Electronic and Experimental Music: Luciano Berio

I love Luciano Berio and he is probably the first musician that turned me on to NOISE and experimental music and electronica. These are great bits from a documentary about his work.

Ghettoized Artists

It's basically against the law to be an artist.

I'm just sick of it.

The past few days a certain someone in our family has tried to sell their art on the street. For amazing prices too! He managed to spend only a short time, about half an hour in a lovely public square, with lots of people enjoying the summer evenings, a fountain...sold one small painting. Then was asked by a cop to get a move on. We have the same fucking bullshit in Toronto too. Only Chicago is even worse...if thats possible.

I am so pissed off. I began searching the internet to see if others out there are like me...fed up.

I don't think art should even be in a gallery. I believe it should be sold for pretty inexpensive prices and mostly shown outside, on street corners, in parks, in grocery store parking lots.

I am pretty much alone on this...except for Paris and New York. The artists in New York went up against Rudy Guillianni to have the right to show their art outside.

It's complete utter bullshit that we can't set up little areas to meet people and show our art to people outside. Not only is it virtually impossible to show or sell art work as an artist on a good day outlawing our freedom of speech by not allowing us to show our work outside...free of walls, free of gallery bullshit, free of "historically correct" theories and someone else telling us how to frame or exhibit our work. This is utter bullshit...and I am really surprised when I think about it...just how long this crap has gone on within cities especially...and how artists do so very little to stand up for themselves.

Today I found a group in Chicago that is using the protection that homeless people have for free speech (well...it allows them to panhandle downtown) to allow artists to share their visual language...I think they plan on suing the city...

Artists Give Chicago An Ultimatum

Chicago Artists from the Free Speech Artists’ Movement have given the City of Chicago an ultimatum to exempt artists from the peddlers license or go to court over the artists’ First Amendment right to sell their art on the public sidewalks and in the parks of Chicago. The artists of the Free Speech Artists’ Movement (Free S.A.M.) say the City writes broad laws claiming to control traffic on sidewalks that impact their speech rights enormously. The artists point out First Amendment case law demands narrow laws whenever writing laws that limit First Amendment protected speech. Free S.A.M. artists claim their art is protected speech. They are willing to fight for their right to survive in Chicago.

In Chicago, homeless persons have won the right to panhandle in the Loop based on their protected First Amendment right to free speech. But a homeless person, if he is an artist, can’t ask you for the same dollar for a portrait on a paper plate because he has lost his speech right to do so. Jobless artists also miss this speech right. Street artists are criminalized in Chicago. Their rights are legislated away. World famous, Lee Godi, who made her mark selling her paintings around the steps of the Art Institute, under today’s laws, would be jailed and never be able to become known.

Art fairs, neighborhood festivals and especially the closed gallery scenes of Chicago are not viable alternatives to the right to sell your art on the street, where you are able to meet directly with your audience on a daily basis. With their freedom to sell in public, artists can create open-air art markets with poetry and song in Chicago. More tourists and more artists would be attracted to Chicago. Our economy would grow.



Especially in the uptight economic situation Americans are finding themselves in...isn't it time to let people try to sell their handmade and visual and linguistic narratives? Fuck the bullshit. I first got really angry when our landlord wouldn't let us have a yard ale and sell our art. What the fuck are we paying rent for exactly? I thought America was pro-freedom and pro free-enterprise?


“A peddler is a person who moves from place to place on the street selling food and non-food items to the public,” said Efrat Stein, a spokeswoman for the city's Department of Business Affairs & Licenses, which issues peddler's licenses.
Leroy said that selling items on the street as opposed to inside a store or at home means bigger profits.
“I have less overhead, more productivity and minimum stress,” he said.
And just like retail stores, street entrepreneurs markup their prices to allow for a profit.
“I pay $2 each for DVDs and sell them $5 a piece or three for $12,” Juno said. “That’s cheaper than the $15 to $20 Target may charge when they only paid $5 for it from the movie studio.”
For the most part, prices are reasonable for merchandise sold on the street, said one of Brown’s regular customers.
“Every Friday I come see my man to get the latest movie flicks and CDs. The only time I go to the movies is when I am with my girl. Otherwise, bootleg works just fine for me,” the man said.
Leroy charges $10 for Barack Obama T-shirts, Cubs baseball hats and a 10-pack bundle of face towels or socks. At stores like Wal-Mart, Barack Obama T-shirts are not even sold, and 10 face towels cost more than $10.
For safety reasons, he declined to reveal how much money he earns as a street vendor.
“I have been robbed, stabbed and shot while selling my merchandise so I don’t want to say how much money I take in,” Leroy said. “But obviously if I have been doing this for 25 years, I must be doing pretty well.” But as lucrative as some street vendors’ enterprises may be, it could be illegal.
City ordinance requires those selling items on the street to the public to first obtain a peddler's license that is good for two years. To do so, sellers must be at least 16 years old, have a valid driver's license or state identification card, obtain an Illinois business tax number from the state, not owe any debts to the city such as parking tickets and pay $165 fee. The license can be purchased at City Hall. Still, city officials said it is illegal to sell certain merchandise on the street like DVDs, CDs and cigarettes, even with a peddler’s license.
Leroy said he does have a peddler’s license, but Juno said it's a waste of money.
“The city wants me to give them money to make money, and the only thing I get for my money is a piece of paper. Man, please. The city can go to hell,” Juno said. From "The Defender"

