Just past the halfway point in the documentary Mr. Soul!, poet Felipe Luciano calls Ellis Haizlip “the most effective, insidious revolutionary that I have ever met.” It isn’t meant as a specific accolade, but it is a badge of honor for a man who honored the true meaning of sedition. Subversion in the arts is a skill which can be expressed as simply as putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Seditious political expression is rarely so subtle. The creator and host of the all-too-short lived public television variety program Soul! achieved a dream mix of diverse thought, some which went under the radar, some designed to be unnoticed, all of which was riveting, and everything absolutely accessible.
Soul! captured everyday insurrection. Melvin Van Peebles’ 1971 independent feature Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song proclaimed to be unapologetically Black, Haizlip saw no reason to bring apology into the equation. Nothing he was doing,...
Soul! captured everyday insurrection. Melvin Van Peebles’ 1971 independent feature Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song proclaimed to be unapologetically Black, Haizlip saw no reason to bring apology into the equation. Nothing he was doing,...
- 7/31/2021
- by Alec Bojalad
- Den of Geek
In the 1980s, the crack epidemic tore through America’s inner cities like a brushfire, and it was a devastating scourge. But it also left a seared trail of media images that were more concocted, simplistic, and racially biased than they pretended to be. Remember “crack babies”? The phenomenon of an infant born to a crack-addicted mother, with the infant damaged by (or addicted to) the drug, was something that on occasion did happen, but the news media, using radically distorted numbers, made it sound like an encroaching army of zombie babies. As for crack users themselves, two-thirds of them were white, yet you wouldn’t have dreamed that from the media coverage. Those trumped-up images, like crack itself, did their damage, leaving a residue of hyped sensation the way that junk food deposits chemicals in the body.
Stanley Nelson’s “Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy,” a Netflix documentary that drops on Jan.
Stanley Nelson’s “Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy,” a Netflix documentary that drops on Jan.
- 1/9/2021
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
At the moment, Baz Luhrmann is working on his take of New York City in the 1970s in the upcoming Netflix series "The Get Down," but the story of what really went down, told by the people who were there, is on the way with "Rubble Kings." And today we have the exclusive trailer and poster for the documentary. Directed by Shan Nicholson, narrated by John Leguizamo, and produced by folks including Dito Montiel and Jim Carrey, the movie tracks the dangerous years of 1968 to 1975, in which the city's gang war reached devastating and bloody heights. But from within that scene also came peace, and the flourishing of hip-hop culture that would define a generation. Featuring Yellow” Benji Melendez, Afrika Bambaataa, Blackie, Carlos “Karate Charlie”Suarez, D.S.R, Ed Koch, Felipe Luciano, Harlem Cody, Jazzy Jay, Jee Sanchez, Joe Conzo, Kool Herc, Lorine, Marshall Berman, Nono, Red Alert, Rolando Ruiz,...
- 5/28/2015
- by Edward Davis
- The Playlist
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