TETINE

Friday 25 May 2018

MC CAROL M. FRANCO / MC Carol - feat Heavy Baile

MC Carol unraveling everything, bleeding against death. I'm Marielle, Claudia, I'm Marisa I'm the black that could be your daughter ... screaming against White Macho patriarchal power.  Marielle Franco, FRANCO FRANCO FRANCO
Escute essa canção. Listen to this song.


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Tuesday 22 May 2018

RAMNMELZEE - BEAT BOP THEORY


The Spectacular Personal Mythology of Rammellzee

Drawing from philology, astrophysics, and medieval history, Ramm channelled the chaos of seventies New York through his art and music.


Published on The New Yorker by Hua Hsu (May 28, 2018)

In the late nineteen-seventies, the sociologist Nathan Glazer had grown weary of riding New York’s graffiti-covered subways. The names of young vandals, who identified themselves as “writers” rather than as artists, were everywhere—inside, outside, sometimes stretching across multiple train cars. Glazer didn’t know who these writers were, or whether their transgressive spirit ever manifested itself in violent crimes, but that didn’t matter. The daily confrontation with graffiti suggested a city under siege. “The signs of official failure are everywhere,” he wrote in an influential 1979 essay. Graffiti, with its casual anarchy and cryptic syntax, offered glimpses into a “world of uncontrollable predators.” In the nineties, Glazer’s essay would help inspire the concept of “broken windows” policing—a theory that preserving the appearance of calm, orderly neighborhoods can foster peace and civility.

Graffiti has always had this kind of metaphorical power. It is somehow more than art or destruction (even though it is both), and it prompts awe or dread, depending on your tolerance for disorder. For every Glazer, there were romantics like Norman Mailer, who had written the text for a book of photographs elevating graffiti to the status of “faith.” From his perspective, graffiti forced the upper crust to reckon with the names and the fugitive dreams of a forgotten underclass: “You hit your name and maybe something in the whole scheme of the system gives a death rattle.”
Few people understood and internalized this power as deeply as the artist, rapper, and theoretician Rammellzee (which he styled as The ramm:ell:zee). He believed that his time in the train yards and the tunnels of New York gave him a vision for how to destroy and rebuild our world. He was born in 1960 and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. His birth name is a closely guarded secret; he legally changed it to his artistic tag in 1979. (He also insisted that The ramm:ell:zee was an “equation,” not a name.) Little is known about his youth, aside from passing aspirations to study dentistry (he was good with his hands) and to be a model (in a 1980 catalogue, he is identified as Mcrammellzee).

Ramm—as he became known—believed that language enforced discipline, and that whoever controlled it could steer people’s thoughts and imaginations. His hope wasn’t to replace English; he wanted to annihilate it from the inside out. His generation grew up after urban flight had devastated New York’s finances and infrastructure. Ramm channelled the chaos into a spectacular personal mythology, drawn from philology, astrophysics, and medieval history. He was obsessed with a story of Gothic monks whose lettering grew so ornate that the bishops found it unreadable and banned the technique. The monks’ work wasn’t so different from the increasingly abstract styles of graffiti writing, which turned a name into something mysterious and unrecognizable. Ramm developed a philosophy, Gothic Futurism, and an artistic approach that he called Ikonoklast Panzerism: “Ikonoklast” because he was a “symbol destroyer,” abolishing age-old standards of language and meaning; “Panzer” because this symbolic warfare involved arming all the letters of the alphabet, so that they might liberate themselves. He lived these ideas through his art and his music, and by being part of the hip-hop scene during its infancy.

In 1983, Rammellzee and a rapper named K-Rob went to visit the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Though Ramm and Basquiat were friends, they were also rivals. Ramm would later say that Basquiat wasn’t a “dream artist”—he didn’t so much radiate visions outward as take things in like a “sponge,” learning about genius from books. He and Ramm once bet on who could most convincingly parody the other’s work. (Ramm claimed not only that he won but that Basquiat’s art dealer, who wasn’t in on their ruse, told Basquiat that “his” work was the best he had ever done.)

