-schooler was right. Obama’s attempt to change the tone of American politics runs into one cold reality: Divisiveness still works.

A week ago, Senate Democrats said that it would be very difficult to seat anyone appointed by Blagojevich. By Wednesday, we were treated to the sight of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid doing everything but composing sonnets to Burris: “He presents himself very well. He’s very proud of his family. He’s got two Ph.D.s and two law degrees.” This was, of course, shortly after the media spectacle of a harried and harassed Burris struggling to make his way to the Senate chamber. It didn’t take much imagination to conjure visions of Little Rock in 1957 or black voters being turned away at the polls.

It’s precisely because that history remains so vivid in our memory that Blagojevich’s choice of Burris stings. African Americans have spent centuries struggling for inclusion, not for the right to be political cover for indicted governors. A scarier thought is that being connected to political grime is precisely what inclusion means. Take a random tour through the scrapbook of racial politics, from Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” reference in 1980 to Bill Clinton and Sister Souljah in 1992. The race card has always yielded political benefits for those who deal it.

The irony, of course, is that after decades of white politicians using racial division to whip up their constituents, it has morphed into a card for black politicians to play as well. Last year, in the midst of the sex scandal that eventually drove him from office, former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick wailed that he had been the victim of numerous N-word assaults. (This may have been the case, but racism — in a majority-black city — did not compel him to have sex with a staffer and lie about it under oath.) Kilpatrick was forced to resign anyway, but he did succeed in momentarily knocking his political enemies back on their heels.

The Burris fiasco is no exception to the race card’s ability to fluster. Following Rush’s preemptive strike with “plantation politics,” Reid appeared on “Meet the Press” and tried to argue that the Senate’s opposition had nothing to do with race. But he ended up resembling one of those white liberals who mistakes a black CEO for a secretary and then launches into the story about how he founded the campus NAACP chapter in college.

Taken together, all these ironies might make for a kind of absurdist theater were there not real consequences for voters. Blagojevich knew that he would have had a more difficult time pushing a white candidate, but the truth is that anyone appointed by the Illinois governor would effectively be filling half a seat and would have very little prospect of reelection. It will be exceedingly difficult for Burris to be an effective representative for the people of Illinois, and state Republicans are virtually guaranteed to play the Blago card in 2010.

Only Burris knows why he accepted the Blagojevich offer (losing three runs for the governorship, one for the U.S. Senate and one for mayor of Chicago might have had something to do with it), but the benefits to Blagojevich are clear. The governor gets to thumb his nose at indignant Senate Democrats, at Obama (who said he thought Blagojevich should resign) and at Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (who informed on him). Rush gets to appear like a valiant crusader for black representation in the upper house of Congress. Everyone wins, except the people.

jelani1906@gmail.com

William Jelani Cobb is an associate professor of history at Spelman College and the author of the forthcoming “Change Has Come: The End of the Civil Rights Movement and the New Black America.”

Player ripped for Palestine T-shirt

MADRID–Sevilla striker Frederic Kanoute is facing a fine from the Spanish football federation for revealing a T-shirt expressing support for Palestine during a match.

Kanoute lifted his Sevilla shirt over his head after scoring in the team’s 2-1 Copa del Rey win over Deportivo La Coruna on Wednesday to display a black T-shirt on which the word “Palestine” was printed in several languages. He was given a yellow card for the display.

Kanoute, who was born in France but plays internationally for Mali, is a practising Muslim.

Associated Press

Military coup follows death of Guinea’s president

The Army dissolved government offices just hours after President Lansana Conte’s death on Tuesday.
By Huma Yusuf

Hours after the death of Guinea’s President Lansana Conte Tuesday, the Army dissolved the government and suspended the Constitution.

The African Union is monitoring developments in the wake of the military takeover as an ensuing power struggle could destabilize the country, which is divided along ethnic lines.

President Conte had been ill for several years, reports the BBC.

According to the Associated Press, a group called the National Council for Democracy announced the dissolution of the Constitution on Tuesday morning, hours after Mr. Conte’s demise.

President Lansana Conte … died Monday night, the country’s National Assembly president announced at about 2 a.m.

A uniformed spokesman for a group calling itself the National Council for Democracy began broadcasting its announcement of the takeover at around 7:30 a.m. local time on state-run radio and TV.

“The constitution is dissolved,” the unidentified spokesman said. “The government is dissolved. The institutions of the republic are dissolved,” he went on. “From this moment on, the council is taking charge of the destiny of the Guinean people.”

He said presidential elections will be organized shortly, but did not elaborate.

The identity of the National Council for Democracy spokesman could not be immediately ascertained, reports Reuters Africa.

Journalists at state radio headquarters contacted by Reuters said a group of soldiers had entered the building and forced staff to broadcast the communique….

The identity of the soldiers who made the broadcast was not immediately known and it was not immediately possible to establish whether other government locations and institutions had been taken over by the military.

In the early morning radio address, the spokesman for the council, since identified as Capt. Moussa Dabiss Camara, emphasized the need for a new, ethnically balanced Guinean government, reports Bloomberg. He added that a military official would serve as president alongside a civilian prime minister.

In a statement read on state radio, [Camara] cited “the incapacity of the republican institutions to resolve the crises, the incapacity of the government to supply Guineans with basic social services.” He also criticized the government’s inability to revise contracts with mining companies.

Before the dissolution of the government was announced, “Prime Minister Ahmed Tidiane Souare appeared on state television where he appealed for calm among the ‘brave Guinean people’ and called on the Army to help keep the peace,” reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

In fact, during the televised broadcast in which the government announced Conte’s death, the president of the National Assembly Aboubacar Sompare was seen standing next to the head of the armed forces, suggesting that the military would allow a peaceful, constitutional transfer of power, reports Reuters. By law, Mr. Sompare should lead the country until an election is held within 90 days.

Sompare asked the country’s Supreme Court to name him president in line with the Constitution. He was expected to subsequently organise elections to choose a new president.

According to the BBC, Conte’s rule had become more oppressive and unconstitutional in the years before his death.

He came to power in 1984 at the head of a military coup to fill the power vacuum that had been left by the sudden death of his predecessor, Sekou Toure, who had been president since independence from France in 1958.

He eventually oversaw a return to civilian rule and was elected three times, although critics said the votes were never free or fair.

As his health declined over the last five years, it was often far from clear who was in charge and the government barely functioned, [a BBC] correspondent says. Some political parties were allowed to operate, but many opposition leaders were either intimidated by the authorities or jailed.

Conte’s government was also facing increased protests against its rule, reports Bloomberg.

In early 2007, at least 110 people were killed by security forces after protests demanding Conte’s resignation, according to Human Rights Watch. The year before soldiers shot dead 13 unarmed people during demonstrations against rising food prices, the New York-based group said.

The international community is concerned that the ethnically divided Guinea is vulnerable to civil war and may destabilize the region in the wake of Conte’s death, reports Al Jazeera.

Richard Cornwell, the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, said: “We’ve been expecting for some years that Lansana Conte’s health would eventually give in … and there had been no preparation for any sort of succession….

“What we were really worried about, more than even a coup was the fact that the army might split and this would result in civil war.

“And of course with Guinea, being where it is … with Sierra Leone and Liberia as its near neighbours, this would be very dangerous in that region.”

Specifically, it is feared that the Guinean Army may split along ethnic lines, leading to a conflict, reports the BBC.

The BBC’s Will Ross, in Ghana, says it is important to see whether the army is united on the way forward for Guinea, as a power struggle could be extremely dangerous given the deep ethnic divisions there….

The African Union is closely monitoring developments in Guinea, reports AFP.

The African Union is “preoccupied and keenly monitoring” political developments in Guinea after the death of President Lansana Conte, a senior official said on Tuesday.

“We pay homage to the memory of the departed head of state, but we are preoccupied and keenly following this development and the succession of president Conte,” the AU’s Peace and Security Commissioner Ramtane Lamamra told AFP.

From http://www.csmonitor.com

Supreme Court to hear challenge to voting rights act

By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will hear a challenge to the landmark 1965 voting rights act, paving the way for a major decision this term on federal power to oversee state election laws.

In the backdrop is the recent election of Barack Obama and the question of whether America still needs an expansive law protecting against discrimination in voting now that a black man has won the presidency.

A decision in the case from Texas, to be heard in April, could impact the U.S. government’s authority to ensure that racial minorities — who were subjected to literacy tests and other devices to keep them from the polls for most of the 20th Century — continue to have as much of a chance as whites to elect candidates of their choice.

In dispute is the 2006 renewal of the Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed overwhelmingly and President Bush signed.

Richard Hasen, an election-law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said the dispute “has the potential to be the most important election case since Bush v. Gore.” That 2000 decision cut off Florida ballot recounts and ensured Bush the White House.

“The court has repeatedly upheld the constitutionality (of the disputed provision),” Hasen noted. “The question is whether the role of race in American politics has so changed in the last decade or two that remedies that were once constitutional are now considered impingements on state sovereignty.”

A Texas utility district says the provision known as Section 5, which gives the U.S. government authority to oversee state electoral-law changes, is no longer needed and is unconstitutional. The utility district uses the election of the first black president as evidence.

“The America that has elected Barack Obama as its first African-American president is far different than when Section 5 was first enacted in 1965,” say lawyers for the utility district.

Section 5 covers nine states and several counties and municipalities where, as Justice Department lawyers note, race discrimination “has been most flagrant.” Texas utility district lawyer Gregory Coleman says the continued use of that section attaches a “badge of shame … based on old data” and should be lifted.

Civil rights activists, backing the Justice Department’s defense of the renewed Voting Rights Act, have stressed that parts of the nation continue to vote along racial lines and argue that the law that opened the door to widespread black voting four decades ago is still needed.

“Obama’s election reflects an enormous advancement in race relations in the United States,” says Laughlin McDonald of the American Civil Liberties Union. “But voting, particularly in the southern states covered by the oversight provision, remains significantly polarized along racial lines.”

Exit polls from the Nov. 4 presidential election showed that whites in many southern states heavily favored John McCain to Obama. In Texas, 73% of whites favored McCain; in Georgia, 76%, and in Alabama, 88%. Nationally, the percentage of whites for McCain was 55%, exit poll data show.

Last May, a special lower court unanimously upheld the provision. U.S. Appeals Court Judge David Tatel wrote, “(G)iven the extensive legislative record documenting contemporary racial discrimination in voting in covered jurisdictions, Congress’s decision to extend Section 5 for another twenty-five years was rational and therefore constitutional.”

States covered by jurisdictions cannot make any changes to their electoral laws without getting approval from the Department of Justice or a federal district court in Washington. The requirement is designed to ensure that a local government does not draw new voting-district boundaries or enact rules that would dilute the votes of blacks or other minorities.

The law passed the Senate unanimously and the House by 390-33 in 2006.

U.S. Solicitor General Gregory Garre had emphasized in his filing to the court all the evidence Congress reviewed when it reauthorized the law, including “several instances of minority voters’ being threatened with arrest or prosecution for voting.” He said that significant gaps in registration rates between minorities and white citizens continue to exist and that the threat of Section 5 is a significant deterrent in states and municipalities where white majorities might want to adopt electoral plans that dilute the power of black voters.

The utility district, which conducts elections to select its board of directors, says its policies should not be subject to regular DOJ review. Coleman says federal law has sufficient protections for any voter racial bias that occurs.

The case is Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Mukasey.

Blu certainly is valedictorian of the 2007 class. This Los Angeles emcee can’t slow down, and releasing project after project, he excelled quickly from rap fan to gracing XXL covers, and collaborating with a crop of peers that just want to share his spotlight. After the magic of Below The Heavens was followed with the mixed results on C.R.A.C.’s The Piece Talks, Blu raises the bar again, largely with the help of low profile producer Mainframe. The duo links for a heap of life lessons, concept characters and some of the best production to come out of underground Los Angeles since Cut Chemist and Madlib.

Initially premiering with singles on two late 2006 compilations, Johnson & Jonson is said to have sat around for over a year until increased interest allowed for release. The case or not, some of the album’s offerings show a greater depth and level of uncertainty to the promising emcee. “The Only Way” chronicles a hopeful view from the bottom, as Blu talks family loss, financial struggles and a difficult Hip Hop industry. “A Perfect Picture” is a weed-induced moment of Blu bragging about his pimp-hand, while Mainframe fiddles with bugged out beat, influenced by classic MF DOOM production. By far, the album’s highlight is its bonus track, “Hold On John.” Pulling vocals from… shall-we-say the most famous John to ever touch a microphone, Blu presents his equivalent of Talib Kweli’s “Get By.” The song finds the emcee drinking, smoking and doubting the world around him, with some encouragement from the ‘60s musical genius, and a glimmer, as we’re watching Blu grow monthly, that this too, shall pass.

Just as 2007 asked, “who the hell is Blu?” this year, the question might be appropriate of his producer. “Get The Name Right” stands beside Ghostface’s classic “Mighty Healthy” for its cluttered arrangement of samples that feels too good and too chunky to be made after 1990. Album opener “Finally” though, proves that Mainframe doesn’t need comparisons. Rather than create a dope loop and let it roll out, the dynamic shifts in each song challenge Blu’s rhyming, alter his deliveries and make this project feel like it took years to make. Outstanding sampling from Soul, Folk and Rock genres, along with Blu’s ability to use timeless subject matter in his rhymes make this album feel very ‘70s-inspired, and the Los Angeles sunshine travels through the disc. Just as Noodles did on Freeway’s “I Cry,” or Dilla with “Hit Me With A Strap,” Mainframe lets the vocal samples interplay with Blu on “Mama Always Told Me” and “Hold On John,” a signature move that he executes as well as any producer has in the craft, and hopefully a will-be trademark.

Releasing material as fast as Blu has, the only way he can keep his audience interested after launch is through creative and unique projects. Certainly, Blu has. Like Talib and Hi Tek, Vast Aire and Vordul Mega, Hip Hop collaborators make projects and let fans decide whether the chemistry endures. Johnson & Jonson is a bloodshot, bedroom-made Hip Hop album that’s smooth as the powders and oils it swipes its name from.

J and J

Everything’s wacky in Chicago hip-hop these days: Kanye West is all mopey and contemplative, while Common has just landed on Planet Rock. “This is that new shit/It don’t feel the same,” goes the hook to the title track of the rapper/actor’s latest, which, in its employment of the entire soundtrack from the Atari 2600 edition of “Super Breakout,” sets the tone for a synthetic, sexified club record that’ll bring in new fans while probably alarming old ones. As was the case with John Legend, who beamed into the club on his latest, the initial effect is jarring, even in its star’s capable hands. But it also settles in nicely. “Announcement” benefits from a slinky beat that lets the MC breathe, “Make My Day” issues some California love courtesy of Cee-Lo, “Gladiator” is a great old-school brag rhyme, and the pro-Obama preacher “Changes” lets the old Common back in the door. Common’s been around long enough to earn this kind of detour (even if he already took one with the trippy “Electric Circus”), and it must be frustrating having all the acclaim in the world but not all the sales. All of which makes “Universal” an interesting spin, even if it requires adjusting for those who used to love him.

Review by Jeff Vrabel for Billboard

Q-Tip’s solo career reads like a bad joke. As A Tribe Called Quest’s frontman, he led the alternative hip hop movement and helped establish hip hop as a literate and creative art form during the 90s. After the Native Tongues moved on and ATCQ disbanded, Tip released his solo debut Amplified in 1999 and looked forward to a career of production and performing as his abstract genius and legend would warrant. And after ten years, at least three inexplicably shelved LPs (most notably “Kamaal the Abstract,” which got as far as promo pressings), and countless record labels, Tip’s long awaited follow-up “The Renaissance” arrived almost silently. Release delays date back years, and since rumors of “The Renaissance” have floated for so long, the quick and quiet release seems odd, especially given his huge fanbase and genre-defying appeal.

At 43 minutes and twelve tracks, it’s a concise and focused listen and is immediately enjoyable. While it emits a spirit somewhat comparable to a Tribe recording and shows a hint of the smooth Soulquarians vibe of the late-90s, I’d say it’s most similar to Amplified. However, Amplified’s most frequent criticism is that it is too forced and pop-oriented, and “The Renaissance” does not have that problem. The music is comparably playful, upbeat, and bouncy, but is less poppy and more mature and soulful than its predecessor. The production, mostly piano-based, is layered with a range of artistic instrumentation that sounds classy despite its fun and appealing nature. It’s a very clean and consistent sound, and transitions are so fluid that the first half seems like variations upon a single idea.

Tip still has the charm and wit of the wily teen from People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, but his focus has shifted with time and maturity. He’s happier to drop a clever one-liner or a latently insightful verse than elaborate upon social ills as he did in the 90s. He doesn’t often display the style that led to his “abstract rapper” tag; instead his lyrics concern different manners of love, music, and levels of inspiration. The hooks are strong and his approach is well-rounded, seemingly intent upon the combined quality of the music and rap. No guest MCs appear, but vocal contributors include Raphael Saadiq, D’Angelo, Norah Jones, and Amanda Diva.

The disc opens to the pleasant, bouncy guitar strums of “Johnny Is Dead,” which give way to an appealing arrangement with rumbling bass and piano chords and a strong performance from Tip. The breezy “Gettin’ Up” and “Official” are similar in approach, structure, and sound to the opener and achieve the same appeal as well. “We Fight/Love” is an excellent collaboration with a particularly airy Raphael Saadiq, who complements Tip nicely over a great arrangement. Another highlight is the hidden title track after “Move,” which has a hypnotic beat and the album’s most insightful lyrics. “Dance on Glass” picks up when the rich beat finally kicks in about a minute through, and the Norah Jones duet “Life Is Better” is smooth, inspired excellence. “Won’t Trade” is clever, and “You” is a decent love song that sounds good but moves too slowly. However, “Believe” with D’Angelo is wonderful musically and lyrically, and the closer “Shaka” is the track that most resembles a classic Tribe cut.

“The Renaissance” is not the revolutionary opus that some might expect from Tip after such a long layover, but as Dr. Dre should soon learn, hype builds around years of delays. The music is totally enjoyable and well-produced even if not totally uncharted (granted, some of these tracks are years old), and the LP reminds me why I had so eagerly anticipated Q-Tip’s return a few years ago. This album is a great listen and should not disappoint.

Review by ctrx for Amazon.com

Children use sticks to get termites to eat out of a mound near Murehwa, Zimbabwe, on Sunday.

Rebecca Chipika, a child of 9, prods a stick into a termite mound to draw out insects. She sweeps them into a bag for her family’s evening meal.

These scenes from a food catastrophe are unfolding in Doma, a district of rural Zimbabwe where journalists rarely venture. It’s a stronghold of President Robert Mugabe’s party and his enforcers and informants are everywhere.

At a school for villagers visited by The Associated Press, enrollment is down to four pupils from 20. The teachers still willing to work in this once thriving farming and mining district 160 miles (250 kilometers) northeast of Harare, the capital, say parents pay them in corn, cooking oil, goats or chickens. One trip by bus to the nearest bank to draw their government salaries costs more than teachers earn in a month.

