Wajeha al-Huwaider is perhaps the best-known Saudi campaigner for women’s rights, human rights and democracy. She has protested energetically against the kingdom’s lack of formal laws (the Koran is it) and basic freedoms and in particular against the guardianship system, under which every female, from birth to death, needs the permission of a male relative to make decisions in all important areas of life—education, travel, marriage, employment, finances, even surgery. In 2008 a video of her driving a car, which is forbidden for women in Saudi Arabia, created a sensation when it was posted on YouTube. Al-Huwaider is a strong supporter of the June 17 Movement, which calls on Saudi women to start driving on that date, and made the celebrated YouTube video of its co-founder, Manal al-Sherif, jailed for nine days in May for driving. While this interview was in preparation, she was briefly detained by the police when she tried to visit Nathalie Morin, a French-Canadian woman held captive with her children by her Saudi husband. Why the driving protests? And why now?
The issue of women drivers has remained unresolved since the driving protests of 1990. Just before the launching of the June 17 campaign, a group of well-known women and men signed a letter to the Shura, or Consultative Assembly, asking to reopen the discussion. It was rejected. That was the spark for the current protest of Manal and the other women. The issue never goes away...
It's somehow appropriate for its DIY ethics that the seminal moment in the history of modern British urban music is a four-part YouTube clip. Ripped from a home-made, long out-of-print DVD called Conflict, one cameraman films a tiny box-room full of young grime MCs, performing on pirate station Deja 92.3 FM, high up on a rooftop in Stratford – only yards from what is now the Olympic site.
Filmed on a summer evening in 2003, over 40 minutes, 15 or so members of legendary crews Roll Deep, East Connection and Nasty Crew squeeze into the makeshift studio – an all-star cast akin to getting the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Buzzcocks on the same bill. This was, in fact, grime's 100 Club moment – and thanks to the internet, we can all pretend we were there. As Roll Deep's DJ Karnage builds momentum with the instrumentals, the microphone is passed from MC to MC, from legends Wiley and D Double E to a 16-year-old Tinchy Stryder, to forgotten early heroes Demon and Sharky Major. The video is notorious for its dramatic climax, when a 17-year-old Dizzee Rascal nearly comes to blows with an MC who was then as hotly tipped as he was, Crazy Titch. The whole cast is a litany of possibility, of foiled and realised ambition; the future of British pop music at the crossroads. Eight years later, Dizzee is a global superstar with four No 1 singles to his name; Crazy Titch is serving a life sentence for murder.
Seen from this distance, the poignancy lands with the clinical punch of a Wiley snare: Dizzee Rascal now wants nothing to do with the music that first made him famous – he won the Mercury prize for Boy in Da Corner only months after this video was recorded. In 2011, Dizzee is collaborating with Shirley Bassey and Shakira; shadow-boxing backstage at Hyde Park with Prince Harry, while Titch resides at his grandmother's pleasure.
The videos, with a million or so YouTube views, findable by Googling Roll Deep Conflict, are a window on to an extraordinary era in British musical history. In one 10-second bit of hosting, Wiley accounts for the now-vanished trinity that created grime, and gave the British pop zeitgeist its platform: radio, raves and riddims. "This is Deja 92.3 FM … hold tight the raving massive, don't forget Eskimo dance ... hold tight Danny Weed, hold tight Target". This was a time when pirate radio was a hub for a whole (teenage) community – the geographical horizons as narrow as the musical ones were broad: "That's where I'm from, Bow E3," Wiley sprays into the mic. "I'm like the 38 bus, because I never turn up."
It also tells a story about grime at its musical peak: a stage before, or perhaps exactly when, the ego of MCs began to take over. Prior to that, anyone with a mic in their hand was first of all answerable to the beat, to the producer-DJ auteur, and pirate radio was all about "rolling out" the instrumentals – building a steady, if restless momentum. The MC was a performer, but also a host: a master of ceremonies, but also, in the parasitic sense, possessed by those extraordinary early grime beats and their macabre, avant-garde minimalism. As Wiley spits, "I'm futuristic, quantum leaping/there's no defeating/E3 tiger – see me creep on the riddim like a spider/kill them with a 16-liner". You wouldn't know it to hear 2011's shiny electro collaborations with the likes of Calvin Harris, but grime "spitting" is supposed to be twice the speed of hip-hop rapping: typically, you had just 16 bars to show your skills, before passing the mic to the next MC – a rule that made grime the most thrilling, ADD-friendly onslaught of a genre. Andy Warhol should count himself lucky he got 15 entire minutes to make an impact.
As the energy mounts, Crazy Titch is bopping with cartoonish energy, face screwed up at the sheer meanness of the track playing underneath, his blitzkrieg of bars including the lyric "Draw for me, you'll be on the 10 O'Clock News" seconds before the fight with Dizzee breaks out. When the scuffle starts, it could almost be a scene from EastEnders – apt, given the location. The music cuts out abruptly, and amid the clamour of raised voices and bravado we hear "step outside!", "leave it, man" – you can almost hear Pat Butcher telling them "he's not worth it!". Wiley is immediately in between the two callow young MCs – the godfather of grime, the paternal statesman who cares more for the scene than his own career. They are pulled apart, and everyone spills out on to the rooftop, silhouetted against the east London gloaming, as friends attempt to calm them down.
