2000

The Prison Industrial Complex

Joe Lockard
Political rhetoric in the United States adopts issues that substitute for direct discussions of class...in refusing to speak to why the prisons of the United States have become home for literally millions of people of color during the past several decades, American political rhetoric has engaged in another of its historic evasions of race and racial oppression.

Canaries on the Rim

Megan Prelinger
This is a book as much about landscape as about political action; telling a story in which neither exists without reference to the other.

The Diversity Hoax: Law Students Report from Berkeley

Joe Lockard
The editors of this sob-n-complain anti-affirmative action book must have gotten straight As in their mandatory PC Think classes, because they picked up on the Whimper and Moan study module quite neatly.

Loa Project (Volume II)

Joe Lockard
The cerebral quality of DJ Cam's music is compelling. He resists categorization, weaving between recognizable hip-hop motifs and the sonic abstraction that is his trademark.

Racially Yours

Greenbacks Russell, Tye Sacks
Irony is the curse of our age, and Milwaukee's The Frogs are cursed with as much of it as anybody. After all these years, sincerity is still passe in the underground, so if you argue that Racially Yours is insincere and fraudulent, well, then you just don't get it.

The West

Joe Lockard
This is materialist music rewoven from fragments of daily soundscapes: Marxism does glossolalia.

Beyond Skin

Joe Lockard
A struggle for equality of transcendental entitlement has been a basic struggle that pervaded the art and philosophies emerging from the past century's anti-colonial movements. The declaration of artistic independence with which Nitin Sawhney introduces his Beyond Skin album originate in this struggle.

Hyacinths & Thistles

Greenbacks Russell
When I was a little kid, I had a portable phonograph that played at 78. I'd spin my mom's neglected Stan Kenton and Vaughan Monroe 78s, which were of no interest to me until I played them at the wrong speed.

The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach

Joe Lockard
We take the word 'fascist' too lightly. The word gets used for conservative opponents whose views offend, or just as a common verbal brick for throwing.

Self-Titled

John Brady
Popular culture is awash in examples of individuals taking advantage of the opportunity afforded them by the culture industry to engage in the spectacle of personal revelation, in the very public, most often sensationalized, display of their private and intimate lives -- their desires, needs, misdeeds, thoughts, wishes, experiences, motivations, fears, and secrets.

Live from the Battle of Seattle

Joe Lockard
The thinness so palpable in 'Live from the Battle of Seattle' album speaks towards how little anti-globalism informs aesthetics or artwork in the United States.

Recent 555 Split Singles

Perry Como Va
It's been nearly a decade since Negativland first drew its guns out on U2 with their seminal SST Records-era rendition of 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For,' and turned sampling into a politically motivated form of popular musical appropriation.

The New Settler Interviews, Volume I: Boogie at the Brink

Aaron Shuman
For more than fifteen years, New Settler magazine has been documenting the growth of intentional communities in the forests of Northern California...

Falun Gong's Challenge to China

Joe Lockard
There has been a developing appreciation for the role of religious practice in undermining anti-democratic secular ideologies that refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of internal opposition.

The Green Wedge

Greenbacks Russell
I've never had much use for music where the message is more important than the music itself; you're supposed to like and support it for its intent. But most good causes make lousy art, like this new Jello Biafra single.

Military Geography for Professionals and the Public

Megan Prelinger
The Army is reshaping itself to engage in numerous smaller conflicts, as opposed to all-out land war.

Gearhound

Joe Lockard
One reason a lot of electronica reviews tend to be short is a lack of descriptive vocabulary for many of their experimental effects. Early electronica, like Kraftwerk from twenty-five years ago, seems simple to describe in comparison with contemporary work that pushes language towards difficulty or give-it-up hopelessness.

Avenue B

Mike Mosher
Sad and bogue. In Detroit-Ann Arbor slang of three decades ago, this phrase meant pathetic, played out and out of steam, bogus and inauthentic.

Live at Bazaar Cafe, Dec. 16, 2000

Megan Prelinger
As I sat before the show enjoying my mushroom-barley soup, I pondered how incredible it is that our next President is going to whitewash his racist election debacle simply by announcing, in a sense, that it doesn't exist.

Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

Jeremy Russell
Violence is not random, it is not mysterious, it is not so different from other human behaviors.

The Underclass

John Brady
On their latest release The Underclass, anarcho-punk vets Rudimentary Peni offer such an artistic diagnosis of the times, focusing on the trauma and human suffering that accompany the latest period of accelerated capitalist development.

Role Model

Joe Lockard
If you've wondered what to do while spending an evening alone with that ramped-up laptop, use those whizzy chips to whip together some sounds. If your fate is a cursor, make music with it.

FS59: An Otobiography

Scott Schaeffer
Focusing in particular on Michele Kammerer, the first transsexual fire captain in the United States, FS59's primary achievement is the depiction of the everydayness, the ordinariness, of the struggle for equality and the ways in which this struggle -- and its solution -- can appear to us in the experiences of daily life.

Outcast

Joe Lockard
If times and media change, then what of the noir novel's voice? What direction has it taken at the beginning of a new century?

Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong

Joe Lockard
The politics of memorialization are changing. If the recent march in South Carolina against display of the Confederate flag on the state capitol building is one example, James Loewen's excellent Lies Across America is another example of re-envisioned history.

The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904-1924

Joe Lockard
Four Immigrants Manga traces the adventures and misadventures of this foursome of friends from their landing at Angel Island forward. They encounter a range of racism, from the casual patronizations to legislative racism, that framed the lives of Asian immigrants to California.

Racism

Joe Lockard
Memmi's theorizations were defined by the complexity of his own compound perspectives as an early Tunisian nationalist and Marxian anti-colonialist, as a Jew encountering antisemitism among both colonizers and colonial subjects, and as an immigrant to metropolitan France.

Czeslaw Milosz: A Berkeley Reading

Joe Lockard
Although usually discussed as a Polish writer, Czeslaw Milosz taught in the United States for some thirty years and may as easily be read as an American immigrant writer.

International Human Rights Film Festival, Tel Aviv, Israel, and Ramallah, Palestine

Yael Munk
The festival would have no rationale if human rights were to be respected and the Middle East finally become a place, like many other places in the world, where human rights are part of common knowledge and constitution.

Ricci's Pieces

Jeremy Russell
The album is irritating, there's no denying. It starts with a shrapnel-ized song in strangled Spanglish wrought by V/VM and then moves through a whining monologue...

In the Country of My Dreams

Joe Lockard
Oakland is one of the unannounced boiling pots of ethnic literatures in the United States.

Telling Stories

Joe Lockard
Pick up Tracy Chapman's newest album with delight and hope; put it down with sadness. The spirit is not here.

Timothy McSweeney's Windfall Republic

Timothy McSweeney belongs to the nineteenth-century. He wanders loose at the end of this twentieth century...

Viscera

Charlie Bertsch
Our sexual fantasies may well be the place where we are most truly ourselves. We revisit them again and again, until the landscape is so familiar that we can conjure its features with the slightest provocation: the way a shirt drapes, the pitch of a question, the gloss of a boot.

The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo

Charlie Bertsch
The New Military Humanism is the latest in a series of tracts in which he exposes the deadly hypocrisies of the United States and other "enlightened" democracies.

Travels With My Amp

Mike Mosher
This one is fun! Imagine the Ramones doing a Halloween album.

Rock and Roll Nightmare

Mike Mosher
Is this band from L.A.? Thought so. There is something very Angeleno in its skillful balls-to-the-wall attack.

Undressed

Micah Holmquist
Like pornography, Undressed dispenses with characterization and the boring details of living so that it can focus solely on the sex lives of the attractive, but not very talented teenagers and twenty somethings that populate the show.

Shorter, Faster, Louder

Joe Lockard
What distinguishes Kid Dynamite is pure, massive energy in their music.

American Ruins

Megan Prelinger
Every American should have a coffeetable book about ghettos and vacant lots.

Internal/External

John Brady
Ten or so years ago one of the most dominant motifs in the discourse of popular music was geography. People talked about certain cities having specific sounds and scenes, and they ascribed to certain areas the almost mystical ability to foster cultural creativity and to churn out toe-tapping hits.

