WELC
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TO H -ROC K BLUN TED CREW YAR
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02 YOU ARE HERE 14 JUST QUIT WORK 22 ART WHORE: YAR 06 NICE IT UP!:
HATER TOUCHES ON HOUSTON’S DANCEHALL
12 STIR IT UP
Marley Meets Marcos Café
18 I.P. FREELY DJ WITH STYLE
21 BLUNTED CREW 25 QUEEN MAJESTY
PUBLISHER MONIQUE CRUMP
EDITOR IN CHIEF BRIGITTE ZABAK CREATIVE DIRECTOR JEFFERY CRUMP JR.
CONTRIBUTING DESIGNER ROBERT BJORN TAYLOR
COVER PHOTOGRAPHED BY PHILLIP NGO – Gray Agent Photography
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HATER Touches Houston’s Dancehall
Within the city of Houston, there are many options to where you can experience another culture’s nightlife without a passport or a latex gloved cavity search courtesy of the TSA. The thought of being immersed in Jamaican nightlife at 3 a.m. had never entered my mind. To be honest, I wouldn’t even be able to write about it hadn’t I been driving home early one morning from a bar. I was on the southwest side passing by a shopping center wondering, ‘why in the hell were there so many cars out at three in the morning’. I stopped in the parking lot to hear the sounds of Jamaican patois and thumping dancehall spilling out of the doors of one of the halls. Upon first walking into the dance it was like walking into a rave..only it’s cool..and mainly a Jamaican crowd. The hall vibrated from the wall of speakers and reggae tunes were interrupted every minute by the selector and horn noises to create the atmosphere that is The Dance. The dance was crammed full with people who were doing dances that I have only seen successfully demonstrated on YouTube. The scantily clad girls battled for the dance floor doing head stands and splits to command the attention of the crowd. There was a thick layer of smoke and smell of jerk chicken from the Jamaican lady banging her spoon on the wall to show her appreciation of the riddim that was just dropped by the DJ. I was happy to have found a spot to work off my buzz-or hell- get another beer & be entertained by the party. I had found my new after hours home. Dancehall is more than just a genre of music. It’s an institution in which music, dance and community vibes merge. Dancehall is also the place where dances and sound clashes go down and where you can check out some of the artists perform. Like any party the dance is ruled by the sound system. The sound system is a DJ crew that dictates how the party will go. Here in the “H”, the most established sound is Mikie Faith Crew. The Mikie Faith Crew has been in Houston for over 25 years but different members have come and gone but standing in the crew now are Fatta Carey, Goldfinga, Tony Weed and Mikie Faith himself. Fatta Carey is the charismatic leader (big upping his crew);
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and his longtime friend, the dancehall promoter, Billy Bronco. With a name like Billy Bronco I was expecting a fat Soprano looking cat in sweats-- not a laid back Jamaican, who was excited to tell me about his birthday bash coming up. Bronco has owned the promoting business NyamCash for 15 years; he has his own sound system [Famous Squad], and owns the new venue Celebrity Hall. Golfinga and Fatta Carey explain to me the difference in dancehall events; there is the dance which is just an all out club-party-vibe where the people get to show off their new dances; and then there is the sound clash. The sound clash is when battling sounds will demonstrate who is the baddest by their collection of dub plates. Dub plates are record or cd presses, which are cut by artists just for that particular sound. For instance; if I got Beanie Man to say; “Big Up to Hater Magazine’ on a recording-then that’s a dub plate. Fatta Carey explains that over use of dub plates can also ruin a party if it’s in the wrong setting. “It’s all about time and place. You can come back from Jamaica with a fresh batch of dub plates and not one makes sense, but you just tell everyone you spent thousands of dollars and they have to listen to it”. This example can be witnessed by anyone who has been at a club dancing to their favorite song and the DJ keeps interrupting the song to shout out someone. Mikie Faith crew has clashed in the past but Fatta Carey prefers not to revisit their triumphs instead he talks about bringing the variety of communities and sounds together. “In my personal opinion, I see myself as a bridge. It’s easier to talk to people when you grew up with them but we want it to be more multicultural. At other dances in major cities you will see 4 to 5,000 people and we are trying to build up to that level” he exclaims. The youth of the Caribbean community in Houston has energized these parties to help them make the parties and performances lively. Artists will create songs about dances, the dancers will promote and it becomes a show each Saturday to demonstrate what you learned during the week. One dance in particular that I thought was just another reason for Beyonce to toss her weave around is the Dutty Wine. In this dance, a girl will bend and roll her head around in a
