The museum will use technology to create a multi-generational experience featuring music, artifacts, video and photography, research areas, and a performance stage, Executive Director Rocky Bucano says, according to DNAinfo.
“[The museum will be a long-awaited] home for the world’s most popular art form, hip-hop culture … bringing hip-hop back to the Bronx where it originated from,” Bucano said. “It’s gonna be a complete history of hip-hop.”
The museum has a long list of Hip Hop stars sitting on its Board of Trustees. Kurtis Blow serves as the museum’s Chairman of the Board, Ice-T sits on its Founding Board of Directors, and DMC is an Advisory Board Member. In addition, Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, LL Cool J and Q-Tip, among others, serve as Cultural Ambassadors, while dozens of Hip Hop artists serve as Honorary Advisory Board Members.
“The Universal Hip Hop Museum may be the single most important project for the preservation of Hip Hop culture,” Kurtis Blow said in statement. “This new cultural institution will be a great new tourism destination for NYC and the Bronx. What a great day for Hip-Hop! Our four years of hard team work has paid off. I thank God, as I am elated to know that this mecca devoted to the cultural phenomenon of Hip-Hop will preserve not only my legacy, but also the legacies of many others for the world to see.”
The project, which will be delivered in two phases, is part of a large-scale development that will turn a vacant site along the Harlem River into a waterfront hotspot dubbed “Bronx Point.” In addition to the Universal Hip Hop Museum, the development is set to incorporate a state-of-the-art multiplex theater, education space and up to 1,045 units of affordable housing. The site is located adjacent to Mill Pond Park and the 145th Street Bridge that connects to Upper Manhattan. The first phase of the plan is expected to be complete by 2022.
“Today, we are excited to announce the activation of this long-vacant waterfront site with high-quality public open space, over 600 units of permanently affordable housing, and a range of cultural facilities that pay homage to the boogie down Bronx,” said New York City Economic Development Corporation President and CEO James Patchett.
The outside world might never have heard about the suspected massacre if not for some barroom boasting by a group of miners fresh from working an illegal gig in the Amazon jungle.
The garimpeiros had bragged that they’d come across members of a reclusive, uncontacted Amazonian tribe near Brazil’s border with Peru and Colombia, authorities say.
The tribe members were greater in number — there were as many as 10 — but the gold miners said they’d gotten the better of them and killed the entire lot, said Carla de Lello Lorenzi, communications officer for Survival International in Brazil.
The miners cut the tribe members’ bodies so that they wouldn’t float, Lorenzi said, then dropped them into the Jandiatuba River.
The miners had collected tools and jewelry from the indigenous dead, corroborating their story.
An unidentified person who overheard the story was disturbed by it, recorded the miners’ conversation and turned the audio over to authorities. They have since launched an investigation into what, if confirmed, would be one of the largest mass murders of uncontacted people in decades.
Advocates for stricter protective measures say the suspected massacre is evidence that the Brazilian government isn’t doing enough to safeguard the more than 100 vulnerable tribes that have never made contact with the outside world — and have no desire to.
“If these reports are confirmed, [Brazilian President Michel Temer] and his government bear a heavy responsibility for this genocidal attack,” said Survival International’s director, Stephen Corry. Corry said the government has slashed funds for an agency that protects the tribes, leaving them “defenseless against thousands of invaders — gold miners, ranchers and loggers — who are desperate to steal and ransack their lands.”
“All these tribes should have had their lands properly recognized and protected years ago — the government’s open support for those who want to open up indigenous territories is utterly shameful, and is setting indigenous rights in Brazil back decades.”
According to the New York Times, the government closed five of the 19 bases it uses to monitor uncontacted tribes and prevent incursions by miners and loggers.
Three of the closed bases were in the Javari Valley, home to more uncontacted tribes than anywhere else on Earth.
For obvious reasons, little is known about the indigenous group involved in the suspected killings.
Locally, Lorenzi said, they’re known as Fleicheros, or “the ones who throw arrows,” but their language and customs — and how they interact with at least two other uncontacted tribes in the immediate area — remain a mystery.
