As you know, I can't stay in my house every week! I need to find places to go! So after numerous BBM broadcast messages, I found myself at the last night of Dwele's European Tour! Yay me!
To be honest, i'm not a Dwele enthusiast, as I think all of his ishk sounds very similar and almost monotonous, but he did rock the crowd!
I didn't arrive early enough to catch the opening act, because, well... I couldn't be bothered! I got there just in time to catch the Grammy nominated star hit the stage... in the same outfit he wore the show promotion material! Haha!
I don't think he cared though, as he strutted through the crowd and onto the stage to Kayne West's Power. After his second entrance, as he was not impressed with his first reception, he made sure that he conversed with the crowd, asked them their name, serenaded a lil'!
Admittedly, as good as he was, I was disappointed that he didn't perform Travellin' Girl or Weekend Love, because, to me, they were turning points in his career. Nonetheless, I was enthused by the energy that he and his band acquired throughout the show. His key player has to be the most eccentric, dread wearing and excitable keyboard player I have ever experienced in my 5 years of music journalism! I am so sure than if that keyboard was not attached to the stand, he would have been doing backflips and playing upside down. I'm sure I got a whiff of dread in my eye, and I was by the back, no need for HD!
He rocked the mic with favourites, I Think I Love You, Cheating and Find a Way. But also reminded us of what brought us to the venue in the first place. Namely in the acoustic arrangements in my personal favourite Open Your Eyes (original by Bobby Cadwell, and also used for the hook in Common's The Light), and his tributes to Frankie Beverly and the late Nate Dogg.
He also performed tracks from his current album W.ANTS. W.ORLD. W.OMEN (W.W.W). Namely his album consisting of his alter ego his world documenting and his love for Women, because we can't forget that "baby making, bubble bath and audio hallmark card type of music."
Now, you know me - I can't not get my piece in! In closing the show, he swooned through the audience, serenading the ladies. Naturally, he came in my path, and I managed to give Dwele a little dance while he performed What's Not To Love.
It wasn't as bad as the Chris Brown Fiasco in 2008, but let's not go there!
History has taught us that whenever a major rock star overdoses, it's usually a result of illicit substances. Heroin, cocaine, ham sandwiches -- the world of popular music has seen it all. Until now.
In a recent interview with a German newspaper, Tokio Hotel guitarist Tom Kaulitz admitted that he'd recently taken too many pills of Viagra while on tour in Asia, and claims that the medication left him ill and blurry-eyed for days. "I first asked the seller 'Do I look like someone who needs help with that?'" Kaulitz explains. "He said 'no' - but that I should nevertheless try it out. I popped one in." As MSNBC reports, Kaulitz reportedly took more pills when he got back to his hotel room. "I popped a few more pills, probably too many," he said. "The next morning my head was pounding and everything in front of my eyes was blurry. It wasn't fun any more. It was pretty bad."
And, as you can imagine, it was pretty embarrassing. "Unfortunately there were situations where it just wasn't appropriate," Kaulitz admits.
Elmer 'Geronimo' Pratt, a former Black Panther leader, dies in Tanzania
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June 2, 2011 | 7:36pm
Elmer G. "Geronimo" Pratt, a former Los Angeles Black Panther Party leader who spent 27 years in prison for a murder he says he did not commit and whose case became a symbol of racial injustice during the turbulent 1960s, has died. He was 63.
Pratt died at his home in a small village in Tanzania, where he had been living with his wife and child, according to Stuart Hanlon, a San Francisco attorney who helped overturn Pratt's murder conviction. Hanlon said he was informed of the death by Pratt's sister.
Pratt's case became a cause celebre for elected officials, Amnesty International, clergy and celebrities who believed he was framed by the government because he was African American and a member of the Black Panthers.
"Geronimo was a powerful leader," Hanlon told The Times. "For that reason he was targeted."
Pratt was convicted in 1972 and sentenced to life in prison for the 1968 fatal shooting of Caroline Olsen and the serious wounding of her husband, Kenneth, in a robbery that netted $18. The case was overturned in 1997 by an Orange County Superior Court judge who ruled that prosecutors at Pratt's murder trial had concealed evidence that could have led to his acquittal.
Pratt maintained that the FBI knew he was innocent because the agency had him under surveillance in Oakland when the murder was committed in Santa Monica.