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wind it up like motion. The dance use to be people just posting up against the wall looking hard; now you will see men and sexy women alike take over the dance floor with the latest and greatest steps. The women aren’t just for visual entertainment either, ‘Showtyme the Dancehall Diva’ went from a dancer in the dance crew Jugglers to a respected dancehall promoter. When asked how she got the moniker, “Showtyme” she says, “Everyone that danced was big on names and I always liked the Showtime riddim. One day I joked to my friend Tonya that I would call myself that and she said something along the lines that it fit because it’s like a show when I get to the party.” She parted from dancing this year to start promoting and bringing acts to Houston with a professional edge that she feels she brings to the scene. “Eighty percent of dancehall promoters will screw you over, unlike them I will make sure your money is right, you have a hotel and that you are fed” she says. When asked about the violence in dancehall she explains “It goes back to where dancehall came about. It’s more for the ghetto youth struggle. It’s built from that environment; so naturally the people who are more interested in it are a lil’ rough”. I recount my own experience with attending the dances and how I notice people of all ages partying and enjoying one another. “The dancehall is very intimate. You see people in there from their 50’s and 60’s. Once you start going you get hooked” she says. Houston has a history of original sounds and artistic scenes that go unnoticed until it’s packaged and edited for a segment on MTV. For the heads that seek something in its raw, grimy and original form- they should definitely travel off the beaten path – pay Bronco at the door and drink a Red Stripe at the next dance. When I ask Fatta how he feels about the newcomers that will go to check out his party he says” “We are Jamaicans; we ain’t scared of nobody. Tell everyone to come to the party”.
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Marley Meets Marcos CafĂŠ
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The foursome dancehall/reggae loving deejays known as Swift, Vitamin A, BMC and Cef contribute significantly to Houston’s dancehall culture from the “other” perspective. Although none of them hail from da islands, they represent like they grew up on roti. Spinning mostly at G.R.A.B. bar and the Warehouse, these guys have the downtown sound on lock. 1. What separates blunted from the other sounds in Houston? No one in our sound is Carribean or Jamaican. We all come from Texas and play Reggae/Dancehall to the fullest. 2. What strengths does each one of you bring to the crew? Steve Swift is known for his vocal talent as a top notch MC and wicked reggae DJ. Vitamin A brings skills as a reggae DJ on the dance floor and on Mix Cd’s. BMC brings his hype mixing skills with experience in spinning DNB/Reggae/Dancehall. Cef is talented on the decks and is known for his early juggling sets. 4. Does the carribean community support your events? Yes, big up to a Reggaelink, Kingsmancamp and Jugglers United
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5. If you want a fine ass girl to start dancing what do you play? Anything they wanna hear 6. What strengths does each member bring to the group? Hmm...Interesting question. Well, the other 3 definitely bring loads of experience to the crew. Vitamin’s been DJing since the late 80s, I believe. BMC & Swift probably have over 20 years experience between the two of them. Swift has been selectin’ reggae the longest though. 7. Have any of ya’ll been to Jamaica? Swift went for his birthday this year 8. Do you usually have weird dancing hippies at your events? Not enough!
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seanmorrisseycarroll.blogspot.com Coming from street art, you need to keep a low profile. An alias and a strict code of confidence are a must. With a little press, like Houston Press Street Art of the Year 2005, the going can get a bit tough. What to do? Evolve. Since then, Houston artist YAR has collaborated with other artists on more structured murals, joined Domy’s Sketch Club, released short run editions of books and zines and moved into the gallery scene with exhibits at Domy Books, Commerce Street Artists Warehouse, the Lawndale Art Center and The Joanna Gallery. The artist credits his audience with his success; YAR wants to keep his work accessible, notably by keeping his prices down. “I want people like me to be able to like it and buy it.”
books,” a refreshing contrast to the culture that has grown into a worldwide enterprise of slick advertising, commercial marketing and hip retail. Ignoring the rules of tagging, lettering and crews, YAR has joined the ranks of international street art, with its emphasis on innovation, as perpetrated by sites like Streetsy and Wooster Collective. Shepard Fairey and Banksy, from Los Angeles and London respectively, have paved the way for artists to develop credibility and an audience in the art world coming from the street.
That gets tough to do when a collector calls from Paris, wanting to buy out the drawings in your show. This became the fate of over half of the watercolors in YAR’s latest show at Domy, where he split the bill with noted street artist GIVE UP. Still, the artist is dismissive, content to think more about his own practice than its effect in the art market.