Meanwhile, the country is in political paralysis following disputed elections in March. A power-sharing deal signed two months ago has stalled over the allocation of ministries between Mugabe’s party and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change.

Shingirayi Chiyamite is a trader from Harare who brings household goods to the countryside to barter for crops. He says a 12-inch bar of laundry soap exchanges for 22 pounds of corn. He crisscrosses the land in search of the few villages that have corn to spare, hauls his purchases to the highway and hitchhikes back to the city. Some of the corn will feed his family, the rest he sells. He is constantly on the move.

“If you rest, you starve,” he says.

Information is almost as scarce as food. Survival is the obsession.

Cell phones operate only sporadically. State radio has not been received since the district relay beacon broke down eight months ago.

Mhangura, a town of about 3,000 people, has had no running water for months. Power outages happen daily because of a lack of cash to maintain utilities. People walk about three miles to a dam to fill pails or gasoline cans.

Some of the scarce water is used to embalm the dead in wet sand, a centuries-old African tradition to preserve a body until family members gather for the burial.

“There’s nothing here. People are dying of illness and hunger. Burial parties are going out every day,” said Michael Zava, a trader in Mhangura.

The hospital that serves the district is closed, and so is its small morgue, so there’s no way of telling how many are dying, Zava said. Children’s hair is discoloring, a sign of malnutrition. Adults are wizened and dressed in rags — they have no cash for new clothes.

Zava said he has seen villagers plucking undigested corn kernels from cow dung to wash and eat. A slaughtered goat is eaten down to everything but hooves, bones and teeth. Crickets, cicadas and beetles also can make a meal.

The food crisis began after 2000, when Mugabe launched an often violent campaign to seize white-owned farms and give them to veterans of his guerrilla war against white rule over the former British colony.

Officials from Mugabe’s party toured the Doma district recently and told the new farm owners that the government could not supply their needs. People were advised to make do with what seed they had left, and with animal manure for fertilizer.

Ordinarily, after harvest the cotton fields are burned to protect the next year’s crop from disease. Not this year. People couldn’t afford to buy new seeds, and were hoping to get another season out of last year’s crop. Instead, the crops came up diseased.

Pasture has been burned by poachers to scare rabbits and rodents into traps. Deer are being hunted for food, and lions from remote parts of the Doma region and Chenanga nature reserve are killing cattle, donkeys and goats, villagers said.

Jackals, baboons and goats compete with villagers for roots and wild fruits.

The wild guava season is over and matamba, a hard orange-like fruit, cannot safely be eaten until ripe. Villagers pick the fruit and cover it with donkey or cow dung, leaving it in the sun to hasten ripening.

Katy Phiri, the grandmother collecting corn kernels, said she put her trust in God.

“There’s nothing else I can do,” she said. “I have never gone this hungry before.”

Source: www.cnn.com

Can We Save the Planet and Rescue the Economy at the Same Time?
By Al Gore

Our economy is in terrible shape and getting worse. Gasoline prices have been increasing. Jobs are being outsourced. Home mortgages are in trouble. Banks, automobile companies, and other institutions we depend upon are under growing pressure. The war in Iraq continues, and now the war in Afghanistan appears to be getting worse.

Meanwhile, the climate crisis is growing more dire—much faster than predicted. Scientists with access to data from Navy submarines traversing beneath the north polar ice cap have warned that there is now a good chance that within five years it will completely disappear during the summer months. And by the way, our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it?

Yet when we look at these seemingly intractable challenges, we can see the common thread running through them. Our dangerous overreliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all of these challenges—the economic, environmental, and national security crises. We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change.

If we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems will begin to unravel and we will find that we’re holding the answer to all of them right in our hands. The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels.

Scientists have confirmed that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world’s energy needs for a full year. Enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to meet 100 percent of US electricity demand. Geothermal energy is capable of providing enormous supplies of electricity.

But to make this exciting potential a reality, we need a new start. That’s why I’m proposing a strategic initiative designed to regain control of our own destiny. It’s not the only thing we need to do. But it’s the linchpin of a new strategy to repower America. I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years. This goal represents a challenge to all Americans, in every walk of life: political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and every citizen.

A few years ago, it would not have been possible to issue such a challenge. But the sharp cost reductions beginning to take place in solar, wind, and geothermal power—coupled with the recent dramatic price increases for oil and coal—have radically changed the economics of energy.

Of course there are those who will tell us this can’t be done. Some are the defenders of the status quo, those with a vested interest in perpetuating the current system, no matter how high a price the rest of us will have to pay. But even those who reap the profits of the carbon age have to recognize the inevitability of its demise. As one opec oil minister observed, the Stone Age didn’t end because of a shortage of stones.

We should speed up this transition by insisting that the price of carbon-based energy include the costs of the environmental damage it causes. I have long supported a sharp reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made up in CO₂ taxes. We should tax what we burn, not what we earn. This is the single most important policy change we can make.

America’s transition to renewable energy sources must also include adequate provisions to assist those Americans who would unfairly face hardship. We should guarantee good jobs in the fresh air and sunshine for any coal miner displaced by impacts on the coal industry.

To those who argue that we do not yet have the technology to accomplish these results: I ask them to come with me to meet the entrepreneurs who will drive this revolution. To those who say the costs are still too high: I ask them to remember that when demand for oil and coal increases, the price goes up. When demand for solar cells increases, the price often comes down. To those who say the challenge is not politically viable: I suggest they go before the American people and try to defend the status quo. Then bear witness to the people’s appetite for change.

A political promise to do something decades from now is universally ignored because everyone knows it is meaningless. But 10 years is about the time that we as a nation can hold a steady aim and hit our target. When President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we could accomplish that goal. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon.

That was 39 years ago, and since then, many Americans have begun to wonder whether we’ve lost our appetite for bold policy solutions. Folks who claim to know how our system works these days have told us we might as well forget about our political system doing anything bold, especially if it is contrary to the wishes of special interests.

I’ve got to admit, that seems to be the way things have been going. But I’ve begun to hear different voices in this country from people who are tired of baby steps and special interest politics. So I ask you to join with me to call on every candidate, at every level, to accept this challenge—for America to be running on 100 percent zero-carbon electricity in 10 years. This is a generational moment. We need to act now.

In July Al Gore launched his call for 100 percent clean electricity in 10 years with the speech from which this article is adapted.

Article courtesy of motherjones.com

Run Cars on Green Electricity, Not Natural Gas

Jonathan G. Dorn

With the dramatic increase in oil prices earlier this year translating into higher prices at the gas pump in the United States, concerns over U.S. dependence on foreign oil are once again part of the national discussion on energy security. Combined with the growing understanding that carbon emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels are driving global climate change, the debate is now focused on how to restructure the U.S. transport system to solve these two problems. While the idea of running U.S. vehicles on natural gas has lately received a great deal of attention, powering our cars with green electricity is a more sensible option on all fronts—national security, efficiency, climate stabilization, and economics.

Having a fleet of natural gas–powered vehicles (NGVs) would simply replace U.S. dependence on foreign oil with a dependence on natural gas, another fossil fuel. The United States has scarcely 3 percent of the world’s proved natural gas reserves, yet even without the increased demand that would result from an NGV fleet, the country already consumes nearly a quarter of the world’s natural gas. At current rates of consumption, U.S. proved reserves would only meet national demand for another nine years.

U.S. natural gas production has remained relatively constant over the last two decades and is unlikely to increase over the long run, despite growing consumption. Consequently, any rise in demand is likely to be met by increasing imports. Since the late 1980s, U.S. net imports of natural gas—primarily from Canada—have tripled. The U.S. Department of Energy projects that by 2016 the majority of U.S. natural gas imports will come from outside North America.

With Russia and Iran topping the list of countries with the largest proved reserves of natural gas, a growing reliance on imports would increase the strategic vulnerability of the United States. These two nations—which along with 14 others collectively control nearly three fourths of the world’s natural gas reserves—are members of a Gas Exporting Countries Forum that was established in 2001. While there is no direct evidence that these countries are seeking to form a natural gas cartel, at the Forum’s 2005 annual meeting they discussed how to maintain a satisfactorily high natural gas price. (See data).

Just like oil, natural gas is a finite, nonrenewable resource. This means that switching to a fleet of NGVs would be at best a short-term fix. As natural gas becomes more difficult to obtain and more costly, a fleet of NGVs and the 20,000 or so natural gas refueling stations that would be required to support them would simply be abandoned.

A better investment is one that supports a fleet of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), such as the Chevy Volt slated for sale in 2010, which can use the existing electric infrastructure. A study by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that if all U.S. automobiles were PHEVs, the current U.S. infrastructure could provide power for more than 70 percent of the fleet. Battery charging would occur mostly at night, when demand for electricity is low. In the emerging energy economy—an economy built on domestic wind, solar, and geothermal energy sources—the greening of the grid by replacing fossil fuel–based electrical generation will also be a greening of the transport system. Beyond the grid, distributed power systems—solar cells on rooftops, for example—could also be used to power PHEVs.

With today’s energy mix, PHEVs running on electricity from the grid are nearly three times more efficient than NGVs on a “well-to-wheel” basis—that is, when considering the full life cycle of the energy source, from fuel extraction to combustion to vehicle propulsion. This is because internal combustion engines, such as those used in natural gas vehicles and in today’s gas-powered automobile fleet, are incredibly inefficient. Only 20 percent or so of the energy in the fuel is used to move the vehicle. The other 80 percent is wasted as heat. Thus, choosing electric vehicles over NGVs can sharply reduce energy demand.

This important fact seems to have escaped T. Boone Pickens, the legendary oil tycoon from Texas who is now promoting a plan to replace natural gas in the electric power sector with wind-generated electricity and use the freed up natural gas to power a fleet of NGVs. Burning natural gas in a new combined cycle power plant is three times as efficient as burning natural gas in a car. Even including electrical losses from transmission, distribution, and battery charging, running a car on electricity from a natural gas power plant is more than twice as efficient. Keeping natural gas in the electric sector to help power a fleet of PHEVs is therefore the logical choice. Wind-generated electricity should replace electricity from coal-fired power plants, the most polluting power source.

Under normal driving conditions, well-to-wheel carbon dioxide emissions for vehicles running on electricity from natural gas–fired power plants are one fourth as high as emissions from cars directly burning natural gas. Since a PHEV operating in electric-only mode has no tailpipe emissions, electrifying transport would move the majority of carbon emissions from millions of vehicles to centralized electricity-generating plants, greatly simplifying the task of controlling emissions. As fossil-based power generation is replaced with wind and solar power, cumulative carbon emissions from centralized power facilities will be greatly reduced.

Carbon pollution is not the only environmental concern. Over the last decade, the decline in U.S. conventional natural gas production has been offset by turning to more unconventional sources, such as coalbed methane, tight sandstones, and gas shales. Between 1998 and 2007, this unconventional production increased from 28 to 47 percent of total output. Growing reliance on gas shales in particular is raising concerns about water consumption and contamination. Extracting gas from this source involves hydraulic fracturing, a process that injects water, sand, and chemicals into the shale layer at extremely high pressures. The process can use millions of gallons of water per extraction well and is known to leak chemicals into surrounding aquifers. The Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection for New York City recently wrote to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation voicing concerns that drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale formation will contaminate New York City’s watershed, jeopardizing drinking water. Opposition to unconventional production is likely to rise as gas companies attempt to expand operations into increasingly sensitive areas.

On economics, driving with electricity is far cheaper than driving with gasoline or natural gas. The average new U.S. car can travel roughly 30 miles on a gallon of gasoline, which cost $3.91 in July 2008 (the latest date for which comparable price data for natural gas is available). Traveling the same distance with natural gas cost around $2.51, while with electricity, using the existing electrical generation mix, it cost around 73¢.

In addition to being cheaper, electricity is less vulnerable to price shocks than natural gas. Electricity is generated from many different energy sources, so the impact of a quick rise in the price of any one fuel is usually tempered by stable prices for other fuels. In the new renewable energy economy, electricity prices will be insulated against fuel shocks, since energy from the wind and the sun is abundant and free.

While the price of residential electricity in the United States has increased only 30 percent since 1995, the price of natural gas has more than tripled due to rising demand and production costs. With the fast-industrializing economies of China and India expected to compete with the United States for natural gas, prices will likely continue their sharp upward trend.

Choosing natural gas to power our vehicles would send the United States down the same expensive and inefficient path that created our addiction to foreign oil and our dependence on a resource that will ultimately run out. Choosing green electricity can take us in a new direction—one that leads to improved energy security and a stabilizing climate.

Copyright © 2008 Earth Policy Institute
For more from Jonathan G. Dorn, go to the Earth Policy Institute website.

3 Green Pre-Conditions for a Big Three Bailout
by Matthew McDermott

With all the talk about bailing Detroit’s Big Three automakers out of a mess seemingly of their own creation, a number of groups have put forward the idea that if Detroit wants monetary help there are going to have to be some serious conditions placed on how that money is used.

In a new piece for Yale Environment 360 Jim Motavalli nicely sums up how Detroit got to be between the rock and a hard place (reliance on an unsustainable bigger is better formula entirely dependent on a never ending supply of cheap oil), and some of the conditions which should be placed on them should funding be approved to support them.

Three green pre-conditions for an auto bailout are as follows:

Stop Trying to Block Environmental Regulations

“The first requirement is that the automakers should drop their four-year legal attack against the global warming laws in California and other states,” says Ailis Aaron Wolf of 40mpg.org, a project of the Civil Society Institute.

The argument by the Big Three, and supported by the Bush administration, is that only the Federal government has the right the set fuel economy standards and therefore any effort by states to set higher standards in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are invalid.

Establish More Competitive Business Plans

Luke Tonachel, a transportation analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, also wants to see some tough love for the auto industry. “Any money that helps the automakers deal with their current economic situation should be conditioned on their establishing a business plan that will make them competitive in the future,” he said. “They have to make dramatically cleaner, high-mileage vehicles if they want to be competitive in a world of insecure and volatile oil markets and intensifying global warming.”

Tonachel went on to list off-the-shelf technology and methods that could be implemented to improve environmental performance: streamlined body designs, more efficient 6 or 7 speed transmissions, low rolling-resistance tires.

Mandate Greater Commitment to Hybrids & Greater Fuel Efficiency
Ailis Aaron Wolf of 40mpg.org and Jim Kliesch of the Union of Concerned Scientists weighed in on fuel efficiency. Wolf first:

Obviously, the more forward-thinking automakers that have built hybrids and concentrated on fuel efficiency have done better in the marketplace. Any bailout funding should be tied to requirements that they commit to building hybrids, clean diesels and other highly fuel-efficient vehicles.

Kliesch advocated a 4% per year increase in fuel efficiency,

Jim Kliesch, a senior engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, thinks automakers should commit to a four-percent-per-year improvement in fuel economy across their entire product lines, from big trucks to compact cars. “We’re saying the taxpayers should be getting a return on their investment,” he said. “Consumers are clamoring for more fuel-efficient vehicles, and sadly there aren’t many of them out there right now. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but one of the biggest problems is that the industry has dragged its heels too long.”

So what do TreeHugger readers think? After all it’d be your money (if you pay taxes in the US at least…), what green conditions should be placed upon any Big Three bailout money?

More at: Yale Environment 360

Article courtesy of treehugger.com

Rapper Jim Jones talks to The Daily Beast’s Touré about how the new president-elect inspired him to clean up the language in his music.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-11-20/what-up-my-obama/

by Touré

Soulja Boy.

What. Were. You. Thinking?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-30/a-rapper-salutes-the-slave-trade/

I asked him, “What historical figure do you most hate?
He said, “Shout out to the slave masters! Without them we’d still be in Africa.”

Here at SoulGen, we like to highlight progressive, creative, highly-intelligent, impactful change makers who embody the SoulGen mission… “making conscious cool.” SoulGenesis is proud to feature one of our earliest members and supporters, Brian Peterson.

Brian is an author and educator. He holds a Bachelors of Science and Engineering (Computer Science) and a Masters in Education from the University of Pennsylvania (www.upenn.edu).

Currently, you’ll see Brian’s blog, Obamantary, featured on our home page.

On his blog, Brian says “I am a writer caught up in a whirlwind of activity, forced to pick and choose moments for reflection. This slice of time - two years ago, an improbable dream for most, is one to tell the grandchildren about. I’m trying my best to capture the stories and my underlying thoughts, and praying the world is really ready for change.”

As the former Executive Director of The Ase Academy (www.aseacademy.org), Peterson has displayed a tremendous passion and commitment to the education of youth. He also has extensive experience in supporting college students. He served as the Education Fellow in W.E.B. Du Bois College House (dubois.house.upenn.edu) on Penn’s campus for five years, developing outreach and academic support programs for House residents and the entire African American community on campus. He also designed and co-teaches an African American studies course at Penn, and was an active leader of several student groups while in college.

Peterson has written two novels, Move Over Girl (2000) and Spoken Words (2004) (www.chance22.com), both receiving critical acclaim and wide appreciation. He is also a former staff writer at Okayplayer.com (www.okayplayer.com), the online music community for the Grammy-award winning group The Roots, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, Common, Talib Kweli, and others. There he founded and edited a literature appreciation section called “Okay Books,” in addition to providing news content for the site and interviewing artists.

In 2003, Peterson co-founded and launched Lion’s Story (www.lionsstory.org), a non-profit educational research and development collaborative to develop and assess life-long learning strategies for people of color, specifically incorporating technology and innovative content. The African American Student’s Guide to Excellence is one of Lion’s Story’s first projects.

Peterson currently resides in Philadelphia with his wife and three children.

Dear Partner!

As passionate and dedicated youth development professionals, we all have an inherent responsibility to ensure that our youth have a very clear path to success. However, over the recent months we’ve increasingly heard about a disturbing trend affecting our nation’s high schools. Students are dropping out of school at an alarming rate, and if not addressed immediately, this crisis will swallow the hopes and dreams for the future of the very communities we reside in and serve on a daily basis. Below are just a few of the disheartening statistics:

• Each year approximately 1.23 million students fail to graduate from high school; more than half of whom are from minority groups.
• In 2005, only 55 percent of all black students graduated from high school on time with a regular diploma, compared with 78 percent of whites.
• About half of poor, urban ninth graders read at only a fifth or sixth-grade level.
• Approximately two thousand high schools (14 percent of American high schools) produce more than half of the nation’s dropouts. In these “dropout factories,” the number of seniors enrolled is routinely 60 percent less than the number of freshmen three years earlier.
• Over a lifetime, an 18-year old who graduates earns $260,000 more than a person without a high school diploma and contributes $60,000 more in federal and state income taxes.
• Teachers, school leaders, parents and students have all been grappling with this issue, but very few organizations have been able to offer tangible solutions.

We would like to introduce you to the “All Things are Possible” Campaign (ATAP), presented by SoulGenesis and Chris “Kazi” Rolle, star of the critically-acclaimed documentary, The Hip Hop Project.