Photo: Geronimo Pratt, left, with defense attorney Johnny L. Cochran Jr. in Los Angeles in 1998. Credit: Nick Ut / Associated Press
The revolution was a change in thinking, people changing their hearts
and minds. This country was at a crossroads and could have gone either
way. But the people stopped taking whatever was being handed to them at
face value; they stopped putting up with the status quo and started
thinking for themselves. The revolution is a mental thing. You did not
see it televised.
In 1970, the American poet and jazz musician Gil Scott-Heron,
who has died aged 62 after returning from a trip to Europe, recorded a
track that has come to be seen as a crucial forerunner of rap. To many it made him the "godfather" of the medium, though he was keener to view his song-like poetry as just another strand in the diverse world of black music.
The
Revolution Will Not Be Televised came on his debut LP, Small Talk at
125th and Lenox, a collection of proselytising spoken-word pieces set to
a sparse, funky tableau of percussion. It served as a militant
manifesto urging black pride, and a blueprint for his life's work: in
the album's sleeve notes, Scott-Heron described himself as "a Black man
dedicated to expression; expression of the joy and pride of Blackness".
He derided white America's complacency over inner-city inequality with
mordant wit and social observation:
The revolution will not be right back after a message 'bout a white tornado, white lightning or white people.
You
will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, a tiger in your
tank or the giant in your toilet bowl. The revolution will not go better
with Coke. The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath. The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.
Throughout
his 40-year career, Scott-Heron delivered a militant commentary not
only on the African-American experience, but on wider social injustice
and political hypocrisy. Born in Chicago, Illinois, he had a difficult,
itinerant childhood. His father, Gilbert Heron,
was a Jamaican-born soccer player who joined Celtic FC – as the Glasgow
team's first black player – during Gil's infancy, and his mother,
Bobbie Scott, was a librarian and keen singer. After their divorce,
Scott-Heron moved to Lincoln, Tennessee, to live with his grandmother,
Lily Scott, a civil rights activist and musician whose influence on him
was indelible.
He recalled her in the track On Coming from a
Broken Home on his 2010 comeback album I'm New Here as "absolutely not
your mail-order, room-service, typecast black grandmother". She bought
him his first piano from a local undertaker's and introduced him to the
work of the Harlem Renaissance novelist and jazz poet Langston Hughes,
whose influence would resonate throughout his entire career.
In
the nearby Tigrett junior high school in 1962, Scott-Heron faced daily
racial abuse as one of only three black children chosen to desegregate
the institution. These experiences coincided with the completion of his
first volume of unpublished poetry, when he was 12.
He then left
Lincoln and moved to New York to live with his mother. Initially they
stayed in the Bronx, where he witnessed the lot of African Americans in
deprived housing projects. Later they lived in the more predominantly
Hispanic neighbourhood of Chelsea. During his New York school years,
Scott-Heron encountered the work of another leading black writer, LeRoi
Jones, now known as Amiri Baraka.
While he was at DeWitt Clinton
high school in the Bronx, Scott-Heron's precocious writing talent was
recognised by an English teacher, and he was recommended for a place at
the prestigious Fieldston school. From there he won a place to Lincoln
University, Pennsylvania, where Hughes had also studied, and met the
flute player Brian Jackson, who was to be a significant musical
collaborator. During his second year at university, in 1968, Scott-Heron
dropped out in order to write his first novel, a murder mystery titled
The Vulture, set in the ghetto. When it was published, two years later,
he decided to capitalise on the associated radio publicity by recording
an LP.
The jazz producer Bob Thiele, who had worked with artists
ranging from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane, persuaded Scott-Heron to
record a club performance of some of his poetry with backing by himself
on piano and guitar. The line-up was completed by David Barnes on vocals
and percussion, and Eddie Knowles and Charlie Saunders on congas, and
Small Talk at 125th and Lenox was released on the Flying Dutchman label.
Pieces of a Man (1971) showed Scott-Heron's talents off to a fuller
extent, with songs such as the title track, a fuller version of The
Revolution Will Not Be Televised, and Lady Day and John Coltrane, a
soaring paean to the ability of soul and jazz to liberate the listener
from the travails of everyday life.