But the tribe members are not the only people in that part of the Amazon, Lorenzi said. It is illegal to mine there, but prospectors have brought earth-moving equipment to the area, leaving giant craters that can be seen from the sky.
They also bring violence, according to the government, which says garimpeiros are responsible for threats, child prostitution and killings.
Even their nonviolent presence in the protected lands can be dangerous to uncontacted tribes, which lack the immunity to fight the diseases that miners and loggers bring.
Any contact can be contentious and even violent, with the uncontacted usually getting the worst of it because, as Lorenzi told The Post, “it’s usually bows and arrows against guns.”
Details about those contacts remain hazy, because they involve two groups of people unlikely to speak to authorities.
Still, tales of the worst violence sometimes get out. Survival International documented the story of Marisa Yanomami and Leida Yanomami, survivors of the Haximu massacre in 1993:
“The gold-miners killed our brothers and sisters and also killed our father with machetes; some of them were killed with guns,” they told the organization. “After the first 10 people died, at the start of the war, we moved to another place to hide and stayed in our shabono (communal house), but the next day, the miners appeared again.”
In a statement on its website, the Brazilian National Indian Foundation, or Funai, said it had prompted the federal public prosecutor’s office to investigate the most recent allegation.
The government has also trumpeted its latest operation against incursions on protected lands. In August, it shut down an illegal mining operation. Soldiers destroyed four dredging machines and fined mining operators $1 million for environmental crimes.
Investigations are tough undertakings. The site of the suspected killing, for example, is a 12-hour trek by boat during the dry season. And it involves a group of people with their own language and a centuries-long wariness of outsiders.
Even the details of the killing are sketchy, Lorenzi said. And the vacuum of information speaks to another fear advocates have: that these types of violent interactions happen a lot more frequently than is reported.
“That’s highly probable, yes, because it’s so difficult to document,” she said. “It’s the uncontacted versus illegal miners who think they can get away with anything.
A 19-year-old West Side woman was found dead inside a walk-in freezer at a Rosemont hotel Sunday morning, about a day after she had gone missing from a party she attended with friends, police and her family said.
Kenneka Jenkins was discovered after an hours-long search and was pronounced dead at 12:48 a.m. Sunday, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
Jenkins’ mother, Tereasa Martin, said police told her Jenkins apparently let herself into the freezer while inebriated and died inside. An autopsy was performed Sunday but it wasn’t immediately clear whether foul play was suspected, according to Becky Schlikerman, spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office.
The cause and manner of the teen’s death remained undetermined.
Speaking to reporters outside the hotel Sunday morning, Martin said she was having trouble understanding what happened.
“(I’m) horrified,” she said. “It’s something that no one could ever imagine. It’s unbelievable.”
According to Martin and police, Jenkins left her house in the 2100 block of West Warren Boulevard around 11:30 p.m. Friday to attend a party with friends in a hotel room at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O’Hare Hotel & Conference Center in Rosemont. Gary Mack, a spokesman for the village of Rosemont, said Jenkins’ sister last spoke to her around 1:30 a.m. Saturday.
Mack said witnesses told police they saw Jenkins at a party on the ninth floor of the hotel.
Martin said her daughter’s friends called her after 4 a.m. Saturday to say they had lost track of Jenkins in the hotel and left after they were unable to find her. The friends said they were in the car Martin had lent her daughter for the night and they had Jenkins’ cellphone, Martin said.
Martin said she headed to the hotel around 5 a.m. Saturday to try to find her daughter. Hotel staff told her they needed a missing persons report from police before they could start reviewing surveillance video of the premises.
Martin said she then called the Rosemont Police Department and was told to wait a few hours before filing the report to see if Jenkins turned up.
Jenkins’ older sister, Leonore Harris, filed a missing persons report with Rosemont police later that morning, Mack said. Authorities notified the hotel about the missing teen around 1:15 p.m. Saturday. The 11-hour search for Jenkins included all public areas and the ninth floor, where she was last seen by witnesses, Mack said.
“The hotel staff and management (were) actively canvassing the area at that time,” Mack said.
Martin said around 3 or 4 p.m. Saturday, police viewed some of the hotel video footage and said they did not see Jenkins pictured.