Medical English for German Doctors

John Brady
In this cultural and market environment, it is a special pleasure to come across some virgin pop marginalia, that is, old and obscure cultural objects that have yet to be sucked up by the culture industry and re-packaged as the latest commodities designed for unreflective cultural consumption.

The Living Arts Section

John Brady
The problem of the Living Arts section lies with the film and book reviews.

Product Three

Robert Soza
It may simply be my deep-seated dislike for academic theory and thus I have an automatically ambivalent attitude toward the song -- however, as much as I decry theory, I still read the shit and get a kick out of it from time to time.

Long Dim Road

Robert Soza
The album clearly expresses the despair that accompanies the lives of the those left behind the current economic expansion...

No More Prisons

Joe Lockard
The American prison system and the legal system that wastes human life -- especially the lives of people of color -- has become one of the sorest political issues.

The Cat and the Cobra

Joe Lockard
Hardcore punk is near-impossible to define as a genre: it's more an international zeitgeist than a musical commonality.

Bolides Over Basra

Joe Lockard
The Middle East has been lodged in the American vocabulary of tropes for too long, contributing shorthand for everything in the range between intractability and fanaticism.

CRASS Art and Other Pre Post-Modernist Monsters

Charlie Bertsch
Best known for her involvement with the anarchist punk band CRASS, Gee Vaucher is an artist who combines photo-montage with more traditional illustrator's techniques to comment on the hypocrisy of our world.

Marx in Soho

Charlie Bertsch
Howard Zinn is second only to Noam Chomsky as an icon of the American Left.

The Yo-Bonic Yo-Yo

Megan Prelinger
The slogan emblazoned across the package reads: 'Get wound up on Yo-Bonics.'

All Hands on the Bad One

Steven Rubio
As always, Sleater-Kinney's musical roots are lovingly clear, although here the influences are perhaps not as obvious as in past albums.

Dirty Money

Kim Nicolini
A series of vignettes about life as a goth/punk sometimes sex worker, sometimes movie extra, sometimes musician and artist...

La Sirena de Pecera

Robert Soza
La Sirena de Pecera's pure power chords and theatrically indignant vocals brought me to my knees.

Generation Ecstasy

Charlie Bertsch
I've been a big fan of Simon Reynolds's music criticism since I first ran across it in the late 1980s, when I used to pore over the pages of New Musical Express and Melody Maker with religious fervor.

Vu-Du Menz

Micah Holmquist
It is an unfortunate and sad fact that the blues is a musical strait jacket for artists as often as it is a vehicle for the expression of real human emotions.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Mike Mosher
The 1978 movie musical Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band deserves some credit for its naive, Saturday Evening Post-sentimental attempt to shelter a segmenting pop music market in the big tent of a 1950s-style Hollywood schmaltzy musical.

Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

Joe Lockard
The photograph on the dust cover states this book's horror succinctly.

The Aztec Love God

Charlie Bertsch
The situation of American minorities may not have improved much in the last twenty-five years -- in some respects it's actually worse -- but the situation of American minority literature has.

Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture

Charlie Bertsch
There's nothing more embarrassing than watching an overly educated scholar try to sound hip.

Manhattan Loverboy

Joe Lockard
Arthur Neresian's Manhattan Loverboy is the novel of an American shlemozel.

CD 1

John Brady
Neither Dub, nor any other kind of music has the power to reshape our social world in such a profound way...

kid606 and friends vol.1

Steven Rubio
Instead of a bunch of guys pulling their puds in tandem for a rabid audience, we're left with a group of solo artists masturbating alone in their rooms while playing their favorite songs on their computers. Group sex has been replaced with onanism.

Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences

Joe Lockard
In a perverse manner, Connerly has become a 'race man' and lives within a trap of his own making, fulminating against 'preferences' instead of against prejudices and discrimination.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Steven Rubio
An integral subplot to the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been the gradually growing intensity of the relationship between Buffy's best friend Willow, and Willow's new friend and fellow Wiccan, Tara.

Tape Op Magazine

Jonathan Sterne
It bills itself as a magazine about 'creative music recording' and each issue comes packed with interviews, home recording ideas and reviews of recordings made by readers.