Search Words That Brought People Here

VISITS

Total 78,530
Average Per Day 89
Average Visit Length 1:30
Last Hour 3
Today 29
This Week 622

I haven't listed search words that brought people to this blog in a long LOOONNNGGGG time. I used to list them all the time, like once a week but it seemed like a lot of the words were "same old same old"...but today I saw a couple of funny ones so here is a list from the recent activity. I'm getting darn close to 80,000 visitors hitting this joint, I was surprised to see that today on my site meter. I was also surprised that almost no one has noticed that I lost my template. I was cleaning up a problem on my template a few weeks ago..and had to remove my header and everything...and I have no idea how to put it back. So now my blog is back to it's original ghetto standard format. Actually I don't mind so much.


house machine for living
kiss them for
lola rennt gnostic
guy maddin foley
congratulations madonna
on turntable
favorite female
pinata protest
pre-raphelites were punk rockers of their day
male supermodels
fur
cormac, mccarthy, has, unmistakable, prose, style, what, you, see, the, most, distinctive, features, that, style, how, the, writing, the, road, some, ways, more, like, poetry, than, narrative, prose
ending blood meridian
pop stars and sunglasses
pirates
history masterbation
christian, know, therell, never, paradise, space, and, time, therell, never, utopia, human, history, the, question, have, the, kind, conviction, commitment, courage, and, willingness, serve, make, things, better, the, short, time, that, are, here, pass, onto, our, children
club keanu
cormac mccarthy rolling stone interview
gnostic clothing

The Gossip

From Spin Magazine:

What's that joke about gay couples wanting to get married? They deserve the chance to be as unhappy as straight people. On the Gossip's major-label debut -- 12 Rick Rubin–produced tracks spanning minimalist disco, post-punk, and garage -- the trio extends the gay-positive message of 2006's "Standing in the Way of Control," the single that broke them in Europe seven years after the band started. Yet frontwoman Beth Ditto remains caught somewhere between Donna Summer and Dolly Parton: she loves to love, but all those complications keep her down.
Ditto is obsessed with the word itself: "love" appears in three song titles, not including the dark, pulsing "Four-Letter Word" (which is about you know what). Rarely, as on centerpiece "Men in Love," does she actually celebrate it. She breaks up that track's kicker ("Men in love...with each other...hey!") with expectant pauses, as her phrasing mimics the song's jerky rhythm. On "For Keeps," Ditto sets up an us-versus-the-world argument, but the condition of the settlement is the persistently unfulfillable "need to be free." Ditto's huge voice can't do soft, so it shoots skyward on "Love Long Distance," and coupled with a mechanical piano and canned beat, the band starts to sound a bit catatonic. But the rest of Music for Men is a tightly wound disco-punk conjugation. In the end, that's the only love affair the band happily consummates.



INterview with the band...

David Lynch: Artist, Storyteller...Singer!

David Lynch has landed up becoming more and more of a grassroots and alternative artist over the past few years. With his experience and fame he has been able to use it to continue to be an artist and I greatly admire him for this act. He is a yardstick for independent music and film makers. All hail Lynch! The entire article with Lynch is a perfect piece in conjunction with the Trent Reznor interview below. This is how it's done.