The family left and came back a third time around 6 p.m. Saturday, Martin said, at which point relatives started knocking on room doors to see if any guests knew anything. The hotel called the police to complain about the knocking, Martin said. One of those responding officers listened to the family’s plight and agreed to view the video footage again, Martin said.
Around 10 p.m. Saturday, police told Jenkins’ relatives they had spotted her on video from about 3:20 a.m. that day, “staggering” drunk near the front desk, according to Martin.
Martin said the family members stayed at the hotel until after 1 a.m. Sunday, when police informed them they had discovered Jenkins’ body in the walk-in freezer.
It was not clear who located Jenkins’ body, but Mack said the hotel was doing some construction in the area where she was found. Martin said she was told the freezer Jenkins was in was turned on and cold but was not being used to store food.
“I just happen to know there’s work being done on some new facilities over there, so there is some construction activity where a new restaurant is being built, and (she was found) in that vicinity,” Mack said. (“This is not an area where anyone would typically be who was a guest in the hotel.”)
It is not clear whether the construction area was blocked off in any way.
Martin said Jenkins told her she was “going to the show and bowling” Friday. Martin said she only learned about the hotel party when Jenkins’ friends called to say they couldn’t find her and were heading back with the car.
The friends told her the three were getting set to leave the party but realized Jenkins had left her phone and car keys back in the room. Jenkins stayed in the hallway while the friends said they retrieved her stuff.
When they got back to the hall she was gone, Martin said they told her.
But Martin said she questioned the friends’ accounts, saying their (“stories changed over and over.”)
Martin also said she had a hard time believing the police account that Jenkins got into the freezer on her own, saying if her daughter was drunk she would have had difficulty opening the heavy freezer doors.
Jenkins would have realized the freezer doors weren’t the doors to an elevator or a hotel entrance, Martin said. (“Those were double steel doors, she didn’t just pop them open),” she said.
Martin was angry about what she said was hotel workers’ lack of urgency in the face of her pleas for help finding her daughter Saturday morning,( directing her to the police rather than immediately reviewing hotel footage.)
Daniel Pena, a manager at the hotel, referred questions about the incident to Rosemont police Sunday.
“Anyone can understand how a parent can feel distraught over the loss of a child and feel the need to lash out due to the tremendous pain they’re feeling, and we can certainly understand that,” Mack said. “But people can rest assured Rosemont is one of the top, highest trained, most respected police departments in the state of Illinois and does a good job at what they do.
“Every situation has a lot of variables, and certainly this one did,” he said. “The hotel has probably never seen anything like this, either, I would imagine.”
Martin said she thought Rosemont police also failed to heed the family’s frantic attempts to figure out what happened to Jenkins.
“If they had taken me seriously and checked right away, they could have found my daughter much sooner and she might have been alive,” Martin said.
Just before sunset on Sept. 11, 2001, one of the worst days in America has known, I snuck past police barricades and made my way to the roof of a high-rise building about eight blocks from ground zero – the closest I could get – and stared at the landscape of horror.
Smoke shrouded the 16-acre site. Twisted metal columns jutted from an enormous crater, all of it blanketed in white ash. The only flecks of color came from the yellow stripes on the coats of rescue workers.
Finally away from deadlines, it was supposed to be my moment to grieve. But I just stood there, my mind racing. Why did this happen?
It wasn’t until 9 days later, on my day off, that I let pent- up emotions flow.
Images flashed in my mind. Dazed New Yorkers walking aimlessly, carrying photographs of missing loved ones. The woman with streaks of mascara on her face who told me her fiancé would be found. Groups of strangers standing around a TV propped on milk cartons on the sidewalk, shrieking in unison as they watched a replay of planes crashing into the towers.
On the first days, we thought survivors would be plucked out of the rubble alive. Throngs of reporters from all over the world stood outside hospital ER entrances, waiting for the miracle stories we all desperately wanted to hear.
We waited in vain. The miracles families prayed for never came.
People say 9-11 is the day America lost its innocence. To me, it was the beginning of a wake-up call. Terrorism was a problem over there. But this, the first major attack of civilians on U.S. soil, prompted us to start asking questions.
Why, indeed, did this happen?