This monumental and innovative campaign will bring together two things that youth need: 1) positive role models who care about them and are dedicated to their success, and 2) tangible and useable information that motivates them in a way they can easily grasp and understand.

Our keynote speaker, Chris “Kazi” Rolle, has dedicated his life work to inspiring youth through Hip Hop. He is most well known for his work with the Hip Hop Project, a powerful youth program that spawned the award-winning documentary called The Hip Hop Project. Kazi is the star of the film which chronicles his life as an adolescent who didn’t have much growing up, and his meteoric rise to becoming a community leader, Hip Hop artist and main character of The Hip Hop Project. Click the following link to see a brief video that gives a great perspective on who Kazi is, and the inspirational power he brings to audiences young and old.

The Hip Hop Project is the main component of the ATAP campaign, and was produced by film legend Bruce Willis and Hip Hop pioneer Queen Latifah. We have screened this very powerful film in front of youth audiences around the world consistently invoking deep emotion, healing and uplifting conversations. You can see the trailer of the film by clicking HERE.

The ATAP campaign uses the power of the film coupled with inspiring workshops by Kazi and other SoulGenesis staff to accomplish the following:

• Motivate young people to stay in school through Kazi’s film, music and inspirational life story.
• Provide teachers, administrators and youth workers with tools that have been proven to help engage disconnected youth.
• Establish new Hip Hop Project programs in your school. The Hip Hop Project program has been proven to motivate young people and to incentivize them to work harder in school in order to continue participation in the Hip Hop Project.
• Expose students and staff to more socially responsible media, music and networks.

Join us in our mission to directly address the high school dropout crisis! Together we can impact 1,000,000 youth before the end of 2010. For booking or for more information about ATAP, please contact us at 215.432.7396 or by email at Isaac@soulgen.com.

Thank you kindly for your support.

Sincerely,

The ATAP Team

KAZI Speaks at the United Nations

1 Alliance for Excellent Education: High School Dropouts in America - EPE (2007)
2 Editorial Projects in Education, Diplomas Count (2008)
3 Neild & Balfanz an Extreme Degree of Difficulty: The Educational Demographics of the 9th Grade in Philadelphia (2001)
4 Balfanz, - Locating & Transforming the Low Performing High Schools (2007)
5 Rouse, C.E. (2005).

Despite the Western world’s increasing cultural diversity, there are still many who have geography-class preconceptions about the shape, size and color of the package in which they’ll find an indigenous treat. Multilingual singer/songwriter Yael Naim confounds preconceptions like these on the self-titled release she created in her apartment with co-producer David Donatien. Recording the songs at home wasn’t merely economical, it allowed for complete creative freedom. The fruits of that freedom are audible in the duo’s original blend of European, American and Middle Eastern musical elements.

Naim’s breakthrough came when her English-language song “New Soul” was used in an Apple laptop commercial, fittingly sparking an avalanche of digital downloads. But the bulk of her album is darker and sung in Hebrew, which the singer learned while growing up in Israel. Ironically, it was her return to France—her country of birth—that provided the gestation for her personal artistic voice. Naim’s decision to write and sing her composition “Paris” mostly in Hebrew was a move of intuition, she says—a key factor in her creative process. Because Naim’s primary musical influences were classic American pop and soul, she had been writing exclusively in English. But a growing need to reconnect with her Israeli roots and resolve her ambivalence about living in France led her to write in her oldest and most personal tongue. Naim claims that composing with Hebrew words accesses her simplest and most emotional work—songs like the wistful “Lachlom.”

Commonly, Hebrew music is linked to Judaism. Naim’s globe-spanning pop bears no such connection, though the sense of homelessness embodied in certain songs does parallel the longing behind traditional and mournful Jewish songs. In Naim’s music, though, spirituality is only subtly implied. When translated, Naim’s impressionistic lyrics sometimes find her floating in dreamlike states or meditating in the stillness of dawn. Her now-internationally famous track, “New Soul,” emerged when Naim dismissed her formerly held belief in reincarnation. On the humble but affirming song, she sings of the fumbling attempts to live well that convinced her she must be starting from scratch after all. (I’m a new soul/ I came to this strange world/ Hoping I could learn a bit about how to give and take/ But since I came here/ Felt the joy and the fear/ Finding myself making every possible mistake.”)

“Far Far” is a seemingly autobiographical cut that describes a girl awakening to artistic gifts she believes are an answer to prayer. Then, turning philosophical, she describes the introspective process by which art is created: by embracing one’s contradictions in tandem with one’s abilities. (“From time to time there are colors and shapes/ Dazzling her eyes and tickling her hands/ They invent her a new world with oil sky and aquarel rivers/ But don’t you run away already/ Please don’t go/ How can you stay outside?/ There’s a beautiful mess inside…”)

In the CD’s booklet, there’s a picture of Naim sitting on a pillow, intensely engaged with a toy keyboard. This is a perfect representation of the music, which combines the artistry of a mature musician with the playful and unselfconscious spirit of a precocious child. Her effortlessly culture-blurring sound suggests that it truly is a small world after all.

Review By Steve Morley for www.umc.org

1. “New Soul”

2. “Pachad”

3. “Toxic”

From the first track to last Jason Mraz dazzles, perplexes and scintillates on his high-octane 3rd full-length studio album “We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things.” His witty, highly individual lyrical style and organic, powerful backing band transform these songs into four minute detours into the mind of the most underrated singer/songwriter of the 2000s.

Lead single “I’m Yours” finally lands on its feet after many years in Mraz’s setlists with its mellow, Hawaiian grooves, complete with visions of obligatory surfers and pineapple drinks in the background. It’s just a slice of what “We Sing…” has to offer, however. “Lucky” is a sparse, melodic duet with Colbie Callait that transitions aptly out of “I’m Yours,” while “Make It Mine” and “Live High” are classic Mraz with feel-good, enrapturing melodies designed to sweep listeners clean off their feet. “Make It Mine” is particularly upbeat, full of hand-claps and lush, horn-laden instrumentation. It should be a single, and if it becomes one it should give Mraz his first major hit since 2003’s “The Remedy” if radio programmers have even a neuron left in their heads.

The subject matter is diverse on “We Sing…” but Mraz never suffers from mood swings. “Love For a Child,” by far one of the most touching compositions of his career, touches on the effect of divorce on a young child (”When the house was left in shambles/Well, who was there to handle all the broken bits of glass?”) while “Only Human” promotes environmental awareness without playing the blame game. “Details In the Fabric” featuring James Morrison is a moody, meditative look at life, love and relationships, while “Coyotes” takes Mraz’s sonic pallete in new directions with layered vocals, percolating snyths and an awesome background chorus. His operatic vocals from “Mr. Curiosity” from his last LP make an appearance here.

Other tracks continue the unparalleled quality. “Butterfly” is an awesomely-produced ode to sexual chemistry (”You make my slacks a little tight/You may unfasten them if you like/That’s if you crash and spend the night”) with effervescent instrumentation and a mercurial, vigorous melody. “If It Kills Me” finds Mraz pining through cheeky, self-deprecating lyrics about the lady who’s got everything except the insight to see he’s her best match (”We get along much better than you and your boyfriend”) while “A Beautiful Mess” bookends the sentiments of “Details In the Fabric” with a more optimistic outlook.

The album’s arguable highlight, however, is the curiously-titled “The Dynamo of Volition.” Replete from wall-to-wall with Mraz’s entrancing singing/rapping style, the song is like “O. Lover” or “Forecast” from 2005’s “Mr. A-Z” is that it perfectly captures Mraz’s unrivaled melodic weightiness. The lyrics spew left and right in haphazard fashion, but whether or not they are all understood makes no difference. “…Volition” is an exemplary Mraz tune, with a melody powerful enough to hang over the listener, the kind of melody that paints a picture like a scene from an indie movie, that haunts in such a way that it is instantly classic and unforgettable. It says more than any words ever could.

Mraz has that rare kind of talent that puts him in the category of legendary musicians, those musicians with such blazing, inherent talent that it is simply cannot be learned or created. Elton John, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder come to mind as those types of dynamic musicians that were born with such astounding abilities, and Mraz has what it takes to join their ranks if only more listeners would wizen up and find out what some of us have been lucky to know for over five years.

Review By Rudy Palma “The Writing Fiend”

1. “Make It Mine”

2. “Live High”

I think I am probably going to die any minute now. An inflamed, deceived mob of about 50 desperate men are crowding round the car, some trying to turn it over, others beating at it with large rocks, all yelling insults and curses.

They have just started to smash the windows. Next, they will pull us out and, well, let’s not think about that …

I am trying not to meet their eyes, but they are staring at me and my companions with rage and hatred such as I haven’t seen in a human face before. Those companions, Barbara Jones and Richard van Ryneveld, are - like me - quite helpless in the back seats.

If we get out, we will certainly be beaten to death. If we stay where we are, we will probably be beaten to death.

Our two African companions have - crazily in our view - got out of the car to try to reason with the crowd. It is clear to us that you might as well preach non-violence to a tornado.

At last, after what must have been about 40 seconds but that felt like half an hour, one of the pair saw sense, leapt back into the car and reversed wildly down the rocky, dusty path - leaving his friend behind.

By the grace of God we did not slither into the ditch, roll over or burst a tyre. Through the dust we churned up as we fled, we could see our would-be killers running with appalling speed to catch up. There was just time to make a crazy two-point turn which allowed us to go forwards and so out-distance them.

We had pretty much abandoned our other guide to whatever his fate might be (this was surprisingly easy to justify to myself at the time) when we saw that he had broken free and was running with Olympic swiftness, just ahead of pursuers half hidden by the dust.

We flung open a rear door so he could scramble in and, engine grinding, we veered off, bouncing painfully over the ruts and rocks.

We feared there would be another barricade to stop our escape, and it would all begin again. But there wasn’t, and we eventually realised we had got away, even the man whose idiocy nearly got us killed.

He told us it was us they wanted, not him, or he would never have escaped. We ought to be dead. We are not. It is an interesting feeling, not wholly unpleasant.

Why did they want to kill us? What was the reason for their fury? They thought that if I reported on their way of life they might lose their livings.

Livings? Dyings, more likely.

Peking power: A Chinese supervisor cajoles local workers as they dig a trench in Kabwe, Zambia

These poor, hopeless, angry people exist by grubbing for scraps of cobalt and copper ore in the filth and dust of abandoned copper mines in Congo, sinking perilous 80ft shafts by hand, washing their finds in cholera-infected streams full of human filth, then pushing enormous two-hundredweight loads uphill on ancient bicycles to the nearby town of Likasi where middlemen buy them to sell on, mainly to Chinese businessmen hungry for these vital metals.

To see them, as they plod miserably past, is to be reminded of pictures of unemployed miners in Thirties Britain, stumbling home in the drizzle with sacks of coal scraps gleaned from spoil heaps.

Except that here the unsparing heat makes the labour five times as hard, and the conditions of work and life are worse by far than any known in England since the 18th Century.

Many perish as their primitive mines collapse on them, or are horribly injured without hope of medical treatment. Many are little more than children. On a good day they may earn $3, which just supports a meagre existence in diseased, malarial slums.

We had been earlier to this awful pit, which looked like a penal colony in an ancient slave empire.

Defeated, bowed figures toiled endlessly in dozens of hand-dug pits. Their faces, when visible, were blank and without hope.

We had been turned away by a fat, corrupt policeman who pretended our papers weren’t in order, but who was really taking instructions from a dead-eyed, one-eared gangmaster who sat next to him.

By the time we returned with more official permits, the gangmasters had readied the ambush.

The diggers feared - and their evil, sinister bosses had worked hard on that fear - that if people like me publicised their filthy way of life, then the mine might be closed and the $3 a day might be taken away.

I can give you no better explanation in miniature of the wicked thing that I believe is now happening in Africa.

Out of desperation, much of the continent is selling itself into a new era of corruption and virtual slavery as China seeks to buy up all the metals, minerals and oil she can lay her hands on: copper for electric and telephone cables, cobalt for mobile phones and jet engines - the basic raw materials of modern life.

It is crude rapacity, but to Africans and many of their leaders it is better than the alternative, which is slow starvation.

The Congolese risk their lives digging through mountains of mining waste looking for scraps of metal ore

It is my view - and not just because I was so nearly killed - that China’s cynical new version of imperialism in Africa is a wicked enterprise.

China offers both rulers and the ruled in Africa the simple, squalid advantages of shameless exploitation.

For the governments, there are gargantuan loans, promises of new roads, railways, hospitals and schools - in return for giving Peking a free and tax-free run at Africa’s rich resources of oil, minerals and metals.

For the people, there are these wretched leavings, which, miserable as they are, must be better than the near-starvation they otherwise face.

Persuasive academics advised me before I set off on this journey that China’s scramble for Africa had much to be said for it. They pointed out China needs African markets for its goods, and has an interest in real economic advance in that broken continent.

For once, they argued, a foreign intervention in Africa might work precisely because it is so cynical and self-interested. They said Western aid, with all its conditions, did little to create real advances in Africa, laughing as they declared: ‘The only country that ever got rich through donations is the Vatican.’

Why get so het up about African corruption anyway? Is it really so much worse than corruption in Russia or India?

Is it really our business to try to act as missionaries of purity? Isn’t what we call ‘corruption’ another name for what Africans view as looking after their families?

And what about China herself? Despite the country’s convulsive growth and new wealth, it still suffers gravely from poverty and backwardness, as I have seen for myself in its dingy sweatshops, the primitive electricity-free villages of Canton, the dark and squalid mining city of Datong and the cave-dwelling settlements that still rely on wells for their water.

After the murderous disaster of Mao, and the long chaos that went before, China longs above all for stable prosperity. And, as one genial and open-minded Chinese businessman said to me in Congo as we sat over a beer in the decayed colonial majesty of Lubumbashi’s Belgian-built Park Hotel: ‘Africa is China’s last hope.’

I find this argument quite appealing, in theory. Britain’s own adventures in Africa were not specially benevolent, although many decent men did what they could to enforce fairness and justice amid the bigotry and exploitation.

Taking over: Chinese building workers in Zambia

It is noticeable that in much former British territory we have left behind plenty of good things and habits that are absent in the lands once ruled by rival empires.

Even so, with Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Uganda on our conscience, who are we to lecture others?

I chose to look at China’s intervention in two countries, Zambia and the ‘Democratic Republic of the Congo’, because they lie side by side; because one was once British and the other Belgian.

Also, in Zambia’s imperfect but functioning democracy, there is actual opposition to the Chinese presence, while in the despotic Congo, opposition to President Joseph Kabila is unwise, to put it mildly.

Congo is barely a state at all, and still hosts plenty of fighting not all that far from here.

Statues and images of Joseph’s murdered father Laurent are everywhere in an obvious attempt to create a cult of personality on which stability may one day be based. Portraits of Joseph himself scowl from every wall.

I have decided not to name most of the people who spoke to me, even though some of them gave me permission to do so, because I am not sure they know just how much of a risk they may be running by criticising the Chinese in Africa.

I know from personal experience with Chinese authority that Peking regards anything short of deep respect as insulting, and it does not forget a slight.

I also know that this over-sensitive vigilance is present in Africa.

The Mail on Sunday team was reported to the authorities in Zambia’s Copper Belt by Chinese managers who had seen us taking photographs of a graveyard at Chambishi where 54 victims of a disaster in a Chinese-run explosives factory are buried. Within an hour, local ’security’ officials were buzzing round us trying to find out what we were up to.

This is why I have some time for the Zambian opposition politician Michael Sata, known as ‘King Cobra’ because of his fearless combative nature (but also, say his opponents, because he is so slippery).

Sata has challenged China’s plans to invest in Zambia, and is publicly suspicious of them. At elections two years ago, the Chinese were widely believed to have privately threatened to pull out of the country if he won, and to have helped the government parties win.

Peking regards Zambia as a great prize, alongside its other favoured nations of Sudan (oil), Angola (oil) and Congo (metals).

Fighting back: Peter Hitchens with Michael Sata, the opposition politician nicknamed ‘King Cobra’

It has cancelled Zambia’s debts, eased Zambian exports to China, established a ’special economic zone’ in the Copper Belt, offered to build a sports stadium, schools, a hospital and an anti-malaria centre as well as providing scholarships and dispatching experts to help with agriculture. Zambia-China trade is growing rapidly, mainly in the form of copper.

All this has aroused the suspicions of Mr Sata, a populist politician famous for his blunt, combative manner and his harsh, biting attacks on opponents, and who was once a porter who swept the platforms at Victoria Station in London.

Now the leader of the Patriotic Front, with a respectable chance of winning a presidential election set for the end of October, Sata says: ‘The Chinese are not here as investors, they are here as invaders.

‘They bring Chinese to come and push wheelbarrows, they bring Chinese bricklayers, they bring Chinese carpenters, Chinese plumbers. We have plenty of those in Zambia.’

This is true. In Lusaka and in the Copper Belt, poor and lowly Chinese workers, in broad-brimmed straw hats from another era, are a common sight at mines and on building sites, as are better-dressed Chinese supervisors and technicians.

There are Chinese restaurants and Chinese clinics and Chinese housing compounds - and a growing number of Chinese flags flapping over factories and smelters.

‘We don’t need to import labourers from China,’ Sata says. ‘We need to import people with skills we don’t have in Zambia. The Chinese are not going to train our people in how to push wheelbarrows.’

He meets me in the garden of his not specially grand house in the old-established and verdant Rhodes Park section of Lusaka. It is guarded by uniformed security men, its walls protected by barbed wire and broken glass.

‘Wherever our Chinese “brothers” are they don’t care about the local workers,’ he complains, alleging that Chinese companies have lax safety procedures and treat their African workers like dirt.

In language which seems exaggerated, but which will later turn out to be at least partly true, he claims: ‘They employ people in slave conditions.’

He also accuses Chinese overseers of frequently beating up Zambians. His claim is given force by a story in that morning’s Lusaka newspapers about how a Zambian building worker in Ndola, in the Copper Belt, was allegedly beaten unconscious by four Chinese co-workers angry that he had gone to sleep on the job.

I later checked this account with the victim’s relatives in an Ndola shanty town and found it to be true.
Chinese sign in Zambia

Evidence of China is never very far away

Recently, a government minister, Alice Simago, was shown weeping on TV after she saw at first hand the working conditions at a Chinese-owned coal mine in the Southern Province.

When I contacted her, she declined to speak to me about this - possibly because criticism of the Chinese is not welcome among most of the Zambian elite.

Denis Lukwesa, deputy general secretary of the Zambian Mineworkers’ Union, also backed up Sata’s view, saying: ‘They just don’t understand about safety. They are more interested in profit.’

As for their general treatment of African workers, Lukwesa says he knows of cases where Chinese supervisors have kicked Zambians. He summed up their attitude like this: ‘They are harsh to Zambians, and they don’t get on well with them.’

Sata warns against the enormous loans and offers of help with transport, schools and health care with which Peking now sweetens its attempts to buy up Africa’s mineral reserves.

‘China’s deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo is, in my opinion, corruption,’ he says, comparing this with Western loans which require strong measures against corruption.

