Friday, October 22, 2004
Wedding helps to
heal from break up
By Eric Edwards
The Orlando Sentinel
I have the honor of being the best man at my
younger brother Ethan's wedding. I am shar
ing this honor with my youngest brother,
Patrick.
This bit of uplifting, love-focused public
speaking comes to me at a time when I'm feel
ing quite un-uplifted and un-love-focused.
Having recently closed the book on a rela
tionship that I thought would be a keeper, I'm
suffering from that hollowed-out, slow-burn
ing depression that makes me unbearable.
Since I wasn't all that bearable before this
bout of selfish wallowing, this blue streak
makes it difficult for friends and acquaintan
ces, who are struggling not to slap me silly.
But here I remain, jotting down thoughts on
small pieces of paper, thoughts I hope to pass
on to the wedding attendants. Unfortunately,
most of the grist I have milled makes material
better suited for a Sam Kinison special than
my brother’s wedding.
The attitude adjustment I will require in or
der to fulfill my oratorical duties will demand
more therapy than a week's worth of Dr. Phil
can provide.
No matter how easygoing a person may
seem, a good bruising of his heart will twist
even the happiest of demeanors into something
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(KRT)
STUiDiNT UF*
I've been swimming in this sorry state for
about a month now, so it's high time I get over
myself and shape up for the future - if not my
own, then at least my brother's.
In fact, there is probably no better time for
me to break from this wretched despondency.
Weddings are glorious ceremonies that start
new families and bring old families together
in celebration. About half of the families that
will gather are the people I grew up with, the
people who have known me for my whole life
and the people who, by the laws of nature, must
love me no matter how unlovable I might be
feeling at the moment.
That's what healing the heart is all about -
accepting that though one person didn’t give
you the love you felt you deserved, there are
others who will. Your family loves you first,
and girlfriends and boyfriends love you sec
ond. It almost never feels like that at the time,
probably because of the intensity of physical
love, but the slow burn and the incredible reli
ability of the love of family is something we
can never break with.
So at my brother's wedding I'll wrap myself
in being close to the people 1 care the most
about; I'll throw back a couple of Manhattans,
and I'll knock 'em dead with the finest best-
man speech ever.
And if making 200 people chuckle at my
brother's expense doesn't speed up the healing
process, nothing will.
Hip-hop ambassador to planet
By Greg Kot
Chicago Tribune
(KRT)
Few hip-hop artists have stretched the definition of
dance music further than Afrika Bambaataa. While many
deejays now specialize in a particular style - trance, chill
out, jungle - Bambaataa brings the world to his finger
tips.
In a span of two years in the early 1980 s, Bambaataa
provided a blueprint for hip-hop and electronic music,
collaborated with James Brown and Johnny Lydon and
turned German art-rockers Kraftweik into the hippest
band in the ghetto.
"I learned from James, Sly and Uncle George," says
Bambaataa, referring to the funk trinity of James Brown,
Sly Stone and Parliament-Funkadelic's George Clinton.
"But I was also listening to Yellow Magic Orchestra,
Kraftwerk and Gary Numan, and getting off on the elec
tronic music in John Carpenter's ‘ Halloween’ movies and
‘Assault on Precinct 13.’ I wanted to be the first black
group to come out with that sound. So I formed Soulsonic
Force and invented electro-funk."
With electro-funk, as immortalized in the now-classic
singles, "Planet Rock" and "Looking for the Perfect Beat,"
Bambaataa planted the seeds for myriad styles of dance
music in the last two decades: Miami bass, techno, hip
house, drum 'n' bass and electro-clash.
"They keep renaming it, but it's all electro-funk," says
Bambaataa. "We added the break beats of hip-hop and
the bass sounds of funk to electronic music, and created
something that was the best of many worlds: rap, funk,
electronic. It's all dance music. To me, all music is dance
music."
Bambaataa proved as much to his audiences at block
parties in the '7os, where everything from old soft-drink
commercials to Nancy Sinatra B-sides were liable to pop
into one of the deejay's dusk-till-dawn sets.
Born in 1960 to a nurse and a construction wotker, the
young Kevin Donovan drifted into trouble with the Bronx,
New York, street gang the Black Spades. In a neighbor
hood of crumbling high-rises that was over-run by drug
dealers and gang bangers, Donovan was a charismatic
thug-leader. He saw friends put in jail, and another was
killed in the streets. He began to take to heart the words
of black leaders such as Malcolm X and Elijah
Mohammad Muhammad.
"I saw it was time to move the gangs in a different
direction, before we all wound up dead or in jail,"
Bambaataa says. He had started deejaying in the housing
projects before he was a teenager, before the era of two
turntables, light shows and echo chambers turned deejays
The Behrend Beacon 111
into stars.
"I'd bring my parents' stereo to parties, and someone
else would set up with his home stereo on the other side
of the room, and we'd go back and forth, shining a flash
light on whoever picked the next record," Bambaataa
says.
Dance parties were commonplace in the streets, parks
and community centers, and deejays such as Kool Here
elevated deejaying to an art form with their canny song
selection, booming sound systems and cut-and-mix ma
nipulations. Here zoned in on the most exciting rhyth
mic passages in his vast amty of vinyl albums and singles
and stitched them together into audience-pleasing break
beats. One of Here’s most attentive disciples was the
young Bambaataa, whose extensive knowledge of mu
sic earned him the title "Master of Records." After his
mother bought him a pair of turntables for his high school
graduation, his deejaying career took off.
"I would come with 16, 20 crates of vinyl, and play
from 9 until 4 in the morning, switching records every
minute or two," he says. "We were always trying to outdo
each other, play records more obscure than any other
deejay, scratching out the titles so other deejays couldn't
copy us. People would tell me they didn't like salsa mu
sic, but I’d slam some on 'em with a break beat, and they'd
be dancing to it. I'd work in calypso and rock, the
Monkees, Kraftwerk, James Brown and just for kicks an
old Coke commercial or ‘My Boyfriend's Back.' You
came to my shows, you were going on a musical jour
ney."
The next stop was taking those innovations to the re
cording studio. For Bambaataa, access to electronic gad
gets such as the TR-808 drum machine, Fairlight digital
synthesizer and Roland Vocoder made the pioneering
single "Planet Plant Rock" possible.
With producer Arthur Baker and keyboardist John
Robie, Bambaataa took hip-hop and dance music off the
street and into an outer space by melding Kraftwerk's
"Trans-Europe Express" and "Numbers" with Captain
Sky's funky "Super Sperm" and the melody from Ennio
Morricone's "The Mexican."
The recording was both avant-garde and popular, ris
ing to No. 48 on the pop chart in 1982 and selling more
than 500,000 copies. It’s equally audacious follow-up,
"Looking for the Perfect Beat," declared: "We are the
future, you are the past." Together, these mind-blowing
tracks ushered in dance music's future, a sound that in
fluenced everyone from Dr. Dre to the Chemical Broth
ers, and brought James Brown ("Unity"), ex-Sex Pistol
Johnny Lydon ("World Destruction") and Screamin'
Raechel ("Fun with Bad Boys") of Chicago's house scene
to Bambaataa's door for collaborations.