Peaches: "Impeach My Bush"; Neil Young: "Impeach the President"

Both Peaches and Neil Young have announced forthcoming albums which stick it to the Shrub. Peaches' third album, due out on XL Recordings on July 11, is called Impeach My Bush; its tracks include "Fuck or Kill," "Two Guys (For Every Girl)," and "Boys Wanna Be Her." Peaches recently performed at the "Bring Em Home Now" Concert for Peace in New York City.

Neil Young's forthcoming album, Living with War, includes the tracks, "Impeach the President" and "Shock and Awe." The title track includes the lyrics, "I raise my hand in peace/I never bow to the laws of the thought police/I take a holy vow ... to never kill again/In the big hotels ... in the mosques and the doors of the old museum ... I take a holy vow ... to never kill again." (No info yet on when it is to be released.)

Neil and Peaches join Green Day, Merle Haggard, Steve Earle, Mary Gauthier, and many others in expressing their opposition to Bush and his Iraq adventure. When will the Democrats sign up?

Tags: Bush, impeach, Peaches, Neil Young

Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) Calls Off Planned Tel Aviv Concert

Roger Waters, ex-Pink Floyd (1965-1983) and since then a solo artist, was scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv, but has called off the concert in response to appeals by Palestinian artists and cultural organizations as well as Israeli refuseniks. Amazing. No US pop star could ever get away with this. Waters has also been very vocal in expressing his opposition to Israel's apartheid wall. Read more about this at ElectronicIntifada (and thanks, Laurie).

P.S. After doing a little more research, I've learned that Waters has moved his concert from Tel Aviv to Neve Shalom, a mixed Arab-Jewish village in Israel, near Jerusalem. So he's not boycotting, but trying to encourage peaceful coexistence.

Tags: Roger Waters, Israel, Palestine, boycott

Immigration Rally in Springdale, Arkansas

Immigration Rally
Originally uploaded by tsweden.

Today thousands rallied in Springdale, Arkansas (just north of my hometown of Fayetteville), joining the hundreds of thousands who rallied throughout the country in favor of fair and humane immigration reform. I'll report on the estimates of the crowd when I read the papers tomorrow morning, but it was huge. The state of Arkansas has had the fastest growing Hispanic population (percentage-wise) in the entire US, and Northwest Arkansas is one of the most important centers of Hispanic growth in the state, due to the construction boom and the poultry industry (Tysons and others). Tysons did not even bother opening its plants here today. Si, se puede!

I'll post more photos from the rally on my flickr account (see right column) soon, I hope.

(Postscript: Local papers reported the size of the crowd at 3-5,000, but I believe it was bigger. One third of the population of Springdale (total, 60,000) is now Hispanic, according to the results of a census released in the last week.)

Tags: immigration, Arkansas, Hispanic, migrant

The Kominas: Islamic Punk on MTV-Desi

Check out the report on The Kominas (which means "The Bastards") on MTV Desi here. According to MTV Desi, they were inspired to form the band by Michael Muhammad Knight's novel, The Taqwacores. Their song, "Rumi Was A Homo," is a must-listen.

When I read Knight's book, I couldn't believe that there actually was an Islamic punk scene, but Mike assured me there is, and sent me a CD with a few cuts. A compilation is forthcoming, I believe, from Alternative Tentacles. You can go to the Kominas site on myspace and download 3 of their songs, for free. It's all, as they say, halal beats.

Tags: punk, taqwacore, Muslim, Bollywood

Unspeakable Love to Be Launched in Lebanon

I just received this press release from my friend Mai Ghoussoub at Saqi Books.

Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East
by Brian Whitaker (£14.99)

Launching in London on Wednesday 10 May at Candid Café, EC1, Unspeakable Love is the first book to be written on the topic of gay and lesbian life in today’s Middle East;

Guardian Middle East editor Brian Whitaker is a journalist whose wide travels in the region have given him a unique opportunity to meet and talk to people who are affected by the Arab world’s strict taboos against homosexuality;

Saqi is taking the unprecedented step of launching Unspeakable Love in the Middle East on Wednesday 5 April with the support of Helem – the only openly gay rights organisation in an Arab country;

Deeply informed and engagingly written, Unspeakable Love draws long overdue attention to an issue that many regard as too contentious to discuss. Whitaker treats gay rights as fundamental to the wider topic of human rights in the Middle East and provides fascinating comparisons with similar struggles in the West in the 1960s.