Everyone in Africa knows China’s Congo deal - worth almost £5billion in loans, roads, railways, hospitals and schools - was offered after Western experts demanded tougher anti-corruption measures in return for more aid.

Sata knows the Chinese are unpopular in his country. Zambians use a mocking word - ‘choncholi’ - to describe the way the Chinese speak. Zambian businessmen gossip about the way the Chinese live in separate compounds, where - they claim - dogs are kept for food.

There are persistent rumours, which cropped up in almost every conversation I had in Zambia, that many of the imported Chinese workforce are convicted criminals whom China wants to offload in Africa. I was unable to confirm this but, given China’s enormous gulag and the harshness of life for many migrant workers, it is certainly not impossible.

Sata warns that ’sticks and stones’ may one day fly if China does not treat Zambians better. He now promises a completely new approach: ‘I used to sweep up at your Victoria Station, and I never got any complaints about my work. I want to sweep my country even cleaner than I swept your stations.’

Some Africa experts tend to portray Sata as a troublemaker. His detractors whisper that he is a mouthpiece for Taiwan, which used to be recognised by many African states but which faces almost total isolation thanks to Peking’s new Africa policy.

But his claims were confirmed by a senior worker in Chambishi, scene of the 2005 explosion. This man, whom I will call Thomas, is serious, experienced and responsible. His verdict on the Chinese is devastating.

He recalls the aftermath of the blast, when he had the ghastly task of collecting together what remained of the men who died: ‘Zambia, a country of 11million people, went into official mourning for this disaster.

‘A Chinese supervisor said to me in broken English, “In China, 5,000 people die, and there is nothing. In Zambia, 50 people die and everyone is weeping.” To them, 50 people are nothing.’

This sort of thing creates resentment. Earlier this year African workers at the new Chinese smelter at Chambishi rioted over low wages and what they thought were unsafe working conditions.

When Chinese President Hu Jintao came to Zambia in 2006, he had to cancel a visit to the Copper Belt for fear of hostile demonstrations. Thomas says: ‘The people who advised Hu Jintao not to come were right.’

He suspects Chinese arrogance and brutality towards Africans is not racial bigotry, but a fear of being seen to be weak. ‘They are trying to prove they are not inferior to the West. They are trying too hard.

‘If they ask you to do something and you don’t do it, they think you’re not doing it because they aren’t white. People put up with the kicks and blows because they need work to survive.’

Many in Africa also accuse the Chinese of unconcealed corruption. This is specially obvious in the ‘Democratic Republic of the Congo’, currently listed as the most corrupt nation on Earth.

A North-American businessman who runs a copper smelting business in Katanga Province told me how his firm tried to obey safety laws.

They are constantly targeted by official safety inspectors because they refuse to bribe them. Meanwhile, Chinese enterprises nearby get away with huge breaches of the law - because they paid bribes.

‘We never pay,’ he said, ‘because once you pay you become their bitch; you will pay for ever and ever.’

Another businessman shrugged over the way he is forced to wait weeks to get his products out of the country, while the Chinese have no such problems.

‘I’m not sure the Chinese even know there are customs regulations,’ he said. ‘They don’t fill in the forms, they just pay. I try to be philosophical about it, but it is not easy.’

Unlike orderly Zambia, Congo is a place of chaos, obvious privation, tyranny dressed up as democracy for public-relations purposes, and fear.

This is Katanga, the mineral-rich slice of land fought over furiously in the early Sixties in post-colonial Africa’s first civil war. Brooding over its capital, Lubumbashi, is a 400ft black hill: the accumulated slag and waste of 80 years of copper mining and smelting.

Now, thanks to a crazy rise in the price of copper and cobalt, the looming, sinister mound is being quarried - by Western business, by the Chinese and by bands of Congolese who grub and scramble around it searching for scraps of copper or traces of cobalt, smashing lumps of slag with great hammers as they hunt for any way of paying for that night’s supper.

As dusk falls and the shadows lengthen, the scene looks like the blasted land of Mordor in Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings: a pre-medieval prospect of hopeless, condemned toil in pits surrounded by stony desolation.

Behind them tower the leaning ruins of colossal abandoned factories: monuments to the wars and chaos that have repeatedly passed this way.

There is something strange and unsettling about industrial scenes in Africa, pithead winding gear and gaunt chimneys rising out of tawny grasslands dotted with anthills and banana palms. It looks as if someone has made a grave mistake.

And there is a lesson for colonial pride and ambition in the streets of Lubumbashi - 80 years ago an orderly Art Deco city full of French influence and supervised by crisply starched gendarmes, now a genial but volatile chaos of scruffy, bribe-hunting traffic cops where it is not wise to venture out at night.

The once-graceful Belgian buildings, gradually crumbling under thick layers of paint, long ago lost their original purpose.

Outsiders come and go in Africa, some greedy, some idealistic, some halfway between. Time after time, they fail or are defeated, leaving behind scars, slag-heaps, ruins and graveyards, disillusion and disappointment.

We have come a long way from Cecil Rhodes to Bob Geldof, but we still have not brought much happiness with us, and even Nelson Mandela’s vaunted ‘Rainbow Nation’ in South Africa is careering rapidly towards banana republic status.

Now a new great power, China, is scrambling for wealth, power and influence in this sad continent, without a single illusion or pretence.

Perhaps, after two centuries of humbug, this method will work where all other interventions have failed.

But after seeing the bitter, violent desperation unleashed in the mines of Likasi, I find it hard to believe any good will come of it.

Article By PETER HITCHENS for www.dailymail.co.uk

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“I had a very strong vision in mind for the album,” the artist says of this - her own description. “For me it’s about bringing everything that makes up village life in Africa into an urban setting in a way that’s easy for everyone to relate to.”

In pursuit of this vision, Zamajobe again teamed up with musician, songwriter and producer, Erik Paliani, who helmed her 2006 debut ‘Nadwo Yami’. With the help of some enormously talented players, the two have crafted an album that sees Zamajobe reflect the cool spirit of the world’s most gifted modern soul singers, delivered through a filter that only a thoroughly conscious 21st century Zulu woman can bring.

The 11-track offering conjures up a mythical place that reflects the multiple meanings in its title. “Ndoni Yamanzi means a black stone or it could mean a beautiful black woman,” Zamajobe explains. But, intriguingly, it can also signal purity, authenticity, organicness and more.

“I believe that I’ve made an album that defies constraints,” Zamajobe says. “Young or old, if you live in the village or the town, you can connect with what I am saying and with the groove-based music that supports the lyrics.”

She’s not wrong: Flitting across the album is a beauty that requires no special skills or background to find its footing in the heart of listeners.

Sure there’s plenty of the kind of cool jazz that Zamajobe’s fans have come to expect from her on the album - particularly on songs like ‘Nokuthula’ which features Neil Engel on trumpet and Sam Mataure on drums on one of Ndoni Yamanzi’s most elegant and sparse songs. Jazz styling’s are also evident on ‘Come To Me’ and many of the other tracks on the album.

But taking centrestage are Zamajobe’s beguiling and bewitching vocals that are often supported by little more than Paliani’s guitar playing, as well as a rhythm section that never intrudes.

Take a listen to the supremely sophisticated ‘Fly’ to hear this near perfect music mix in action. Or press play on the album’s title track to be immersed in the transporting sound that Zamajobe and Paliani have so effortlessly crafted on Ndoni Yamanzi. The latter is a slow-build gift of a song that glides into the hearts and minds of listeners in the most enthralling way.

Ndoni Yamanzi also contains Zamajobe’s first song in Chichewa, ‘Mwezi S’unama’. Says Zamajobe, “Erik joked with me after we recorded it saying that if the song was played in Malawi, I would be given land for free, so beautiful did it turn out!”

For Zamajobe, her second album is the one that takes her closer to her true music identity.

“I feel like I am really finding my creative feet on this one. The first album happened in a fairly spontaneous way but with this one I wanted to take a step back and give some real thought to where I am going with my music. I knew I wanted it to be groove based and I knew that I wanted to conjure up a place where both the village and the town can exist together – and I think we’ve done that.”

Maria Kounelakis - Sony BMG

Click Here to sample the music from Ndoni Yamanzi

Naledge jumps off ‘The In Crowd’ strong in “Black Out,” switching up the flow pace skillfully. Still, with recycled lines like “nice round mics like I was Scott Pippen,” it’s hard to give him props. Naledge’s best work comes on “The Pledge” alongside what emerge as the album’s best two verses by Duck Down stars Buckshot and Sean Price; it’s difficult for the young rapper Naledge to rise to the “top of the pops” when “Jesus Price” riddles off random illness like “I smoke a nick of weed, sold a nick of crack/ now I watch the Knicks listening to Nickelback/ I don’t like football, what’s a nickel back?/ take this bottle to the store, get a nickel back.”

The only tracks on which Naledge doesn’t get out-rapped fall flat due to sub-par guest spots i.e. the boring “Snob Hop” w/Camp Lo and uninspired “Middle Of The Map” parts 1 and 2 w/Fooch, Black Milk and Guilty Simpson. Naledge, though satisfactory in the verses of these songs, just doesn’t bring enough vigor in the choruses. Outside of Double O’s prominent horns, keys and nicely chopped drums, the influence of fellow Chi-Town emcees Lupe Fiasco and Kanye West shine on ‘The In Crowd’ more than Naledge’s skills. Even the reflective tones of “Inner Me,” boosted by Double O’s budding production skills, barrows it’s title from an old Lupe line. Other more blatant thefts include a Tupac/jeans lyric Lupe spits on “Pressure” (‘…Food & Liquor,’ 2006). And mentions of flying from Paris to Tokyo (“Paper Trail”) are just too close to the original cool nerd’s hit single for comfort.

“Driven Down The Block (Remix),” featuring Cool Kids, Bun B and Pusher T, is no extravagant improvement on the original single. However, the title track, “The In Crowd,” has the KIH stamp; this high energy joint has an 80’s glam feel with it’s fast pace percussion and subtle keyboard pattern. Kidz In The Hall selects a choice group of emcees for its’ sophomore LP and Duck Down debut ‘The In Crowd.’ Phonte of Little Brother delivers a tight verse in the smooth sounding “Paper Trail;” Skyzoo articulates passion for the atypical ladies over producer Double O’s soulful standout “Let Your Hair Down.” But it’s evident that KIH’s emcee Naledge has work to do before the duo can stand among the new school’s best.

Review by Mike Ivey Jr. for www.nobodysmiling.com

The proliferation of the internet and Web 2.0 must have had a profound effect on J*Davey, in a good and a bad way. On the one hand, the Los Angeles duo’s name and brand of new wave and electronic funk/soul/pop has gained a significant online following due to the myriad messageboards, blogs, and social networking sites that litter cyberspace. Because of this exposure the group has become a veritable e-household name. On the other hand, this phenomenon has paved the way for a massive amount of bootlegging that has to have astonished the group. There probably isn’t a computer/music nerd that has not sent a J*Davey mp3 through AOL instant messenger a t some point since the group burst onto the scene a couple of years ago.

Nevertheless, songstress Jack Davey and producer Brooke D’Leau have managed to rise above the e-hype to deliver a final product for mass consumption in the form of the double EP (??) The Beauty in Distortion/Land of The Lost. These two EPs represent most of the duos work that has been floating around cyberspace that most myspace fans have heard ad nauseam. For the uninitiated, however, this debut project is nothing short of a pop music renaissance.

Miles Davis, Prince, The Police, Talking Heads, DJ Quik, Bone Thugs N’ Harmony, and The Mahavishnu Orchestra. The only thing that this seemingly random list of artists have in common is the sound that J*Davey manages to concoct from their disparate genius and musical textures. The first EP, The Beauty in Distortion, showcases the duo’s uncanny ability to mesh electronic funk, Soul, R&B, and sparse experimentalism to arrive at a synthetic stew of sound. The prototype of this sound is the group’s lead single “Mr. Mister”. Here, Brook D’Leau is able to mangle the synthesizers and keyboards like a Weather Report alumnus while Jack Davey’s (often) erotic vocals and lyrics melt into the mix as another instrument altogether.

At times the direction the group is trying to take its songs can be a bit unclear as some tracks just seem to float off into the ether. “Cowboys and Indians” is a loose and spacey jam that employs a Funkadelic like vibe with a Sir Nose-type voice throwing is streams of randomness. This type of jammy natured songwriting Is a bit less authoritative as the songs don’t really seem to go anywhere or have a stated goal or purpose, but that of course is the king of all nitpicks. It’s probably better to call these extended jams like this and other euphoric exercises like “Everybody Touch It” what they are…sonic crack, sans base.

You might have heard the second EP, The Land of The Lost, as it was released as a free download mixtape from The Fader magazine in 2007. Most of the tracks from that release reemerge here, unmixed of course, but in a slightly different sequence. Many of the standouts remain. Jack Davey is able to display her serviceable emcee chops on “sLAyers” and the group’s standard “Slooow” closes the disc. We are also blessed with a 2006 live version of another standard “No More” and charming number to consider for the bootlegger that has it all.

Despite most of this effort being a grand revisit of the group’s hijacked material it is important to note that this properly released version is mastered-up and has not gone through various overdubs like a 1995 Doo Wop mixtape. By combining and spring boarding from several music genres, the group is leading the charge in a popular music revolution. Their mixture of pop sensibilities and a unique approach to songwriting and instrumentation make them the new standard in music today. To classify them is nothing short of a futile exercise as the group’s efforts are the next evolution in bridge music. This stuff is out there…way out there. And even if you think you got it, you might as well get it again.

Review by Travis Larrier (courtesy of www.thisisrealmusic.com)

“Formula” has become a buzz word for “underground backpackers;” it denotes cookie-cutter ideas, pushed by the mainstream, designed to hook listeners - the same old new stuff. Buckshot and super-producer 9th Wonders’ second joint album, ‘The Formula,’ is anything but recycled blueprints. It shines on an often dark hip hop landscape.

We learn early that it’s a “Brand New Day;” Bucks’ “label is signing” and he vents “nothing less than the best” over 9th’s pulsating bass and beckoning horns. Buckshot songs about relationships and love may seem unexpected but 9th Wonders’ sentimental, R&B affects funnel Bucks’ groove that way. Uppity ladies catch harsh lessons throughout ‘The Formula;’ “Be Cool” is the impressive mesh of a bluesy sample and nice R&B vocals by Swan. She even overdubs well as Buck laments, ‘you only come around when I’m chiefing boo/ and every other weekend we beefing boo.’ “Just Display” and “Throwin Shade,” though similar in content, achieve two unique vibes; the latter applies spurts of vocal bellows and horns for a happy, snare heavy feel; lyrics about jealous gun fire never sounded so gleeful. “Just Display” is a much darker, stringy impulse; Buck relays a lesson about bitter women who cling to the material to mask scars. Buck lays bare his own anguish in “Only For You (Lou),” a soul-hearty RIP shout out to his fallen friend Lou.

The beat to “Here We Go” blends the musical vibrancy of “Throwin Shade” as Bucks’ flow imitates the sober tones of “Just Display.” And, like “Just Display,” the story involves slowing down the microwave pace of our world by walking. ‘The Formula’ packs rich sonic weight despite its’ lean track-list. “Man Listen,” the album finale, picks up right where “Ready (Brand New Day)” leaves off, rejoicing over Buck and Duck Downs’ creative business triumphs; 9th Wonder sums up another opus with more choppy soul singing over sweet strings and quaking percussion. It’s no wonder Buck went from “beef to showing teeth”- he works with an ace producer, handles a roster of emcees he respects and loves, and Duck Down has lately signed acts from Kidz In The Hall to KRS-ONE. Life sounds good when you’re not afraid to apply your ‘…Formula.’

Review by: Mike Ivey Jr. for www.nobodysmiling.com

No Hip hop group has been as prolific as The Roots. Over the last 15 years, the band has produced a musical catalog that rivals the greats in any category of music. Their ability to evolve has kept the crew not only relevant but in the forefront of modern day music. Following the release of 2006’s classic LP, Game Theory, The Roots presents the moody, socially charged Rising Down.

The sound of Rising Down is edgy, serious and provocative. The disc’s title song features Mos Def, Black Thought and Styles P using the “slow flow” while expressing societal disappointment and hostility over a beat that bangs and drags. This particular combination of lyrics and sounds suggests the disc’s overall theme of anxious frustration. Rising Down is revolutionary theme music.

Impressively, the album features a significant array of vocal appearances. These vocalists do a great job sticking with the general energy and theme of the album while ?uestlove pulls off his best production effort to date. This effort creates an offering that is cohesive and fluid despite a number of moving parts and guest appearances. No other Roots album features the array of artists found on Rising Down. Whether it be Philly’s own Peedi Crack, new comer P.O.R.N., the soulful Truck North, Chrisett Michelle, Mercedez Martinez, The Roots’ staples Malik B and Dice Raw, Talib Kweli or underground emcee Saigon, the music is consistent and never evokes mixtape disparity.

More importantly, the wide array of appearances allows an aging Black Thought, noticeably exhausted from carrying the lion’s share of the vocals on The Roots’ previous eight albums, to limit his amount of lyrical material on each song. What results is one or two very solid or dope verses from Thought, complimented by a spirited performance from a guest appearance, all presided over by ?uestlove. Whereas Phrenology, The Tipping Point and even Game Theory are at times lyrically monotonous and lackluster, Rising Down is diverse and exciting. Also of note is Black Thought’s swapping of the more business-conscious alias “Riq Geez” for the aggressive and catalytic “Nat Burner”. His reclamation of this past identity further reflects the temperament of the album.

Outside the obvious assortment of vocal talent are a couple nuances that add to the “fullness” of Rising Down. “Get Busy” features scratching by the legendary DJ Jazzy Jeff; “@ 15” is a rhyme from a then, 15-year old Black Thought, showing his prodigious rapping gift in a style similar to his idol, Kool G Rap. The closing track, “Rising Up”, is an up-tempo Go-Go mix, suitably featuring DC’s own Wale. These subtleties, coupled with the numerous guest appearances all controlled and arranged by ?uestlove, create a product that is remarkably diverse, yet astonishingly fluid. With that said, Rising Down is probably the band’s most challenging effort thus far. Not surprisingly, The Roots are up for the challenge.

Review by A. Knight II (Courtesy: www.thisisrealmusic.com)

1. “Rising Up”

2. “Birthday Girl”

The superficial comparisons between Santi White aka Santogold and hipster darling MIA are just that — superficial. It is only when White uses an off-the-cuff or repetitive adlib on her self-titled debut that even a remote comparison can be drawn between the two. The fact is, when you peel back the layers on Santi White’s musical career, you find that the Philadelphia native comes from a distinct and storied pedigree of musicians precluding her from being anybody’s clone. As the front woman for Philadelphia-based punk band Stiffed and co-writer/producer for Res’ 2001 epic debut album How I Do, White has fashioned herself into an accomplished songwriter who knows her way around a recording studio. Santogold is a strong display of her artistic résumé.

