Leo

Leo

June 2012 Volume 1, Issue 1

216 Sumner Street Newton Centre, MA 02459

617-795-2022

Leo Senior Staff

Editors-in-Chief: Daniel Kaufman and Sophie Scharlin-Pettee Managing Editors: Daniel Barabasi, Yoonchan Choi, Wendy Ma and Nicholas Reed

Contributors Michael Britt Michelle Bushoy Joshua Carney Dylan Cloud Chris Connell Andrew Dembling Connor Donahue

Ari Ebstein Hattie Gawande Ellie Goldsmith Ben Korsh Leo Schumann Ahaana Singh Jonathan Stricker

Faculty Advisor: David Weintraub Special Thanks to: Brian Baron

Editors’ Desk

T

he Leo Volume 1 Senior Staff is proud to present Newton South’s newest publication, featuring student writing, design and art. Our goal is to provoke thought, start dialogue and offer new outlets for student opinion and creative expression in ways that South has never seen before. With the addition of Leo, South now offers a newspaper, an online resource, a literary magazine and a news journal.

It is our hope that Leo will contribute a new print source that will enrich South’s already impressive journalism program.

What separates us from South’s other publications is our devotion to relating our articles to ideas on a global level. We value aesthetics and insight that connect the goings on at South with those of the outside world.

Leo opens up an opportunity for students to express themselves without restrictions on length, content or opinion; we present a wide variety of articles ranging from political op-eds to movie reviews to Onion-esque news reports.

This issue begins the grand opening of South’s reconstructed

journalism program and with it a new era of inspirational writing. The Lion’s Roar has been reporting for almost 30 years, NSHSDenebola had its soft-launch not long ago, Regulus has documented school-wide trends since the first graduating class and Reflections has allowed students to showcase their art and creative writing.

By combining forces, we aspire to raise student awareness about what other students are thinking. Leo asks its contributors to write an article, investigate a scandal or draw a portrait, mainly just to make a point. What is a Super PAC and why is it important?

Was silent film waiting for sound or is it an art form all its own? What’s hiphop really about?

Volume 1, Issue 1 sets a precedent that, hopefully, will continue to encourage Leo’s future success. In 5, 10, maybe 50 years from now, we want the editors and readers of Leo to look back and find a thoughtfully crafted and influential collection of writing that makes students stop and question their surroundings. We don’t believe this issue represents the peak of Leo’s

success; in fact, its quality should only improve from here. With the help of South’s students and staff, we plan on making Leo a lasting impression of what makes our school such a unique environment for creative and analytical thought.

Our first issue focuses largely on Hip-hop and its culture, as Hiphop is often misconstrued and misunderstood, but seldom praised for its influence. In this issue, our staff writers explore the origins of Hip-hop, as well as the art form’s lasting impression on every aspect of our society. In writing, music, dance and visual design, Hip-hop has become a defining force of our generation that represents something far more complex than overproduced music videos and B-boy poses. In the words of Doug E. Fresh, “Hip- hop is supposed to uplift and create, to educate people on a larger level and to make a change.” We hope Leo accomplishes the same thing.

— Leo Senior Staff

A special thank you to the following people that made our first issue possible:

Donors Circle Kenny Family

Julia Mackenzie

Marina Rakhilin

Striker Family

Ally Dellheim

Sethee Family

Michael Kan

Donahue Family

Singh Family

Weintraub Family

Leslie Lebowitz

Cris Goldsmith

Jarrett Gorih

Jim Britt

Leslie DeAngelo

Lisa and Roman Schumann

Choi Family

Matthew Copeland

Alla Bushoy

Salwa Elarabi

Richard DeAngelo

Block Family

Xuemei He

Sandra Carney

Reed Family

Barabasi Family

Janet Bogoslaw

Kaufman Family

Scharlin-Pettee Family

Morton and Freda Fishman

Alex Smolyar

Stembridge Family

Jane & Joel Dembling

Joseph Hazan

Hisham Bedri

Leo Volume 1, Issue 1

Contents 4 | Editor’s Desk 6 | Aperture

Contemplations 10 | The New American West 17 | The Artist versus the Entertainer 23 | The Megaphone of Discontent

Politick 27 | Rise of the Super PACs 28 | Crisis in Afghansitan

South by Southwest 8 | Khan Academy 15 | Viral Videos 16 | Enter the Void 22 | History of Film

Jokes 19 | Illuminati Exposé

|

June

Aperture Bay State Coin Co. Jon Stricker

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South by Southwest

A Fresh Look on Learning Khan Academy offers new way for students to learn

* Ahanna Singh

Everyday, students stare at their homework for hours unsure of how to actually do it. They read numbers and letters, meaningless when unprocessed. Whether they slept in class or they claim the teacher to be at fault, almost every student has undergone the state of pure confusion.

Thankfully, a new webbased revolution has saved countless students from turning in a half-blank sheet of homework: Khan Academy.

A great reference tool, Khan Academy is contributing to the increase in technology use over in-class aide.

With over 3100 videos, founder Salman Khan developed a system to wirelessly aide students around the world in the subjects of math, physics, chemistry, biology, and, recently finance and history. Armed with a computer pen and textbooks, Khan records videos for thousands of subcategories.

“I probably use [Khan Academy] about once a week,” freshman Kailah Korsh said, “Usually when I don’t understand something in math, I’ll use the videos to better explain it.” By appealing to all age levels, the videos clear up much confusion for many students like Korsh.

The revelation of having a targeted explanation of almost every school topic at one’s disposal is life altering.

There is no longer that stress

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of looking at your homework and having mental breakdowns because you don’t understand it. Well, yes, in high school those mental breakdowns are inevitable, but Khan Academy makes them a little more infrequent.

Through Khan Academy’s simple, universal teaching methods, the use of technology is quickly overtaking in class study helpers such as textbooks, references, and even teachers.

Khan Academy isn’t unique in its philosophy. With the evolution of YouTube usage, recording “How to…” and step-by-step videos have become very popular. Khan just took it to a whole new level.

With videos, he has created a nonprofit organization (khanacademy.org) that has benefited thousands. Its beneficiaries are not only students; teachers and parents have found the website to be a revolution as well.

Korsh’s mother, Ellen, believes that the website has contributed to Korsh’s development as a math student. “[Kailah] was having so much trouble with math at the beginning of the year, but once she found this website her understanding and confidence levels sky-rocketed.”

Ellen said.

On the surface, the reliance on websites like KhanAcademy.org shows more confidence with the class material. As they can pause, rewind, and replay the clips, students can pace the way they learn to fit their needs. Though it can also reflect poorly not only on faculty, but also on ourselves. Why can’t we learn in class itself?

Is it because of the teacher, or are our attention spans truly lacking this much? Khan’s videos are an incredible tool and are very helpful, but students should have no reason to be dependent on solely them.

Born into the Information Age, our current generation has become increasingly over-dependent on technology.

Student minds are no longer excercised in the same intensity as they were in a classroom. Though it is difficult to learn in some classroom environments, the side notes and anecdotes that arise in class cannot be taught in a 10-minute video.

More and more students are turning to Khan as a teacher. Quick and easy comprehension from the instructional video clips has led to the ability for students to complete homework and prepare for quizzes and tests

more efficiently. Though with the influx in viewers and followers, a curious question arises. What are the side effects of using technology for entertainment as well as education? For many, Khan aides students of teachers who have trouble with handling. On the other hand, it can lead to the lack of a useful teacher presence.

“After being modified a bit, [KhanAcademy.org] would definitely be capable of teaching classes,” Korsh admitted, “Though it would miss the personal aspect of a teacher being present for the students, it’s potential and capabilities are endless.”

With or without the threat of teacher loss, KhanAcademy.org’s success and praise truly shows for itself. Numerous user stories are submitted and shared on the website with a great deal of sincerity and praise for Khan and what he is doing.

As technology has evolved and created amazing opportunities for users over the years, the results have shown consistent success.

Salman Khan has initiated a revolutionary way of learning that continues to prove itself among students and families everyday, but slowly destroys the attention span both in school and at home of the youth.

The New American West A hipster on the tame frontiers of plastic and consumerism

by Ari Ebstein “I sometimes think there is a malign force loose in the universe that is the social equivalent of cancer, and it’s plastic. It infiltrates everything. It’s metastasis.

It gets into every single pore of productive life. Before long … our bodies, our skeletons, will be replaced with plastic.”

– Norman Mailer

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I

’ve always felt that Marx’s quip that the capitalist will sell the rope from which he is hanged was a bit too idealistic. Marx lived in the nineteenth century and never witnessed the full might of commodification—a force so passé in the twenty-first century that we seldom stop to notice its cancerous infiltration into “every single pore of productive life.”