‘Anyone interested in reform in the Arab world must read this book.’ Mai Yamani, Research Fellow at Chatham House and author of Cradle of Islam

‘This is an important, timely book, and lucid to boot – a must-read for anyone who believes in human rights.’ Rabih Alameddine, author of Koolaids and I, the Divine

Unspeakable Love will be published on 1 September in the United States. For further information about the launches or to request an invitation, please contact Lara Frankena on 020 7221 9347 or email lara@saqibooks.com.

Brian Whitaker is Middle East editor of The Guardian and has a website at www.al-bab.com. He is available for interview.

Tags: Middle East, gay, lesbian, queer

Rolling Stones Rice Krispies

A must see video, an amazing advertisement for Rice Krispies recorded by the Rolling Stones in 1964.

(The Rolling Stones have recorded the second-best Condi song, "Sweet Neo-Con." Steve Earle's "Condi Condi" gets top honors. But the Earle has no Rice Krispies song that I'm aware of.)

Tags: Rolling Stones, Rice Krispies

Update (September 22, 2008): the old link is dead, but here's the vid at another location:

Deep Purple Baghdad: Archaeology Resists the Ba'th

Interesting tidbit from an article in today's New York Times about the director of the Baghdad Museum, which today sits full of treasures but empty of visitors (it remains closed to the public). During the days of Saddam, the director Donny George, who was a Ba'th Party member, used to play in a Deep Purple cover band called 99 Percent (as in 99% perfect). The income he earned from the band helped tide him over. (Plus it must have been great fun to pound out "Smoke on the Water" near the banks of the Tigris.)

The other thing I liked about the story is that Mr. George used to get out of Ba'th Party meetings (which no doubt were frequent and endless) by going off on digs at all of Iraq's thousands of archaeological sites.

Tags: archaeology, Deep Purple, Iraq

Condi: Rock Star

Back in December Joel Brinkley wrote a terminally silly and wishful thinking article in the New York Times about Condi's travels and her "rock star image" abroad.

How's that image doing these days? Today's New York Times has a report today on Condi's trip to England, which tells us that she "faced more protests and public embarrassment here on Saturday" and that it has been a "two-day run through a raucous, mishap-ridden gantlet." Not only have British Muslim protesters given her hell, but her fellow rock stars wouldn't even meet with her.

"On Friday, Ms. Rice had to content herself with a visit to the Liverpool school where Paul McCartney studied instead of meeting him — and had to face a short line of students wearing T-shirts that said: 'No torture. No compromise.' During a visit to a school in Blackburn, she was greeted with chants of 'Condi Rice go home!'"

There was a concert for Condi at Liverpool's Philharmonic Hall on Saturday. Poet Roger McGough (who used to be in a 60s pop band called The Scaffold with Paul McCartney's brother Mike) was supposed to host, but pulled out last week, in the wake of calls for protests outside the event by the Merseyside Stop the War Coalition. Singer Jennifer John, who agreed to perform at the event, chose to perform John Lennon's utopian pacifist song, "Imagine," as a form of protest. (Imagine no religion...). Condi was supposed to visit a mosque in Blackburn yesterday, but that invitation was withdrawn due to pressures from anti-war activists.

Some rock star. Eat your words, Joe Brinkley! (Although one might argue in defense of Brinkley, who was just doing what most reporters do these days: copy the statements put out by government PR and spinsters.)