Santogold draws its influence from a number of different sources as White corrals several quasi-related genres on this album. The even-keeled swagger of “L.E.S. Artistes” is similar to the soulful rock material she penned for Res. Elsewhere, the drive and pace of “You’ll Find A Way” and “Say Aha” show traces of White’s longstanding collaborative relationship with members of legendary hardcore punk band Bad Brains. Yet still, the heavy dub of “Shove It” hints more at the punk-infused dub of The Clash. It is this mixture of sounds and textures that make this a true representation of Santi White the artist.

The album carries credits from more than five producers in addition to White herself. While this might suggest a jumble of disparate sounds and textures, it is White’s creative vocal inflections and acrobatics that make the album an exciting, engaging and somewhat thematic listen. Her vocals range from inviting and soothing to percussive and revolutionary. In one fell swoop, Santogold channels the musicality and angst of The Clash, a moody type of neo-haunt similar to Nico and the new wave strut of Blondie.

The blissful vocal harmonies of “Lights Out” and White’s laid back ease and vulnerability on “I’m A Lady” contrast sharply with any of her contemporaries’ vocal stylings or abilities. Whereas other artists of this current hipster-pop genre appropriate and employ World music grooves and Baltimore Club sensibilities, White nestles cozily and comfortably in the vortex where reggae, dub, ska and punk rock meet. To her credit, White has shrouded this specific pool of music with her own original songwriting and unpredictable yet engaging vocals so much so that she is crafting a new version of truly digestible and universal popular music. So universal is it that two cuts off this album are the soundtrack to the new Bud Light Lime campaign. Helplessly infectious and unsurprisingly bold, Santogold is an authoritative effort. This album is not a debut. It is the coming out party of a young talent who has been cutting her teeth and developing her chops with some of the industry’s stalwarts for just under a decade.

Review by Travis Larrier (courtesy of www.thisisrealmusic.com)

Since the very beginning of Murs’ career, he has always had a different outlook on the game than his fellow peers from the west coast power-house collective, the Living Legends crew. Since 1995, Murs has been one of the hardest working rappers in the game. Officially, this is his 7th full-length album, which barely speaks of his entire career. He’s a part of the collective known as 3 Melancholy Gypsy’s, who’ve released 2 full-length albums. He’s also part of the duo Felt, with Slug from Atmosphere, who are currently working on their 3rd album. And besides appearing on 7 full-length Living Legends releases, he’s appeared on approximately 50 records within and outside the crew.

One of the things I’ve always noticed about Murs is that he’s never been tied down to a certain type of sound or producer. From Eligh, to Bicasso, to El-P, to 9th Wonder, to Terrace Martin; Murs stays inspired like a true artist from the golden age. Whether he’s dropping material on an independent label, Definitive Jux, Rhymesayers, or Warner Brothers; Murs has never compromised the quality of his art or craft.

Plain and simple, mainstream hip-hop needs a record like this. Murs brings back that golden age aesthetic to a time when hip-hop albums are vastly disposable in the commercial and underground scene. Murs has always spoke on tales of the common man, and has always brought a conscious, personal, and thought provoking message of real life events to the table. Being a long time fan, I feel Murs has really stepped up his game up lyrically, and is flexing his muscles to their tightest for his major label debut. Now more than ever, it’s apparent Murs is trying to change the game with an eye-opening record of positivity and realness - and now he has the tools and the distribution to make that happen on a global scale.

Having heard Murs’ entire catalog, the production was the thing I was most interested in. Producers include Wild Animals, 9th Wonder, Keith Harris, Scoop DeVille, LT Moe, Khalil, Josef Leimberg, Terrace Martin, & Knotch. One of the most notable additions to the production is DJ Quik. If you are unfamiliar with the west coast legend & audiophile, just know that his mixing and engineering skills have given this production a mainstream glossiness that Murs has never had before, which demands more presence from Murs than ever before.

Review by Alan Pounds for Amazon

It has been four years since the world last heard from Raphael Saadiq as an artist. He was busy on the production side of music, collaborating with artists like Alicia Keys, Teedra Moses and Joss Stone. The Way I See It, Saadiq’s third solo album, is similar to his first two in the classic vintage feel that filters through it, a characteristic that Saadiq embraces proudly. A major difference is that Saadiq’s personal touch and ingenuity can get lost in the re-creation of the soulful sounds of an era gone by.

It is true that Saadiq brings a totally fresh perspective to a relatively uninspired male R&B/soul genre. He lists Stevie Wonder (who appears on the “Never Give You Up” track) and other soul singers such as Gladys Knight and the Pips, Al Green, Sam Cooke, The Temptations and the Four Tops as musical inspirations for the album. He also cites the work of movie directors Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee and the ambiance of Costa Rica as influences. With muses such as those, the album certainly has an epic feel, one that tells a moving story with seamless quality of sound reminding one of the time period when the Funk Brothers’ golden touch permeated much of the music of Motown. Even the length of the tracks is reminiscent of older albums with shorter songs - five tracks are under three minutes long. The album can very well be viewed as a tribute to these forbearers of soul music.

However, the album is problematic because Saadiq’s work recaptures that nostalgic feeling a little too well. The album sounds like something that’s been heard before - either on an old school movie soundtrack, a 1950s sock hop or in a bluesy 1960s or 1970s lounge. The fact that many critics of the album immediately brand it as “retro” is a clear indicator of this aspect of the work. While previous Saadiq albums boasted this same reflective attribute (Instant Vintage is a particularly appropriate moniker for his debut album), they exuded a singular quality identifiable as Saadiq’s individuality and creative innovation in the musical sphere. The innovation in this album is not as transparent or evident, leaving many Saadiq followers frustrated and hunting for more.

That is not to say that the album does not present beautiful music. Key tracks on the album include the first single, “Love That Girl,” “100 Yard Dash” and “Sometimes.” “Love That Girl” is Saadiq singing falsetto accompanied by a resounding echo in a groovy laid back ballad with a rich texture of percussive elements; “100 Yard Dash” is a hard hitting up-tempo jam that Saadiq packs with an energetic and definitive punch despite its 2:18 length; “Sometimes” is a modern day uplifting tune that rings of the 1975 Spinners’ classic “Sadie” in praise of maternal role models.

There is no doubt that Saadiq’s passion, raw energy and talent are exhibited in his latest album. He dares to break back into the mainstream with a totally different sound and attitude about his music. The major predicament is that while he masterfully reinvents golden soul music, his personal signature is lost in the mix.

Review by Amber Wiley for www.thisisrealmusic.com

1. “Love That Girl”

2. “Never Give You Up”

By Vernon Clark, Inquirer Staff Writer

Declaring a new day in the struggle to reduce crime and violence in the black communities of Philadelphia, civic, community, government and religious leaders yesterday urged thousands of black men to step forward to help patrol streets.

At an event billed as “A Call to Action: 10,000 Men” at the Liacouras Center in North Philadelphia, nearly 10,000 men - most of them dressed in black - gathered to volunteer to be “peacekeepers” in their communities. Many were lined up at tables with sign-up forms. A number already had registered online, organizers said.

Looking out at the large audience, Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson, a strong supporter of the effort, said, “We can make a major difference.

“We have to learn how to live together and work together. We are all in this together,” he said.

Johnson was among about a dozen speakers who addressed the gathering. On the stage, about 50 leaders, many of them elected officials, sat facing a sea of black men.

Organizers did not give an exact count of those who showed up yesterday. The Liacouras Center has a capacity of 10,200 and it appeared that nearly all seats were taken. Details about the effort, including how it would be organized and controlled, have not been made public.

The organizing effort began this year after Philadelphia’s rising number of homicides appeared to be on track to surpass last year’s total.

The city has been getting national attention as a murder capital, even though the homicide rate - the number of killings per 100,000 residents - is below those of some other major cities and the homicide count has recently dipped below last year’s. As of midnight Thursday, 321 homicides had been reported this year, compared with 323 last year.

Robert Massey, 30, of Germantown, who brought his 9-year-old son, Rahim, said: “This is the only place I had to be today. I want my son to hear all of this. I want him to know his father cares about his neighborhood.”

Mayor Street praised the crowd for coming out in support of their communities.

“This day is a launching day. This is the day when we are going to do something different in this city,” Street said. “Every one of us is going to make a personal commitment today that . . . ‘I’m going to do the work to make this a better community.’ It’s a new day.”

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Although Common’s marriage to the game has birthed seven albums during a career more than twice as long, his latest offering does not in the least reflect an itch that might suggest that his lyrical commitment to H.E.R. is on the rocks. In fact, Common continues to utilize his vocal husk to penetrate a ghetto matrix that is as lovingly supportive of those who make it out, as it is a harbinger for soul murder, where dream deferment rivals breathing and Starbucks get more priority than public housing. Meanwhile, the poor and the colored slap box with absurdity under an ever-expanding cloud of urban impossibility where the idea of light at the end of the tunnel is a crude joke.

Yet survival is a precondition for the hued and the aggrieved whose humanity is forever on a chopping block screaming to be realized, recognized, and dignified at whatever the cost. Guiding the listener through this urban macabre is where Common has always been at his best, blessing the mic with a poetic economy and attention to detail that has vaulted him into that mighty fraternity of the rappers rapper. What better way to describe Hip-Hop’s verbal power than to tell us “that lyrics are like liquor for the fallen soldier, from the bounce to the ounce, its all our culture” or reminding us of urban desperation with the memorable “the karma of the streets is needs and takes, sometimes we find peace in beats and breaks” on the title track “The People.” To the casual listener this might appear to be convenient word play, but to the discerning Hiphoppa, “liquor” serves as both an intoxicant and an elixir, while “bounce to the ounce” signifies the Roger Troutman funk jam of the same name, it also suggest that the “bounce” (the sound of the culture) and “the ounce” (the social dead end of the drug game) are all part of the complex cultural fabric of the hoods’ for which it sprang. Though common knowledge, it’s Common’s poetic juxtaposition and ability to smoothly crash words into new meaning that makes his insights so aesthetically fulfilling.

Sonically, Common plays it safe and attempts to capitalize on the mainstream success of Be by maintaining Kanye behind the boards and enlisting a select few to assist in the musical landscape. One wonders if this was his choice, the labels, or both. Without question, Finding Forever could have been enhanced by more sonic exploration, but love, hope, hurt, fear, myopia, and resilience remain critical themes of poetic engagement for “Chi-town’s Nas.” In his previous effort Common urged us to Be, but in his latest tome he asks us to be the presence that is eternal—to find forever. To my mind they are one in the same, beautiful indeed.

–Review by Fanon Che Wilkins, Ph.D. for SoulGen.com

Perhaps the most persistent irony in Hip-Hop is that being dope does not always translate into fame and fortune. Conversely, being wack does not necessarily guarantee a four-digit income. But what is for certain is that respect will always enable soul wrenching poetry and unfettered creativity to ascend above the mediocre and formulaic in route to becoming a beacon of hope for desperate souls scouring the viberesphere for something they can feel. These were the sensibilities that made Little Brother’s The Listening (2003) and The Minstrel Show (2005) such welcome additions to the game.

Two years later, the L-Bees, minus super-producer 9th Wonder and a major label deal with Atlantic Records, are back in the indie-world and Phonte and Rapper Pooh sound as fresh as ever. Out of the gate, the Illmind produced “Sirens” packs enough punch to make Jesse Jackson, the NAACP, and Americas favorite Dad—Bill Cosby rethink their respectability plan to quell the nigga talk and “uplift” the hood. Pooh sets the tone with an intelligence that Al Sharpton (and now Russell Simmons) surely wouldn’t endorse. He opines:

they talk about us not using the word nigga, I wanna speak about a couple issues much bigga, like most Black folks live below the poverty line and they wonder why the fuck we are attracted to crime, we got niggas shootin’ niggas at the drop of a dime, babies in the streets dyin’ way before they time many single parent mothers packin’ welfare lines, and niggas being dumbass, the apocalypse is on us, niggas take onus, that’s all I ever asked and got pegged as a hata’, now they tryin’ to take niggas out with the fada’, started with three two six see you lata’, back independent cuz the kids I wouldn’t cata’, go against the system you in bed with Al-Quaeda, dog they ain’t playin,’ look here their going to war with more than Rap, this are mafuckin’ lives now it’s time to fight back!

Now for all of you Hip-Hoppas out there struggling to defend who you are and what you love, Phonte provides ammo for your next debate:

…they tryin’ to blame this Rap shit for all of our ills, like I can stick you up with a mic, like I could rape you with a verse or use a verb as a knife, like before Kool Herc everything was alright, like I wasn’t callin’ Black women hoes before Rappers Delight, shit that’s just idiot talk, this whole shit is a farce, I refuse to be Hip-Hop’s pallbearer, had to tell my son cut that bullshit off, them ain’t videos nigga’ that’ psychological warfare, twenty different variations of the same face, designed to keep yo broke ass in the same place, something else more, yo it’s got to be, because I’m in transition cuz they watchin’ me..

So now that the civil righters have been chin checked and the stakes of the game have been carefully delineated, Phonte and Pooh invite listeners to witness their growth and maturity as young men grappling with the same challenges that confront ordinary dudes searching for purpose and meaning in life. With gut busting humor (now a L-Bee trademark), the duo celebrate the everyday desires to dress well with “Good Clothes,” and gets assistance from the ubiquitous Yung Weezy (Lil’ Wayne) on the only 9th Wonder produced track, “Breaking My Heart.”

Although 9th plays the side, fellow Justus Leaguer Khrysis gets behind the boards on “After The Party” and expertly melds atonal shrieks and hums over an alternating bass and snare to create an end of the night feel that everybody can relate to. Jersey’s Illmind of Beat Society fame produced the bulk of the album, but the L-Bees employed the services of hit makers Hi-Tek and Nottz on “Step It Up” and “Two-Step Blues” respectively. In the tradition of Nas’s “Bridging the Gap,” the L-Bees bring to life, with the assistance of hometown crooner Darien Brockington and Nottz’s up-tempo arrangement, an evening at the Elk’s Lodge where young and old two step their blues away in a tradition that would make Bessie Smith proud and Ma Rainey show her black bottom. Here we see the L-Bee’s plea for intergenerational unity on full display.

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of Little Brother’s previous work was their amazing ability to create great albums that were well sequenced and contained a unity of feeling. This has become a lost art in the Itunes-era. Many believed (including this author) that much of this craftsmanship would be lost with the departure of 9th Wonder from behind the boards, but I was pleasantly surprised to realize that this simply was not the case. Like their big brothers before them–Tribe, De La, Public Enemy, Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth—they allow the album to tell a story about disappointment, perseverance, maturity, redemption, and just plain old having fun—something we all need from time to time. Get the Get Back and get in for the ride.

1. “Sirens”

2. “Good Clothes”

From 1991 to 2002, Sierra Leone, West Africa experienced a civil war that devastated the country. The last several years the country has focused on maintaining peace, rebuilding infrastructure and bringing millions of displaced people home. One of the amazing initiatives to emerge has been the Sierra Leone Refugee All-Stars, a group of Sierra Leonean refugees that used music to bring healing, raise awareness and promote action.

SoulGenesis is particularly interested in supporting this initiative and others that help empower the local community. We seek initiatives that do not provide handouts but create opportunities for local people and economies to become self-sustaining. As such we have partnered with three dynamic organizations, Empowerment Works, Evil Twin Bookings and Christie Communications.

Simple ways you can help now:

- Put the Refugee All-Stars in your Netflix cue. One dollar will be donated for every time a Netflix customer places Sierra Leone’s Refugee All-Stars in their cue.

- Come to the SoulGenesis and Evil Twin Booking Screening of the critically acclaimed, The Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars, on June 20 at 8PM at Kaffa Crossing in Philadelphia. A portion of the proceeds will benefit the Refugee All-Stars and Empowerment Works. Details below.

- Learn more about some of the powerful global initiatives of Empowerment Works and how you can get involved.

Organizers of the drive to put at least 10,000 volunteers on the streets said preliminary indications were that they met their target, and would in the next 30 days be able to send patrols into trouble spots to deter crime.

Volunteers will be unarmed and have no powers of arrest but will be trained in conflict resolution and mentoring in a city where 85 percent of homicide victims are young black men.

Backers, including Philadelphia Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson and record industry boss Kenny Gamble, say the initiative has a better chance of succeeding than earlier anti-violence campaigns because it is broadly representative of the black community, and is not led by city government or the police, who are mistrusted in some inner-city areas.

It has been endorsed by more than 80 community groups, businesses, churches and government agencies, organizers say.

The homicide rate, which rose to a nine-year high of 406 in 2006, has defied repeated appeals by police and civic and community leaders, and has led national media to dub Philadelphia “Killadelphia” instead of its official title, the City of Brotherly Love.

In a two-hour rally at a Temple University auditorium, black leaders urged men to take responsibility for their communities and their families, and to stop blaming others for a history of economic underachievement.

“Slavery, at this late time, is no longer an acceptable excuse,” said A. Bruce Cawley, a prominent black businessman. He said that in the 325 years since blacks have lived in Philadelphia, they had been overtaken in prosperity by immigrant Irish, Jews, Italians, and now Asians and Hispanics.

“And where are we? We are sitting on the sidelines,” Cawley said.

Johnson, whose department has been criticized for failing to curb the homicide epidemic, said police cannot be blamed for its root causes such as poverty, unemployment, poor education, and weak gun control. “Traditional policing is not working,” he said.

Chandlan Crawford, 38, a forklift truck driver from southwest Philadelphia, said he had already volunteered to join a street patrol, and was optimistic that the estimated 8,500 who attended Sunday’s rally would generate more support. “The people that are here will take the message out there,” he said.

Gamble, the chairman of the campaign, described the homicide epidemic as “a war” that can only be won by overcoming what he said was the “ignorance” and “self-hatred” that affect some black men.

“There are no more excuses,” Gamble said. “We need a code of conduct and a standard of behavior that will outline what’s right and what’s wrong in our community. We as black men have to be able to enforce it.”

© Reuters2007 All rights reserved

By Jon Hurdle

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University of East Anglia researchers gauged CO2 absorption through more than 90,000 measurements from merchant ships equipped with automatic instruments.

Results of their 10-year study in the North Atlantic show CO2 uptake halved between the mid-90s and 2000 to 2005.

Scientists believe global warming might get worse if the oceans soak up less of the greenhouse gas.

Researchers said the findings, published in a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research, were surprising and worrying because there were grounds for believing that, in time, the ocean might become saturated with our emissions.

‘Saturated’ ocean

BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin said: “The researchers don’t know if the change is due to climate change or to natural variations.

“But they say it is a tremendous surprise and very worrying because there were grounds for believing that in time the ocean might become ’saturated’ with our emissions - unable to soak up any more.”

He said that would “leave all our emissions to warm the atmosphere”.

Of all the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, only half of it stays there; the rest goes into carbon sinks.

There are two major natural carbon sinks: the oceans and the land “biosphere”. They are equivalent in size, each absorbing a quarter of all CO2 emissions.

© BBC MMVII

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California will file a lawsuit against the EPA demanding the right to set its own limits on vehicle emissions that are stricter than national standards, spokesman Aaron McLear said.