That night, Basquiat invited Ramm and K-Rob to record a song he’d written. Ramm, who had rapped in the movie “Wild Style,” was already known for his unique nasal sneer. (He called it his “gangster duck” style.) The two men looked at Basquiat’s elementary rhymes, laughed, and tossed them in the trash. Instead, they made up their own lyrics—a brilliant, surreal tale of a kid (the earnest, bemused K-Rob) who’s on his way home and a hectoring pimp (Ramm) who tries to tempt him toward the dark side. Basquiat called the song “Beat Bop,” and paid for it to be produced; he painted the vinyl single’s cover art himself. The song was murky and strange, like a spiky funk jam slowed to a sinister crawl. In the background, someone tunes a violin. There’s so much echo and reverb on the track that it sounds like an attempt at time travel.

In the eighties, graffiti gained acceptance in the art world. Despite Ramm’s charisma, the intensity of his work and his stubborn, erratic personality kept him on the movement’s fringes. Where Basquiat and Keith Haring seemed shy showmen, Ramm came across as a nutty professor. His early paintings took inspiration from the psychedelia of comic books and science fantasy, with mazy train tracks running across cosmic reliefs. His palette was attuned to the era’s anxieties about nuclear war and nuclear waste. The colors were bright and garish, suggesting a box of neon highlighters run amok.

In the mid-eighties, he began rendering these ideas in 3-D. He made sculpturesthat evoked the fossilized remains of twentieth-century life: newspaper clippings, key rings, chain links, and other junk, floating in an epoxy ooze. The most remarkable works were his “Garbage Gods,” full-body suits of armor, some of which weighed more than a hundred pounds. They look like junk-yard Transformers doing samurai cosplay. His most famous character, the Gasholeer, was outfitted with a small flamethrower.


Ramm’s art, thought, and music are the subject of the exhibition “ramm∑llz∑∑: Racing for Thunder,” at Red Bull Arts New York. Befitting the popular drink’s own sense of iconoclasm, “Racing” bathes in Ramm’s frenzied, free-associative, and occasionally overwhelming energy. There are his early canvases and sculptures, along with flyers, business cards, manifestos, and patent applications. A small theatre screens previously unseen videos of Ramm rapping at night clubs. The most impressive part of the survey is a floor devoted to his “Garbage Gods” and “Letter Racers”—skateboards representing each letter of the alphabet, armed with makeshift rockets, screwdrivers, and blades.

Throughout the exhibition, you can hear moments from Ramm’s lectures on Gothic Futurism—a thrilling jumble of street-corner hustling and technical language, all “parsecs,” “integers,” “aerodynamics.” As I was examining a collection of hand-painted watches, I kept hearing Ramm pause as he reached the end of a long disquisition on ecological catastrophe and graffiti-as-warfare, and then bark, “Next slide!”

In early May, the Red Bull Music Festival staged a Ramm-inspired concert to mark the opening of the art show. Ramm had continued to make music after “Beat Bop,” never wavering from his philosophies, just declaring them against increasingly turbulent, industrial-sounding backdrops. The eclecticism of the bill spoke to his wandering ear, and ranged from the terse hardcore of Show Me the Body to the wise-ass raps of Wiki. K-Rob, wearing a T-shirt featuring a mushroom and the words “I’m a Fun Guy,” reprised his verse from “Beat Bop,” grinning the whole way through. Gio Escobar, the leader of the deft punk-jazz band Standing on the Corner, dedicated a song to a late friend. The departed are everywhere around us, he said, as a groove emerged from the band’s dubbed-out chaos. “And they’re waiting.”

As hip-hop and art changed, as graffiti vanished from New York’s trains and walls, Ramm delved further into his own private cosmos—namely, the enormous loft in Tribeca where he lived, which he called the Battle Station. His obscurity wasn’t a choice. In the early eighties, he offered to send the U.S. military some of the intelligence he had gathered for national defense. (It declined.) In 1985, he wrote an opera, “The Requiem of Gothic Futurism.” In the nineties, he tried to promote his ideas by producing a comic book and a board game. He thought that toy manufacturers might want to mass-produce his “Garbage Gods” models. He was the first artist to collaborate with the streetwear brand Supreme. There was a series of infomercial-like videos to seed interest in “Alpha’s Bet,” an epic movie that he hoped would finally resolve the narrative arc of his extended universe.