From Sight & Sound Magazine, July 2009 issue:

“Well, here's how it happened,” Lynch explains by phone from his home in the Hollywood Hills. “Danger Mouse told me that he had been working on this album with Sparklehorse and asked if I could do some still photos for it. I thought that was a cool concept. As he was leaving I said jokingly, 'You know, I thought you might be coming up here to ask me to sing.' I thought he would laugh, but he said, 'No, no, no, I want you to sing on a track.' So he started playing me tracks that didn't have anybody on them, one of them stood out, and that was the song 'Dark Night of the Soul'.”

Lynch had worked successfully on music in the past, among other projects writing lyrics for singer Julee Cruise for her two albums he co-produced with his regular composer Angelo Badalamenti in the early 1990s. But he has only recently begun to sing himself; the first time was on songs included on the Inland Empire (2006) soundtrack. Of the two songs he sings on the new album, 'Star Eyes (I Can't Catch It)' and 'Dark Night of the Soul', he says: “It was really a thrill. I am working on new music. I'm not a musician, but I play music. I started doing it just to make sounds, experimental sounds, and it's led to something. When you see real musicians and what some of them can do, it's mind-blowing; I love being in that world, it's just a thrill. Musicians depend on others, it's truly like a bonding, unity thing. It's magical.”

'Dark Night of the Soul' is sung by Lynch in a tremulous voice - imagine his distinctive speaking voice, with its unusual vowels, sung in a shy, higher pitch and you're getting close. The track gives the record its title, capturing the overall mood of the album. Although the different singers worked entirely independently of one another, all the songs ultimately seem thematically linked by suggesting a troubling, nightmarish - and typically Lynchian - journey through an urban night.

Lynch conceived the ideas for the three or four photographs that would accompany each song; all of the pictures in the book were shot especially for the project. As ever with Lynch, the initial process involved him 'fishing' for the ideas swimming around him. “I'd just sit and listen to those songs, images would come and I'd write those things down. And then Danger Mouse and his bunch and me and my crew, we organised two days of shooting, just like going out and shooting a film, but it was going out and shooting stills - that was a blast, such a great two days.”







Oh...I am so excited about this Interview Project!

Trent Reznor Interview: Music Is Free

UPDATE (1-22-08) at 2:25 p.m.: More than a week after this story was published, Trent Reznor accused CNET News.com of misquoting him about the issue of a music tax on ISPs. We have posted an audio excerpt of the Reznor interview here. For the sake of full disclosure, we have also updated this story to include the text of what he said following his remarks about the ISP tax.

Very early in a discussion with Trent Reznor, the front man for the band Nine Inch Nails, it's obvious how highly he prizes his collaboration with musician Saul Williams on the album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust.
Reznor produced and helped bankroll the album, which debuted November 1. All the more reason why he was stunned when fewer than one in five people who downloaded the music were willing to pony up $5, roughly the cost of a McDonald's Quarter Pounder.

Williams and Reznor were trying to follow the lead of Radiohead by distributing music online without the backing of a label. Like the British supergroup, Williams made the album available for free in one version but he also offered the option of buying a higher-quality digital download for $5. The promotions were groundbreaking and plenty of people predicted that a profitable outcome would convince many musicians to drop their labels and use the Internet to distribute their own artistic creations.
And then Reznor ended the hoopla last week when he reported on his blog that 154,449 people had downloaded NiggyTardust and 28,322 of them paid the $5 as of January 2. In the blog, Reznor suggested that he was "disheartened" by the results.

Now, in his first interview since releasing the sales data, Reznor on Wednesday talked about his rethinking of music in the digital age. (To see an interview with Williams, published Friday, click here: "Unlike Trent Reznor, Saul Williams isn't disheartened.")

Q: Trent, lots of fans were shocked and saddened by how disappointed you sounded with the sales results. Many piped up to tell you that the numbers may be misleading. Were the numbers that bad?
Reznor: I'm not disappointed with the numbers with Saul at all. I think, particularly looking at what he's done historically and in the climate of today's music scene, that's something to be proud of.

What disappointed me is that I had thought--and this is just based on how I experience music--given the opportunity (his voice trails off). Why do I end up stealing music? Usually because I can't get it easily somewhere else or the version I can get is an inferior one with DRM, perhaps, or I have to drive across town to get it to then put it on my computer or it's already out on the Internet and I can't pay for it yet.

If I think of it a month later walking through Amoeba (record store), hmm...do I want to just buy a piece of plastic and give most of the money to the record labels, who have to be thieves because my experience with them has always been that? And you have a lot of reasons why you didn't do it. So I thought if you take all those away and here's the record in as great a quality as you could ever want, it's available now and it's offered for an insulting low price, which I consider $5 to be, I thought that it would appeal to more people than it did. That's where my sense of disappointment is in general, that the idea was wrong in my head and for once I've given people too much credit.