California, which has become a leader on environmental issues in the United States, passed a state law in 2005 that would require new vehicles to meet progressively tighter standards for greenhouse gas emissions starting with 2009 models.

But the state needs a waiver from the federal government to implement the law and says it has run out of patience awaiting it. Schwarzenegger set an Oct. 22 deadline six months ago for a decision and threatened to sue if the EPA failed to act by then.

“It is almost two years since we asked for this waiver. The governor feels we have been patient enough. He has met with the EPA administrator and with the president on this and has sent letters to them both. We have done everything we can and now it is time for action,” McLear said.

The EPA said earlier this month it expected to make a decision on California’s request by the end of 2007.

Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has said repeatedly that the US government is moving too slowly on climate change issues and that states like California must lead the way.

US automakers are fighting California’s plans in the courts. In a separate case, a US federal judge last month threw out a California lawsuit that had sought for the first time to hold vehicle manufacturers responsible for damages caused by climate-changing greenhouse gases.

Last year, California passed the most far-reaching greenhouse gas emissions reductions in the United States, saying it would cut global warming gases to 1990 levels by 2020 — or by 25 percent from current levels.

© Reuters News Service 2007

When I approached Ethel Cee about being featured in this Music Issue, her emotions went from shock to excitement to a chilled, relaxed vibe. “Cool,” she decided finally. “I don’t feel I did anything paper-worthy before.”

Let’s see, this year alone she’s opened up for Sean Kuti, Little Brother, Rah Digga and recently recorded a segment for Bahamadia’s upcoming DVD.

Paper-worthy? I’d say so.

Before getting into who Ethel Cee is, you’ll first need to know who she’s not. Being a black female MC in the underground automatically makes her stand out, but she doesn’t make that the foundation of her music.

“I don’t get caught up in all that, really. I understand how important it is, but it is not a crutch. I can’t be the face of black female MCs everywhere, or even the face of hip-hop. When I go onstage I need to represent myself,” she says.

Her peers know her as one of the hardest-working MCs in Philly. Originally from Mount Airy and now living in West Philly, Ethel Cee saw her career blossom when she became a regular at the Painted Bride’s spoken-word and slam nights. This was around 2001, when the thriving Philly neo-soul scene was led by names like Jill Scott and Ursula Rucker. Cee befriended another MC named Nikkie, and together they formed the duo, Versus, who mixed rap, singing and spoken word to spit out political and social issues.
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“I didn’t know who I was back then, really,” she laughs. “Once I joined Versus, it all started moving pretty fast.” Later she became part of the Squadzilla collective, who performed and promoted projects together. Currently she’s building her name as a solo artist and one-third of the Nuthouse crew with established artists Dave Ghetto and Fel Sweetenberg. “In Nuthouse, I can still concentrate on Ethel Cee while also doing projects with Dave and Fel,” she says. “Both have a natural swagger about them that translates so easily and clearly onto a track. … They push me to be better than I already am.”

After all these creative transitions, Cee came to realize hip-hop could be a permanent outlet of expression for the rest of her life. “Those were all positive stepping stones for me. Being around all those people taught me the importance of writing and rehearsing. They helped me to become a seasoned MC,” she says. “The girl who is Ethel Cee has independence and a completely different confidence that wasn’t there before — it’s empowering.”

While she performs frequently, and can be heard on various mix tapes, it’s her solo album, due out spring 2008, that will officially introduce Ethel Cee to the masses. Her lyrics are a reflection of her life, experiences and travels, so she’s taking her time making sure it truly represents her. “I’m not just going to put out anything to have something out there,” she says. The as-yet-untitled CD will include production by C-Rock from Diverse Soundscapes. There’s talk of getting DJ Skipmode from Ill Vibe Collective involved, too. Everything else is still being worked out, or she’s just keeping hush-hush about it.

Taking risks is her priority. For example, the beats she chooses to rhyme over aren’t strictly hip-hop; there’s also break beat, house and electronic. Her flow tends to lean on the smooth side (credit that spoken-word background), but on some rhymes she gets aggressive. “I tend to write better when I’m angry. It would be a gross misrepresentation if you heard the same thing from me all the time. I decided when I went solo that if this is something that I’m going to do for a long time then I have to challenge myself and do something that is going to keep my attention. It’s important for the crowd to be enthralled in what I do, but it’s more important for me to be enthralled in what I do.”

She runs down her roster of performances and hosting duties for the next three months and it made me tired just listening. With a smirk, she says, “I’m not here just because I’m cute.”

Courtesy of Deesha Dyer, Philadelphia City Paper

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic lawmakers denounced federal authorities Tuesday for not intervening in the Jena Six case, citing racist noose-hanging incidents far beyond the small Louisiana town where a school attack garnered national attention.

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing with federal officials and community activists examining the case of the six black teenagers charged with the beating of a white student. The incident happened after nooses were hung from a tree on a high school campus there — a symbol of the lynching violence of the segregation era.

Democratic lawmakers, many of them black, blasted federal authorities for staying out of the local prosecutor’s case against the six, particularly that of Mychal Bell, who is currently in jail after a judge decided he violated the terms of his probation for a previous conviction.

“Shame on you,” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, said to Justice Department officials, directing most of her fury at Donald Washington, the U.S. attorney for Louisiana’s western district — and the first black person to hold that position.

“As a parent, I’m on the verge of tears,” Jackson Lee said.

“Why didn’t you intervene?” she asked repeatedly, raising her voice and jabbing her finger in the air as some in the audience began to applaud.

Committee chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., called for quiet before Washington spoke.

“I was also offended, I too am an African-American,” Washington told the panel. “I did intervene, I did engage the district attorney. At the end of the day, there are only certain things that the United States attorney can do.”

Following that exchange, Conyers pointed out he had invited the local district attorney, Reed Walters, to testify, but he declined. At that, some in the audience yelled out, “subpoena him!”

Since the Jena case made headlines, there have been a number of other nooses found in high-profile incidents around the country — in a black Coast Guard cadet’s bag, on a Maryland college campus, and, last week, on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University in New York.

The Department of Justice has created a task force to handle noose-hanging investigations in five states. It investigated the Jena matter but decided not to prosecute because the federal government typically does not bring hate crimes charges against juveniles, Washington said.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, a New York-based civil rights activist, said there was unfairness in a criminal justice system that declined to charge white students for a hate crime because they are minors, but initially chose to charge the six teens in the beating case as adults.

“These nooses were hung over a year ago sir. So I know that the wheels of justice turn slow, but they seem to be at a standstill,” said Sharpton. “That’s why we’re seeing nooses all over America.”

The senior Republican on the panel, Lamar Smith of Texas, said, “more than anything what we need is an effort to reduce racial tension… What we do not need is stoking racial resentment.”

According to a CNN-Opinion Research Corp. poll released Tuesday, 79 percent of blacks said the black teenagers in Jena were treated unfairly. Whites were more evenly divided, with 33 percent saying they were treated unfairly, 29 percent fairly and 38 percent saying they were unsure.

The survey, conducted Oct. 12-14, involved telephone interviews with 762 whites and 307 blacks. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points for the whites and plus or minus 5.5 percentage points for the blacks.

In an Associated Press-Ipsos poll taken late last month, nearly nine in 10 blacks said that blacks and other minorities cannot receive equal justice to whites under the nation’s justice system. Whites agreed, but by a much narrower 50 percent to 44 percent.

Last week, a judge sentenced Bell to 18 months in jail after determining he violated the terms of his probation for a previous conviction.

Racial tensions began rising in Jena in August 2006 after a black student sat under a tree known as a gathering spot for white students. Three white students later hung nooses from the tree. They were suspended by the school but not prosecuted.

Associated Press Writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.

The family of J. Dilla is calling on fans to support the J Dilla Project, a new initiative designed to raise money and awareness about lupus, the disease which took the famed producer’s life on February 10, 2006.

Fans are being encouraged to start their own “J Dilla Project” teams across the United States to join The Alliance for Lupus Research’s annual Walkathon, which raises money and awareness to treat lupus, which is an incurable blood disease.

Frank Nitty, of Detroit rap group Frank N Dank, was a childhood, lifelong friend of J. Dilla. The group recently released the DVD Frank N Dank & J. Dilla’s European Vacation, which chronicles the producer’s last tour, as well as his final days alive.

“It’s always a good thing to support a good cause and for the fans of Dilla, you are not only supporting Lupus research but also the legacy of one of the greatest producers of our time, J. Dilla,” Frank Nitty told AllHipHop.com. “You can’t go wrong, so just go support.”

J. Dilla, born James Dewitt Yancy, suffered with Lupus for three years.

Fans are also being encouraged to sponsor individual walkers and to give donations to help further the cause of Lupus research in an attempt to find a cure for the deadly disease.

The Alliance for Lupus Research was founded in 1999 by Robert Wood Johnson IV with the support of the Arthritis Foundation.

Johnson is an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune and since its inception, the foundation has raised over $42 million dollars earmarked for lupus research.

Fans in almost every major metropolis in the U.S. who wish to support The J Dilla Project and ALR’s Walkathon can participate, as events are taking place in New York (October 13), Chicago (October 20), Atlanta (October 20), San Francisco, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Houston and other cities.

For more information visit: http://walk.lupusresearch.org/site/PageServer

Courtesy of Nolan Strong, AllHipHop.com

Mychal Bell, 17, who was freed two weeks ago after his adult criminal conviction for beating a white classmate was overturned, was sent to the Renaissance Home for Youth in Alexandria, Louisiana, the source said.

The decision came at the end of a two-day juvenile court hearing that was closed to the media and public.

Carol Powell-Lexing, one of Bell’s attorneys, said the judge’s decision would be appealed.

Bell was freed on $45,000 bail on September 27, after an appeals court threw out his conviction on battery and conspiracy charges in adult court and remanded the case to juvenile court.

But Judge J.P. Mauffrey agreed with prosecutors that Bell had violated the probation he was given for four previous juvenile offenses, including two simple battery charges, the sources said.

Bell had been placed on probation until he turned 18.

Civil rights activist Al Sharpton, who has championed Bell’s case, denounced Thursday’s decision as “revenge” by the judge and called on Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco to intervene.

Demonstrators in September took to the streets of the small town of Jena to protest how authorities handled the cases of Bell and five other teens accused of beating white student Justin Barker in December 2006. The incident was a culmination of fights between blacks and whites.

Many said they were angry that the students, dubbed the “Jena 6,” were being treated more harshly than three white students who hung nooses from an oak tree on Jena High School property.

The white students were suspended from school but did not face criminal charges. The protesters said they should have been charged with a hate crime.

Jill Scott is undeniably one of the most popular constituents of the Neo-Soul movement. On her third studio album, there’s proof of her seven-year stint as a recording artist. The album cover is the first where her face is shown as it looks in the present (her first was the top of her head, the second was a childhood picture), and she’s going out—with the door open and purse in hand. The Real Thing: Words and Sounds, Vol. 3 (Hidden Beach) definitely poses the question: Where is Jill going? Her divorce and her starring role in Tyler Perry’s new film speak volumes on the new emotional and professional territory that she’s had to voyage through.

“Let It Be” opens The Real Thing with a powerful statement—“If Classical, Country Mood, Rhythm & Blues, Gospel, Whatever it is, let it be.” Jill makes it easy to keep the open mind. This new repertoire of songs demonstrates that even after an ending of a marriage there’s a new beginning, and if you’re lucky, a new sexual awakening. The jazz-blue influenced “Celibacy Blues” can make any woman feel that longing, wherever they are listening. With a line like, “I get some new batteries almost every night,” it’s thought provoking for anyone paying heed, and that’s the thing about Scott. She proves that candor is more provocative than any suggestive song lyric.

Scott’s music can be rendered a bit “female-centric” but, like on her other albums, she proves that her writing is more about human connections. “Hate On Me” is a universal memo for those haterade drinkers. On “Whenever You’re Around” she confesses to her lover that she’s built an emotional relationship with another man.

Five tracks on The Real Thing are under two minutes, which shows Jill’s capacity and talent in concisely saying what she wants. “Crown Royal” is amazingly simplistic. While this latest album also carries less Hip-Hop tinged beats that were prevalent in Beautifully Human; there’s a new element of Hip-Hop that she brings to this new project, and it’s in the lyrical arrangements. In “Epiphany” she raps through the most potent part of the songs.

So, where is Jill going? She’s obviously still on that voyage, like we all are. She just gets to write songs about having sex, and lack thereof. Jill Scott delivers another home-run, not as classical as The Real Thing predecessors, but it’s just as rich and filled with Scott’s brand of R&B, with a new a twist. The Real Thing speaks on that revolution that might occur after a break-up or a divorce—it’s about life’s constant change.

Courtesy of Jonathan Reyes, AllHipHop.com

1. “Hate on Me”

2. “All I”

Log onto an India.Arie lyrics page and you won’t come away expecting an easy-breezy listen–here’s an artist, remember, who made a name for herself by declaring her disdain for silicone and Cristal on her 2001 debut. What’s consistently a revelation for new recruits to the Arie camp, then, is how good the music makes you feel. No matter how heavy the subject matter (and it still gets heavy–God surfaces in the first verse of “Intro,” the prayerful opening song), she delivers it in such a way that it ends up feeling like homespun wisdom–accessible, cloudless, and heartening.

Testimony, no minor R&B/soul achievement, is full of such earth-mother moments: “The Heart of the Matter,” a cover of the Don Henley song, is what a hug might sound like if it were music; “There’s Hope” reminds tunefully that you don’t have to pay to smile (”You better thank God for that”); “Private Party” points up the benefits of getting naked before a mirror and liking what you see (impossible as that sounds, it’ll seem less so after listening); and “I Am Not My Hair,” a sexy thumper featuring Akon, celebrates not the hair, not the skin, but “the soul that lives within.”

Musically, “Testament” is a testament to the benefits of branching out; in addition to gospel and hip-hop, you’ll also find country and pure pop forays here. All of it works, and works wondrously. Arie may be the Oprah of the music world: she’s spiritual, she’s got her head screwed on straight, and whatever she touches turns to gold. Or at least it ought to.

Courtesy of Tammy La Gorce, Amazon.com

1. “Good Mourning”

2. “I Am Not My Hair”

What a marvelously audacious introduction The Colored Section is. Emerging from the same Jazz Café-centered alternative Atlanta soul scene that nourished and nurtured fellow hippie-soul singer/songwriters like Joi and India.Arie all the way into the public consciousness, Donnie’s first LP is a topical, unapologetically conscientious, and even righteously stinging declaration that, yes, can only be likened to the classic sociopolitical masterworks of spiritual heirs Donny Hathaway and especially Stevie Wonder. Songs like “Cloud 9″ and “Wildlife,” in fact, may be too indebted to genius-era Wonder — the former with its wah-wah guitar and warm gusts of squelchy synth vibrato, the latter with its prominent clavinet and crisp harmonica ad-libs — but are such stunning vintage impersonations that both easily could have slipped somewhere onto Innervisions. No matter from which angle you choose to approach such a statement, it couldn’t really be taken as a criticism, nor should it be with The Colored Section.

The music is consistently empowered and empowering: gracefully buttery, always deeply moving, and at its core profoundly idealistic. Generous melodies abound, rising from a gospel-derived groundwork, spun around street-tinged jazz rhythms, and enlivened by wonderful touches of humor like the Dixie frills of “Big Black Buck” that underscore an otherwise valuable criticism of consumerist society. And lest Donnie be dismissed as an imitator (a studied, well-versed disciple clearly, yes, but certainly not a clone), he explores a wealth of his own refreshingly original ideas, stretching out with genuine invention (the gorgeous cosmic explorations of “Heaven Sent,” the jittery electronic backdrop of “Masterplan”) as often as he reaches backwards into retro styles (invigorating bossa nova on “Do You Know?,” the romantic, Baroque string arrangement of “Turn Around”).

It is as bold and self-assured a debut as soul music has seen since D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar. It falls just short of brilliance only because it borrows a few tricks too many from its obvious musical models, but even with its flaws, the album is such a vivid, radiant outpouring of soul-stirring talent and passion that it could fill two hearts.

Courtesy of Stanton Swihart, All Music Guide

Rapper. Singer. Producer. Songwriter. Dancer. Entertainer. However you describe him, one thing is undeniable: tU pHAce will bring the house down. tU pHAce’s music incorporates unique blends of emo, electronica, hip-hop, and soul. Whether in front of rock fans at the Vans Warped Tour, hip-hop heads at Cypress Hill shows, or mixed crowds at MTVu’s Campus Philly festival, tU pHAce and his five-piece band break the musical monotony inflicting much of today’s mainstream and independent music.

1. “Jupiter”

2. “Looking Away”

3. “You and Me”

At SoulGenesis, we believe that every individual has the potential to be an agent of positive change and we want to help make that happen. By partnering with various mentoring organizations in the Philadelphia region, we hope to connect SoulGenesis community members with young people across the city to provide them with positive influences and role models.

Photo courtesy of www.unitedwaycwv.org

With a poignant and conscience style all her own, Chavous has burst onto the underground scene in Philly blending a unique cross-section of soulful tones and esoteric rhythms along with the elements of gospel, jazz, R&B, and classical music into a distinctive style that challenges the listener to take a moment for self-reflection and acknowledgment of the power within.

With songs that speak of positive self image, happiness, freedom, love, joy and self-empowerment, Chavous is carving a niche for herself as the fully conscious voice of the soul movement.

Her voice is light and airy one moment, deep and broad the next. Angelic in its range and soothing in its promise, it threatens to usher in a new standard in the American music industry. On the precipice of releasing her first studio project, she is a fresh, new eclectic voice known quite simply as: CHAVOUS.

1. “Much Better”

2. “Hey”

What happens when three individuals with a passion for Hip Hop and Soul music meet on the Hilltop (Howard University)? A blend of sound derived from works of professors of melody & sound. Those lessons learned by pupils, L Shaze, J Sinclair, and Walk On, form School of Beats. Based in the Nation’s Capital, School of Beats has sound that is as dynamic as the surrounding institutions. Their creations are heavily influenced by the pioneers of the urban spirit.

In their production, you can find hints of Isaac Hayes, ingredients Curtis Mayfield and Willie Hutch, elements of Al Green, and of course a dash of the Philly Sound. Beat conductors, such as Jay Dee, Pete Rock, DJ Premier, No I.D., Madlib and 9th Wonder, all provide inspiration for these young travelers of rhythm.

In this infant stage of a Hip Hop Renaissance, School of Beats is destined to bring to life the essence of the past and craft standards for the future. So enjoy this site and get ready for class, School of Beats is in session!

Courtesy of thisisrealmusic.com

1. “Blaxploitation”

2. “Upper Room”

After a long hiatus, Pharoahe Monch returns to deliver his highly anticipated second solo album Desire. This LP is very ambitious in that Pharoahe attempts to break the mold of what a so-called conscious emcee is supposed to sound like. For the most part, he succeeds. Too often this “conscious sound” translates into boring content and uninspiring lyricism under the façade of “good music,” which amounts to nothing more than rap that does not degrade women, promote drug culture, or wallow in genocide. Sadly enough, this formula often lacks the intensity, energy, and realism that made Hip-Hop emcees relevant in the first place.