No, the capitalist wouldn’t sell his own noose; he’d package it with a plastic bourgeoisie stand-in into a doit-yourself kit so that the masses could protest the forces of alienation while increasing his dividends. Marx, in his relationship with a less entrenched capitalism, could have never imagined it as quite so dynamic a force: the drive to amass capital, unrelenting, smoothly assimilating criticism into commodity.

Herbert Marcuse got a bit closer than Marx to understanding the dynamics of post-industrial capitalism. “At the most advanced stage of capitalism,” Marcuse said, “society is a system of subdued pluralism, in which the competing institutions concur in solidifying the power of the whole over the individual.” This, I think, is closer to the truth.

Growing up during the height of global capitalism, I am drenched in this “subdued pluralism,” a façade of sub-cultural differences, all similar in that they’re all evidenced by material goods. This is the big tent of consumerism: brand is identity; identity is brand.

But the suffocating logic has gone into realms even Marcuse couldn’t have imagined.

In 2011, everything is a brand. Not just your sweaters and your jeans—this is the old consumerism. Now your very tastes, proudly displayed on your Facebook, twitter, etc., are brands.

Are you the kind

of person who likes Pulp Fiction? It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Kanye West? Well, then do we have an outlet for you. It’s called the Internet, and everyone can play.

I’d like to tell a story from within the eye of that “infernal machine” known as “technological consumerism.” It is the story of the hipster, a vaguely anti-consumerist subculture, and its anointed musical prophet, Kanye West. In their intertwined story lies a microcosm of the schizophrenic contradictions we all swim through, if only slightly more pronounced. It is a tragic story, and it starts in 2003 . . .

K

anye West was a successful producer working in New York City by 2003. He had produced hits for Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Nas. But now he wanted more; he wanted to rap.

He took “Jesus Walks” and a few other singles to record executives, but no one wanted him. His image wasn’t consistent with the time. He appreciated high fashion and had a dangerous social conscious. The contrast between him and, say, 50 Cent, couldn’t have been greater. 50’s Get Rich or Die Trying (2003) was more or less the benchmark of hip-hop taste for record companies at the time, with hit singles like “P.I.M.P” and “High All the Time”.

Who was this kid from the Chicago suburbs who rapped about the falseness of gangster materialism? Surely, they thought, no one could make money off of him.

Luckily, West had established a close relationship with Jay-Z, an executive at Roc-A-Fella Records. West had revitalized Jay’s career with his excellent production on The Blueprint 2 (2002), and Jay felt like he owed West a favor. In 2004, Jay gave him a chance—a decision he wouldn’t regret. West’s debut album College Dropout (2004) was a huge commercial and critical success.

If you listen to College Dropout (which you should; it’s an incredible album), what’s striking is West’s instant

iconoclasm. A rapper who clawed his way into the hip-hop scene confidently breaks the fourth wall, rapping about the vapidity of gangster culture. His hit single off the album, “All Falls Down”, is a poignant critique of American consumerism that defied all the rules about what a mainstream hip-hop artist could say. “It seems, we’re living the American Dream/But the people highest up got the lowest self-esteem/ The prettiest people do the ugliest things/For the road to riches and diamond rings.” The audacity of such a confession can’t be overstated. West was risking his future with this song, and it paid off.

But if West had just pontificated about the emptiness of hip-hop consumerism, he wouldn’t have been half as popular as he was; no one likes a pompous rapper.

West distinguished himself because he contextualized his own vices within the framework of gangster culture. “I promise, I’m so self-conscious/That’s why you always see me with at least one of my watches/Rollies and Pashas done drove me crazy/I can’t even pronounce nothing—pass that ver-say-chee.”

He was a literal iconoclast—a man protesting the material standards of his time. But he didn’t stop there: “I ain’t even trying to act holier than thou/Cause fuck it, I went to Jacob’s with twenty-five thou.” He not only criticized the materialistic gangster values of his musical peers; he acknowledged his own contradictions, his own imperfections.

His conscience appealed to more than just alienating force of consumerism—he connected to the very self-loathing of his fans, who, like West, longed for material success and derided its vapidity. He viscerally understood the paradox of wealth’s liberation and imprisonment. West ended “All Falls Down” with perhaps his best-ever punch line: “Even if you in a Benz, you still a nigger, in a coupe (coop).”

But West’s ironic distance from materialism couldn’t remain. His

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consumerist values would become his tragic flaw, leading to the shell of the man that’s left today.

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n 2007, West’s mother, Donda West, sought plastic surgery from a surgeon in Beverley Hills. The surgeon advised her against the surgery, so she went to someone else, who administered the mammaplasty. She died during the surgery.

West was crushed. In 2008, he told reporters, “It was like losing an arm and a leg and trying to walk through all of that.” He immortalized her in his incredible song “Hey Mama”, a touching single that effuses real love through the headphones. It also hurts to listen to, though, because this time, West isn’t in on the irony. “I said Mama, I’ma love you till you don’t hurt no more/ And when I’m older, you ain’t have to work no more/And I’ma get you that mansion that we couldn’t afford.” Well, West did grow up, and he bought her whatever she pleased.

Yet his wealth was her literal demise; he had bought her plastic surgery. “I’ma get you a Jag whatever else you want/Just tell me what kind of S-Type Donda West like.” His love is genuine but reified, and he’s blind to the products of his own success. In this sense, his mother’s tragedy compounded on itself, and with the death of West’s conscience, two lives were lost instead of one.

I think the irony with the plastic surgery is clear enough, so I won’t dwell on it. As Donda West’s very body turned to plastic, that uncanny microcosm of postindustrial capitalism, her and her son’s dreams came crashing down, and all that was left were the echoes of fantasies once held.

In the aftermath of her death, West’s music and lifestyle descended into an empty hedonism. His music was more popular than ever, and he was accumulating even more wealth. But his social

“

As Donda West’s very body turned to plastic, that uncanny microcosm of post-industrial capitalism, her and her son’s dreams came crashing down, and all that was left were the echoes of fantasies once held.

commentary was getting harder to find, and in general, it was less creative.

None of this detracted from his ballooning popularity. West’s tragedy made him an even more enticing public figure, and soon he was the darling of the hipster.

In 2010, West released his most critically acclaimed album to date, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The album’s most popular song, “Lost in the World”, samples Bon Iver’s “Woods”—an obvious olive branch to his now impossible-to-ignore indie fan base.

In the song, West describes the alienation and contradiction of stardom. To start, West uses an autotuned sampling of Bon Iver, an eerie repetition of the phrase “I’m up in the woods/I’m down on my mind/I’m building a still to slow down time.” The escapist naturalistic fantasy of the hipster is now West’s, too. Hollywood is too complicated, and he seeks the serenity a chosen alienation in nature.

After the sample, West raps a series of oppositions.

You’re my devil; you’re my angel You’re my heaven; you’re my hell You’re my now; you’re my forever You’re my freedom; you’re my jail You’re my lies; you’re my truth You’re my questions; you’re my proof You’re my stress and you’re my masseuse.

A seriously troubled man lies somewhere in between these contradictions. I’m sure West exists somewhere between appearance and reality, orgasm and depression, high and addicted, mastermind and college dropout—but I’m not sure where, and

”

neither does he.

All I’m sure of is his profound sense of isolation. “Mama say, mama say, mama Maku-san/Lost in this plastic life/Let’s break out of this fake-ass party, turn this into a classic night.” If only it were that easy. West’s depression can’t be wished away with a one-night stand; indeed, I’d guess more bad comes from this hedonistic transience than good.

H

ow does this all come back to the hipster? Well, West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was the most popular rap album among indie music lovers since Stankonia (2001). Pitchfork, the hipster’s tastemaker for music, gave the album a perfect ten, an exceedingly rare honor that the website usually reserves for a Radiohead album. In the new consumerism, where taste is the new material good, this review ensured West indie credibility. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy cemented West as the hipster’s rapper, an outlet for digital natives who “ironically” don’t give a fuck. His apathy, his materialism, his contradictions—they’re as much the hipster’s as his.