For many of us, it sparked the beginning of our education on the collusion between government and multinational corporations.
On the surface it seemed that the federal government, under both the Clinton and Bush administrations, was asleep at the wheel – very much the way the Bush administration was when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.
Bush claimed we’d bring back Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.”
But the more we learn about the ties between the Bush family and the bin Ladens, questions like this one pop up: Did Bush really want to capture him?
With fewer than 50 ground troops surrounding the massive Tora Bora region in the mountains of Afghanistan where bin Laden was hiding, ground commanders pleaded for 800 more soldiers, according to Gary Berntsen, the CIA field commander whose book “Jawbreaker” goes into amazing detail about the botched paramilitary operation. Bernt-
sen and other ground commanders said the U.S. let Osama bin Laden get away.
Was this because of President George Bush’s close ties to the bin Laden family?
In 1978, Bush and Osama bin Laden’s brother, Salem bin Laden, founded Arbusto Energy, an oil company based in Texas.
Several bin Laden family members invested millions in The Carlyle Group, a private global equity firm based in Washington, DC. The company’s senior advisor was Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush. After news of the bin Laden-Bush connection became public, the elder Bush stepped down from Carlyle.
Interestingly, on Sept. 11, 2001, members of the Carlyle Group – including Bush senior, and his former secretary of state, James Baker – were meeting at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., along with Shafiq bin Laden, another one of Osama bin Laden’s brothers.
While all flights were halted following the terrorist attacks, there was one exception made: The White House authorized planes to pick up 140 Saudi nationals, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, living in various cities in the U.S. to bring them back to Saudi Arabia, where they would be safe. They were never interrogated.
Sixteen years later, and we’re still asking questions. We may have lost our innocence but we’re also losing, thankfully, our ignorance.
A group of white teens attacked an 8-year-old biracial boy and hanged him by a noose, his family says, and police in Claremont, NH are refusing to release information in the case.
The Root’s Angela Helm reported on Sunday that an 8-year-old biracial boy was hanged by a rope around his neck by other juveniles in what his grandmother said was a racist attack.
As the child was being flown by a medevac to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, his mother Cassandra Merlin posted to Facebook, “So my son is being flown to Dartmouth after a 14 year old kid decided to hang him from a tree. I don’t care if this was a so called accident or not. My son almost died because of some little sh*t teenage kids.”
NH1.com said that Claremont Police Chief Mark Chase refused to comment on the case, but said the department is investigating the incident, which took place on Aug. 28. He said that because the perpetrators are juveniles, he is prevented from discussing the case publicly.
He said that unlike the adult judicial system, which is aimed at punishment, the juvenile justice system is designed to correct and rehabilitate aberrant behavior.
“These people need to be protected,” Chase said. “Mistakes they make as a young child should not have to follow them for the rest of their life.”
“Notice how he called these predators ‘young children,’” wrote Helm, “infantilizing the white teens. Conversely, teens like Trayvon Martin are made out to be hulking, menacing adults. Chief Chase seems to be centering the perpetrators feelings and futures, all but forgetting about the trauma of a little boy who had his so-called friends hang him from a tree to the point where he had to be medevaced to a hospital.”
According to the victim’s grandmother Lorrie Slattery, he was playing with a group of children and teens when they began to taunt him with racist epithets and throw sticks and rocks at him.
Someone stood on a picnic table and the group wrapped a rope from a nearby tire swing around the boy’s throat, then kicked him off the table.
The victim swung back and forth three times before he was able to free himself. None of the teens came to his aid.
NH1.com said Chief Chase refused to state whether the crime was racially motivated, although accounts of the incident make it clear the attack was based on the child’s race.
Slattery told Valley News it’s clear to her that the attack was racist because her grandson has been targeted for racist abuse from the same group of children and teens in the past.
Her grandson is recovering now and preparing for his first day of school on Tuesday.
Helm wrote, “Welcome to Donald Trump’s America. Say what you want, but when the U.S. president defends avowed white supremacists, one can’t be surprised when bullying takes on a decidedly racist tone as it did with an 8-year-old biracial boy who was hung from a tree in the year 2017. The climate has been set.”