Tags: Condoleeza Rice, Liverpool, anti-war

The Teaches of Peaches in Arkansas

I started using Peaches in my courses when I taught Queer Theory in Spring 2004, and I've subsequently used her and her music in my Popular Culture class (Spring 2005 and Spring 2006). I am currently writing a paper called "Back It Up Boys: Peaches Queers Straight Sex," which focuses on Peaches' song, "Back It Up Boys" (off of Fatherfucker) and the practice of pegging. Accordingly, I have been catching up on my reading about Peaches. I was checking out the archive of articles about Peaches on her website. There I found an article called "Peaches Brew" by John Walshe, published in HotPress (July 2004), and I came across this:

Aside completely from the righteous indignation she often arouses by asking her audiences to shake their dicks, Peaches has had a big impact on the fringes of popular culture. There are regular Peaches lookalike contests held in various parts of the US, and some of her lyrics are studied as part of university courses in Toronto and Arkansas.

Hawgblawg fans, those university courses in Arkansas would be my courses. How do I know? Well I told Peaches that I was using her songs in my classes when I met her in Austin in April 2004. (Here's the evidence that I have met her, in Memphis in October '03. Notice that she's wearing the same dress in the photo with me as she is wearing in the photo here, taken from an article in the Style Section of the New York Times, October 19, 2003.)

In her interviews, Peaches used to talk about how her lyrics were taught at the University of Toronto, now she has added Arkansas to her schtick. I'll keep looking for other evidence.

On another Peaches front, here's a report from the New York Times on her performance on March 20, at the Bring Em Home Now benefit.

Beyond all remonstrations, mild or pointed, lies Peaches, who chanted and rapped over a skinny electronic rhythm-track about sex as a cure for everything. This wasn't totally germane to the evening, but it was weirdly effective anyway; in the right light, sex can stand in for anything, including religion and political resistance.

The full report is here but you have to sign up to view it.

Tags: Peaches

Natacha Atlas: Mish Maoul

Mish Maoul (Unbelievable) is the title of Natacha Atlas' new solo album, which goes on sale April 25. What is truly "mish maoul" about it is that her record company, Beggars Group, has put up a special website for the release, and you can listen, right now, to the entire album. I've listened to it just once so far, so I can't give a very detailed review, but I can say that it is well worth getting. I've loved every single one of Natacha's previous releases. Mish Maoul is a bit of a change from Natacha's last release, Something Dangerous, which registered the strong influence of Missy Elliott. This one has more of a basic Egyptian pop feel, less hip-hop, but nonetheless contemporary Egyptian pop, incorporating lots of styles, and doing them all very well. I really like "Hayati Inta," which has a very Moroccan feel, and uses the guimbri, the chief instrument of the Gnawa. "Ghanwah Bossanova" (Bossanova Song) is great too, as much lounge as bossa nova. I basically liked everything, and there is not a bad track (although I don't much like the short rap in English, at the opening of "La Lil Khowf" [No to Fear].) So give it a listen, or two, and then go out and buy it.

My review of the Natacha Atlas DVD is here.

Tags: Natacha Atlas, music

Daddy Yankee in Irbil

Abu Aardvark posted this segment from a report by Spencer Ackerman on Irbil, Kurdistan a few days ago, and I wanted to add some comments of my own about it. So here's what Abu A. excerpted:

The gas-hustlers have a comfort, though – chilly as it may be in the face of a security crackdown. Wafting through the airwaves and onto the streets of Irbil is an unlikely palliative speaking directly to the Kurdish imagination in this current moment of netherworldly nationhood: reggaetón. At precisely the right moment of national confusion, this hybrid confection of Jamaican dancehall reggae and Latin lyrical thuggishness is musing to northern Iraq about the liberating possibilities of gasolina. In a bizarre but tangible sense, the peshmergas' status as Irbil street bosses has competition from a San Juan rapper named Daddy Yankee.

Gasolina is Daddy Yankee's anthem, the track that earned him his crown as king of reggaetón and a 5,000-word profile in the New York Times Magazine. It's possible to hear the song three times a day over the radio in Irbil, probably more often than it appeared on the New York City FM dial at the height of its stateside ubiquity in 2005.

That's thanks largely to Radio Sawa, the much-derided brainchild of the United States broadcasting board of governors that mixes American pop and agitprop, which mainlines Gasolina directly to Irbil. The song is so popular in the city that a trip to the Happy Times restaurant and shisha lounge in the middle-class neighbourhood of Ainkawa is an invitation to a reggaetón barrage. On a typical evening, the restaurant's massive projector screen shows Daddy Yankee merrily waxing down a woman's shapely and barely-concealed derrière while patrons nod their heads and chew pizza.