In 1999, the hipster was an urban nomad protesting globalization in Seattle. Now, the hipster, like West, has been firmly absorbed into the capitalist mainstream, a subculture that has become predominant amongst a new generation of digital natives who buy clothes from Urban Outfitters and flaunt their independent tastes on Facebook, ostensibly embracing material standards ironically. But there is nothing ironic about either West or his hipsters. They both used to be anti-consumerist; now, he unironically

fetishizes his wealth, and they unironically fetishize him. The bluntness of this devolution is best evident on the cover of West’s brand-obsessed collaboration album with Jay-Z, Watch the Throne (2011). It’s just gold. Pitchfork gave it an 8.5. An Oberlin film graduate even a film made called “Watch the Throne: The Indie Movie”. It’s just three white girls reciting a pastiche of lyrics off the album, and it’s insufferable it will make your eyes bleed through shutter shades.

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nd so the relentless assimilation of capitalism’s critics carry on: Kanye West, from anti-consumerist to brand fetishizer, carrying the hipster in his wake. Oh, the alienation is still all there. In “Welcome to the Jungle” (off of Watch the Throne), West raps, “Just when I thought I had everything, I lost it all.” But any explanation of his depression’s source is absent. In fact, quite the contrary; in the album’s opener, “No Church in the Wild,” West raps, “When we die the money we can’t keep/But we probably spend it all ‘cause the pain ain’t cheap.”

In “All Falls Down” West was aware that his idealization of wealth was born from his insecurity; moreover, he knew that this insecurity bred a paralyzing self-consciousness. Now, to combat that disorienting pain, he’s chosen to spend his way to heaven. I don’t think it’s worked.

Contrary to West, some hipsters are now fighting their assimilation.

They are occupying Zucotti Park, and they refuse to diminutive themselves into a consolidated message, making the beltway press go berserk. They reject the notion of brand as identity and therefore are refusing to be condensed.

But they have a mountain to climb if they want to combat the infernal machine of technological consumerism.

The nucleus might not the protests to brand themselves, but plenty of people are showing up to prove that their political taste is still hip, including an old friend.

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South by Southwest

Viral Upload How Internet videos degrade our humor It’s a beautiful Sunday morning and instead of doing homework or spending my time outside I stay closeted in my heated home lurking on Facebook. Though, instead of seeing posts of friends of friends of friends across my newsfeed, it occurs to me that my Facebook page is completely covered in YouTube links, all replicas of one another.

Whether the video is a red head telling the world that Gingers have souls or an auto-tuned version of bed intruder – everyone has seen the videos and passed on the torch of insufferable YouTube dribble to the next generation.

Whether or not these videos are made with the intent of creating an artistic statement or simply to provoke brainless entertainment is irrelevant, what matters is how people view and react to them. The fact that these videos rack up millions of hits overnight and are watched over and over again suggests that their viewers expect very little from their entertainment.

Viral videos, Internet video clips that gain widespread media attention in very short amounts of time have taken a toll on their fan base.

Contemporary YouTube videos, many of which are intended to be comical, can also be described as offensive, sadistic, and cruel.

Freshman Eli Levine described a 2007 video as funny due to “[Chris Crocker] screaming in hysterics about media attacks against Britney Spears.” The video has become a worldwide sensation, resulting in disparaging comments directed towards Crocker.

Freshman Jonathan Kirshenbaum fails to see the appeal of the viral video trend. He described more recent videos

as being “stupid-funny”, but deemed an earlier video he watched “inspirational”.

In this video in question showed clips of a man doing a silly dance number in various locations around the world. The clips are set in Asia and Europe and show a delightful and humorous video encouraging cultural relativity. This dancing video juxtaposes the creativity and interesting material found in the earlier viral videos with the event-oriented modern videos.

Nowadays, many popular videos are deemed funny due to their desperate and sad nature. Various generations, but primarily teenagers, send the clips to their friends and peers solely to mock the “actors” seen in the video.

Freshman Mandy Moy described comedy from a decade ago as “funny and interesting to watch just because ideas were just so much better than they are now.” This reflects upon the gradual comedic downfall taking place in society over the past two decades. Whether you admit it or not, everyone loves watching someone take a crazy fall or make a fool out of themselves.

Society’s take on humor was not always like this. In the late 1990s popular videos were just well made clips, probably animated, uploaded by visionaries who were truly fascinated in the prospect of video editing.

One “viral” video from the 90s, dubbed Dancing Baby or Baby Cha-Cha, gathered crowds around an animation of a 3D baby doing a bizarre cha-cha dance in only a diaper. Although the video was neither lengthy nor infused with witty dialect, the quick jest of a cute clip was just what people needed. However this type of video has

fallen out of style in favor of more crude, face-paced videos based on popular video site viewerships.

Videos no longer depend on their ingenuity or thought-based comedy; they now rely on an enthralled viewership. Therefore, if the videos begin to become less co-medically engineered, then so do their viewers.

Society decides which video becomes popular based on early adopters being able to spread them to large audiences and the audience’s strongly positive or negative response. To amuse the population those uploading videos onto YouTube need to one-up the other viral videos, and so spread videos full of odd or crazy happenings.

The underlying cause of society’s destructive humor is based on its need for awe and surprise. What will future viral videos come up with? Based on the downward trend of the definition of comedy, the chain of videos chosen by society as “interesting” will progressively worsen until we are faced with videos alternating between constant freak-outs, purely dissonant harsh tones, and a stream of people falling flat on their faces.

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graohics by Yoonchan Choi

* Michelle Bushoy

South by Southwest

Movie Critique:

Enter the Void (2009) * Andrew Dembling

Fans of both Robert Pattinson and David Cronenberg rejoiced several weeks ago as the teaser trailer for Cosmopolis was released, an upcoming collaboration between the two. The latter, however, left a maelstrom of accusations on the video, criticizing it for being a rip-off of the 2009 film Enter the Void.

A similar stream of complaints can be found on the music video for Kanye West’s “All of the Lights,” which premiered last year. Both videos are criticized for their similarities to the visceral, seizure-inducing assault of text of which Void’s opening credits were composed.

The influence is undeniable; the overwhelming, strobing barrage of neon typography is sure to leave an impression on all of its viewers, filmmakers most of all.

The film, directed by notorious Argentine auteur Gaspar Noe, follows junkie Oscar in first person through his life, DMT trips, death and afterlife.

Literally—the entire movie is shot from the perspective of Alex’s eyes, in both the physical and spiritual sense. Oscar, played by Nathaniel Brown, is a drug dealer living in Tokyo with his sister, a downtown stripper played by the woozy Paz de la Huerta, with whom he may or may not have an incestuous relationship.

When a drug deal goes bad, Alex is shot by the police, and his spirit, along with the camera, leaves his physical body. At this moment Oscar transcends into omniscience; the following two hours depict his witnessing the aftermath of his death along with his reflections on life, with the two often blending together.

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Noe is known for his intense and obscene subject matter; his past films, Irreversible and I Stand Alone, both quite explicitly depict rape and murder. While the subject matter in Void is definitely less severe, it depicts sex in, quite literally, the most intrusive way possible.

These stylistic choices, however, are not all for show. Noe has crafted what can arguably be called the most thought provoking film of the past decade. He crafts juxtapositions that make one question what really defines love, death, and most importantly, consciousness.

The title is probably the most puzzling enigma of all. He presents a seemingly endless number of suggestions as to what he thinks “the void” really is (among them being the objective universe, the universe we inhabit, a nightclub, vaginas).

Of course, the element that leaves the biggest impression is the opening credits.

Set to LFO’s “Freak,” it seems to completely ignore every movie that has come before it.

The same can be said for the film itself; it is completely unique in almost all aspects. The only cinematic experience one could relate it to would be that of the

Star Gate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Enter the Void is a film that will confuse, confound and continue to inspire its cult of loyal followers. It is a rare thing when high trash and high art, pornography and philosophy, and exploitation and exaltation coexist as beautifully as they do here. Follow the title’s command, and enter.

photo courtesy of Fidélité Films

THE ARTIST VERSUS THE ENTERTAINER LEO SCHUMANN

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n 1929, the first Academy Award for Best Actor was given to German Emil Jannings for his roles in the silent movies The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command. Jannings had moved from Germany to Hollywood a few years before and had transplanted his successful and artistically brilliant career in the German film industry to America. He arrived at the beginning of the end of the silent era. The Jazz Singer, the first major motion picture with sound, had been released two years earlier. As the “talkies” rose to dominance in Hollywood, Jannings quickly faded from the Hollywood screen. Why? His thick German accent.

He returned to Germany and became an enthusiastic actor in films of the Nazi era.

The 2011 Academy Award-winning film The Artist, the only silent film to win an Academy Award since those first Academy Awards, contained about fourteen spoken words at the very end of the movie. The most memorable of these were from George Valentin, played by French actor Jean Dujardin. In a thick French accent, Val-

entin says: “wis plezere.”

