Charles Martin's Blog, page 12
September 18, 2015
Why The Oklahoma Hip Hop Festival Is Important.
Oklahoma Hip Hop Festival
6-11 pm Friday (Premiere Night, Free)
9 am -12 am Saturday ($20 Admission)
701 W. Sheridan in OKC
oklahomahiphopfestival.com
Oklahoma City is changing. All cities are changing, of course. Our world is in constant flux as one generation gives way to another and ideas evolve, new technologies emerge, populations shift, and cultures adopt new traditions and values. But Oklahoma City is changing faster than many other communities across the country in part due to a vibrant youth movement, shifting cultural demographics, a surge in small businesses transforming entire districts, and city leadership aggressively pushing to establish the state capitol into a legitimate metropolis and cultural hub for the region. And hip hop is going to be an important part of the future of Oklahoma City.
Gregory Jerome is the passionate spokesman of the Oklahoma Hip Hop Festival and began work on the two-day event nearly a year ago as a way to make the various disciplines of the urban cultural movement approachable to all Oklahomans. This is as much an educational tool as it is a celebration of rap, art, poetry, and dance—all considered vital elements of hip hop.
Members of Literati Press stepped up early to volunteer for the festival and we’ve also ponied up some resources to serve as a sponsor, not just to spread our own brand, but because I believe that promoting an event that embraces a multi-cultural appreciation of hip hop is critical to knitting all the communities of our city together. Hip hop has achieved a level of relevance that its elements can be witnessed in all levels of American society, from our urban cores to the bedroom and rural communities. It has permeated the soul of our nation and is an essential part of our collective story.
The festival is an offshoot of Elemental Hip Hop, a youth program that Jerome founded to teach the various art forms of hip hop to kids as tools for self-expression and empowerment. This festival is not about having hip hop replace the country/western, folk, rock, or other musical communities in the state, but rather to supplement them and hopefully cross-pollinate. Diversity is blooming within Oklahoma and our ability to embrace this evolution is going to be a critical step in leaving behind our days as a languid fly-over state and accelerate our development into the home of ambitious and influential artistic voices as well a more integrated, tolerant society.
September 17, 2015
Oklahoma Emmy-Award Winning Rapper Re-releases EP
Jabee
11:25 pm Saturday, September 19
Oklahoma Hip Hop Festival
701 W. Sheridan in Oklahoma City
http://iamjabee.bandcamp.com/album/lucky-me-ep
After the debut album Life is Good by Oklahoma MC Jabee, I, and a lot of other people, were impressed by the level of sincerity in his lyrics and production, and how fantastically they complimented the album as a whole. We were left wondering what he was going to do for his follow-up. Well, after a few B-Sides and a couple of non-album singles, Jabee just re-released his 2010 EP, Lucky Me to keep fans engaged ahead of his next full length album dropping in early 2016.
Instead of the beautiful piano melodies in Life is Good, Lucky Me featured more celebratory and understated horns, melodies, and a soulful and jazzy atmosphere. The topics and a few instrumentals sounded more cathartic and depressing, but it never comes across as brumous. The instrumentals don’t ever sound cloudy or drenched in reverb, like Beach House, and he never sounds like he’s drowning in his sorrows like Drake. Songs like “Coretta Scott” and “Understand” demonstrate the new mood shift perfectly. All of these changes have good things to contribute to the EP and highlight and complement the topics very nicely, giving them weight and importance. This sets up Jabee as a sympathetic underdog, making the listeners gravitate towards his personality even more than they did on his last album. “Jewels”, “How to Fly”, and “Nobody” demonstrate the more uplifting side of this EP very nicely, while making the darker shifts in this project more apparent.
There are only a few blemishes on this otherwise nearly perfect collection of songs. One being the track “Imagination”, not because it’s bad, but because it’s just not as good as the rest of the project. The instrumental doesn’t have much of a direction, and the mood can be a little confusing. Also the song “Beautiful Day” is a little misplaced on this album. The chorus is a little too sunshiny and happy, and sandwiching it between “Understand” and “Coretta Scott” just strikes me as not well thought out in the greater scheme of this project.