Growing up in California, YAR moved to Katy, Texas in high school. The insulated community was riding high on the evangelical Christian movement in the late ‘90s, until a fallen idol threw the devout into a tailspin. For two years he moved back to California and attended college in Long Beach, shuttling between film and philosophy majors, making skate videos with his friends and growing disillusioned with the necessary collaborations of filmmaking. His first forays into graffiti were inspired by the street art scene in Southern California, especially the brazen work of Shepard Fairey and Space Invader, as well as feeding the philosophical bent he had acquired.
YAR is a strange character to be singled out in the stylized and blinged-out graffiti world, but he takes his influences from hip-hop music and literary sources. “Some people collect toys, I collect
Early street art pieces were of writer Franz Kafka or a Big Brother piece, inspired by the George Orwell novel 1984, that utilized stencils and spray paint. When he moved back to attend the
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University of Houston in 2005, he didn’t know anyone in Montrose and an evolution took hold in his artwork. He spent every night wandering the streets looking for spots and days drawing relentlessly. At first it was stickers, collaged faces on postage labels slapped compulsively on boxes, signs and walls. As he grew into feeling comfortable with his drawing, YAR began cutting up plain brown paper and pasting larger works. The most famous are his ‘ghosts’ with their open mouths and ragged ends, simplified but evocative figures that exploded all over the neighborhood. These works are what garnered the artist his first praise in the media, as well as the backhanded compliment of having your work torn off of fences and gas pumps whole. Since then his twisted faces have been painted on multitudes of surfaces. Gasping mouths sprouted from the ground and faces were sprayed onto warehouse walls. One show at Brazil last year was filled with giant heads without bodies, and an onion shaped man with dozens of lifeless arms. Working with the collective Lollipauperz, one hundred collaborative collages on records went up on street signs one day. Silkscreens went down on tee shirts, collages and books. Stickers and wheatpastes have been spotted in San Francisco and New York. His most recent work is a series of watercolors dominated by rainbows and brown bodies, his crowds of characters gesturing,
carrying bodies or spraying paint. These figures are anxious, but they live in a narrative much more stable than earlier, lonelier work. Not for a few years did YAR feel comfortable in Texas, but he invested his life in reading. His grandfather studied the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, an American who saw that logic equations could be carried out by electrical currents; an innovation that would lead to digital technology over fifty years after it was written. In the technologized modern world, philosophy is food for thought for the young artist, pouring new life into the language of reason abandoned by short-sighted culture. Seeking what is interesting and relevant today has fuelled argument, war and murder since Socrates was poisoned for his outlandish beliefs in 399 BC. By the Enlightenment in the 18th century, Francis Bacon professed that “knowledge is power”; pragmatists like Peirce took that knowledge a step further by acknowledging that what is useful for a person to believe may be very different from their reality. YAR relates the subjectivity of Russian authors like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy to this philosophical precedent, their characters grinding against the harsh realities they can somehow not fully grasp. The mutability of truth, the disparity between what we believe and the rest of the world, is further unearthed by Peirce when he writes “Doubt,
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like belief, requires justification.” In the music of underground hip-hop standouts Aceyalone and Aesop Rock lies a truly metaphysical understanding of postmodern life for YAR. Sampling Herbie Hancock and John Coltrane on A Book of Human Language, Aceyalone walks the listener through chapters of his life; The Hunt, The Catch, and especially The Faces resonate with the artist as deeply investigating life’s big questions and bringing them down to earth. In the recent painting These are a few of my favorite friends from the history of mankind... writers and philosophers are grotesquely caricatured. The faces are from earlier generations except for Aesop Rock, a confrontational and dedicated rapper, who contrasts his insightful perspectives with the fate of the working class around him. The senselessness of our individuality in the larger picture, and what we can strive to do for the positive, is where language fails us. Here, YAR’s artwork takes shape- an attempt to describe the world outside of words, a place of only people, subjective and unknowable others. Our paralysis today, in philosophy and humanity, is embodied by the artist in simple characters meant to attract interest - and wherever that may lead.