The following year, his
university-set novel, The Nigger Factory, was published and his final
Flying Dutchman disc, Free Will, was released. Following a dispute with
the label, Scott-Heron recorded Winter in America (1974) for Strata
East, then moved to Clive Davis's Arista Records; he was the first
artist signed by the newly formed company.
Arista steered
Scott-Heron to chart success with the disco-tinged, yet brazenly
polemic, anti-apartheid anthem Johannesburg, which reached No 29 in the
R&B charts in 1975. The Midnight Band, led by Jackson on keyboards,
was central to the success of Scott-Heron's first two albums for Arista –
The First Minute of a New Day and From South Africa to South Carolina –
the same year.
Jackson left the band as the producer Malcolm
Cecil arrived. Cecil had helped the Isley Brothers and Stevie Wonder
chart funkier waters earlier in the decade, and under his direction
Scott-Heron achieved his biggest hit to date, Angel Dust (1978), which
reached No 15 in the R&B charts. With its lyrical examination of
addiction it became an ironic counterpoint to the cocaine abuse that
dogged Scott-Heron's later years.
During the 1980s, producer Nile
Rodgers of the disco group Chic also helped on production as the Reagan
era provided Scott-Heron with new targets to attack. B Movie (1981), a
thunderous, nine-minute critique of Reaganomics, stands out as the most
representative track of this period. As he put it:
I
remember what I said about Reagan... meant it. Acted like an actor...
Hollyweird. Acted like a liberal. Acted like General Franco when he
acted like governor of California, then he acted like a Republican. Then
he acted like somebody was going to vote for him for president. And now
we act like 26% of the registered voters is actually a mandate.
Scott-Heron
made a practical impact on American public life in 1980, after Wonder
released Hotter Than July, on which the track Happy Birthday demanded
the commemoration of the birthday of civil rights leader Martin Luther
King with a national holiday. Scott-Heron went on tour with Wonder, and
in Washington they campaigned to support the black congressional
caucus's proposal. Wonder and Scott-Heron fronted a petition signed by 6
million people, and in November 1983 Reagan signed the bill creating a
federal holiday in January, the first falling in 1986. Scott-Heron told
the US radio station NPR in 2008 that the holiday served as a "time for
people to reflect on how far we have come, and how far we still have to
go, in terms of being just people. Hopefully it will be a time for
people to reflect on the folks that have done things to get us to where
we are and where we're going."
He also eulogised the work of
Fannie Lou Hamer, a black civil rights leader and voting activist, in
his song 95 South (All of the Places We've Been), on the album Bridges
(1977). However, though his work was often overtly political, he told
the New Yorker magazine in 2010 that he sought to express more than
simple sloganeering: "Your life has to consist of more than 'black
people should unite'. You hope they do, but not 24 hours a day. If you
aren't having no fun, die, because you're running a worthless programme,
far as I'm concerned."
A sense of joyous, rhythmic exuberance
comes through on tracks such as Racetrack in France (also from Bridges),
where, moving away from his standard commentary, he describes a French
audience erupting into a hand-clapping frenzy as his band performed.
Lightness
of musical touch and tone were brilliantly fused in his 1980 single,
Legend in His Own Mind, in which he mocks a nameless lothario over a
shuffling beat and a loping jazz piano riff that somehow contrives to
sound at once sardonic and gentle. The rhyming couplets, though,
demolish his delusional victim over a descending slap bass sequence:
Well you hate to see him coming when you're grooving at your favourite bar He's the death of the party and a self-proclaimed superstar Got a permanent Jones to assure you he's been everywhere A show-stopping, name-dropping answer to the ladies' prayers.
The
Bottle (1974) resurfaced as an underground classic in the years
following the British acid-house "summer of love" of 1988. Its
incendiary rhythmic flow and compassionate lyrical exploration of the
links between material poverty and the corresponding human response – a
drive towards narcotic or alcoholic abandon – suited the spirit of those
times perfectly and recruited a new generation of fans. Scott-Heron
himself fell victim to the alcohol and substance abuse he had so long
decried, and in 1985 he was dropped by Arista.