By the time Rammellzee died, in 2010, after a long illness, New York City had been completely remade by mayoral administrations that took broken-windows policing as gospel. The Battle Station became condos. The Internet has made it easy to take what the culture provides you and rearrange it in some novel, cheeky way. It’s much more difficult to build an entirely new world—to abide by an ethical vision with a ferocity that requires you to break all the rules. I was surprised by how moved I felt standing underneath Ramm’s “Letter Racers” and studying the textures of the “Garbage Gods.” To see their meticulous handiwork up close was to believe that Ramm’s far-flung theories, his mashup of quantum physics and “slanguage,” made sense as an outsider’s survival strategy. I noticed all the discarded fragments of city life—bulbs and screws, a billiard ball, a doll’s head, old fan blades and turn-signal signs, visors stacked to look like pill bugs. His commitment was total. These are works of devotion.

This is where Ramm wanted to live—at the edge of comprehensibility, but in a way that invited others to wonder. Cities are filled with strangers who possess an unnerving energy, who hail us with stories, songs, and poems. Ramm was one of these. In an interview filmed in the aughts, Ramm sheds light on his everyday life. Sometimes, he says, he’ll be walking down the street or sitting at a bar, and people will just look at him. And sometimes they’ll come up to him and ask, “Who are you?” He’s explaining all this while wearing one of his “Garbage God” masks. You notice his paunch, the warm crackle of his voice at rest. “I’m just an average Joe,” he says, and he sounds like he believes it. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the May 28, 2018, issue, with the headline “Graffiti Prophet.”BEAT BOP THEORYBeat Bop - Ramnmellzee + K Rob
Get funky in the place [x2]
It's pathetic dope addicts have to be abused
It's a shame what a day to be a prostitute
Life is given to us just to do the right thing
Instead of that we came a ho or a big dope fiend
Make you feel real bad every time I see
Another bum or brother sleeping on the street
In the corner in the morning every night and day
It's a pity so many people try to act gay
Everybody's turning crazy so you'd better believe
To do the right things or soon you'll see
Life ain't a moral joke it's a serious thing
When you're dealing with the answers that you can't explain
New York City is a place of mysteries
Drug addicts dope dealers taking over the streets
That me is always saying why the hell do we pay?
What for they break the laws and get a couple of days
No sense tryin' to help there's really no use
Think of us messing up lectating at you
Hot rocks tryin' to pop with no respect
Niggas waiting at the station for the big pay cheque
Home boys going bakin' on Thursday night
Girls waiting in the house for Mr. Right
Kids going to school just to be a fool
Never want to learn work just a polin' on you babe
It's the funky beat and it's the funky beat
And it's the funk, the funk and it's the funky beat
Yyyyyeah
[Rammellzee]
This is the mellow they call the Rammell
That rocks you with the rhythm that'll shock your spell
When the shake-up kid that wakes you up in the morning
Gotta rape with the rhythm like a number one groanin'
MC quick just to make your peanut butter
Shock with the rhythm of a number one undercover
Break it up just shake it up rodeo uh [x2]
I'm the mellow D down with the funky sound
That can mace your brain with my diamond studded crown
Just a makin' you dip like a little bitty dive
Live a prick just bakin' your hide
Rock on to the break of dawn
Just freak that yeah baby
Just freak it yeah baby
Like the little jelly-bean I'm a sweet like a candy-cane
Make you get down just the number one stain on the train
Just groovin' like a say john
Just break it up yeah yeah stay john
Like a roller coaster ride that can make you bump
Just groovin' with the rhythm as I shake your rump
You gotta rock rock you don't stop the baby y'all
You gotta now rock and you don't stop
Just hip-hop the day they doo-be-doo
Yeah Scooby Doo what you wanna do crew
Just freak out, yeah baby
Just freak up yeah, yeah baby
Drink it up yeah, I know my dear
I can rock you out this atmosphere
Like a gangster prankster number one bankster
Got the much cash to make you thankyou
Rock on to the break of dawn
Break of dawn, keep it on keep it on
I know ZZ that can rock quick
Like a iconoclast had your rhythm to the stick
Just a rock on like the finger lick
Finger popping hop popping now don't stop bunny rock
Bunny rock and you don't stop
That long finger nail at the end of my tip
Of my pinkie cocaine make you slip a my lip
Just make you freak when a panny wanny with clip
Got the little pat to the dab'll make you my hip
Shake shake rock body rock the hip and the hop
Like RPM's my
Nose don't care about the rhythm that breaks
Because the music is down when your body want to shake
Gotta hip hop and then baby dog get down
Let the rock just shock your dome
Just break it up, shake it up yeah baby
Cause the groove just rocks like a little shady
Get shade yeah, shade it up with the glasses
Make it on with the serious pattern
Get the melody quick, yep the melody sound
That'll rock you quick with the number one crowd
I can get up on the groove that make you shake down
Cause the beat from the depths of hell make you get down
Rock on, to the beat