403 of the Most Sought After Samples and Scratches

John Brady
Hip-hop and electronica producers live and die by the sample; a large part of their job entails searching for the funkiest break-beats and the most attention getting vocal snippets.

XTRMNTR

Joe Lockard
The underlying strain of anticolonialist and nationalist Celtic ideology that accompanied Primal Scream in its earlier years has continued forward into less specific but forceful elaborations.

Empire

Aaron Shuman
Now, ain't that some shit? The immanence of revolution, glimpsed in Charlie Chaplin, absent all those dead papers this or that dyspeptic Marxist insists on sliding under my door.

Gimme Indie Rock, Volume 1

Steven Rubio
If your taste in music stops when The Minutemen's D. Boon died, then Gimme Indie Rock is nothing more than Lawrence Welk for the new millenium.

Architechnology

Aaron Shuman
If as Ganxsta Ridd once said, the microphone is a gun because you don't pick one up unless you know how to use it -- a dictum critics of hiphop would do well to heed -- then Chicago's Rubberoom has a full arsenal of sound at its disposal.

70s Rock Must Die

Aaron Shuman
Godfather of punk, the only thing Biafra proves here is that there's no need to argue; parents just don't understand.

What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney

Joe Lockard
Gedney's talent as an unobtrusive observer emerged from a predisposition that concealed his own life as much as it facilitated his photography.

Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America

Micah Holmquist
The book doesn't reach any decisive conclusion but it is clear that Powers isn't so convinced that she and her coworkers were really resisting the system.

American Skin

Micah Holmquist
It certainly says a lot about the authoritarian nature of law enforcement in the United States that the New York City Patrolmen's Benevolent Association has condemned Springsteen...

NYC Ghosts and Flowers

Charlie Bertsch
It's an interesting record, but not one which is likely to rock your world. That's why part of me is reluctant to endorse Sonic Youth's drift into esoterica...

The Allies

Joe Lockard
Sometimes a reasonable body wonders if turntabilism at the end of the '90s hadn't already begun to turn into the late-century equivalent of the theremin, a musical technology that revolutionized the experience of sound but reached its expressive limits.

He's Able

Joe Lockard
The producers surely have a great 'Scream for Death' album from Argentinean and Chilean torture chambers of the 70s out there waiting for them. Yeah, it's bottom-feeding, but it's a business...

Out of Nowhere

Joe Lockard
Call him the poor man's Berlioz of rock electronica. Jimi Tenor indulges all his propensities for late romantic grandeur and sweeping musical phrases.

Do You Remember Technology?: Geeks, Gadgets, and Gizmos

Charlie Bertsch
When we confront our memories outside the well-ordered spaces of historical chronology, they can seem both fresher and stranger, like brief glimpses into a world to which we can't really return. Unfortunately, the book's authors give no indication that they gave their approach much thought.

Code 4109

Joe Lockard
DJ Krush is probably one of the least political of the trip-hop spinners, having much more of a reputation as a master technician.

Jets to Brazil

Greenbacks Russell
New York's Jets to Brazil is one answer to the question, 'What do you do after you've done punk?'

Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives

Steven Rubio
Clinton as symbol, Clinton as Elvis, does indeed expand our sense of the possible. Clinton as president, though, has failed Elvis, and has in the process failed us all.

The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry

Charlie Bertsch
There are a wealth of good writers out there who have consistently fallen through the cracks in the literary establishment, whether because they live in the wrong place or write for the wrong people. It is poets who fall into this latter category that predominate in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry...

Birth of the Hip-Hop Dynasty: Part One

Aaron Shuman
One sunny day in August, twenty kids in green t-shirts and toothy smiles were finishing bagged lunches at Rancho Peralta Park, when their playground was taken over by a capoeira fighter, an innocuous, four-eyed skateboarder who happens to know kung fu, and the afternoon of battles that ensued.

Community Music

Joe Lockard
What the Asian Dub Foundation brings home in its community music is the reinterpretation of memory through the tangled threads of disparate British cultures.

K Records Roundup: New 2000 Releases

Greenbacks Russell
The bulk of K Records' 2000 releases are a good cross-section of the indie rock scene at the turn of the century.