Since Donald Trump’s election, hate crimes have spiked dramatically in the U.S., particularly in the area of hate-related murders.
A televangelist whose church closed its doors during Hurricane Harvey claims that he is the victim of “misinformation” and told flood victims not to have a “poor me” attitude.
In his Sunday sermon, multimillionaire pastor Joel Osteen addressed the criticism that has been directed at him after his 16,000 seat Houston megachurch initially closed its doors during the storm, in which thousands of people were left homeless and 40 were killed.
Pictures and video posted on social media showed the church apparently undamaged by the storm, and Osteen initially claimed he had not opened its doors because he had not been asked to by the state. The church re-opened Tuesday, as floodwaters began to recede.
Osteen defended the decision not to open the church during the devastating storm, and told those affected not to have a “poor old me attitude.”
“You know I really believe in these times of difficulty it’s, for me, certainly not the time to question your faith but to turn to your faith because God is the one that gives you the strength to make it through the difficult times,” he said in a video of Sunday’s sermon posted on YouTube.
“We are not going to understand everything that happens but, you know, having a ‘poor old me’ mentality or ‘look what I lost’ or ‘why did this happen’, that’s just going to pull you down. Like we’ve been talking about all night, you just got to turn it over and say ‘God you’re still on the throne’.”
Osteen preaches the prosperity gospel, a branch of Christianity that holds that following Christian teachings can increase personal wealth. His Lakewood church is one of the largest in the U.S.
On Sunday, Osteen blamed “misinformation” for criticism levelled at the church for remaining closed. He said he hadn’t opened its doors due to safety concerns, and floodwaters came within a couple of feet of breaching flood walls installed after floods in 2001.
He added: “Had we opened the building sooner and someone got injured, or perhaps the building flooded and someone lost their lives, that would have been a very different story. Now I don’t mind taking the heat for being precautious. But I don’t want to take the heat for being foolish.”
He continued: “This is not just an attack on me, it’s an attack on what we stand for—for faith, for hope, for love,” he said. “Jesus even said, ‘When the world hates you, remember: it hated me first.'”
New York, NY – Wu-Tang Clan’s Masta Killa, RZA and DJ/producer Mathematics recently stopped by Hot 97 to discuss the pioneering New York Hip Hop collective’s forthcoming album, Wu-Tang: The Saga Continues.
About 11 minutes into the interview, as the trio was talking about Hip Hop as a business, RZA doled out a handful of gems about what MCs can do to become a reverberating voice in the culture.
“I would advise any MC who is coming on as an MC, or as they call it a rapper, to definitely strive to have powerful bars, great lyrics,” RZA said. “Because even a singer strives to become a better singer, a guitar player strives to become a better guitar player, you know what I mean? I think that it’s important for their longevity and for them to recognize at one point in life — whether it’s Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, Nat King Cole, as far as we can go back — sometimes the artist’s voice becomes the voice of the time, then the voice of the world. It’s important they recognize they are making a soundtrack of our generation.”
As he continued, he touched on Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole’s roles in the current Hip Hop landscape, explaining how they provide the balance the culture needs. He uses Future‘s “Mask Off” and its reference to the powerful pain killer Percocet to make his point.
“It’s [‘Mask Off’] not giving a description of everything that’s happening,” he says. “But now Kendrick will come on, who I think is an MC who keeps the balance for us, I think J. Cole keeps the balance and I love Future, trust me. Put on Future, I might jump up and start dancing with you. I’m into it, but there has to be a balance, and I think the MCs who aren’t putting that focus into it that they should always consider it, and go back and study the great ones so that they can add that. I mean, we watch Drake just become greater and greater. We watch that happen — even Kendrick. You watch him continue to become a better MC because he cared about being that.”
Later in the interview, they touch on Martin Shkreli, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Azealia Banks, classic Hip Hop and their excitement for the new album.
The recent surge in popularity of controversial artists like XXXTENTACION and Kodak Black has stirred up a dialogue between Hip Hop fans and critics alike — why are men who have a documented history of assaulting women still supported by the masses? Where do we draw the line and how can we separate the man from the music? Or should we?
