Salon.com > Peter L'Official

Rapper’s delight

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 20:00:00 +0000

Charlie Ahearn, famed writer-director of the 1982 old-school hip-hop film classic "Wild Style," broke my heart about a quarter of the way through Jeff Chang's "Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation." Asked about the double-edged impact of the Sugar Hill Gang's 1979 chart-topping, crossover hit "Rapper's Delight" on break dancing and DJ culture in the clubs, he observes, "Nobody was dancing. Period! Rap became the focal point. MCs were onstage and people were looking at them." The song, apart from enlivening the then-waning Bronx club scene, helped cast the DJ down from his heretofore prominent position as ruler, sole controller and cold-rocker of the party. The days of kids decked out in denim cut-sleeves sporting well-manicured 'fros at clubs "gettin' they dance on" were done. Dancers became spectators, DJs cut records for profit, and silver-tongued Bronx kids rhymed over those records, enacting the culture's transition from DJ-dominated live performance to the more formulaic, highly marketable, studio-ensconced iteration dominated by the rapper. This leads to Ahearn's heart-stopper: "This is 1980. In other words, hip-hop is dead by 1980. It's true."

Tolkien’s cosmological vision

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 21:00:00 +0000

In the last dread days of disco-dûr, in the midst of the Seventh Age -- known in perhaps a more familiar tongue as "the Nineteen Seventsies" -- there emerged from the House of Houghton Mifflin, and later from that of Ballan-tine, a great book of which much was expected, though few but the most ardent of devotees could wholly comprehend it. It has, in the Tolkienian spirit, valiantly returned.

"The Silmarillion," J.R.R. Tolkien's fantastically complex, comprehensive and, yes, uneven mythological narrative was his life's work -- the underlying structural legend of the world into which young Frodo Baggins would later walk, many millennia hence, on his arduous journey to cast the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Its narrative principally concerns the time before "The Lord of the Rings," from the genesis of Eä and Arda (the universe and Earth, in Tolkien's legendarium) to the creation of Middle Earth and its denizens -- the divine, the Elvish, and the human, with nary a hobbit in sight.

Dark side of a sea dog

Mon, 22 Nov 2004 21:00:00 +0000

There's a certain spirit to the epigraph Nick Hazlewood chooses for his pointed historical biography, "The Queen's Slave Trader," that cuts right to the diseased heart of the matter at hand. He quotes John Keats' "Lines Written on 29 May, the Anniversary of Charles's Restoration, on Hearing the Bells Ringing." Keats writes, "Infatuate Britons, will you still proclaim/ His memory, your direst, foulest shame?"

The "memory" in question for Hazlewood -- a freelance journalist whose previous book, "Savage: The Life and Times of Jemmy Button," dealt with the tragic life of a South American native brought to England as an "exotic" on Charles Darwin's Beagle -- is that of John Hawkyns (or Hawkins, as others have spelled it). A contemporary and likely older relation of Sir Francis Drake, Hawkyns was a hero of the 1588 defense of England against the Spanish Armada, and a notorious pirate-merchant who, through violence, intimidation and sheer audacity, challenged the Spanish stranglehold on the Caribbean colonies. He was the kind of man who, in an angry letter to the royal treasurer of a town in what is now Colombia, could level a well-placed threat with ice-cold aplomb, writing, "seeing as [the town] had sent him to his supper [i.e., had sent a letter refusing to trade with him], he would in the morning bring them as good a breakfast." Before I bring your Patrick O'Brian-infused blood to an excited simmer at the prospect of enjoying another rousing seaborne epic, there is something far more sinister to consider regarding the Pirate Hawkyns. He was also the first Englishman to trade in slaves.

“And It Don’t Stop” edited by Raquel Cepeda

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 20:00:00 +0000

I can hear him, his voice pregnant with that inimitable timbre -- a mixture of seductively syncopated cadence and bass, the perfect distillation of raw rhythm, charisma and rage -- as clearly as if I were listening through stereo headphones.

Tupac Shakur, accused of assaulting the filmmaking brothers Allen and Albert Hughes during a music video shoot, waits outside of a Los Angeles County Municipal courtroom for the plaintiffs to exit the room. They do, and almost instantly, one of the brothers boldly calls him a female dog in the diminutive. Sharp words are exchanged, egos are puffed along with chests, and the Hughes brothers' Nation of Islam security steps in to separate the warring parties. Pac responds accordingly, as only he can: "You gon' need muthafuckin' Farrakhan to calm me down! You got that? Farrakhan! You bean-pie-slingin', bow-tie-wearing bitches. You wear bow ties, remember that!" The sheriff's department then enters the fray, separating all antagonists. Pac acknowledges their arrival: "Officers. I'm glad you arrived. These men were trying to attack me! Can you believe that? They tried to attack me with the Nation of Islam. Those are Farrakhan's boys, you know. I'm so glad you're here. I have full confidence in the law's ability to handle the situation."

Mother of all home movies

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 21:34:00 +0000

Jonathan Caouette's autobiographical "Tarnation" unfolds with the vigor of hallucinatory thought -- a hyperchaotic collage of Caouette's own gauzily saturated Super-8 footage, family snapshots, amateur short films and clips of '80s television, set to a moody, haunting soundtrack of ambient music. It's earning accolades, and not simply because the film was edited entirely using Apple's iMovie editing suite -- standard system software included on most Macs -- which accounts for its much-publicized (before postproduction) budget of about $218.

Caouette, born in 1972 in Texas, began documenting his daily life at age 11 by interviewing family members, filming confessional-style monologues and making short films, all to escape the dysfunction surrounding him. His mother, LeBlanc, a childhood beauty queen, underwent frequent shock therapy after she was diagnosed with a a mental condition in her youth, which the film suggests doomed her to a life of numerous hospitalizations, physical abuse and mental instability, and left Caouette to grow up mostly with his grandparents. Caouette himself was later diagnosed with depersonalization disorder -- an affliction characterized by feelings of detachment from one's own body or thoughts.