As this niche grows and further entrenches itself in the Hip-Hop industry and collective psyche, the content becomes more about promoting an image of positivity in the same sense that 50 Cent promotes an image of “gangsta.” Both representations are wack. They embody a few abstract, hollow ideas that have no basis in reality and as such, cannot inspire us to change the harsh realities that exist within communities here in the U.S. or worldwide. Pharoahe assesses this problem and provides his solution in one line: “You’re A&R’s a house nigga, the label’s the plantation, now switch that advance for your emancipation.”

The desire for the emancipation of our music and culture is what this album signifies. Pharoahe Monch accomplishes this by accentuating his creativity, as opposed to molding himself to fit within the prefabricated, stereotyped roles so commonly found in today’s Hip-Hop scene. It is that indomitable spirit which exudes from Pharoahe—the swagger of a king, which makes him such an appealing artist. Songs such as “Free,” “What It Is,” “Hold On” (feat. Erykah Badu), and the phenomenal reinterpretation of the Public Enemy classic “Welcome to the Terror Dome” are dope tracks that make a strong statement, while at the same time set a solid example of where Hip-Hop can go and what real Hip-Hop is in 2007.

Written by Jamal Berry for SoulGenesis

1. “Desire”

2. “Hold On”

One blues man and a voodoo band have become an increasingly popular tangent for R&B as of late, combining the mellow vocal soul of the ’70s with folksy guitar strum and clip-clop percussion reminiscent of Tom Waits at his most rhythmic. Atlanta singer/songwriter Anthony David might overstate his case for being a Delta blues man, titling his album 3 Chords & the Truth, but that does little to take away from his Ben Harper-esque growl and skillful song craft, which have already been recognized with his participation on India.Arie’s Grammy-nominated Acoustic Soul album.

At his best, David recalls Terry Callier or Q-Tip’s highly promoted yet tragically never released “Barely in Love.” At his worst, he either relies on too much saccharine production (the ’70s orchestra over saturation of “Part of My Life”) or, inversely, too little (the lone pick and vocal of “Cheatin’ Man,” which stumbles over lines like “When the stage is set for drama/I keep thinking ’bout my momma”). But the slight sampling hip-hop feel of “Krooked Kop” hits the balance just right, as does the mechanically led “Cold Turkey” with its distant steel-on-steel quarry metronome, its metal pulse egging on the jaw-clenching subject matter. He even gets a little reggae on “50/50 Love,” complete with a Jamaican backing vocalist, proving that Southern R&B is just a starting point for this promising talent.

~ Joshua Glazer, All Music Guide

1. “The Water, The Fire”

1. “Yes”

“They say you can’t please everybody.” Those are the words spoken by Talib Kweli to open his latest album Eardrum. Eardrum personifies a newfound level of maturity and growth for Kweli in that he now realizes he cannot be the “Everything Man” as the opening track of the album insinuates. He is simply Talib Kweli, revolutionary emcee extraordinaire.

Being a self-proclaimed “revolutionary emcee” in a time of great apathy, nihilistic despair, and corporate consolidation is a daunting task that Kweli showed signs of difficulty with on his previous effort The Beautiful Struggle. Eardrum, however, finds Kweli taking a different approach to trying to create the necessary space to represent himself as a revolutionary emcee. Eardrum is filled with an abundance of food for thought that will please the appetite of a cross section of the Hip-Hop audience, while at the same time giving Kweli’s core fan base the raw energy and thought-provoking lyricism that they have come to love and expect from him.

In fact, there is enough good food here to bring all parties back to the table for seconds, thirds and fourths. “Country Cousins,” “Eat to Live,” “Give ‘Em Hell,” and “Soon the New Day” are just a few of the tracks that will get mad rotation on iPods and midnight mix shows all over the world. It would not be a surprise to see a mainstream single emerge from this album due in part to the eclectic mix of guest artists, ranging from U.G.K. to Norah Jones, with production work by Hi-Tek, Pete Rock, and Sa-Ra. Amazingly, Talib pulls off this great record, which is heavy on features, highly accessible, and driven without feeling too forced or sounding corny. Maybe he is the everything man.

Written by Jamal Berry for SoulGenesis

Check out Kweli’s new video for “Hot Thing”! One of the best music videos we’ve seen in a while over here at soulgen.com!!!
[youtube width="425" height="335"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUPCBmcpNzk[/youtube]

1. “Country Cousins” feat. UGK and Raheem Devaughn

2. “Soon the New Day” feat. Norah Jones

Leaving Somalia at the age of thirteen on what turned out to be the very last commercial flight to ever do so, amidst a crumbling society and the end to this day of any form of central government, K’NAAN carried with him a very strong sense of purpose. It is this sense of purpose as well as his amazing lyrical gift, which has made him a beacon for other artists as well as those dedicated to global change.

Similarly, in Toronto in 2002 while recording a verse for a War Child benefit track entitled “Keep the Beat K’NAAN’s unique flow caught the attention of artist/producer Jarvis Church, one half of the Grammy award winning production team Track and Field (Nelly Furtado). From there began a creative partnership that would lead to the creation of K’NAAN’s’ first full length album “The Dusty Foot Philosopher.”

K’NAAN creates urgent “music with a message” because his whole existence depends on it. “Soobax” produced by Track n Field is percussion-fuelled protest music at its finest. It’s more than a song, it’s something people raise arms for,” explains K’NAAN “The term Soobax actually means to “come out” so when I recorded that in the studio, I imagined myself being in front of gun men, and I’m communicating directly to them”. He adds: “Sixty-year-old women in Canada jam to that song because it’s saying things they couldn’t say. When my brother heard the song he said that it’s the first song he’d heard of mine that could get me killed.”

“Hardcore”, is a truthful reflection, a comparison track for those MC’s who believe that they, their circumstances or themselves to be Hardcore. “Strugglin” is tracks for those who struggle and find themselves pushed to the brink yet at that point transform that struggle into power and the ability to overcome. The African Way” utilizes superb backing music supplied from a group of nomadic musicians K’NAAN ran into and recorded in a restaurant in Mombassa, Kenya. “Wash It Down” is another must-hear track made entirely out of the sounds of crashing water, done by the “forces of nature”. All and all the LP is a break out from the braggadocio world of Hip Hop.

Review courtesy of www.cdbaby.com

In a show of support and unity, many people and organizations from around the country are planning to mobilize in Jena on September 20th – the day of Mychal Bell’s sentencing. On September 16 – 21, the NAACP Youth & College Division is requesting NAACP units and community supporters to participate in the “Jena 6 National Week of Solidarity & Action”. Attached you will find a plan of action to assist you in implementing activities during this week.

Remember that the Jena 6 cases are not just isolated incidents that occurred in one small, Southern town in America. In fact, many injustices disproportionately impacting Black youth are occurring in big cities, small towns and rural areas everyday. The Jena 6 cases show us how criminal/juvenile justice, education and voter empowerment can all intercede to impact the lives of young people for better or for worse.

It is imperative that your education and activism continue well past when the final decisions in the Jena 6 cases are rendered. Additional information regarding logistics for September 20th is forthcoming. Please review the actions attached to see how you can continue the fight for justice and equality in your local community.

If we don’t stand up for the Jena 6 and fight to end racism in America who will?

We’ve all heard it and we’ve heard a lot about it, but are we ready to act? You may have already seen some of the tips below, but have you incorporated them into your everyday life yet? (awkward pause) We know. Let’s do it together. Check out our top seven tips for greener, happier living. For the month of July, SoulGenesis presents SoulGen GreenLife^TM, our seven simple steps to a greener, happier life.

Save. Reuse. Recycle. - Kick the bottled water and plastic bag habit. Get a reusable water bottle and refill it. Keep a reusable bag with you and take it to the shopping market. Consume less. Waste less.

Offset - For pennies a day you can offset your CO2 emissions. Visit www.terrapass.com or www.planktos.com to find out how you can sponsor the planting of new trees and other energy saving projects to help reduce global warming.

Unplug - Unplug your phone charger and other items when not in use. This is a huge and completely uneccesary pollutant and drain of energy.

Lights Off and Out - Change your light bulbs. Ride your bike to your local home goods store and purchase energy saver light bulbs for your most used lights! They may be more expensive, but they last for like 30 years! You’ll be taking your kids to college before you have to change your light bulbs again. (Slight exaggeration, they’ll be at least finishing middle school.)

Go Green Transportation - Don’t go out as much (or car pool to parties), bundle your trips, car pool, ride your bike or skateboard to work! If you can, consider a hybrid, fuel efficient or alternative energy vehicle. Also, consider a car share.

Enough Water - Turn off sink while brushing your teeth. Take shorter showers. Shower with a friend or partner (18 and over only please).

Nibble Differently - Would you believe that the best way to reduce global warming is to adjust your eating. By consuming more locally grown, organic food, you are not only reducing carbon emissions from transportation but also from pesticides and food production. Also, consuming less meat (particularly beef) is another great way to reduce carbon emissions because of the tremendous amount of energy required to manufacture beef. According to several recent studies, the production and consumption of beef is one of the planet’s largest pollutants!

See, not so bad. This is easy for you and we will do it together. Check back regularly to hear how we are doing greening our lives at the SoulGen blogs and let us know how you are doing.

Like what you read, send this page to a friend. Spread the love. Spread the GreenLife.

Hip-Hop’s culture has been in a state of disillusionment for quite some time now, with the mainstream serving up with stale material, and most of the underground not caring enough to provide interesting alternatives. When it seems all hope is lost, every few years there comes a refreshing act reminding one of what it was to become enamored with this music. Blu & Exile’s Below The Heavens could be termed a future classic as the respective MC/producer duo hearken back to a Gang Starr or Pete Rock & CL Smooth with not only their chemistry but advanced skill in their arenas.

Coming out of L.A., Blu is perhaps the most technically gifted early adult MC since a younger Nasir Jones made his mark over a decade ago. His partner Exile manages to sample everything from soul to jazz to vocals from Sesame Street’s Grover character and work magic delivering beats that knock hard. Thematically this is a concept album of sorts, but it doesn’t really feel like one: A young man a few years out of his teens sets out to tell the world the story of his ups and downs through fatherhood, a dysfunctional family background, love, and financial struggles amongst other trials and tribulations. Blu’s deep introspection is matched with a notable ferocious battling prowess making him one of the best newcomers to hit the scene in quite some time.

Below The Heavens was written and recorded 2-3 years ago at the tender age of 21, with Blu displaying wisdom far beyond his days as he tells who he is, where he’s been and where he’s trying to get. The future appears bright with other projects on deck for both Blu & Exile in the near future. With any luck, this album will inspire future generations to make a difference in the quality of beats and rhymes produced for mass consumption.
-Review by Jesse Fairfax

1. “Simply Amazin”

2. “Blu Colla Workers”

3. “In Remembrance”

“All I got is my balls and my word,” Lifesavas declare on “Freedom Walk,” echoing Pacino in Scarface for a bracing slice of hip-hop activism that comes near the end of Gutterfly: The Original Soundtrack.

With an aggravated beat and on-point lyrics—and welcome guest appearances from dead prez and Living Colour’s Vernon Reid—it’s one of the best tracks on an album that teases old blaxploitation melodrama, cribs enthusiastically from ‘70s funk, but keeps its feet firmly planted in the present. There’s a party vibe on a good chunk of Gutterfly, but this is serious business, too.

The drama that the album “soundtracks” is included in scene snippets where Vursatyl, Jumbo the Garbageman and DJ Shines all get to chew on alter egos. These interludes aren’t great, but also aren’t as jarring as some hip-hop skits—and have the added benefit of helping establish the overarching narrative of Gutterfly as a whole (essentially about three “ghetto superheroes” who are trapped in a Gotham-like dystopian future vision of the group’s Portland stomping grounds). Sometimes, too, even a disruption in momentum can be useful, as Lifesavas tackle a variety of styles on various songs; the gritty, on-the-streets flow of “Freedom Walk,” for instance, benefits from a breath of interlude air before closing out the album with the old-school street party scene of “Celebrate.”

That diversity is one of the most rewarding elements of Gutterfly. Vursatyl readily acknowledges that he and his partner Jumbo aren’t always on the same page when it comes time to dig into the material, and this seems to have helped them from settling into a comfort zone and churning out material that all seems wed to a template. Instead, there are complete throwbacks with sunny vibes right alongside smoother ballad jams and harsher, more modern (or futuristic) set pieces. Not surprisingly given such a wide range, there are a couple missteps along the way—but Gutterfly’s wealth of smart beats and sharp lyrics ensures that it will continue to build on the buzz generated by 2003’s Spirit in Stone.

— Reviewed by Adam McKibbin (http://www.theredalert.com/)

1. “No Surprise”

2. “Shine Language”

Music and Media

The Graphical Dissertation of Mims’ “This is why I’m hot” - You haven’t seen Hip-Hop broken down until you have seen a Venn diagram of why you specifically will never be hot according to Mims.

So let me get this straight…there are now 8 companies that control all major media?!?! Find out how this happened and why independent media should be important to you now.

News and Politics

Curious what really is going on between the Sunni’s and Shiite’s…oh and the Kurds too? Want to sound smart in conversation? Come to class at Iraq 101.

Climate Change and Global Warming

US budges only slightly in making real change to address global warming. Come on Bush administration! It’s gettin’ hot out here. Read more at www.treehugger.com.

Looking forward to that Caribbean vacation? Let’s try to keep looking forward to them. Find out how our oceans are at risk and what needs to happen to save them. (Disclaimer for lazy readers: It’s a long article but very interesting.)

Community

Howard Coeds Helping in New Orleans Get an Earful on the Racial Disparities in Recovery

Education

Could HipHop actually help educate young people? A lot of people think so, including SoulGen Co-founder, Isaac Ewell.

We believe that it is all of our responsibilities to first understand this impact then to make a concerted impact to help to create more balance in popular images and messages. SoulGenesis has partnered with Mother’s Day Radio in this important effort. Mother’s Day Radio, a non-profit based in Los Angeles, has spearheaded a national effort to bring more responsible programming to the airwaves. Please visit our partner organization’s website at www.mothersdayradio.com to learn about their important work and how you can get involved today.

The other great way to help create an industry shift is to show that you, as a listener, want to hear more responsible and balanced media. In short, support your artists by purchasing their products! We have a host of wonderful artists featured right here at SoulGenesis and more to come very soon.
Simple things you can do now to make an impact:

Other Feature Causes
Each month we will have a featured cause. Throughout the course of the month, we will offer important information such as how this issue affects you and how you can help. In upcoming months we will tackle such critical issues as Global Warming, Fair Trade and Labor and Politics and Voting. Our goal is to help our members become more aware of these issues so that we can begin to collectively make a positive impact on the world around us. Check back soon for updates and more causes and action steps.

Is it possible that an artist be so talented, that record companies don’t have a clue about how to handle them? It happened with D’Angelo, it happened with Q-Tip, it’s still happening with The Roots. Robin Thicke is the latest victim of an amazing talent being left on the promotion department floor.

Thicke’s sophomore album, “The Evolution of Robin Thicke,” is as smooth and soulful as an album can get, and is especially welcome in the days of watered down teenie bopper R&B. Robin Thicke’s voice velvet-like voice blends with the instrumentation like few other artists’ voices do. Instead of singing ‘over’ tracks, Thicke sings within the track creating flawless melodies and goosebump-producing musical compositions.

From the laid back swing of ‘Complicated,’ to the hypnotizing ballad ‘2 the Sky,’ every song on this album takes the listener on a musical journey. “The Evolution of Robin Thicke” is a very mature album for a fairly unknown artist, and is well worth the purchase for even the most critical listener. by J. Grayson

1. “Complicated”

2. “Lost Without You”

With “Extended Play”, Eulorythmics created created one of the best sleeper albums of 2005. Part of the All Natural clique out of Chicago, Eulo’s unique, lackadaisical, style intertwines seemingly effortless rhymes with soulful production.

The result is a mellow yet engaging listening experience. As background music or as the center of the party, “Extended Play” manages to work. Adad, the lyricist, shows off his wordplay and lyrical prowess nicely on such tracks as “Blam!” and “Drama”.

Kenny Keyes, the producer, flexes his muscle on “Good Life” and “L.I.V.E.” On first listen, Adad’s flow may be reminiscient of the MC side of Mos Def, but with a few additional listens, Adad takes on a life and originality all his own. All in all, this smooth, soulful album is a welcome addition to grown-up hiphop; definitely one to be enjoyed all the way through. by J. Green

1. “L.I.V.E.”

2. “Sociology”

In the South African language of Tswana, “Goapele” means “to go forward,” and that is exactly what this Oakland-born singer- songwriter tries to do with the often criticized neo-soul genre. Born to an Israeli mother and a father who was a South-African political exile, Goapele was born into the blood of social consciousness and political activism. Goapele tells us what she thinks of the “system” simply by the title of her 2005 release, “Change It All.”

Her sophomore album (after her widely accepted solo debut “Even Closer”) is a beautiful blend of Goapele’s soft, airy voice, and deep, pounding instrumentals. One of the standout tracks on the album, “You,” a collaboration with soul-singer Dwele, is a hypnotizing, beautifully composed duet, which may mysteriously end up on repeat in your CD player or Ipod. There are no real overpowering voices here, but their chemistry is aparrent as they sing to each other throughout the song.

The title track “Change It All” touches on current affairs including the Iraq war, the state of education and the plight of the poor. She protests “History feels so far away / We’re not fighting for our lives anymore / You’re not fighting for my life anymore / It’s hard to know what’s really worth fighting / Or is it killing and dying on the streets.” At 29 years old, Goapele seems to be wise beyond her years–in love, politics, and in music. It’s hard to listen to her and not conjure up comparisons to R&B legend Sade, but Goapele is her own superstar, and sky’s the limit; Change It All is her springboard.

1. “Change It All”

2. “First Love”

In 2004, two of Hip-Hop’s most under-appreciated artists–the legendary underground producer/DJ, Madlib and the eccentric and ultra talented rapper/producer MF DOOM–teamed together creating a super-group called Madvillain. Consequently, they released what was easily the most anticipated underground Hip-Hop album in recent memory, “Madvillainy.”

Veering from the traditional formula of most of today’s Hip-Hop albums of syncopated beats, misogynistic and/or violent lyrics, Madvillainy tries something daring and new…”creativity.” They’ve created 22 tracks of pure Hip-Hop that one can imagine hearing in lounges from Brooklyn to Amsterdam where the crowds are as diverse as the listeners’ tastes in music. MF Doom’s unconventional but ill flow meshes nicely with Madlib’s penchant for producing some of the hottest abstract beats ever heard. One of the greatest things about this album is how it is constructed.