There’s no denying the allure of N.W.A’s 1991 album, Niggaz4Life. Much like its predecessor, 1988’s masterpiece Straight Outta Compton, the Compton group’s sophomore effort is provocative, the beats bang, and MC Ren, Dr. Dre and Eazy-E’s lyrics demand respect.
But there’s a sinister story simmering below the surface of its success. Four months before the album dropped on Ruthless Records, Dre brutally assaulted Pump It Up! host Dee Barnes at a record release party in Hollywood.
The New York native, who was the first female Hip Hop journalist to have a broadcast television show, had done an interview with Cube after N.W.A’s controversial breakup that ran concurrently with an interview she’d done with the remaining members. Dre reportedly felt betrayed and viciously attacked her on the night of January 27, 1991. The following June, Niggaz4Life debuted at #2 on the Billboard 200.
Meanwhile, doors started to slam in her face and Barnes was having trouble finding work in her field. Even today, she says she’s been told, “I can’t work with you. I’m sponsored by Beats.”
“Everything was gradual,” Barnes said. “People weren’t carrying cell phones. If that would have happened now, people would have filmed it and it would have been on video. It wasn’t all over the internet, but it was a gradual thing. There were a lot of people from the East Coast at the party because it was before the American Music Awards, so by the time the awards happened, it was being spread everywhere by word of mouth. By 2000, everything was up. We had blogs and things of that nature. The spotlight wasn’t on me because of my TV show now, it was because of what happened and who it was with.”
Barnes filed criminal charges against Dre and a civil suit followed. They settled out of court in 1993, but over the years, Dre, MC Ren and Eazy-E had turned the incident into a joke. In fact, in an 1991 interview with Rolling Stone, Dre reduced it to “no big thing,” while Ren said the “bitch deserved it.”
To add insult to injury, Eminem’s 1999 track “Guilty Conscience” featuring Dre reduces her to a pop culture reference with Em’s line, “You gonna take advice from somebody who slapped Dee Barnes?”
“Even as I was moving on with my life, eight years later, Dre makes that track with Eminem,” she explains. “Mind you, I’m living my life after the fact. Technically, the trial was two years of my life I can never get back. Nobody talks about that. If you step back, you could see I must have forgave him a long time ago because there was nothing vengeful about my behavior, you feel me? There was no smear campaign. My concern was it went from physical abuse to psychological abuse with that song.”
In 2015, the N.W.A biopic, Straight Outta Compton, would heighten interest in Barnes once again. Director F. Gary Gray, who also served as a camera man for Pump It Up! in the late ’80s/early ’90s, was asked about the Barnes assault during a Q&A session following a screening of the film, which he dismissed as a side story. But for Barnes, the whole incident was her own side story.
“There was a lot in Rolling Stone,” she says. “Allen Light called the article ‘Beating Up The Charts.’ Long story short — that was a reference to me. This was after the incident. They talk about it. They joke about it. They make light of it. [It’s] the most misogynistic shit ever.
“Two days before Straight Outta Compton came out, they were doing press and F. Gary Gray said something like, ‘Oh that’s just a side story, one of the many side stories,’” she continues. “Well, this is a side story for me because my history in Hip Hop goes deeper than that incident.”
It would be 26 years before Dre would issue a public apology in the New York Times, which was prompted by an article Barnes wrote for the now-defunct Gawker. Then, Dre admitted he was “out of his fucking mind” during the assault and apologized in the recent HBO series, The Defiant Ones, which Barnes also participated in.
“It was the first time he said to all the women I hurt,” she says. “There were so many, he couldn’t name us. I won’t say he can’t name us because we don’t know — we might all fucking haunt him. If you forget somebody it’s a problem, so legally maybe he couldn’t say my name. That’s fine. The point is, to me, it was the first time he acknowledged it whether it was a press thing or not.”
But Barnes was never waiting for him to say he was sorry. It was something she’d come to terms with a long time ago.
“I was not fucking waiting [laughs],” she says. “You don’t waste your life waiting for an apology you’re never going to get. I didn’t care. I already knew from the bragging, the braggadocio, songs about it — talk about balls — to put that in fucking ‘Guilty Conscience’ and do it in a sneaky way, and let Em do it. The story, the myth, the fable goes, Dre fell out of his chair laughing when he heard the line. That shit is like in Wikipedia. I can’t believe it didn’t break me. Like where’s my Wonder Woman cape? Fuck this shit.