The Artist is a charming film. It is the story of Valentin, silent movie actor and public heartthrob. He collides with Peppy Miller (played by Berenice Bejo) at the premier of his highly anticipated action movie, A Russian Affair. She hopes to become a star herself and does so with some help from George. When sound film is invented, however, Peppy rises to be a Hollywood sweetheart, and George and his movies fall into obscurity. He loses his money, his wife and his house. In his misery, George mourns his losses alone until he burns his collection of his own silent films, and consequently his apartment.

Eventually, Peppy consoles George back onto his feet and they costar in some sort of tap-dancing film. Luckily Valentin chose tap-dancing over Nazism to deal with his heavy foreign accent. The PR for The Artist would have been a nightmare.

The difference between George Valentin and Emil Jannings illustrates very well the difference between The Artist and the great silent films of the past. While the original silent films showed no hesitation in veering to the

utterly horrible, the tragically hopeless or the anticly slapstick, The Artist steered clear of the great peaks, comic chaos and tragic, despairing pitfalls that once tore at the hearts of the audience. Emil Jannings, a man who once seemed so acutely understanding of human emotion, spent his later career assuming the most odious job an artist of that era could assume: official Artist of the State for the Third Reich.

Valentin played with matches and did a little dance. While I only use Jannings’s life as a metaphor, and I do not mean to make his actions seem less grave or less horrid, I think the metaphor is accurate.

The Artist ended up steering clear of being either a comedy or a drama, although it had elements of both.

Those elements didn’t do silent film justice. The greatest silent dramas were not great because they were charming, as The Artist is, but because they were intensely and even gruelingly emotional. The greatest silent comedies were not great because they were silly, as The Artist is, but because they were unbelievable. Great silent films were often about individuals trying desperJUNE 2012 • LEO

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Contemplations ately to navigate a nonsensical world (and sometimes failing horribly). The world of The Artist had none of the incredulity or irrationality that both great silent dramas and comedies had. The world and characters of The Artist are too fathomable, too reasonable, too logical, too cause-andeffect for the silent world. The masterpieces of silent cinema overwhelmed the audience, confounded them.

For a film that desired to be a harkening back to the style of early film, fairly little of The Artist’s style harkened back to early film. I believe this originates from a central mistaken assumption: that the silent movies were just inane, that they were comical little pantomimes, that they were shallow festivals of exaggerated expressions, or “mugging,” as Peppy puts it in The Artist.

The relatively low esteem in which The Artist holds silent films is clear in all the silent movies represented in it. Valentin’s A Russian Affair, A German Affair, and Tears of Love are all totally silly. The dashing hero of each movie triumphs over sadistic Soviet prison keepers and spearbrandishing African tribesmen, while of course saving the inevitable damsel. The title character of The Artist, George Valentin himself, is not an artist, but an entertainer.

Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist’s director, seems to interpret silent film as an entertainment form that had not developed into an art form. Not only is it a grave mistake to presume that silent films were entertainment without art, it is a graver mistake to presume that silent movies were an art form that was “waiting” for sound. By the end of the silent era, a brilliant, distinct art form had

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evolved, one separate from sound cinema.

The wondrous distinction here is akin to the distinction a ballet has from a play, in that both ballet and silent films must communicate to their audiences without depending on words and dialogue. The audience must fill the silence and wordlessness with their own thoughts and their own emotions. What is untold becomes innately wonderful or fearful, not only by a suspenseful disconnection from reality, but also by the receding into one’s own mind that this disconnection produces.

In a world where no voices are heard, there is only your own voice. The world of silent film is irrational, immoderate, surreal, and emotional. A world that only communicates specific facts in snippets of text is not a world of fact at all but a world of feeling. The exaggerated hand gestures and expressions do not seem as if they were done out of practicality and necessity but as if they followed as a product of the great untold. The silent world is not one of cause and effect but a world of pride and despair, love and pain. There is no place for emotional convenience and ease in silent film.

In the great silent films, there would be no place for Peppy’s consolation of George.

.W. Murnau, a German director who worked frequently with Jannings and also immigrated to Hollywood, always preferred the silent film art form to “talkies.” While still in Germany,

Murnau directed The Last Laugh, which is particularly appropriate to compare to The Artist because it also chronicles a terrible fall from greatness.

Jannings plays a proud Berlin hotel doorman, a position that had earned him great respect in his working class neighborhood. The unreasonable near-worship he and his neighbors pay to his hotel uniform figures prominently in the film. When he loses his position due to his old age, and his neighbors eventually discover that he has been demoted to bathroom attendant, he is shunned and cast out and languishes shamefully in the basement bathroom to which he has been relegated.

background) and there are a few scenes in which the audience reads documents on screen.

It is interesting to watch how Murnau explains the world to the audience without sound and with hardly any words. Instead of Jannings’ doorman saying at some point, “I really, really wish I were younger and stronger,” he has a surreal dream in which he is as agile as he was in his youth. In his dream, the doors of the hotel are soaringly tall, and all the young, muscular men are inadequate compared to the veteran doorman’s dexterity and strength.

One of the ironies of The Artist is that the sequence that most resembles this form of expression is the only sequence besides the ending which has any sound. That sequence is also a dream, in which Valentin dreams that the world is full of sound—the clinking of glass, the barking of his dog and malicious laughter of the showgirls—and only he has lost his voice.

The dream expresses Valentin’s deep fear of Unlike Valentin, who being left behind by sound falls from fame to obscurity, the doorman falls from prince cinema. Valentin’s dream— with its multiplying showgirls of the lowly to no one of and exploding feathers—is nothing, an afterthought of as surreal as the Berlin doorafterthoughts. The film does have a happy ending, but only man’s. The darkness of Valenafter Murnau’s disclaimer that tin’s fears is brilliantly transthe happy ending is virtually ferred to the screen.

An excellent example impossible, and has only been of darkness, madness, and included because he “cares insanity in irrational silent about the character.” drama is the original movie What makes this film adaptation of The Phantom even more remarkable from of the Opera, directed by an artistic standpoint is that it uses no dialogue. There are Rupert Julian and starring only two intertitles (the slides Lon Chaney as the Phantom. of dialogue or narration, usu- The Phantom lurks in the dungeons beneath the Paris ally white text against a black

In a world where no voices are heard, there is only your own voice. The world of silent film is irrational, immoderate, surreal, and emotional.

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Contemplations The movie extols simple, traditional life and condemns the morally corrosive urban life through the story of a husband and wife driven apart by a seductive and depraved woman of the city.

The expressive artistry of Murnau extends to the film’s sets.

For Sunrise, Murnau carefully created every location from the ground up, including a German-style village and an amusement park. The sets look like something you might have dreamed one night after learning about rural Europe in one class and The Phantom (Lon Chaney) lures the diva into the shadows of the catacombs in Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera. early twentiethcentury cities in another. The transiare used to display fear and designate Opera House, showing himself above tion between the country and city is the insane territory of the Phantom. only rarely, and he is almost never seen an astoundingly expressive sequence Shadows are also used as reflections of when above except as a shadow out of involving a constructed trolley with the emotions of the characters or the the corner of the eye. The Phantom is a stop in the middle of a forest, a city emotion the director intends to evoke an unknowable evil that dwells in the outskirt and ultimately a bustling city in the audience. In The Last Laugh, for deepest darkness, an ingenious, devicenter. The sets help produce the surous shadow that cannot be reasoned instance, when the doorman descends real quality that floats around the film with and cannot be rationalized away. with utter despair into the basement and amplifies every emotion. Sets that As the Phantom lures the opera bathroom, the stairwell seems to be a communicate to the audience are a trait singer he idolizes into his underground black mouth ready to swallow him and of many silent dramas. Murnau illuslair, we, as much as the singing damfinalize his fears. The Artist hardly uses trates the husband’s return to morality, light and shadow with the intentionalsel, are being led deeper into a world for instance, by a shot of the man holdity these films had, only experimenting of dark irrationality. From the Opera to ing his face in his hands with a church with it briefly but dramatically when the catacombs, there is a progression of in the background.