Saul and I went at this thing with the right intentions. We wanted to put out the music that we believe in. We want to do it as unencumbered and as un-revenue-ad-generated and un-corporate-affiliated as possible. We wanted it without a string attached, without the hassle, without the bait and switch, or the "Now you can buy the s**** version if you buy..." No, no, we said: "Here it is. At the same time, it'd be nice if we can cover the costs and perhaps make a living doing it."
I'm not saying that this is a completely accurate test. Yes, there is a possibility that people downloaded it and the same people went back and downloaded it and paid for it and that can throw the numbers off. I get all that.
It kind of gets into the bigger picture that you've had to face as a musician over the last few years, which in my mind was a bitter pill to swallow, but it's pretty far down the hatch with me now: the way things are, I think music should be looked at as free. It basically is. The toothpaste is out of the tube and a whole generation of people is accustomed to music being that way. There's a perception that you don't pay for music when you hear it on the radio or MySpace.
There's a difficult transition in the mind of the musician and certainly in the mind of the record label. If that is the case, how does one adapt to that?

How are you going to adapt to that?
Reznor: For me, I choose the battles I can fight. In my mind, I think if there was an ISP tax of some sort, we can say to the consumer, "All music is now available and able to be downloaded and put in your car and put in your iPod and put up your a-- if you want, and it's $5 on your cable bill or ISP bill."
Someone asked me recently whether I've used 4-1-1 lately. I said 'Not really." They said do you know you're paying for that every month? 'I am?' Yeah, X-amount of your money goes to a service that you don't even use.'

Was everybody in the Williams camp happy that you disclosed the sales numbers?
Reznor: I didn't see the harm in not using this opportunity--and I'll name check Radiohead on this--they've done a pretty suave marketing plan on this new record.
I think generally it's been a pretty cool thing, but what they've done is used those (sales) numbers in a way that they can spin them anyway they want cause you don't know what they are. They can present themselves as the biggest band in the world. Someone leaks out a number of a million and someone says a number of visits and someone else says that must mean they made a million and someone else says the average price was $5 or $6 and that means they made $10 million.

I highly doubt that's what happened based on my own experience.
And I'm not saying that Radiohead and Saul Williams are in the same breath in terms of popularity by any means, but it felt to me like that, partially inspired by Radiohead, we tried this and here's the results we got and I assume there's a bunch of other bands that are intrigued by the idea that may want to follow down that path. I'm not saying it was a failure or a success. I think it was both. But it wasn't 90 percent of the people that showed up paid us what we asked for. Nor did I ever think it would be. I'm not sure what I did expect.
But I've found it entertaining reading different people's perspective on the Web, what they've thought of what I've said. There's been a wave of people that said, 'Oh, that's depressing. Only 18 percent chose to pay for it.' Another whole wave of people feel just the opposite. I don't really know. That was the point of it. I've heard people say, 'What was the point of that blog?' It was just to share information with you. It wasn't any kind of concrete analysis of anything.
I'm sure I didn't win any points with the aforementioned people by doing what I did. I questioned whether it was the right thing, but it felt morally like the right thing to do. I'm not ashamed of it. I find myself a bit defensive right now, like 'Did I f**k up? Should I not have said that?'