“I had a history before the incident and I have a history after the incident, and of course everything in between,” she adds. “The truth got buried under that. The book is going to tell my whole story.”
The book she’s referring to is her forthcoming autobiography, Music, Myth and Misogyny: Memoirs Of A Female MC. She says it’s something that has helped get her to a place of peace.
“I was already feeling good,” she says. “That’s what allowed me to be in the movie [The Defiant Ones] in the first place. I was already in a place of peace for me to feel good about me. What did I have to be ashamed of? Even though that’s the corner they were trying to push me into. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I worked through that with this book. The book is very cathartic for me.”
For Barnes, music was always her first love. Her interest in journalism spawned from her passion for Hip Hop. Her former Hip Hop duo, Body & Soul, was signed to Delicious Vinyl. She worked on a radio show for KDAY in Los Angeles. She had unparalleled access to future legendary Hip Hop artists. While she may be eternally connected to Dre and the ugliness of violence, misogyny has sadly been a part of society for eons, something she’ll continue to fight.
“That’s not something engrained in Hip Hop,” she says. “Mind you, misogyny has been happening forever, way before Hip Hop. Rock, country, blues — every other country song is about some shit like that. This is engrained in our society. This is the culture of our society, not just music. Music is supposed to be a reflection of the way we live. Until it stops in our society, it’s going to be prevalent in everything — music, films, television shows — it’s going to be prevalent everywhere. They cross the line all the time. How do we stop it? It has to be economic. As long as it’s making money, it’s not going to stop.”
The internet went wild with speculation after TMZ published an article claiming Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav was suing his P.E. brethren Chuck D earlier this week. But that’s not entirely true.
While Chuck’s name is mentioned in the court documents reportedly filed by Flav, it’s his partner Gary “G-Wiz” Rinaldo — member The Bomb Squad and owner of the company Eastlink — that he’s really after. Chuck’s name is only tied to it because of a merger between his company — Bring The Noise — and Eastlink [BTNE] that took place in 2007.
Like Chuck’s brother, Eric Ridenhour, said in a Facebook post, “The lawsuit or TMZ is not going to tell you that it’s a company in which my brother’s name is associated in.”
But we are — with Chuck’s help.
“Flav and his people sued me in connection to albums, merch and essentially non-communication and non-payment, but BTNE was the third party that was supposed to account to Flav and everyone else,” Chuck explains to HipHopDX. “Gary [Rinaldo] ignored it. Flav is in Las Vegas doing Vegas things in casinos. Public Enemy hadn’t worked in a year because I wasn’t working without an album and a plan.”
Flav took to Instagram on Thursday (August 31) to clear the air, writing, “#ATTENTION EVERYONE!! this is Flavor Flav speaking himself … I love my partner Chuck D everyone so don’t get it twisted .. we will fix it!!”
While the gesture is slightly reassuring that this won’t be the end of Public Enemy, there’s a sense Chuck is still feeling thwarted. After all, without Chuck, Flav never would’ve landed a record contract with Def Jam Recordings in 1986. Rick Rubin of Def Jam initially wanted Chuck as an MC, even though he was more of a songwriter, but Chuck insisted Flav and the rest of his crew were part of the deal.
But the lawsuit isn’t really what has Chuck upset. It’s more about BTNE not paying Flav and Flav not meeting his obligations to the group.
“The recording thing is based on licensing breakdown,” he explains. “Fifty percent goes to the publisher, 50 percent goes to the masters. It was set up easy, so if Flav did write a song, he would still own part of the master. You gotta pay that. How often is Flav getting accounting for the albums we started put out in 2012, 2013? It was one of those, ‘They’re getting around to it.’ I’m like, ‘What the fuck, man? For three to four years?”
Public Enemy’s latest record, Nothing is Quick in the Desert, was also another point of frustration for Chuck as far as Flavor’s involvement. In fact, he’s more annoyed with his unwillingness to put in the work than the lawsuit itself.