Despite those slight missteps, Jabee comes through with a great EP that I would definitely recommend to anyone who enjoyed his last album or to anyone who likes Hip-Hop in general. The sounds of the instrumentals are very pleasant on the ear and lyrically Jabee is extremely likable, using depressing undertones in almost every song to make his positive outlooks about his current situation stand out more. Don’t hesitate, listen to this album as soon as you get the chance. Also you can catch him perform live at the Oklahoma Hip-Hop Festival this Saturday.
The Hillbilly Moonshine Massacre!!!
Coming October 1, this yarn of aliens and moonshine and conspiracy theories and murderous packs of crazed yokels from Upstate New York is perfect for some Halloween reading. Jonathan Raab has written for the New York Times, CNN, Military Success Network, and The Stars and Stripes. His work also appeared in our own Literati Presents: Emergency Exit, so we are fans and thrilled to be publishing The Hillbilly Moonshine Massacre.
September 16, 2015
September 15, 2015
Welcome to Ralton – Volume 1 Preorder and get free stuff!
Our very first release of a trade paperback! We’ve made it through a comic book run of Welcome to Ralton and will be debuting Volume 1 on October 9 at The Parish for a special exhibition featuring Ralton’s artist/writer Don Rosencrans!
We have also opened up preorders for the trade. Only $14 for 108 pages of stellar art and the story of an everyman coming to grips with the burden of his unwanted superpowers. PREORDER HERE to get a free caricature inside the book of your choice as well as a copy of Issue 5!
The official blurb: Welcome to Ralton, home of everyman Reno Sanders who just so happens to have superpowers and a devil as a best friend.Welcome to Ralton is a kung fu science/fantasy indie comic that digs deeper into the classic vigilante comic to examine the impact heroing can have on the family left back home.
Welcome to Ralton – Volume 1 Preorder
Our very first release of a trade paperback! We’ve made it through a comic book run of Welcome to Ralton and will be debuting Volume 1 on October 9 at The Parish for a special exhibition featuring Ralton’s artist/writer Don Rosencrans!
We have also opened up preorders for the trade. Only $14 for 108 pages of stellar art and the story of an everyman coming to grips with the burden of his unwanted superpowers. PREORDER HERE to get a free caricature inside the book of your choice as well as a copy of Issue 5!
The official blurb: Welcome to Ralton, home of everyman Reno Sanders who just so happens to have superpowers and a devil as a best friend.Welcome to Ralton is a kung fu science/fantasy indie comic that digs deeper into the classic vigilante comic to examine the impact heroing can have on the family left back home.
September 14, 2015
The Cost Of “Good Vibrations”: John Cusack and Paul Dano Try To Untangle Brian Wilson.
Love & Mercy
Available on DVD and Blu-ray Sept. 15, 2015
loveandmercyfilm.com
I first heard about the eccentric, mentally unstable persona of Brian Wilson through an obscure interview (Nardwuar interviews Wayne Coyne) that touched on an even more obscure interview (Wayne Coyne interviews Brian Wilson) that never aired. Incredibly curious, I researched what Coyne described as an “unsettling,” “disturbing,” and “too weird” nature of that exchange and I was soon awakened to a long history of strange and fascinating encounters with the mysterious figure. As far as I knew, Wilson was just a former Beach Boy who got quieter and more esoteric on his solo records like many band-turned-solo acts do. Learning the lore behind Pet Sounds and SMiLE as well as the very story of Brian Wilson himself was eye-opening. Stories about “the price of genius” tend to skew a certain way with juicy details of megalomania or social quirks, but here was one about all-out mental illness. Artistic differences didn’t force Wilson to break up with his band, nor did disinterest cause him to go so long without releasing new material. He psychologically couldn’t handle his own ambitions.
Fortunately, there’s a ray of light to the tragedy, one that is clung to throughout the aptly-titled Love & Mercy. It stars John Cusack and Paul Dano as older and younger Brian Wilson, with Elizabeth Banks as Melinda Ledbetter, the woman who goes from his serendipitous acquaintance to his savior over the course of the film. Unlike some biopics that run chronologically with a familiar rise/peak/fall arc, this one works in parallel storylines, chronicling the deterioration of The Beach Boys circa Pet Sounds and the psychological entrapment of Wilson’s later life. This is a smart choice, since the former begins at a peak and the latter begins at a valley, thereby ensuring the tonal arc adheres to a more fall/valley/rise progression, which is refreshingly positive for the genre.