Songs stop then start (RZA-like), catching you off guard, while at the same time keeping your attention. Although most of MF Doom’s rhyme style is abstract and a bit mercurial, he has such catchy one-liners and drops science so frequently that you challenge yourself to try and find meaning in the rhymes that you missed. Overall, if you’re a fan of DOOM…you probably already have this album, if not, it’s as good a place as any to start. Just know, don’t put this album in thinking that DOOM’s gonna spit some Jay-Z, NaS, Immortal Technique or Phonte of Little Brother-esque rhymes.

Madvillainy is the type of album that you will still catch new things on the fiftieth listen. Relaxing alone with headphones and the lights off may be the greatest way to experience Madvillainy. by I. Ewell

1. “Accordion”

Murs of the West Coast’s Living Legends crew has had a sizeable buzz and following for some time within the underground, largely due to his association with the premier independent label Def Jux. His celebrity rose in 2004 as he partnered with then up-and-coming producer 9th Wonder for Murs 3:16: The 9th Edition. This album enabled Murs to gain fans that were already hooked in by the classic compositions 9th previously laid down for Little Brother and the rest of the Justus League.

The two share a synergy on this record that could be considered akin to a Gang Starr or Pete Rock & CL Smooth. As Murs puts it on the explosive title track, the album’s basic theme is him “tryna walk that thin line between intelligence and ignorance, have a little fun while making music of significance.” Within 10 songs and in just a little over a half hour, the pair manages to cover an array of topics such as heartbreak, sexual exploits and relationship drama, along with tales of gang culture and street life in California.

“And This Is For” is particularly notable as Murs takes a stand for the art of real Hip-Hop and it’s ever diminishing black audience. Murs is the complete package, equipped with wit, multisyllables, a knack for storytelling and a fair share of standard battling braggadocio. The ferocity of the last track “The Animal” (featuring Phonte of Little Brother) best sums up the aggressive, rugged undertone of the album. Murs is to be commended for managing to entertain without trying to represent anything other than himself and his environment.

1. “And This Is For…”

2. “The Pain”

In 1959, Berry Gordy Jr. founded Motown Records, which is responsible for breaking some of the biggest names in the recording industry’s history including, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and Michael Jackson. Along with Gordy, these artists helped create “The Sound of Motown” and helped establish Detroit as the centerpoint of this unparalleled culture.

With their debut album, Triple P, the Platinum Pied Pipers, producers Wajeed, one of the founders of Slum Village and Saadiq, the mentee of world-renowned songwriter, Barrett Strong have picked up where Gordy left off. They have assembled some freshest, yet little known (although not for long) talent and created a classic collection of cuts that are certain to have your head bobbin’, fingers poppin and b-boppin around the house, car or wherever you are. If I had to categorize Triple P, the most fitting category would be hip-hop-soul-funk; however, their sound can not and should not be forced into a box.

Waajeed and Saadiq conduct Triple P Quincy Jones-style, by only appearing on the cover while otherwise remaining in the background. Although every track is sick, pay close attention to “Act Like You Know” and “Shotgun, both featuring uber-producer/artist Jay-Dee who’s straight rhymin’, “Detroit Winter” featuring MC Invincible and “Light’s Out”, featuring Ta’Raach & Georgia. The album also features three lightning hot songs with sultry and soulful singing from the up-and-coming Tiombe Lockhart. With Triple P, the Platinum Pied Pipers have re-ignited the fire that once sizzled under The Sound of Motown and given music lovers hope.

But like Invincible warns on Detroit Winters: “Detroit in the winter, the cold is a poison that lingers/A point for beginners: to hold on, avoiding the shivers/You either bundle up or burn rubber/But if you can’t take the winter, you don’t deserve summer.” If you don’t like great music then Triple P isn’t for you. However, if you do, this joint will keep you warm and toasty through the winter and well into the summer. by I. Ewell

1. “Shotgun (feat. Jay-Dee)”

2. “Deep Inside (feat. Sa Ra)”

Beautiful music…this is not a phrase often used to describe Hip-Hop but the sonic qualities of tracks like ‘Bird’s Eye View’ and ‘One Chance,’ two of True and Livin’s notable songs beg to be regarded not only as exceptional Hip-Hop, but excellent music overall.

On “Tru & Livin,” Zion I’s third full album release, they further solidify their place as a Bay Area Hip-Hop innovator embodying the essence of flowing lyrics over smooth, melodic tracks. The album is a thoughtful collection of well-produced and well-performed songs which call for the audience to recognize the diverse beauty of Hip-Hop. Up-tempo Deep South can be felt on ‘Soo Tall’; the slow and simple percussion and heavy vocals characteristic of Bay Area West Coast can be heard on ‘The Bay;’ pronounced snares and in-your-face rhymes over a head nod track characteristic of the northeast can be found on ‘Temperature’ featuring Talib Kweli.

Zion I remains fundamentally conscious and critical questioning the mainstream Hip-Hop machine on such tracks as ‘Poems 4 Post Modern Decay’ featuring Aesop Rock. Zion I’s clean delivery and steady, consistent rhyme flow nicely complement the horns and keys of Amp Live’s production. Through well placed and executed scratches, Amp stays true to classic DJ roots and reminds the listener of the art of DJ’ing. The duo certainly has a chemistry on “True and Livin” that can’t be overlooked. by J. Green

1. “Birds Eye View”

2. “Temperature” (feat. Talib Kweli)

With the her self-titled album, Corinne Bailey Rae, the British soul singer has been compared to Billie Holiday, Sade and even Erykah Badu. Such high praise could be career ending.

Fortunately for Corinne, she steps up to the challenge by being herself and delivering such anthems as, “Put Your Records On”, a sister-girl feel-good record. About this track, Corinne says, “I’d like to think the music can affect people in a positive way. A song like ‘Put Your Records On,’ I feel like I’m singing that back to a younger version of me, getting 10-year-old girls to have confidence to not fit in with the crowd, and finding an identity in music…Not being afraid to look different to other people, or think different.”

Her voice is innocently soulful and filled with humility. What I like most about Corinne is that she seems to love the theme of love and she’s not using her voice to complain about love or how she’s been wronged. Instead, she creates mature material that presents a very balanced view of the highs and lows of love. “Till It Happens to You” and “Like a Star” are examples my point. On both tracks, Corinne explores the difficulty of being in love with what Common describes as “the one who makes you happiest and hurts you the most.”

What’s interesting about her approach is the listener is able to relate to each song. Most of the songs talk about subjects we’ve all experienced, as if Corinne has ghost-written your memoir. In today’s music market of manufactured artists it’s refreshing to have an artist who appears to be very comfortable in her own skin, willing to talk about her insecurities and not objectify herself to sell albums while singing songs of substance. If Corinne is a sign of where the industry is headed, then I’ll go along for the ride. by J. Grayson

1. “Like A Star”

2. “Enchantment”

Bursting on the national scene in 1991 as one of The Source magazine’s “Unsigned Hype,” Common released his first album, Can I Borrow A Dollar in 1992, a mix of youthful exuberance and raw B-Boy braggadocio. Can I Borrow A Dollar assured Common a spot in the sun, however, it was his second LP, Resurrection and the underground smash “I Used To Love H.E.R.” that made the Southside Chicago wordsmith a living legend.

If “I Used To Love H.E.R.” solidified Common’s status as a dope Emcee nationally, then One Day It’ll All Make Sense made it clear that young Com was growing up fast and concentrating his efforts on more mature affairs such as fatherhood, the perils of the streets, religious dogma and the power of spirituality. From the albums opening invocation Common invites listeners into his “mental window” and begins to take them to places that he’s “been and “to places [that he] wants to go. Unlike his previous albums, One Day It’ll All Make Sense boast a bevy of collabos with Hip-Hop’s avant-garde, including

Lauryn Hill, Black Thought, De La Soul, Cee-Lo, Erykah Badu, Q-Tip, and Canibus. Yet Common remains the center of attraction on “Retrospect For Life,” where the life challenges of abortion and the decision to have a child get equal footing with Lauryn Hill voicing lament and lost on the songs hook. Common continues his smorgasbord of introspection on the Cee-lo assisted G.O.D. (Gaining One’s Definition) and continues to get his full B-boy on with the Blues guitar lick-driven “Real Nigga Quotes” and the unstoppable “Hungry” on which he tells cats that his “shit is so bangin niggaz say it’s gang related, on philosopher’s rink of thought, I’ve skated with precision, Crews is gettin split like decisions.”

Common’s rewind able poetics are never short of rich metaphors, sharp similes, and pop-cultural inspired double entendre that will one day earn him a literary following that rivals the likes of Langston Hughes and Sonya Sanchez. With musical production largely held down by long time Chicago beatsmith NO I.D. (Kanye West’s mentor) and scratches by Mista Sinista, Common ensures that for those who slept and didn’t understand what he was up to in 1997, one day it’ll all make sense.

1. “Invocation”

2. “Retrospect For Life” Feat. Lauryn Hill

If Nasir Jones is right, and Hip-Hop is in fact dead, then Lupe Fiasco’s “Food and Liquor” represents the last optimistic gasp of breath for the expiring beast. There are very few emcees who can survive in the unforgiving “music biz” without a stereotypical and gimmicky image.

Lupe manages—with great credibility—to prove that his musical endeavors are not driven by gimmicks, but intense lyricism, supreme storytelling and intelligent political discourse. “Food and Liquor” offers listening pleasure for the most critical Hip-Hop listener. From the highly cinematic strings that bless the “Intro” to the hard-hitting “Emperor’s Soundtrack,” you’re given the full array of musical possibilities.

The standout song of the album, “Daydream,” pairs Lupe Fiasco with soulful songstress Jill Scott, whose vocal efforts almost outdo Fiasco’s fire on this track. Lupe does, however, stake his claim as one of the best new lyricists around with songs like “The Instrumental,” where he masterfully describes society’s empty addiction to television and radio. Lupe writes “He just sits, and watches the people in the boxes / Everything he sees he absorbs and adopts it / He mimics and he mocks it / Really hates the box but he can’t remember how to stop it / So he continues to watch it.”

“Food and Liquor” is not the future of Hip-Hop, it is the past, present AND future of Hip-Hop. Lupe Fiasco brought us one of the best and well produced albums of 2006, and managed to give the “dying” industry a much-needed breath of fresh air.

1. “Daydreamin’”

2. “The Instrumental”

Since his first album release in 1992, Omar has created a portfolio of music that some of the most recognized artists of today would envy. His fourth album, “This is not a love song” released in 1997, is definitely one of his best collective pieces of work to date.

With a style characterized by a soulful, electric groove and a voice that has been termed “heavenly,” Omar is one of those rare artists who is able to take the listener mind traveling with him on his emotional music journey. There is an almost epic quality in standout track “Golden Brown” with keys, strings and vocals that complement each other with near perfect harmonic balance. On the more subtle, but very impressive, ‘Fallen’, Omar creates a head-trippy, heavy electric experience where it feels like the audience is falling in and out of clouds with him.

Deeper funk, head-nod, grooves include the title track, ‘This Is Not a Love Song’ and ‘Say Nothing’ with accented keys and deeper base. The tranquil love ballads, ‘World of You’ and ‘Lullaby,’ remind you that Omar’s romantic side is just as engaging. Omar’s versatility is truly unquestionable. There is an uncommon brilliance in Omar’s ability to create songs that evolve, morph and unfold as one listens. Subject matter as compelling as music quality make Omar’s “This is not a long song” an album we love and Omar an artist we love. by J. Green

1. “This Is Not A Love Song”

2. “Never Too Late”

The greatest injustice about The Roots’ “Game Theory” is the fact that Def Jam did little to no promotion for the album. How can hip-hop’s greatest label not try to push an album that epitomizes hip-hop from beginning to end?! Thoughts from a Black man ignited and excited over arguably one of the best albums of 2006- and one of the best Roots albums ever.

The move to Def Jam did not slow the creativity down at all for lead lyricist Black Thought, drummer ?uestlove and the crew as they invite the listener to a haunting 13 song opus that takes us to the greatest depths of despair and the greatest heights of hope. From dealing with politics on “Don’t Feel Right”, reflecting on growing up on “Long Time” (featuring a crazy verse from one-time State Property member Peedi Peedi) and even dealing with regrets and broken relationships on “Clock With No Hands”, The Roots provided as relevant an album as there was in 2006.

Last but certainly not least is “Can’t Stop This”, the moving tribute song dedicated to the late great J. Dilla. This album is not only a classic for Roots fans, but serves as a great introduction for new listeners. “Yeah it’s something in the water where I come from, they used to sing it on the corner yo where I come from, making something out of nothing, cause everybody fifty cent away from a quarter yo where I come from”; And with that I must say welcome back to the most prolific hip-hop band ever. It’s been a long time… by I. Ewell

1. “Game Theory”

2. “Clock With No Hands”

“The Healing” from Strange Fruit Project is an emotional, thoughtful, enjoyable and inspiring musical journey into the hearts and minds of this dynamic Houston based trio, Myone, Myth and S1. Continuing along the path of Little Brother’s, “The Minstrel Show” and De La Soul’s, “Grind Date”, “The Healing” represents the maturing of Hip Hop.

They further confirm that is okay for an emcee to speak about life, learning self, the responsibilities of adulthood, and the challenges of dealing with relationships. While your head bops to the feel good track, ‘Parachutes’, the hook affirms, “Feels good to know that though you’re falling down, you’re gonna land on your feet.” On ‘Rise’ featuring Little Brother, they emphatically urge the listener to, “Spread love instead of trying to be the enemy/y’all quick to kill/but slow to build/can’t a brother live/that’s why we follow Salaam/travel through hollow minds…just rise.” Through even a casual listen, it is evident that SFP carefully crated this album.

Beats, hooks and rhymes flow seemlessly creating a very enjoyable listening experience. The versatility of this group is proven from the soulful “Get Live” featuring Eryka Badu to the club-knocking “Soul Clap,” specially made to flaunt the bass in your trunk. SFP takes the listener to church on “Liberation,” a quiet standout and one of the album’s most spirited tracks. Its hard not to get goosebumps as the group explores self-discovery and the inner spiritual struggle toward liberation. ”

So what’s the definition of freedom, gold chains and fast cars, when God calls we can’t even keep ‘em…I seen a lot of soldiers fall victim, with a full clip but it only takes one shot to hit ‘em.” Strange Fruit Project is the dawning of the new era of MC’s for those of us that have grown up on Hip-Hop, but have actually also grown up. Trust, Strange Fruit Project is just getting started in making great music. They have given us a gem in “The Healing” and we believe it will only get better from here. by J. Green

1. “Get Live” Feat. Erykah Badu

2. “Parachutes”

The Roots have always been largely respected for the acumen of their live shows but they have hardly ever been accepted en masse for their studio work. For a brief period in the late 90’s this changed as Things Fall Apart played a big role in shifting attention from what was the reign of the jiggy era, with breakout single “You Got Me” winning that year’s Grammy for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group.

The album’s opening intro expressed frustration with an industry and audience that had come to treat Hip-Hop albums “as disposable, not maximized as product, not to mention art”. This could be considered somewhat of a concept album as everything from the music to the song titles (Step Into The Realm, The Next Movement, Dynamite, Adrenaline, Aint Sayin’ Nothin’ New, Don’t See Us) could be seen as attempts at raising the bar and taking the art to a higher level. The Roots managed to bridge what was then the mainstream and underground with features from Mos Def, Common and Erykah Badu on one side of the fence and Beanie Sigel and Eve on the other.

Although the topic material doesn’t stray very far from rapping about being the best MC and loving hip-hop, Black Thought has been one of the best at his craft for some time now. Devoted fans of the whole ensemble could consider Things Fall Apart the last “official” Roots album being that Dice Raw and Malik B haven’t played major roles on the mic since then. The Roots have always brought the open-minded audience to them without catering to whatever the market may have been calling for at the time.

1. “The Next Movement”

2. “You Got Me”

Voodoo is a well-known, yet highly misunderstood system of religious and ritual practices which originated in Western Africa. Though it is a legitimate religion taken very seriously by those who practice it, many look at it as a joke, or the illegitimate child of Satanism.

This is what makes D’Angelo’s second album “Voodoo” as prophetic an album title as they come. D’Angelo and the rest of the Soulquarians (comprised of ?uestlove, Talib Kweli, Common, Mos Def, James Poyser, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, Q-Tip, J Dilla, Bilal) somehow found a way to conjure up the musical spirits of Jimi Hendrix, a young Smokey Robinson, Prince, and any other great classic soul artist, and pour their liquid soul all over the “Voodoo” project. They also found a way to evoke emotions with the instrumentation of this album. This album is, by far, one of the best composed and produced albums since the digital music age began, and D’Angelo has received two grammys to prove that.

During “Send It On,” the smooth horns dance carefully around an uber-relaxed bass-line that would make even the average music listener cringe in funky disgust. It’s not easy to create an album in which every note is completely relevant. Add one more guitar ad-lib, or take away one subtle echo of the piano–and the perfection of this masterpiece is compromised. Even the silent moments in some songs where the only sound is the lingering of a cymbal crash, the listener is taken on a very rare listening experience. This album is one of a rare perfection, in fact, according to ?uestlove, the Roots’ drummer, multiple male R&B singers had to go BACK to the studio to “step their game up” after hearing this album. by J. Grayson

1. “Send It On”

2. “Africa”

The Grind Date is not your typical De La album, but then again, what is? In an industry littered with one album wonders and short careers, De La Soul has managed to release their 7th album with as much (if not more) grace and fire power as their critically acclaimed debut, “Three Feet High and Rising.”

Grind Date is pure, unadulterated, concentrated fiyah from its slowly building opening track, ‘The Future’, to its climactic finale, ‘Rock Co Cane Flow’, featuring MF Doom.The amazing thing about The Grind Date is that any song on this album could be a standout. The innovativeness and lyrical dexterity exhibited on Rock Co Cane Flow will have the most discerning hiphop connoisseur clutching his head in disbelief.

‘It’s Like That’ boasts a smooth track with laid back rhymes and the heavy beat and cutting rhymes of ‘Days of Our Lives’ featuring Common further solidify De La’s lyrical versatility as a hard-hitting rap trio. On ‘Church,’ De La gets their message through without beating you over the head, “It’s not always good just to get by. Who’s coversing your stakes when you’re bent high. Chasin’ cars, clothes and rocks. Identify with the goods you got…I really don’t care to see your tattoos there. I’d rather see you graduate the school year.

Black folk go put a book in your face. But, first give the hook a taste, bring the the preacher in.” The mantra of the song’s chorus is very simple, “Let’s Heal.” The Grind Date represents De La’s most most commercially friendly and easily accessible album to date. The production is headnod flawless from beginning to end and the the lyrics do not miss a beat. For all of you eccentric De La followers of old, if it sounds like De La has attempted to go commercial, not to worry. Somehow, De La has managed again to change their style enough to remain fresh, and still maintain their unique D.A.I.S.Y. Age roots. Singly this is a great album. The combination of dope beats and dope rhymes makes this arguably one of the most well-produced hiphop albums of recent years. However, in the context of De La Soul’s collective and consistent genius over the past 20 years, the Grind Date is nothing short of amazing. by J. Green

1. Days of Our Lives