Bemused incredulity over the popularity of reggaetón in Kurdistan is among the most telling indications of a first-time visitor.

It would be a stretch to say that the enthusiasm for Gasolina has to do with its subject matter, especially when considering its aggressive rhythm and near-pornographic video. But Daddy Yankee's signature track is a sexually-explicit ode to what gasolina can provide – and here "gasoline" can mean, as Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker, speed, rum, semen or gasoline – and that, of course, is unadulterated pleasure. And at the moment, as Iraq disintegrates, the Kurds are betting quite heavily on what gasoline can do for them.

Abu Aardvark comments, "at least Radio Sawa has had some impact on the Middle East...."

My comment concerns what I think gives Ackerman's report its zing: the apparent "weirdness" of Kurds in Irbil listening to reggaetón. I want to argue that this is not weird at all--except to us Americans who always seem to assume that "Easterners" are essentially different from us and inevitably more backward. We can imagine them drinking Coca-Cola, but not consuming the latest Western pop music craze, especially when they wear those strange headwraps and turbans.

The thing is, the Western mass media, in their various forms, have been around in the "East" ever since they were invented. Cinema shows up in Egypt very shortly after it does in the US. As for Latin music, Cuban music was a world-wide craze in the nineteen fifties. (Of course we know a lot more about its effects in the US and in Africa than we do about its impact on the Middle East.) For instance, a song called "Mambo Sudani" was a big hit in Egypt in the 50's, sung by Sudanese vocalist Sayyid Khalifah (Thanks to Ali for reminding me of the singer's name). As for Iraq, Elizabeth Fernea reports on a visit she and her anthropologist husban Bob made to a shaykh living near Diwaniya in 1956 or 1957, in her book Guests of the Sheik. One of the ways that the shaykh entertained them was by playing "Mambo Italiano" (a hit for Rosemary Clooney in 1954, for Dean Martin in 1955) over and over on his record player. So is it remarkable that people are listening to the Puerto Rican Daddy Yankee in Irbil in 2006, when media is much more globalized than in 1956?

As for his claim that the video for "Gasolina" is "near-pornographic," it is clear that Ackerman has never watched any rap videos, which today virtually always feature scantily clad girls shaking their booty. "Gasolina" is pretty mild compared to some. (And reggaetón is essentially "rap en español.")

Are the Kurds dreaming of all the "gasolina" they will gain control over, if they achieve their dream, and take over Kirkuk?

Tags: reggaetón, Iraq, Kurdistan

Anti-Arab Racism in Israel: 41% Favor Segregation of Entertainment

Chris McGreal in The Guardian (today) reports on a poll of Israeli Jews towards Israel's Arab (i.e., Palestinian citizens), conducted by respected pollster Geocartographia, on behalf of the Center for the Struggle Against Racism. Here are some of the results.

*Over two-thirds of Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab.

*Nearly half would not allow an Arab in their home.

*41% want segregation of entertainment facilities.

*40% believe that "the state needs to support the emigration of Arab citizens." [McGreat notes that this is in the platform of some far-right Israeli parties participating in next week's general election. This policy is known in Israel as "transfer. This is a polite way of saying ethnic cleansing.]

*63% consider their country's Arab citizens a "security and demographic threat to the state".

*18% said they felt hatred when they heard someone speaking Arabic. [This number is probably rather low because over 50% of Israeli Jews are "Eastern" or Mizrahi, mostly from Arab countries. For many Israeli Jews, Arabic is a mother tongue.]

*34% agreed with the statement that "Arab culture is inferior to Israeli culture". [Again, "Arab culture" is the culture of many Israeli Jews.]

Taleb el-Sana, a Palestinian-Israeli member of parliament, observed that polls showing "anti-Semitism in other countries are greeted in Israel with a frenzy of denunciations." "Yet when it happens at their home," said el-Sana, they're quiet, and that's why this is a two-fold failure - they are racist, and they're also not attempting to address their own racism."