To the surprise of many, he returned to recording in 1994 with the album Spirits, on the TVT label. By then, hip-hop
and rap had become the voice of young black America, and attention was
again focused on his early role in the genre. In the Spirits track
Message to the Messengers, Scott-Heron sent out a warning to young,
nihilistic gangsta rappers and implored reflection and restraint:
"Protect your community, and spread that respect around," he urged, and
rejected their use of "four-letter words" and "four-syllable words" as
evidence of shallow intellects. Meanwhile, he found fame of a more
surreal, unexpected variety when he provided the voiceover for adverts
for the British fizzy orange drink Tango, declaiming in stentorian
tones: "You know when you've been Tangoed."
The republication of
his novels by Payback Press, an imprint of the radical Scottish
publishing house Canongate, added to a new sense of momentum. However,
it was not to last, and his frequent live performances became tarnished
by less-than-perfect renditions of his classic works.
Nonetheless,
he could bring a packed Jazz Cafe in Camden Town, London, to a
profound, meditative silence in the late 1990s as he performed songs
such as Winter in America, and all his gigs sold out weeks in advance.
His regular performances on Glastonbury's jazz stage through the 90s
were also good-natured, well-attended events as a new generation
rediscovered the roots of so much of the best music of that decade.
But
in 1999 his partner Monique de Latour obtained a restraining order
against him for assault, and in November 2001 he was arrested for
possession of 1.2g of cocaine, sentenced to 18-24 months and ordered to
attend rehab following that year's European tour. When he failed to
appear in court after the tour finished, he was arrested and sent to
prison. He was released in October 2002. He spent much of that fractured
decade in and out of jail on drugs charges, and released no new work,
favouring instead live performance and writing. His struggle with
addiction continued, and in July 2006 he was again jailed after he broke
the terms of a plea bargain deal on drug charges by leaving a rehab
clinic.
He returned to the studio in 2007, and three years later
released I'm New Here, produced by Richard Russell, on the British
independent label XL Recordings, to wide critical acclaim. On it, he
turned his lyrical contemplation inwards, commenting in confessional and
haunting terms on his own loneliness, his upbringing, and repentant
admissions of his own frailty: "If you gotta pay for things you done
wrong, then I gotta big bill coming!"
Tracks such as Where Did the
Night Go and New York Is Killing Me set his touchingly weathered
baritone over minimalistic beats and production, completing the
redemptive reinstatement of one of America's most rebellious and
influential voices.
In 1978 Scott-Heron married the actor Brenda
Sykes, with whom he had a daughter, Gia. He also had another daughter,
Che, and a son, Rumal.
• Gil Scott-Heron, poet, musician and author, born 1 April 1949; died 27 May 2011
I have believed in my convictions
And have been convicted for my beliefs
Conned by the constitution
And harassed by the police.
I’ve been billed for the bill of rights
And been treated like I was wrong.
I have become a special amendment
For what included me all along.
Like “All men are created equal.”
(No amendment needed here)
I’ve contributed in every field including cotton
From Sunset Strip to Washington Square.
Back during the non-violent era.
I was the only non-violent one.
As a matter of fact there was no non-violence
’cause too many rednecks had guns.
There seems to have been this pattern
That a lot of folks failed to pick up on.
But all black leaders who dared stand up
Wuz in jail, in the courtroom or gone.
Picked up indiscriminately
By the shock troops of discrimination
To end up in jails or tied up in trails
While dirty tricks soured the nation.
I’ve been hoodwinked by professional hoods.
My ego has happened to me.
It’ll be alright, just keep things cool!”
“And take the people off the street.
We’ll settle all this at the conference table.
You just leave everything to me.”
Which gets me back to my convictions
And being convicted for my belief
’cause I believe these smiles
in three-piece suits
with gracious, liberal demeanor
took our movement off of the streets
and took us to the cleaners
In other words, we let up the pressure
And that was all part of their plan
And every day we allow to slip through our fingers
Migration is a world wide phenomenon. While many in America believe everyone comes to the US, migration to the US is only 3% of world migration. Whether fleeing poverty, hunger, violence, crime, corruption or political violence or rule, millions of people every week gather what they have and search for a better life. That is not wrong. It is called being a responsible parent, son, daughter, wife, or husband. We applaud the brothers and sisters in Germany who have formed Berlin Sound Strike and are raising awareness about intolerance and hatred in Germany. We also send our best wishes to Sound Strike Tokyo and hope those sisters and brothers are doing well.