Talk about technology and your experience using the Web as a distribution method.
Reznor: When we started the idea, we liked the clean feel of the Radiohead experience. It didn't feel like we were a sidebar on the Snocap site. Somehow that kind of thing cheapened it in a sense for whatever reason. I'm not sure why. That's based on my own perception. I like the idea of feeling kind of homemade and simple. There is a beauty to the fact that everybody has got their own distribution network that is already set up. How simple and obvious to just do this. But the reality of that is building the infrastructure that has a store and accepts the right form of payment and fulfillment and all those boring kinds of things.
What did you learn from the experience?
If I could redo everything and start again, I think having a physical product is a good thing. I think that having some more coordination on our part--and I'll take the blame on that because there was an urgency to get this done and get it out that I was the ringleader for--I think if we could wave a magic wand and do it again I think being able to offer an inexpensive version in addition to a premium physical product that could be shipped out afterward.
On day one you can buy it online and it's also in the store. But the manufacturing (of CDs) is the leak (to file-sharing sites) for everything and the leak is important to get around. The leak blows momentum. It happens and it's going to happen on every release there is. It's a fact of life. But that leak happens once it leaves mastering and goes to manufacturing, if it hasn't by then, then it certainly does at that point. I like the energy of release day, the excitement of watching blogs light up and bulletin boards. I think that's an important spike in attention. And the only way I can see to accommodate a physical release if it goes to manufacturing after the thing is in the hands of people. But I do think there is a need for presence in physical retail.
Are you going to abandon this or will Nine Inch Nails offer a similar promotion as Williams?
If I had a record to put out today, I would do something very similar to what we just did cause I don't think there is a better option. I would include a physical piece as I just said and all of the components I would make sure had value.
Saul said he doesn't have any regrets about the way the album was released. He credits the Internet with setting him free from having to deal with the labels. Is this how you feel?
Reznor: I can't tell you how great it felt when Saul and I and his team said 'Let's do this. Let's go.'
There's not an army of people saying no for this reason. To feel in control of your own destiny for a change, that's an incredibly liberating feeling. Where it needs to be worked out and fine tuned is the right way to hopefully generate enough commerce from it to justify doing it and really working on the right way and right tone to get the word out to people that doesn't feel intrusive or old school.
But at the same time there is a little bit of an element with Saul's record of a tree falling in the woods...It hurt my feelings to see it not show up on everybody's Best Album Of The Year lists, because I think not enough people knew it was out there.
In a separate interview with Saul Williams, the rapper and spoken-word artist has a very different take on the sales performance of NiggyTardust than Reznor. That interview will appear on CNET News.com on Friday.

How Funky Is Your Faith

In Canada, not funky enough.

What the hell is going on in Canada? First, people are complaining about daycare workers and waste management workers getting 18 days of sick days. The 18 sick days with bankable options when a person retires is an innovative money-saving program to curb absenteeism.

Union benefits and contracts have influenced in positive ways all of our job and benefits. When we want to be jealous and not support a Union...we are settting our own work atmospheres and benefits backwards. An example? We have weekends because of Unions.

The American concept of the weekend has its roots in labor union attempts to accommodate Jewish workers who took Saturday instead of Sunday as their Sabbath. The first five-day work week, according to a posted extract of Rybczynski's book, was instituted by a New England spinning mill for just this reason. Waiting For The Weekend at Amazon.

And next...Harper's government, are wanting to recind on tourism spending, aimed at Gay Pride in Toronto. I believe this is further evidence that Harper is barely even Canadian!

Brad Trost, a Saskatchewan Conservative MP, spoke out this week against federal support for Pride Week, arguing that the caucus and Harper's office were caught off guard by Ablonczy's announcement of support for the event.

"The pro-life and the pro-family community should know and understand that the tourism funding money that went to the gay pride parade in Toronto was not government policy, was not supported by – I think it's safe to say by a large majority – of the MPs," Trost said in an interview with LifeSiteNews.com, a website founded by the Campaign Life organization. From The Toronto Star

We don't need to be making cuts to jobs, to job benefits and to Festivals like the Vancouver Jazz Festival or Gay Pride. We need MORE of these job benefits and more spending on community festivals.

We need HIGHER TAXES in Canada. Every very cool society has high taxes. Higher taxes gives us strong innovative public service workers in the unions, infrastructure maintenance and more jobs! (see "The Happiest Places Have Higher Taxes...from Market Watch)

I am terrified I am seeing treason and a backwards movement in Canada the likes of which would make Tommy Douglas spin in his grave. I am ashamed of Canada right now.






*******************************************

Here is some rigorous discussion about economics and justice that might inspire visitors...



BILL MOYERS: But isn't it a fantasy to think that love can tame capitalism. In fact, you talk about the religion of catastrophe.

The origins of your faith. And, yet, the prosperity gospel, the gospel that began in a lot of big American churches, saying that God wants you to be rich, is spreading like wildfire to the rest of the world. Now, there's a different take on your faith. That is not about catastrophe, but about success.

CORNEL WEST: But that's part of the escapism. If they define success by how the world conceives of prosperity, rather than greatness. In the biblical text the greatness says what? He or she is greatest among you be your servant. There's a clash here. A very important clash.

But love is not a real small thing. Love is not just the key that unlocks the door to ultimate reality. But there would be no weekend if there were not a trade union movement that loved justice enough, and loved working people enough, so that bosses wouldn't treat them like commodities to be marginalized.