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Immortal Technique The 3rd World
The hand-to-hand sales success of Revolutionary Vol. 1 and 2 would make it easy for Immortal Technique to decide that it was time to climb the ladder and start moving bricks for the major labels. When it was announced that The 3rd World had a majority of its production done by Jay-Z’s DJ Green Lantern, it seemed the raw individualism of Tech was being cut with some mainstream hype. Would Immortal Technique be able to stick to his philosophical guns and uncut sound with a DJ known for his work for major label artists on the beats? If the rest of the album sounds like the advance tracks, the Marlo Stanfields of the rap industry should prepare for an extended stay at the business end of Omar’s shotgun...…they’re under siege. At first, Lantern’s production will be jarring for Tech fans used to less polished and more relaxed beats. But further listening reveals lyrics just as potent as the previous releases, packaged in beats that change the way he raps and the way you listen. These songs take an already potent lyricism and delivery and drive them home with an increased versatility derived from the new musical landscapes behind them. Adam Currier http://evolvingmusic.wordpress.com
Rae Davis
Positive Thinking Exponential [May 27, 2008] Listening to Texas native Rae Davis’ Positive Thinking makes me want to do one, or at least two, of these three things: a.Make love b. Work on an article that is due tomorrow c. Smoke a blunt I think A. and C. will mingle together quite nicely against the backdrop of Davis’ latest creation. What about the article you ask? Well, that’s just gonna have to wait. This classically trained jazz musician has put his taste and talent into a compilation of glitchy, jazzy and neo soul (but, not in that cheesy, head wrap way) beats. Positive Thinking is a solid introduction into the potential Davis has as a bona fide musician. It’s the perfect soundtrack for chill, laidback moments when you just want to get lost in something melodic and soulful. Positive Thinking lets you indulge your softer side without overwhelming your senses. Monique Crump
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There’s no shortage of hot reggae DJ’s in New York City. Walk the streets in any borough at any time of day and you’ll hear the pounding riddims bounding from every other car, boombox and bus stop that you pass. Inspired by the raw emotion of the music, DJ Queen Majesty, over the past ten years, has become one of the most in demand dub plate spinners in the city. She’s a tatted up white girl from Buffalo who knows the music from A-Z and can bounce between styles effortlessly. Her weekly internet show on www.eastvillageradio.com is one of the best places to hear the new jams up next to the classics and she’s extremely active in the clubs and bars of her fair city.
HATER: Were you always into reggae? Buffalo New York doesn’t seem like the most reggae-centric city in the world. Where’d you first get hooked? QM: It was after I moved to New York City in 1994 that I was really exposed to it. My first exposure was in the form of ska and rocksteady. HATER: What were you listening to before that? QM: I loved American oldies and R+B, but then new music I would listen to was anything from LL Cool J to Tool. HATER: What made you fall in love with reggae? Ganja? QM: Hah, yeah I think partly. It definitely was a big part of my initiation into dub music. I think all 18 year olds should smoke some weed and listen to Super Ape. But really, Jamaican music, especially the older stuff, is just so raw and heartfelt. It honestly makes me cry sometimes. My reggae collection that I had been building after I fell in love with it was really what spawned my desire to share it. HATER: Whats one of the first songs that ever moved you?
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HATER: Do you do mixtapes? QM: I just made my first official mix cd, called Queen Majesty Trilla (Rick Ross and I are on the same page, apparently). I guess my weekly radio show is a weekly mix, but I do want to put out more official compilations in the future. QM: Good question, I was listening to so much that moved me, but I would dare to say “You
HATER: East Village Radio is a pretty radical con-
Don’t Care” by Slim Smith.
cept in internet radio, how long ago did you get down with them, and how? Your show is off the
HATER: Is there any particular style of reggae that
chain.
you favor when you play out? It seems like a lot of the DJ’s in NYC only really focus on dancehall
QM: Aw thanks. Yeah everyone there is really
hits.
cool, and I love that it’s done in a DJ booth behind a huge window right on street level. I’ve
QM: Yeah I feel like I still just hear all the
been doing my show for almost 2 years now I
mainstream 90’s hits when someone does a
think. My friend Bryant K asked me to do the
dancehall set, or for a while it was long drawn-
first hour of his show, all shows there are 2
out Massive B riddim sets. For me, ever since
hours long.
hooking up with the Deadly Dragon dudes a few years ago, I’ve been playing way more dance-
HATER: When is the radio show on and where/
hall, from the 80’s on. We basically just play all
when can people see you play out?
of our favorites; so some obscure hits, some just obscure, and every now and then ones that
QM: Every Monday from 6-7 on www.eastvil-
everyone has heard.
lageradio.com, and (until I get my website redesigned) you can find all of my info on www.
HATER: But mostly dancehall style?
myspace.com/queenmajesty or check www. deadlydragonsound for our weekly and monthly
QM: Yeah, sorry, mostly all dancehall. But we are all big into old Studio One and rock steady which we usually start our nights off with. HATER: Is that more due to your tastes or how the New York crowd reacts to things? QM: Our tastes. If anything I think in general people know and respond better to roots reggae, dub, or 70’s stuff. We have a pretty particular taste and sound. HATER: See well thats good. So you’re not advocating the killing of homosexuals? QM: Hah. No, in no way am I for hateful lyrics in music or any kind of killing. I actually won’t play any anti-gay songs if I catch all of the lyrics. A few have slipped by me before I heard them fully, though.
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