Three years later, Titch was sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement in the murder of 21-year-old Richard Holmes, a senseless crime supposedly connected to a disrespectful grime lyric. In that Deja FM set, Crazy Titch is captivating, going 100 miles per hour, arms pumping, grinning ear to ear – it's not a stretch to suppose that the gleeful, relentless energy he displays on the mic came from the same place as his manic, unhinged tendencies.
"Forget all this, man, forget all this," one MC is heard saying after the fight breaks out, attempting to defuse the tension. He meant they should forget the beef – and soon enough, they did. But a great deal else was forgotten with it. Dan Hancox @'The Guardian' ...worst headline of the year award winner btw!
What can machines tell us about being human? This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert meet humans and robots who are trying to connect, and blur the line.
We begin with a love story--from a man who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot on an online dating site. Then, we encounter a robot therapist whose inventor became so unnerved by its success that he pulled the plug. And we talk to the man who coded Cleverbot, a software program that learns from every new line of conversation it receives...and that's chatting with more than 3 million humans each month. Then, five intrepid kids help us test a hypothesis about a toy designed to push our buttons, and play on our human empathy. And we meet a robot built to be so sentient that its creators hope it will one day have a consciousness, and a life, all its own.
Ghosting Season is Gavin Miller and Thomas Ragsdale. It was born in 2011 out of the foundations of worriedaboutsatan, the band they have toured and recorded as for over half a decade. They play London this Friday with Demdike Stare at the Lexington.
Tracklist 1 - Kraftwerk - Elektro Kardiogramm 2 - Byetone - Plastic Star (Session) (Ghosting Season edit) Kraftwerk - Elektro Kardiogramm (parts) Nine Inch Nails - Closer (Ghosting Season edit) 3 - How To Destroy Angels - BBB (Ghosting Season edit) Byetone - Plastic Star (Session) (parts) 4 - Pantha Du Prince - Behind the Stars How To Destroy Angels - BBB (parts) 5 - Fairmont - Flight of the Albatross 6 - Ben Klock - Ok Fairmont - Flight of the Albatross (parts) Function - Disaffected (parts) Jonas Kopp - Michigan Lake (Ghosting Season edit) 7 - Modeselektor - B.M.I Joby Talbot - A Yellow Disc Rising From the Sea (Ghosting Season edit) Nine Inch Nails - Closer (parts) Function - Disaffected (parts) Kraftwerk - Elektro Kardiogramm (parts) 8 - Ghosting Season - Dead Man's Switch (Ghosting Season edit) 9 - Apparat - Arcadia (Telefon Tel Aviv remix) (Ghosting Season edit) 10 - Telefon Tel Aviv - The Birds (Ghosting Season edit) Jonas Kopp - Michigan Lake (Ghosting Season edit) Apparat - Arcadia (Telefon Tel Aviv remix) (parts) 11 - Ludovico Einaudi - The Planets
What if American law enforcement agents arrested more than six hundred drug dealing suspects in more than twenty cities across the country in just two days and nobody noticed?
On February 24, that’s exactly what happened as raids targeted drug gangs in cities all over the United States. In two days, 676 people were arrested and authorities confiscated $12 million, 282 weapons, ninety-four vehicles, and large packages of drugs.
It was one of the largest operations against drug cartels operating in the United States in recent years. These gangs were allegedly part of the vast structure that moves millions of dollars worth of drugs out of Mexico and into American neighborhoods in hundreds of cities. But did anyone notice?
As the arrests and seizures were reported by the DEA, FBI, and local law enforcement agencies, the front pages in the cities where the operation unfolded were concerned mostly with the latest developments in Libya, thousands of miles away. The arrests made in their cities, of people selling drugs to their residents, did not seem to have the same news value. For papers like the Los Angeles Times, The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, The Dallas Morning News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Detroit Free Press, or the Newark Star-Ledger, news of the arrests did not make their front pages, even though these cities were part of the operation. The New York Times ran a small teaser on the front page (their main story is here, as did the Houston Chronicle, where the raid resulted in a shootout and a local cop was wounded. Only a handful of papers, like the San Antonio Express-News,The San Diego Union-Tribune, El Paso Times, and in cities along the Rio Grande Valley gave the story some space on their front pages.
Watching from across the border, this was shocking. Raids against drug cartels and coverage of criminal activities surrounding the drug trade frequently jump to the front pages of Mexican newspapers. We experience the war on drugs every day through the violence employed by the cartels trying to control territories across the country. It has left almost 40,000 people dead in its wake.
But in Mexico, whenever raids or arrests don’t make the front page, the reason is frequently not lack of interest, but an abundance of caution. In the past four years, drug cartels have killed more than ten journalists, kidnapped dozens more, and carried out scores of attacks against newspaper offices or TV stations with gunfire and grenades. The objective: burying coverage of their activities.
I know this because I am a newspaper editor in Mexico, and in the past few years I have learned to take into account more than the news value of a crime story. But as far as I know, no threat exists against the US media—and so, the fact that such a significant raid against local drug gangs didn’t make the front pages of the local newspapers looked kind of strange...