Cusack’s Brian Wilson is quieter and more skittish than Dano’s. It is soon explained that this is largely due to his doctor (Paul Giamatti, in a typically savage role), who rules his life and mind with psychological power plays and legal traps. When Wilson goes car-shopping (with his small posse of guards and medical advisors at close range), he happens upon salesperson Melinda. Her open-mindedness and endearment lead him to trust her with a scribbled-down cry for help. Eventually, they begin dating but the more she learns about his life, the more she becomes aware of just how much of a prison it has become. During these later-life scenes, Elizabeth Banks is the audience’s surrogate and lead character, so don’t be misled by her being third-billed.
With a studied portrayal of the real Brian Wilson’s physical presentation and verbal quirks, John Cusack seems like he’s been itching for a role like this, but it’s really Paul Dano that holds the character front and center. Dano is practically a perfect choice—some of his biggest roles have been psychologically tortured people that he plays with a high level of emotion. Here, those emotions aren’t as explosive, but when young Brian Wilson is taking abuse from his father or sparring with perfection, they are no less profound. Dano’s scenes also tend to have a lot of camera reveals, where his performance couples with his isolation in the frame before a context is revealed, which only emphasizes his internal tribulations.
Being a film largely about music, one would be remiss to not recognize the exceptional scoring from Atticus Ross, known for his work with Trent Reznor on the recent David Fincher films. You’d expect a soundtrack with as rich a library as the full Beach Boys catalogue and radio singles of past decades to leave little room for much original score. This is still technically true, but what the filmmakers and/or composer came up with is a stroke of genius. The score is an ambient soundscape comprised of manipulated fragments of Beach Boys songs, and, if I’m not mistaken, it only plays when Brian Wilson is on the screen. It feels cerebral, like we’re getting a glimpse of his mind, which has a constant fixation on music and sound. Even more telling is when this music becomes mixed with the external sound effects of the scene, conveying the disorientation and confusion Wilson experiences. The whole soundtrack could very well be seen as a character of its own.
This film is far more than just a Brian Wilson biopic made for a bunch of Beach Boys fans. It’s deeper than a tribute to a musical genius. It’s more perceptive than a well-rounded depiction of a person coping with insanity. It’s a lesson, an always timely reminder of the value of hope and redemption and a testament to the power of love and mercy.
Seeing this film, I finally got a sense of the true tragedy of Brian Wilson. To be fair, he burned a lot of bridges and rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, something that was also touched on in the film. He’s not innocent, exactly, but neither is anyone else. He’s just dealing with a different set of issues than the standard person. The tragedy is that for all the people that were in his life, it seems like no one was patient or understanding enough to stick it out with him, to help him stay afloat. Some miseducation at the time regarding mental health surely contributed to this, and I don’t doubt that he’s hard to work with, what with his non-sequiturs and an odd sort of ego that bounces back and forth between adamant humility and matter-of-fact boasting. I’m not even surprised the Wayne Coyne interview turned out to be unairable; it takes more than a love for Pet Sounds to gain the confidence of a notoriously timid figure who has spent most of his life out of the spotlight.
We can speculate what might have happened if Wilson’s SMiLE project hadn’t been abandoned decades ago, but I’m willing to bet that he was in a mental state that couldn’t have possibly seen it to completion, even if given unlimited resources. Sure, the album’s abandonment was a blow to the history of popular music, but what an even greater blow to lose its creator for years upon years. Sometimes I forget that near-perfect music comes from imperfect people, that there’s always a series of trials behind the scenes of any given work of art. Eccentric artists tend to be overshadowed by their eccentricities, and it promotes this idea that they aren’t relatable even though they’re humans just like the rest of us. You can remove all references to music and Brian Wilson and just tell the story about an unnamed person, and the film would retain its point. That’s because it’s a universal, timeless point, simple in concept but complex in practice—everyone needs love. Even if you can’t always see it.
September 11, 2015
RoarShacK Free EP
Literati’s resident hip hop expert, Michael Martin, just released his first EP of instrumentals cobbled together from a menagerie of samples with seemingly disparate sources all sewn together into a seamless flow. He’s been fashioning himself into a rap producer since he was a child and this is his first time to show the world what he’s been up to all these years. He specializes in connecting heavy drum beats to organic instrumentation, pulling from piano pop, symphonic arrangements, indie rock, soul, and some classic hip hop. This is an interesting look into the mind of an obsessive music fan. Listen and enjoy.