George argues with his own shadow. light and shadows, getting ever darker Another one of Murnau’s masterJannings was in good company the deeper it gets. As the shadows pieces was his film version of the classic when he won that first Academy Award get stronger and the characters sink tale Faust, a battle between an angel for best actor. One of Murnau’s Amerideeper into this strange world, the sets and a demon through the aged scholar can films, Sunrise: A Song of Two Huget stranger and stranger, transformFaust. The demon, Mefisto (played by mans, won two awards for its astounding through long, shadowy, winding Jannings), tempts Faust into signing ing style. It is an emotionally erratic staircases and ending in a subterranean a bargain with him: Faust’s soul in exdream-like film, which can’t seem to canal. change for supernatural powers and, make up its mind whether it wants to The way Julian and many dilater, youth. The fantastic, the magical be a romantic fantasy or a lonely nightrectors of the era use darkness and and the occult find a natural home in mare. At many points in the film, Murshadows is essential to the way irratiothe insane, irrational, immoderate silent nau makes the audience fear a sudden nality is represented in silent film. In world. careen into heart-wrenching tragedy. the Phantom of the Opera, shadows JUNE 2012 • LEO

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Contemplations

Meifesto (Emil Jannings) spreads plague through the medieval town in Murnau’s Faust.

The unrealistic-looking sets and special effects in silent dramas seem to suit the irrational world of silent film far better than if everything looked believable. One of the most memorable shots in Faust is of a giant Mefisto with enormous black wings, stationary and looming above the little medieval town, with its church steeple and tiny chimneys billowing smoke. The shot metaphorically represents the Black Plague afflicting the town. The magic of the shot comes through not despite its lack of words and verisimilitude, but because of it.

Although these sorts of unrealistic effects are not specific to silent film as an art form, they are typical of the silent era. What these visibly artificial effects do for the audience is allow it to focus on the scene as an idea rather than as an event. Murnau’s depiction

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of a demon spreading plague doesn’t really look like a spreading plague at all, allowing the audience to regard the spread of the plague as synonymous with the work of evil.

The difference between this low-tech effect and Optimus Prime transforming into a 16 wheeler is that the director of a film like Transformers communicates very little sense of the meaning behind the scene (if there is any meaning at all) with such a “believable” effect that is entirely literal rather than metaphorical. Unreal, metaphorical effects make emotions not just a result but a part of the film.

ome of the silent dramas were less aesthetically focused on the surreal and emotional and more on sheer spectacle, which in and of itself has a

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sort of surreal, insane splendor. Opulent splendor is one hallmark of Intolerance, D.W. Griffith’s 3-hour apology note for his 3-hour racist rant of a film, The Birth of a Nation. Intolerance warns of the dangers and tragedies of being hateful, judgmental and, of course, intolerant. It was filmed several years before the invention of subtlety. The film tells four stories of cruelty, set in in four different ages throughout history, which are compared, contrasted and interwoven. Instead of telling one story after the next, the course of one story runs parallel to all the rest of the stories, which compliment each other in meaning. To achieve this, Griffith used the cinematic editing technique called intercutting, which he was instrumental in inventing. Griffith’s crafty storytelling makes his films some of the most stylistically influential in film history.

Contemplations While Intolerance is incredibly heavy-handed and moralistic, it is a genuine visual spectacle. Griffith’s reconstruction of Babylon is absolutely astounding, considering the lack of digital aid, as are the two wars between Persia and Babylon, the battle between mill workers and strikebreakers, the massacre of Protestants in France, and the ultimate opening of Heaven. In 1916, the colossi of Babylon would have overwhelmed the audience in the realization of the power of film. By 2011, the audience has become so used to spectacle of that scale and beyond that the original effect is lost. The Artist could never have overwhelmed the audience in the same way, had it been a spectacle. Its comparatively minimal digital flamboyance might have even been a refreshing surprise to the jaded moviegoer.

At that first Academy Awards Ceremony in 1929, Best Picture was shared

by Sunrise and a silent spectacle: Wings, directed by William Wellman. Wellman’s movie is an extravagant First World War epic with massive trench-warfare landscapes, biplane dogfights and bombing runs on small villages. It’s a celebration of the good old American boys answering the call to duty and gunning down the Germans, or “the Heinies” as they are called frequently during the film.

The spectacle of Wings impresses a sense of grand patriotism on the audience through the awe of this new art form that had the power to bring epic dogfights to the view of an audience member. I wonder what Wellman must have felt watching the Germans, Murnau and then Jannings, take the Acad-

emy Awards. As he sank into his chair, his eyes wide and his teeth clenched, I imagine he thought, “The Heinies are taking over.”

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lthough The Artist is called both a romantic comedy and a drama, the feeling one leaves the cinema with after watching the film is much more that of the former than the latter. The protagonists of silent comedies navigated through absurd worlds just as they did in silent dramas, but in silent comedy, they almost invariably triumphed over their worlds.

As George Valentin did in The Artist, silent comedies usually involved someone overcoming his bad luck. It was a staple for silent comedians to end up with “the girl” by the end of the movie.

There was as much great genius in silent comedy as silent drama, to be sure. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton fall into this school of silent film, which was characterized by visual, physical humor.

Buster Keaton—in my opinion the greatest of the silent comedy geniuses—almost always played the lovable, charmingly down-on-his-luck character.

Like the stories of great silent dramas, his adventures entail a struggle in an unreasonable world, and as with most silent comedies, the protagonist gracefully (but unintentionally) integrates himself into the chaos around him. In his film The Cameraman, for instance, Keaton plays a newsreel cameraman who at one point gets caught in the middle of a gang war in Chinatown. As a New Year’s parade disintegrates into a shootout, the platform Keaton is filming from begins to fall, giving him

a perfect cinematic effect as he goes down with it. In another Keaton film, Steamboat Bill, Jr., the debris from a storm falls around Keaton (never hitting him) as he dazedly wanders through the town.

The humor in The Artist is little like the humor that typified silent comedy: the extended visual gags with build up and structure. Most of the humor in The Artist seems to be contained in its bubbly atmosphere and its playful jabs at the 1920s.

The great visual comedy of silent films is hard to capture in words, but I can say that it often involved the shear unbelievability of a character’s way of traveling through the world.

This sort of humor is a rigorous confirmation of the original definition of a comedy: a story with a happy ending.

No matter how many ridiculous impediments are hurled at the protagonist, silent comedy has a ferocious faith that there is a guardian angel following the protagonist, ensuring that every one of his clumsy missteps is corrected by some surreal luck or stroke of genius. The world of The Artist is as unsuited for the sort of comedy that is unique to silent film as it is unsuited for silent drama. Its obstacles are too predictable.

Despite the incredible artistry in silent cinema, after the invention of the “talkies” the public never truly took silent film to be a worthy art form.

This tragically carried over into the preservation of films. Film itself was less durable and more flammable in those early days, and the majority of silent films have been lost. Even The Way of All Flesh, one of the films for which Jannings won the Academy Award, is now lost.

Much of the famous silent

dystopian film Metropolis was lost until a restoration in 2010, and some remains lost. The scene in The Artist in which Valentin burns his collection of films seems to invoke the fact that a great number of films of that era were accidentally burned, damaged beyond recovery.

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as The Artist good entertainment? Yes. Was The Artist fresh and unusual, by modern standards?

Yes. Did The Artist have some well-done, artistically interesting sequences? Sure thing.

Did The Artist do something new? Well, sort of. It is the first time the transition between silent and sound has been represented in a silent film, although a number of sound films – most notably Singin’ in the Rain and Sunset Boulevard – have dealt with it previously.

Does The Artist recreate the greatness of the silent era? No. Was it a great work of art on the scale of the great silents? Before answering this question, the audience should experience silent cinema in its fullest.

I would only number The Artist among the great silent films if there had been no silent film era. The cause of this film’s tremendous success is the lack of familiarity most viewers have with silent films, the assumption that the unsophisticated 1910s and 20s were unable to produce cinematic genius that could outstrip The Artist any day of the week.

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South by Southwest

The Hollywood Blockbuster Exploring the history of film

* Chris Connell

The Hollywood blockbuster is rooted in hatred, fascism, militarism and anti-humanism. It began that way.

It was willed that way. It remains that way. Its first antecedent, The Birth of a Nation (1914), portrayed the KKK as a gallant coterie of heroes that saved America from the evil reckonings of non-whites.

The Birth of a Nation’s basic narrative provided a skeleton for the modern American action movie to layer on its greasy flesh and oily muscle. Now, instead of white-hooded horsemen, we have half-naked Spartans, still charged with the duty of upholding the supreme sovereignty of the Aryan race against ranks of dark skinned anthropoids.

The Birth of a Nation was not the first film adapted from a novel, but it was the first to take on novelistic ambitions and to take an extended period of time to tell a story rather than succumb to the trend of sparknotes-esque adaptation (Rip Van Winkle and Frankenstein). The film’s willingness to make an event out of cinema, a medium considered to be a carnival novelty, established a precedent for the entire form. Unfortunately, it also set the precedent of making a spectacle of human cruelty.