Freak it on, freak it on with that kid unique
Just check it out, check check it out
I said I broke into a dun Seville yeah
And then I shot across top of hill, with the chill yeah
Break it up Cypress Hill, shake it up
With the writings on the wall, I don't give a f**k
Just jam it up, rock on you don't stop
Jam it up, rock on you don't stop
The B-boy, rock on you don't stop
Freak it on freak it on break down don't stop
From the depths of hell, rock well Rammell
Rock on to the beat beat
Yeah candy-cane kid you're just rocking so sweet
Cause I'm a jam up hip hop making the tip top
Shake on the break down the needle on the eye
Grooving with the rhythm of the break in the tie
[K Rob]
Smoke cheeba, into whores, drinking all week through
Never want to go to school and that's a fact
Till all of a sudden you got left back
Now you're feeling real low and mighty hurt
And your friends are snapping on you like you're a jerk
Now things are hard and you're really depressed
And your mind can't function cause you can't pass the test
You're saying to yourself what can I do?
I can't go home, I might as well quit school
Jobs are hard to find everybody knows
And you can't do crime cause you're on parole
No education is a big disgrace and
So you might as well work at the sanitation
Can you get my drift?
Get funky in the place
[Rammellzee]
I know the man that gets with the deal
That rocks like the pimps that acts real real
He can get real I'll when you're on the chill
I like the quarter drop a dime
That can make you seek a thrill
Master killer called the evil gorilla
Yes the best in the nation yeah number one thriller
I'm the best cut, rocking with the duck
Making with the conceal
Shock shock you don't quit quit you don't quit
Rocking, don't stop the beat bop the rocking
You don't quit quit
Turn it up y'all with the serious sh*t
You shake it on rocking on and on break of dawn
Keep it on keep it on break of dawn
Get on, get on, get on, a get up, get up
Like a rodeo, rodeo big duck
Ha ha, ha ha, ha ha
I like a DD the hopping with the BB
King of the mike a like a mike controller see
Get on the freak a like a little di*k di*k
You're rocking hard with kid unique
Like disco Patty Duke uh I don't stop
Patty Duke played out the hitting the top
I break a rock grandmaster hip a joint up shock it up
Check it out you don't stop
[K Rob]
Get funky in the place [x2]
What?
All the time that you been hanging out with your friends
You never took the effort to see what's happening
Crime, crime, crime can't get it off my mind
Cause it's a thing we have to face all the damn time
People always say why do they break the laws
Gonna tell you right now it's cause a all a y'all
That's a go like ebola, gonna let it be told
It doesn't matter to a thief if you're young or old
Just money they wanting they need it bad
And to take another person's life it makes them feel glad
So rock, to the funky beat
Ain't another ain't another that you heard yet
Rockin' better rockin' better on the radio set
And if you did and if you did please tell me now
Are there others are there others rockin' better in town?
Have to say have to say don't front on me
And if you do and if you do it's only jealousy
All the ladies, G-money
All the homeboys, G-money
Money makin', rock on and
Money makin', rock on and
Boogie Down yeah, rock on and
Rammellzee, rock on and
[Rammellzee]
You know the crew that can make you get down
With the funky moves bust now
When I get down to the funky jackpot
You know I got the rhythm just makes you bet bet
Your cash uh like a three card money money
All I wanna do is just rock the beat honey honey
And with the jam down with the dive
Like I'm picking your pocket with the di*k on the slide slide
But your cock ain't 38 shooting me a straight
Cause I'm down like the double def remanipulate
And on that beat grandmaster make a move
Making with the rhythm when I shoot into the boo boo
Rocking on like a Tutti-Frutti boo boo
You know uh when I went to school
I went to the depths of hell to the darkest deepest corner
Rocking all the women shocking with the order
Order of a double def a magical man
I'm like a dipster prankster deffing with the damn damn
Def def def jam y'all. I'm like a
B-boy makin' with the freak freak [x2]
Shoot it up yeah shoot it up y'all yeah [x2]
Break it down yeah baby [x2]
Sniffing the dope yeah and taking the oath
I'm like a little old homeboy shooting with the toke yeah
Making with the sneaker rocking like a easer
Mc Quick just a number one pleaser
Shooting like an uptown pimp on the check
When I step out my ride I can hit the deck
Rock on to the break of dawn [x2]
Seven twenty Z
[K-Rob]
Bust a move
Well I was coming from school it was three o'clock
Had no money in my pocket broke to the last drop
I had no way of getting home
I was really messed up cause I was all alone
I felt the real sick and very confused
And my heart was pumping fast I think it was the booze
And my legs felt the weak and I couldn't walk
Got pains in my chest when I tried to talk
I said, 'Oh God it had to happen to me'
'Give me a chance to straighten up and get a day OB'
Cause I'm the type of person who likes to play
And at the time I had a drink and got carried away
You know everybody once made a mistake
It's not too late to straighten up so give me a break
I'll go to church and do my work instead of being a jerk
As a doctor or a lawyer even desk clerk
Whatever you say I must do
Cause you're the one and only and I trust you
Crime is going up...