McGeal also reports that, "The Yisrael Beiteinu party advocates redrawing the border to place about 500,000 Arab-Israelis inside a Palestinian state. Yisrael Beiteinu is expected to win about 10 seats in the 120-seat parliament, meaning it could hold the balance of power."

Israel: "beacon to the nations"? (Deuteronomy 4:5-9)

P.S. Of course these things can never be discussed by the mainstream US media or in polite society. To make any connections between Zionism and racism will only incite charges of anti-Semitism.

Tags: Israel

Nancy Ajram shills for coke

Nancy Ajram!! She drinks Coke!! You should too!!
Originally uploaded by *themba*.

One of Nancy's coke adds, referred to below.

Nancy Ajram: Time Out Dubai

I noticed this browsing at Queer Arab. I'm surprised Marc Lynch (Abu Aardvark) hasn't put this up, but I'm sure he will, he follows Nancy very closely.

The cover article, by Soraya Roberts, is here. You have to sign up to read the entire article, it's a bit of a tedious process, but free.

Here are a few of the interesting bits:

"[I]n the political climate of the 21st century Arab world, Ajram is the new face – and body – of social progress. The most famous pop star in the Middle East has taken subversion out of the newsroom and onto MTV. Whether she admits it or not, her bare midriff and swivelling hips are ushering in a new era of liberalism in the Middle East, much to the chagrin of traditionalists." (Soraya sounds a lot like Abu Aardvark here.)

"This scantily-clad femme fatale [overstated!] who has chosen to go under the knife three times (all before her mid-20s) is the ruler of her own destiny. In all of her videos, Ajram is in the position of power, with men either in the background or shown in a sexually ambiguous light."

"Nor is Ajram apologetic about prioritising her physical appearance. ‘Surgery for me is something very natural; I’m not embarrassed about it,’ she says. When it comes to plastic surgery, Ajram opts to avoid hypocrisy, considering that Lebanon has a well-recorded tradition for extensive nipping and tucking." [Sources tell me plastic surgery for women is at least as epidemic in Lebanon as in the US. Maybe more so.]

"Her aquiline nose and aquamarine eyes are splashed across billboards in her hometown (including a five-storey billboard, which is one of the biggest advertising constructions nationwide) in an advertising deal that reportedly earned her US$2 million. Advertising commitments, coupled with her massive Coca-Cola deal (which made her the face of America’s most recognisable brand) have secured her position as the highest-paid female singer in the Arab world."

"Ajram has been able to flourish in the Arab landscape thanks to the advent of music videos. A cascade of music channels flooded Arab television, from Rotana, also a successful music label, to ART, Future TV, Nagham (Arabic MTV) and LBC, which were all accessible via satellite TV, broadcasting micro mini-wearing musical sirens 24 hours a day."

"Ajram became the object of every Arab male’s fantasy following her video for ‘Akhasmak Ah’ (translated as ‘We Might Disagree’) in which she plays a café proprietor whose vocal pyrotechnics and body gyrations drive her male customers into hysteria. The video caused uproar, not unlike Egyptian films of the ’50s (to which its style has often been compared)..."

"Last year the mayor of Marrakech announced that Ajram could no longer hold concerts in the city to avoid a recurrence of the incidents surrounding her performance in April 2005 (where she performed to 100,000 people), which included ‘sexual harassment, theft [and] excessive alcohol consumption resulting in violence and people fainting.’ Prior to this incident, in 2003, airing of the ‘Akhasmak Aah’ video was banned by the Egyptian parliament for indecency. In the same year, a riot broke out outside a Bahraini concert when radical Islamists attacked Ajram’s fans – with religious leaders defending the violence claiming they were opposing ‘immorality’...In October 2003, Bahrain’s parliament refused to ban Ajram from performing in the city."

"Many of her male fans adore Ajram because she projects the image of the submissive girl next door. Ajram still lives with her family (‘how did you know that?’ she asks, slightly embarrassed) and laughs at rumours about her love life." ["Girl next door" was the ideal Playboy centerfold, at least in the magazine's early decades.]

"Nor does the singer discuss politics, like some of her peers."