When we see a man in a photographic image, we believe that he exists. When we see him moving in a film, we believe that this existent man is moving. When the existent man is shown dying, we, to an extent, believe that he is dying. We buy into what films present us, captured by their cerebral miracles of perspective, editing, and time lapse. From an emotional standpoint, onscreen personas become human. We trust films too much to show us reality.

The Birth of a Nation was a betrayal of that trust. When people die, the film betrays our better instincts by describing their killings as acts of

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heroism, dehumanizing the fake humans that we believe in. The film’s most lasting imprint is not specifically that of a grand racist tradition, but that of a general bigotry that allowed for the myth of violence to be described as a purifying force; one that turns boys to men, men to heroes, and heroes to icons. It ignored the gravity of what violence does to people and instead turned human suffering, and indeed humanity, into commodity.

In the century that followed, we’ve done nothing but let ourselves fall deeper into this rabbit hole of ultra violence, hitting every trinket and spear tip along the way.

Today, this Hollywood tradition has split into two camps: films that swim in the glory of their own ignorance, and films that sell their ignorance as art. The former reached its apotheosis in 2007’s 300, one of the most boldly conservative- films of our era. The film is a putrid skidmark on the underpants of modern art. If Classical Greece can be thought of as a mouth, the burphole from which the blueprints of modern civilization were spewed, Sparta was a canker sore, an ugly ulcerous tear on the Hellenic mucous membrane.

In Athens, order was maintained by the development of philosophy, democracy, mathematics, and whathave-you. Meanwhile across the bay, Sparta maintained order by insuring homogeneity. The members of its ruling class were not allowed to live beyond infancy if they were not found aesthetically sound in every capacity. All Spartans’ homes were kept permanently mono-dimensional. All members of the Spartan assembly were put on trial at the end of each single-year term, preventing progress and stagnating society. Freedom was, to them, a defective concept.

I could go on. I won’t go on.

You get the point. 300 utilized this historical perspective to arrive at a logical conclusion identical to that of the Spartans: violence begets freedom. Linking this monotone politic

with a stylized Riefenstahlian cineaesthetics, 300 carries on the legacy of its predecessor The Birth of a Nation.

The other camp, so ignorant that it mistakes its bile for art, reached its most complete embodiment in 2008’s The Dark Knight, a massively dense opus whose pretension is matched only by its brainlessness.

Take for instance the uncanny resemblance between the film’s portrayal of Batman and former President George W. Bush. They both torture and intimidate to get information. They both monitor people’s telephones. They both rely on the prosperity and influence of their fathers. Aside from Batman’s slightly less ridiculous accent and his slightly more ridiculous outfit, he and George W. are nearly identical.

Now, taking it as a given that Batman is but a Bush-stand-in, the film is pure Roveian agitprop. It describes ethical Harvey Dent as lawyer, not villain, who stops crime and terrorism legally as “the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs,” implying that the lawless desperado sheriff figure is necessary, that torture and invasion are necessary, that the actions of the Bush Administration were not only necessary, but heroic. I respectfully disagree. The Dark Knight begs us to take it seriously.

It is a serious film by a serious director addressing serious issues through serious explosions. Therefore, I take it very seriously and in taking it very seriously, I conclude that it’s completely and utterly full of shit.

Like gold plated busts of Mussolini’s scowling visage, 300 and The Dark Knight blatantly illustrate that the dehumanizing propaganda and fascist conceits first put forth by Woodrow Wilson’s private screening of The Birth of a Nation are still alive and well in our contemporary cinema. So much for human progress.

The Megaphone of Discontent Michael Britt

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efending Odd Future’s music is like defending a murderer in an appeals court: they’ve already been convicted of their crime, and all the defense team can do is lessen the punishment.Odd Future’s music is both worshipped and vilified; rarely do people take a moderate stance. And for good reason. Hate plays a central role in the music of three of the leading members: Tyler, The Creator, Earl Sweatshirt and Domo Genesis.

That being said, there is rhyme and reason to the madness. Hip-hop has sung of bitter discontent since its birth in the 1970s. With Gil Scott-Heron and Grandmaster Flash in the ‘80s, to Pac and Biggie in the ‘90s, and now Odd Future 10 years later, hip hop continues to speak out against our corrupt society.

Over the years that discontent has only grown sharper and more conspicuous. It has also become more personal: the hardships of urban life now zero in on what affects the individual rather than the whole population. Society has changed in the forty years since HipHop’s birth. With the growth of the Internet and the increasing liberalism of the media, American culture now

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tolerates profanity to the extent that even the most offensive tracks are not only accepted, but celebrated.

This puts forth a glaring question: are artistic expressions of hate such as Tyler’s single “Yonkers” morally justifiable? Perhaps not, but Odd Future’s music offers a highly personal reflection of the discontent that has been felt in urban America since the ‘70s. It may be hateful, vengeful and violent, but the passion behind it fuels an unprecedented and beautiful art form.

Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA), more commonly referred to as Odd Future, is a west coast hip-hop collective springing from the void in LA’s underground hip-hop scene after N.W.A. and jurassic five left it empty. Since its birth in 2007, Odd Future has comprised ten semipermanent members and is led by a core group of four. Tyler, The Creator provides guidance as the head MC and producer, Hodgy Beats and Domo Genesis back Tyler and Left Brain adds to Tyler’s production prowess. Tyler, a manic and deeply depressed 21-yearold from Ladera Heights, LA, serves as a charismatic leader who continues to attract media attention with his wild

and often misconstrued antics. Growing up without a father, Tyler taught himself to play piano and began making beats in his early teens. By 15, he began to pen some of the first songs to be released by Odd Future.

Tyler’s albums Bastard (2009) and Goblin (2011) present a unique blend of irate misanthropy and absurd humor.

Dr. TC, Tyler’s fictional therapist, is developed throughout the majority of his tracks. First introduced at the beginning of Bastard and later revealed as yet another component of Tyler’s psychotic mind at the end of Goblin, TC enables Tyler to compose a call and response between the two speakers in his mind.

Dr. TC represents Tyler’s own fractured mind, playing different roles at different times and agreeing with Tyler on contradictory points.

Both albums are framed as therapy sessions in which Dr. TC provokes emotional outbursts from Tyler.

For instance, in the explosive, heartwrenching “Golden”: “And a life that’s filled with crap, and a finger filled with hate / And a gat that’s filled with love, now let opposites attract / I can finally be one like a marriage in a church / But this marriage has a hearse and the parents of the one / That’s getting married has a curse and its made up inside of him / Too late to reimburse, but wait, it gets worse / All the guests that’s in the church, all decided to disperse / So there was nobody that could stop the wedding with converse / So they tied the knot, now it’s too late to reverse.” And so Tyler was married to death.

Tyler recognizes contradictions before he speaks them, beginning his tale with the sweeping imperative “now let opposites attract.” He then goes on to tell the story of his marriage to death. He paints the picture of a wedding, telling TC “I can finally be one,” hoping that marriage will repair his split psyche.

His hopes are not fulfilled, as he finds out that “the marriage has a hearse,” that the wedding is really a funeral.

Eventually, he realizes that nobody but him has attended the funeral-marriage, and therefore there is nobody to stop his wedding with death. And “so they tied the knot, now it’s too late to reverse.” For Tyler, death is irreversible.

During the verse, TC interjects, first telling Tyler “don’t do this,” then telling him that it was indeed “too late to reimburse.” At the end of the song,

his hit “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Heron called for a rejection of television programming and popular consumer culture, a sentiment carried directly from the hippie movement to be the hip-hop movement.

Yelling through a megaphone, Heron shouts: “The revolution will not go better with coke / The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath / The revolution will not put you in the driver’s seat / The revolution will not be televised,” referencing slogans from Coca Cola, Listerine, and Hertz car rentals.

Furthermore, Heron challenges established ideas about the nature of revolution, particularly the Civil Rights movement: “There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy Wilkins strolling through Watts in a red, black, and green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving for just the right occasion.”

Roy Wilkins, a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), oversaw the organization through one of the most turbulent and influential periods in African-American hisreg Tate once said that tory. Red, black, and “Hip-hop is dope-know- green are the colors logy, the only known antidote of the Pan-African for prime-time sensory depri- Flag designed in vation.” In this, he captured 1920 by Marcus the essence and the origin G a r vey ’s of the form. Hip-hop’s emerU n i ve r s a l gence from disco and funk in N e g r o the early ‘70s was a cry for an Improvement antidote. An attempt to inject A s s o c i at i o n meaning into the dance music (UNIA). of the ‘50s and ‘60s. A call, I n s ay echoing American culture ing that the on many fronts, for a reality image of Roy check after the illusion of the Wilkins “stroll“affluent society” was eroded i n g t h ro u g h through the 1960s, and finally Watts,” an LA shattered in 1968. In short, n e i g h b o r ho o d hip-hop was born for those to known for race riots, will not cry out and be heard. be televised, Heron proposes In 1971, just as hip-hop that idealized leaders such was on the cusp of its incepas Wilkins are not the key to tion, Gil Scott-Heron released revolution.