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Friday 18 May 2018

An Island of Disparity - Bruno Verner introduces Terra em Transe by Glauber Rocha (1967)

An Island of Disparity: Summer screening series at Goldsmiths 



An Island of Disparity brings different perspectives and points of view together, in a quest to survey a space of heterogeneity. The platform is a weekly informal movie & snacks during the summer term led by/for Goldsmiths postgraduate students from different departments. Every week a postgraduate researcher is invited to share a film in relation to his/her research. The programme asks and intents to reflect on the role and position of Goldsmiths through research students, on institutional and social issues affecting minorities. 

An Island of Disparity aims to establish a safe space to question traditional academic stances through artistic and experimental approaches. As a result, we intent to stimulate cross-disciplinary exchange of perspectives between postgraduate students, and foster intercultural dialogue in the academic sphere, by presenting films from the “Global South” (with English subtitles) and disseminate research around subaltern subjects. 

Imagined and organized by Romeo Gongora and Mitxy Mabel Meneses Gutiérrez.

Landscape:
 
15 May 2018: Wing Kit Hung (Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths): Queer Families in China and Hong Kong: Love between Queer Children & Their Straight Parents
22 May 2018: Mabel Meneses (Department of Politics, Goldsmiths): a clip of one day in the life of a cross-border student at the Mexico-US border, and a satire of the borderland

29 May 2018: Bruno Verner (Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths): Terra em Transe by Glauber Rocha (1967) 

05 June 2018: Faiza Ahmad Khan (Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths): Bamako by Abderrehman Sissako (2006) 

12 June 2018: Saba Zavarei (Department of Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths): Film tbc

19 June 2018: Mubeena Nowrung (Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths): 3 idiots by Rajkumar Hirani (2009)

Contributors: 

Romeo Gongora is a visual artist and PhD researcher in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London (UK). Since 2008, he has conducted major collaborative arts projects that interact with the social sphere, integrating politics and pedagogy in the practice of performance. www.romeogongora.com

Kit Hung is an independent filmmaker and currently pursuing a PhD on queer kinship and queer cinema at the Department of Media and Communications. Lecturer of the Academy of film, Hong Kong Baptist University, his films have won numerous international awards and were screened at over 120 international film festivals.

Mitxy Mabel Meneses Gutiérrez is a MPhil/PhD student in the Department of Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2012, she has been working with International and Transnational Migration, International Cooperation for Development and Education M.menesesg@gold.ac.uk

Faiza Ahmad Khan is at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is working with a video archive of testimonies from an anti-Muslim riot in India. Currently she is exploring infrastructures at the level of the event and of the archive.

Mubeena Nowrung is an Associate Lecturer and PhD Researcher in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research explores coaching and mentoring for university students. She also runs coaching and mentoring sessions, helping students overcome stress, anxiety, and build confidence so that they have a successful university experience, contributing to their academic, professional and personal development  m.nowrung@gold.ac.uk

Bruno Verner is a musician, poet and cultural theorist best known for his work with Brazilian tropical punk funk art duo Tetine. Verner has performed extensively in Europe and Brazil. He is currently pursuing a PhD on Brazilian Post Punk in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London www.tetine.net

Saba Zavarei is an artist, writer and PhD Researcher in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the co-founder at K[]NESH SPACE, a migrating platform for critical and creative spatial practice. ​Stretched between London and Tehran, Saba's work explores the sociopolitical structure of the space in relation to the performances of the everyday life, gender norms, transgressive acts and protest  www.sabazavarei.com

Supported by the SU Academic Communities Fund and MARs Research Hub





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