Tags: Lebanon

Kufiyaspotting #10: Delta 5

Delta 5 were a great and important and very left-wing & feminist post-punk band from Leeds. I've read a lot about them but was only familiar with their song "Mind Your Own Business" as covered by Chicks on Speed, on the album Will Save Us All! Kill Rock Stars recently released a compilation with three of their singles, plus some BBC and live sessions, from 1979-1981. Now I can finally hear the great Delta 5 that previously I just read about.

It's drummer Kelvin Knight (far right) who is wearing the kufiya. Knight once spent time as the drummer for Gang of Four, also from Leeds, to whom Delta 5 bear a sonic resemblance. Delta 5 also ran in the same circles as another great Leeds post-punk band, The Mekons. In the liner notes to this compilation, Jon Langford of the Mekons (and Waco Brothers and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts) says that the personnel of the Mekons and Gang of Four and Delta 5 were all originally very loosely related and put together bands with names like Mekon Delta 4. I love this, whether it's true or not: it combines the Mekons and Gang of 4 name with Delta, and is (is this too obvious?) a pun on Mekong Delta.

Kufiyas were a very common accessory in leftwing Brit circles at the time.

Last kufiyaspotting here.

Tags: post-punk

[Note added November 23, 2012: See the comment below, which clarifies that Kelvin Knight, the kufiya wearer in the photo, was from York, not Leeds, and that he played drums on two classics from The Jermz: "Me and My Baby" and "Power Cut." And he also drummed for The Jerks, another Leeds band that pre-dated Delta 5.

Check out The Jerk's "Dole Queue Boy."

For more on Delta 5, check this out.]

Cock Rock Disco

Cock Rock Disco
Originally uploaded by tsweden.

Cock Rock Disco: Jason Forrest's label, based in Berlin. Jason performed at the Gypsy in Fayetteville last night, along with label mate Duran Duran Duran and Russellville band Taught the Rabbits. Hosted by KXUA-FM, at the Gypsy.

Monday night fun on spring break...

More photos of the event are on my flickr account; scroll down on the right.

Tags: Fayetteville, Arkansas

Kufiyaspotting #9B

Prayers for Iraq, March 18, 2006
Originally uploaded by Jennifer Esperanza.

This powerful Palestinian symbol just won't quit. A member of the Veterans for Peace praying for Iraq, kufiya-garbed, in Santa Fe.

Last two kufiyaspottings here and here.

Tags: Iraq war, Palestine

1001 Muslim Inventions

"1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in Our World": an exibit touring England. Go here for a full description; for the short version, an article in The Independent. Among the contributions named by The Independent: coffee, the bank check, distillation, inoculation, the fountain pen, shampoo, the Camera Obscura, modern surgical instruments, the windmill, the three-course meal, the crank-shaft, quilting, and the garden as a site of meditation. And much more. I found this at The Angry Arab News Service.

(Please read: you are not allowed to learn this in school. Otherwise we might regard Muslims and Arabs as something other than primitives, fanatics, and terrorists.)

Tags: Islam, science

Flaming Creature Devendra Banhart: NYT

Crazy fashion spread featuring Devendra Banhart & his group (Hairy Fairy) in today's New York Times Spring Men's Fashion magazine. With an article by Daphne Merkin called "Gender Trouble" which, of course, cites Judith Butler's book of the same title.

What the spread reminded me was of all those lucious, quasi-Orientalist tableaux in Jack Smith's underground film Flaming Creatures (1963), one of my favorite films of all time. (Last spring I organized a film series for the Gender Studies program at U of A called "Flaming Creatures," which featured the Smith film.) I've put up one image (it's the one on the right), but go see the film.

And go see Devendra Banhart perform on March 20 on a bill with Peaches and Steve Earle, at a benefit to raise funds to fight the US occupation of Iraq.

Tags: Devendra Banhart, Music, queer

"Bring Home The Troops" demo

Today in Fayetteville, AR. For more photos of this demo, scroll down a bit to my flickr account, on the right.

(Addendum: A report in today's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette estimates the crowd to have been 500, a very respectable number.)

Tags: Iraq war, anti-war, War