“Flavor isn’t 100 percent wrong, but he brings a lot of craziness and disorganization to the fucking table, and that causes a myriad of issues that costs time and money,” Chuck says. “His inability to be focused, pay attention and stay woke bleeds into other areas. Him and his manager [Greg Johnson] parting ways, to me, was a bad move. The new manager is amateurish in their decision making. I’m proud of Flav, but he’s a co-owner of the masters of these Public Enemy records. That doesn’t necessarily mean songwriting. It takes effort and teamwork, and he’s got to be mentally on point to write P.E. songs. He has to step it up.”
Flav reportedly said he wrote 50 Public Enemy songs and hasn’t been properly compensated for any of them. Chuck begs to differ.
“What 50 songs?,” he says. “You can’t name 10. Trust me, I want you to write 50 songs. You can’t write 50 meaningless songs regarding Public Enemy. He’s 58-years-old. By now, he should know how to write a song that reflects his age. He’ll write a song that reflects a 21-year-old. You’re the old dude in the club. I’m not asking you to grow up all of a sudden, but god damn.”
Chuck admits that because of the third party, BTNE, Flav didn’t see a dime from merchandise sales, but he knows Flav’s situation can easily be fixed.
“I was more upset at Flav missing his deadlines and being adamant about not working, and rejecting the work on the new P.E. album,” he says. “I was more upset at that, and the unwillingness to do benefits and things of that nature. I wasn’t upset about the lawsuit. Someone had to take the weight, but it doesn’t mean the third party should be negligent on accounting. Flav can be fixed. I don’t think my situation can be fixed as easily. There’s a series of individuals I’m very disappointed in. If things aren’t resolved very soon, I’m going to have to file a lawsuit of my own by October 1.”
For now, Chuck is focused on his upcoming self-titled Prophets of Rage album. The aforementioned Public Enemy album was given away for free and Chuck finds it quite telling that this lawsuit drama is getting more attention.
“It just shows you how it is today,” he says. “We do a gesture in honor of 30 years of Public Enemy and give away a formidable album, and we get more press about the drama than the actual record, which shows you where we are today. But it comes with the territory.”
He adds, “There’s people in this camp that have lost sight about what’s important. I’m a firm believer you pay other people before you pay yourself. If the ship goes down, you go down with it last. You don’t throw them under the water and take the lifeboat. Period.”
The incident was caught by the officer’s dashboard camera.
By German Lopez
It was a mere traffic stop, but the driver was clearly nervous — telling the police officer that she was worried that if she moved her hands, she would be shot.
Then the cop, Greg Abbott, tried to assure her: “But you’re not black. Remember, we only shoot black people. Yeah, we only kill black people, right?”
The shocking words by the Cobb County, Georgia, police officer — caught on dash-cam video during a DUI stop — have led the department to open an internal investigation into the incident, which happened last year.
Cobb County Police Chief Mike Register told WSB-TV in Atlanta, which obtained the video: “The statements was made by an individual, and they’re not indicative of the values and the facts that surround the Cobb County Police Department and this county in general.”
On Thursday, the police chief confirmed Abbott will be fired. “I don’t know what is in his heart, but I know what came out of his mouth,” Register said. “We recommend that he be terminated and we are moving forward on that.”
Previously, Abbott’s attorney also released a statement:
Lt. Greg Abbott is a highly respected 28-year veteran of the Cobb County Police Department. He is cooperating with the department’s internal investigation and will continue to do so. His comments must be observed in their totality to understand their context. He was attempting to de-escalate a situation involving an uncooperative passenger. In context, his comments were clearly aimed at attempting to gain compliance by using the passenger’s own statements and reasoning to avoid making an arrest.
Abbott’s statement, however, is concerning in part because there is some truth to it: Police really are much more likely to shoot and kill black people. And that fact has led to a lot of grievances between police and minority communities in the past few years, particularly with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Black people are much more likely to be killed by police than their white peers
Based on nationwide data collected by the Guardian, black Americans are more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to be killed by police when accounting for population. In 2016, police killed black Americans at a rate of 6.66 per 1 million people, compared to 2.9 per 1 million for white Americans.