There would not be racial, the racial justice that we have of Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Phil Berrigan. There wouldn't be, without the love that you all had for justice, and the love enough for black people, to say, "Quit niggerizing these people. Quit intimidating them. Quit trying to make them so scared that they won't stand up and fight." Love is a serious thing. When you love your mamma, you take a bullet for her if she's treated unjustly. That's why justice is what love looks like in public.

SERENE JONES: But this thing about the story of love that we have the capacity for includes, within it, a recognition of the harshness and the brokenness and the darkness of our lives. And love exists in that. It doesn't exist despite it.

CORNEL WEST: That's right.

BILL MOYERS: I'm not sure you haven't confused love with justice.

SERENE JONES: Justice is nothing but love with legs. Justice is what love looks like when it takes social form.

BILL MOYERS: And that's the trade union movement you talked about.

SERENE JONES: That's what love is.

CORNEL WEST: That's the woman's movement. That's the gay and lesbian movement.

SERENE JONES: You put it in policy forms.


******************************************

GARY DORRIEN: Well, in fact, Rauschenbusch did speak to exactly this issue that Serene's bringing up. That's why he wanted to expand the cooperative sector. He said, "We've got to create structures in which," the way he would often put it, is, "Which bad people are forced to do good things."

That is if you set up, have structures in which cooperation is actually rewarded. Where you're met - where you have to deal with other people. Be solicitous of what they need. What they care about. And the like. That you can actually set up reward systems that make a better society. And sometimes he'd say you can even live out - you could be a Christian without having to retire from the world. And so that, I think these two things actually were tied together quite closely.

CORNEL WEST: I think in our present moment, though, it seems to me, the major challenge has to do with the sentimentalism, on one hand, which is an escape from reality, history, memory, and mortality and the flipside, which is cynicism. Which is just preoccupation with the 11th commandment, "Though shall not get caught."

And just read the business pages these days. What do we see? Gangster activity. Scandal after scandal. Stealing, stealing. Embezzlement, embezzlement. That is the back- this is the after effect of greed, indifference and fear.

Now we - as a Christian, I know there'll never be paradise in space and time. There'll never be utopia in human history. The question is: do we have the kind of conviction, commitment, courage and willingness to serve to make things better the short time that we are here to pass onto our children?

Capitalism is tamed only when those persons who are victimized, be they children or workers and others, love each other and justice enough to organize and mobilize and push capitalism into, like in the 1930s, collective bargaining rights for workers, right?

Or the 1960s. Black folk against American terrorism, Jim Crowe. They love enough. And even our elites. Our elites are not to be demonized. Elites can make choices. They're not locked into a category. That are connected to truth and justice. But it takes courage.


**********************************************

GARY DORRIEN: Certainly, from our experience of the course, this is an extraordinary generation. I mean, it's, they are connected. They care. They're looking for, they're always sort of obsessing about what's real. I mean, they've got radar for what's unreal.

For what is just merely abstract, or it doesn't really speak to their condition. What isn't going to make a difference. What kind of learning doesn't make any difference at all. They've got radar for that. But they're very hungry for what is going to make a difference. And how it is that they can live out their faith in this world that we're creating.

SERENE JONES: They're not afraid of hard thinking. But they also want, they want beauty. The beauty of the thought to inspire.

CORNEL WEST: This is one of the reasons why these new forms that we're talking about find black forms and afro-American forms so attractive.

SERENE JONES: Absolutely.

CORNEL WEST: Because here you got this leaven in this larger American loaf been sitting here all this time. These young white brothers and sisters, they want to get into hip hop. They want to be able to move their bodies. They want to have an orality that is smooth like Jay-Z. There is something about the black experience in America, at its best.

We know we got black gangsters like anybody else. At its best that speaks to these kinds of issues. You've got Martin as the best, in many ways, in the political sphere. You got Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin. So much of the best in the cultural sphere. Now the young folk are hungry for it. We'll see. We're in a new transition.

SERENE JONES: And what you've done so well, in this class, is remind us again and again that space of the real is not a Christianity that's nice. It's a Christianity in which there's love. But mixed into it is the harshness of this. I mean, our students want that.

CORNEL WEST: It's the funk. It's the funk. It's the funk of life.

SERENE JONES: It is.

CORNEL WEST: That's what black life is about. But, in the end, that's what human life is about. How funky is your faith.




The entire transcript of transcript of this discussion is here

Or you can watch the entire video here.