TC finally reveals what the listener has been suspecting all along: he is just a part of Tyler.

The paradox of the funeral-wedding, of marrying death, may not be new to literature, but it is certainly unexplored territory in the world of hip-hop. While Rick Ross might be “making love to the angel of death,” no MC had quite captured the concept before Tyler, The Creator. Some see Goblin as a romp through the mind of an angry cynic, but the level of consciousness in Tyler’s lyrics far surpasses the simplistic view of hip-hop as purely hateful. “Golden”, at least, is true art. It’s certainly ugly, but Goblin is a serious look into the effects of the urban experience in America. It’s an explosive attack waged against American culture and society from the mind of a kid; it’s not only passionate, but also sophisticated.

Above all, it’s personal.

Tyler peers into the depths of his mind, rips from it 21 years of accumulated filth, and ruthlessly brandishes it in the face of society.

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Though it’s clear that Heron deeply appreciates the legends of the Civil Rights movement, he refuses to romanticize them. He presents a sardonic image of Roy Wilkins, using the cliché “slow motion or still life” and describing Wilkins “strolling” through a riot in a jumpsuit made of the Pan-African Flag.

Saving a jumpsuit for a riot is a silly idea. Rioting in a flashy jumpsuit is even sillier.

“Strolling” through a riot in that flashy jumpsuit is downright unhealthy.

Essentially, Heron attempts to deflate the idealized figures such as Roy Wilkins. He proposes that the responsibility for revolution rests with the all the people, not just one or two. He questioned the standard-bearers, and the people responded with hip-hop.

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egend has it that Cowboy of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five coined the term hip-hop in 1978, as

the group was just forming.

The group went on to not only rename the form, but to redefine the style. Throughout the early ‘70s, hip-hop, previously called d ‘ isco rap,’ remained a moderate voice for discontent. It was not yet Greg Tate’s vision of “the only known antidote for primetime sensory deprivation.” Gil Scott-Heron was a man before his time. All the early 1980s would see Heron’s vision come to life.

After The Sugarhill Gang proved that hip-hop could reach a mainstream audience with “Rapper’s Delight,” Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five refocused the form on the issues of urban America, now with a much more personal twist.

In 1982 Grandmaster Flash released “The Message,” a politically charged single that deals with living in the big city.

“It’s like a jungle sometimes / it makes me wonder how I keep from going under,” referring to the concrete jungle of the South Bronx, their hometown. They then went further, exploring the plight of living in urban America with a “bum education and “double-digit inflation.”

T h e ly r i c s take over entirely by the fifth verse, and the song ends with a hauntingly hone s t s t at e m e n t about growing up in the city: “A child is born with no state of mind / Blind to the ways of mankind / God is smilin’ on you but He’s frownin’ too / Because only God knows what you’ll go through / You’ll grow up in the ghetto livin’ second-rate / And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate.”

The state of urban living, JUNE 2012 • LEO

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y the end of the ‘80s, hip-hop was an established power in both music culture and industry. By 1988, it was ready to explode. Public Enemy’s sophomore album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and N.W.A.’s debut album, Straight Outta Compton, paved the way for hip-hop’s commercial success in the ‘90s. They also continued the trend of expressing outright anger.

Chuck D’s thrilling story of a prison break in “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” attacked institutional racism with unprecedented frankness. It also painted an in-depth and unflinchingly realistic picture of relationship between criminals and the law.

Chuck raps about his “black steel” – literally, his gun – and about killing his corrections officer with it. Then, only about five months later, “Straight Outta Compton” rolled in and changed the game. The boys from the West Coast didn’t fool around unless provoked, in which case “AK-47 is the tool / Don’t make me act the mother****ing fool.”

Not only was the album more vulgar than before it, but it was also more self-centered. Ice Cube raps about Ice Cube, or, in this case, Ice Cube’s AK-47.

The whole crew raps about Compton, their base of operations. It may not be the most substantive of records, but

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Straight Outta Compton was a turning point in rap culture; it zoomed in even further on the individual and let fly a host of new vulgarities.

The ‘90s continued the trend of hate in rap with acts like Wu Tang Clan, Nas, 2Pac, and Notorious B.I.G. Everybody rapped about how many guns and women they had, but even under rapid commercialization hip-hop remained a voice for that quiet rage, now focused on more specific social issues and, of course, the self.

Notorious B.I.G. (Biggie) is the perfect example of gangster rap: cold, hard, unfeeling in most of his music, but on occasion overcome by emotion.

In 1994 he released Ready to Die, and on it “Suicidal Thoughts,” one of the most intense outpourings of emotion in the history of hip-hop. The song is framed as a late-night phone call to Puff Daddy. In it he laments his violent past and lays out all of his wrongdoings for the world to see, but does not apologize for them: “All my life I’ve been considered as the worst / Lyin’ to my mother even stealin’ out her purse / Crime after crime, from drugs to extortion / I know my mother wish she got a f***in’ abortion.”

Biggie has given up. He realizes that apologizing would be useless. He doesn’t even want to go to heaven: “It don’t make sense, goin’ to heaven with the goodie-goodies / Dressed in white, I like black Tims and black hoodies.” In his rejection of heaven, Biggie makes clear his disdain for society. He knows he is a criminal, and that fact drives him to reject the comforts of living a normal life. This isolation is felt in the same way

by Tyler, The Creator, whose cynicism is fed by a sense of alienation.

That said, “Suicidal Thoughts” lacks the bigger picture of society seen in earlier works such as “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” or “The Message.” It even lacks the political undertones of 2Pac and other contemporaries. Instead it is an incredibly intimate, personal confession by a man who’s given up on life.

A

fter the assassinations of 2Pac and Biggie, and just before the turn of the twenty-first century, Eminem came blazing on the scene with a combination of humor and anger that would come to define the outrage of the

new millennium. The Slim Shady LP dropped in 1999 to the horror of every white, middle class parent who liked to keep all that hippity-hoppity, rabblerousing music on the other side of the color barrier. Eminem didn’t show any sign that he cared about the controversy of his music other than to rub it in his critics’ faces with songs like “Role Model.” Not only did Eminem shatter hip-hop’s color barrier, but he brought an element of wit back into the game that had been missing for most of the ‘90s. Even the disturbing 1997 “Bonnie and Clyde” contains an element of absurd, morbid humor so undeniably Eminem.

Eminem and Tyler, The Creator are similar in their social hate and absurd humor. Just like Tyler, although less sadistic and more political, Eminem digs up the dirt from his childhood and his current situation and forces it in the face of the society that yielded it. Both Tyler and Eminem create alternate personalities (Em’s Slim Shady and Tyler’s Dr. TC.) as a way to explore their psychological issues, mostly having to do largely with childhood neglect and drug abuse. Both artists also treat disturbing situations with a touch of humor, flaunting their disregard for societal norms and morals with pride. Most importantly, both are focused on themselves. Their lyrics explore childhood traumas and current conflicts, all in the context of urban America.

For all its “dope-know-logy,” Greg Tate goes on to say that “Hip-hop is Ralph Ellison, who once said the Blues is like running a razor blade along an open sore.” Hip-hop, like the Blues – or any other expression of discontent or conflict – is a painful business.

But pain can be beautiful. In fact, it can be art. And it is just that in the case of Grandmaster Flash, Eminem, and/or Tyler, The Creator. The issue is the same in all of their music. It seems clear that Odd Future’s music is a highly personal reflection of the discontent felt in urban America since the ‘70s. Their violence is not gratuitous, and neither is Public Enemy’s nor Eminem’s. Hiphop is a megaphone through which the unhappiness of urban America has thundered since 1971. Year after year, it only gets louder.

illustrations by Ben Korsh

for Grandmaster Flash, is an environment that breeds hate. Children are born as blank slates. Children are naïve and accepting of their circumstances growing up, but God knows better. He’s “smilin’ on you but He’s frownin’ too” because He understands the hardships of urban life.

As the children in Grandmaster Flash’s passage grow up, they become aware of their circumstances and hateful of the world around them. It’s not their mouths singing the song of deep hate, but their eyes. Through this subtlety, Grandmaster Flash implies that people unhappy with their circumstances tend to internalize their anger, thus deepening it.

“The Message” focuses the rage expressed through hip-hop of the self and on the issues of the individual rather than the population at large, as it had chiefly done throughout the ‘70s.

It is the beginning of a trend that will eventually result in artists such as Tyler, The Creator: bitter and self-concerned, but still within the context of urban America.

Politick

Super PAC Nation

Election year sheds light on the dark side of campaign finance

* Hattie Gawande

rise to Super PACs: Committees bankrolled by the exceedingly rich who are now able to relentlessly run negative ad campaigns bashing which ever candidates they find most disagreeable.

Often people who run Super PACs have close ties to the candidate they support, despite the ruling that no official coordination with candidates is permitted. Nevertheless, every Republican candidate has his or her own Super PAC that runs attack add after attack add against opposing candidates.

This simultaneously delighted and infuriated the candidates, who enjoyed the tireless campaigning and support of their own PACs but were decidedly unhappy when they became victims of their opponents’. Newt Gingrich, whose Super PAC spent over sixteen million dollars campaigning for him, famously complained that Super PACs only filled the race with negativity. Super PACs have the potential to derail politics, thus decreasing the importance of the voters in elections. What if, when we reach the legal voting age, our vote no longer matters?

Some politicians and pundits argue that Super PACs actually increase democracy in the U.S. because they sustain less affluent candidates. Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum would not have lasted as long as they did if not for the backing of their respective Super PACs. What this supposedly means is that we are free to support a candidate we actually agree with, rather than the candidate with the most money.

Except that Super PACs sustain candidates’ minor influence from

the public, meaning that the opinions of the common man are still rendered insignificant. What if I supported Jon Huntsman over Santorum or Gingrich?

Too bad for me, the rich don’t care about Huntsman.

In addition to increasing the wealth of a few poorer candidates, Super PACs increase the wealth of the richer candidates as well. Sure, Perry, Gingrich, and Santorum were kept alive far longer than they should have, but Mitt Romney’s super rich Super PACs continued to tear chunks out of them with negative ad after negative ad. Whether or not Obama and Romney’s Super PACs will feature heavily in the general election campaign, the damage has already been done: Romney secured his frontrunner status in the Republican race due in large part to the machinations of the rich, rather than the support from the common man.

Sure, he racked up the majority of the delegates in the primaries, but how many of his votes came from balanced assessments of his qualifications – and how many came because they were saturated with negative ads eviscerating his main opponents?

If we let things be, democracy will be robbed from us, and our vote will count less and less as the years pass.

However, if we demand regulation we might convince politicians that they can no longer rely on overly rich supporters to buy them the Oval Office. The choice is yours. photo illustration by Amanda Yong

As a sophomore in high school, I have no influence over the political goings-on of my country. I have no desire to stand on a street corner waving a sign.

I’m too cynical to sign a petition. Most importantly, I can’t vote. The same goes for most of us here at South – those of us still waiting for the day we turn eighteen.

No matter how strong our political opinions are, we cannot truly express them until we can vote.

This is fine by me; I know that I, at least, am not yet mature enough to vote in an election. (I would vote Ron Paul.

Just because that guy is crazy hilarious.) that being said, I know that the day will come when my voice will be heard.

Or at least that’s what I thought prior to last year. The Republican primaries, a long and dirty fight characterized by a whole lot of mudslinging, repugnant debates, and negative ad campaigns, has signaled to me that democracy in the United States is changing rapidly, largely due to the rise of the Super PACs. PACs (political action committees) are independent organizations that campaign for various political initiatives and candidates. PACs used to be pretty harmless due to strict federal regulation on the contributions they received and on how they spent their money. Granted, abuses of the regulations still occurred but back then PACs were far less widespread than they are today.

So what changed? The rules. In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled to lift practically all PAC regulations in the case of Citizens United v. FEC. Supposedly the Supreme Court reasoned that this decision would restore democratic power to the hands of the people; allowing enormously wealthy people and corporations to anonymously spend unlimited amounts of money to manipulate politics couldn’t possibly have negative repercussions.

The Republican nomination campaigns have showed us how wrong that assumption was. Deregulating PACs gave

Politick

A Wasted Effort Why the war in Afghanistan failed

* Josh Carney

photo courtesy of United States Government Works

Former President George W. Bush said it best: “our enemies are looking for terrible ways to destroy our country, and so are we.” Bush might have been quick enough to dodge a shoe a few in 2008, but he can’t deny the hard facts that this country as a whole must now face. Fighting the war in Afghanistan has come with benefits and innumerable failures. Times have changed, Obama now occupies the Oval Office, and the United States has begun to leave Afghanistan. But before the last troops withdraw, the world must reflect. Can the United States call its involvement in Afghanistan a success? To answer this question the topic must be analyzed the same three ways every international conflict is analyzed: politically, economically and socially.

For starters, the United States is leaving Afghanistan with a deteriorating political system in place. By lying to U.S. officials about the location of Osama Bin Laden, the theocratic Afghani government has instigated a modern era of distrust with the two countries and a general distrust from its peers. The U.S. cannot leave without repercussions. The initial mission in Afghanistan was to stop the threatening powers that were

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moving Southeast from Iraq, but as the U.S. prepares to leave, there is no way to view its actions as progressive since it has not helped to stabilize the nation.

Afghanistan’s poor economic status—result of the war—does not help the situation either. It is one of the main reasons why the country is falling apart. That being said, a 2011 estimate by the CIA Fact Book states that the GDP growth rate of Afghanistan is 7.1%, proof that while the nation is struggling, it also has potential. Unfortunately, U.S. funds are a basis for a large percentage of Afghanistan’s growth to recover.

These funds have been coming out of the pockets of American citizens, and while it will be a relief for the U.S. economy to no longer have to fund Afghanistan, the Afghani government will have a whole new set of expenses to deal with.

Furthermore, the Wall Street Journal claims that as U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the federal government will completely cut funding for the Afghani government. This decision will have a major domino effect leading to decreased growth as well as a general halt in economic progress. The U.S. did not create a functional economy when

it first infiltrated Afghanistan; instead, it delivered a jump-start by pumping money into the country through various expenditures, especially medical aid. As U.S. involvement falters, the nation will leave Afghanistan to crumble back to its former failing economic status.

The clearest reason as to why the U.S. cannot view its efforts in Afghanistan as a success mirrors the growth of anti-Americanism. From defacing bodies to burning copies of the Quran, the extremism of some soldier’s actions has taken the world by surprise. Furthermore, previous involvements in Afghanistan have created a lasting distaste towards Americans.

Since anti-American groups thrive all around the world, these soldiers’ actions of several soldiers have sparked a much larger global controversy. The growth of anti-American sentiment puts the safety of the U.S. into question and has created deep-rooted racial stereotypes against Arab-Americans throughout the country. The U.S. Armed Forces’ involvement in Afghanistan has jeopardized the safety of the U.S. and its citizens.

When the global community looks back on the U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, it will realize that the United States failed to complete its intended mission.

While the Obama administration did kill Osama Bin Laden and wipe out some of Al Qaeda’s top officials, it has begun to withdraw troops despite the fact that the goal has not been reached.

The United States leave Afghanistan with a deteriorating political system, an economy that is completely dependent on U.S. aid and hatred towards the American people.

There should be rejoicing for the returning servicemen. There shouldn’t be “mission accomplished” banners waving.

Jokes

TwoHour-Long Youtube Video Confirms Illuminati Conspiracy Michael Donahue * Connor & Dylan Davis Cloud

*That was a typo** **No it wasn’t

ments 27 and 28, Co and Ni. Now take a step back and look at both of them together: “CoNi”. Sound familiar? “Kony”.

Not convinced? Take the letters for potassium, oxygen, nitrogen and yttrium respectively, followed by the atomic numbers of calcium and magnesium and put them together for a special surprise… Coincidence? Hell no.

The video’s creator, XxSonicLover666xX could not be reached for an interview, but has left a video of himself wearing a Guy Fawkes mask saying that he was just happy to help before going off on a tangent about how EA is a bad company and how PC will always be the supreme gaming system. Before signing off our hero remarked “the government trolled us. They trolled us so hard.” And troll us they did. Despite his attempts to hide his face and alter his voice, it is clear he is morbidly obese.

Professor Jonathon Zimmerman sits in his office “What am I going to do now?” He asks us. “I’m going to de-

vote my life to bringing these monsters down and finding the truth. But for now, I guess I’ll have to Just Go With It.” Buy Just Go With It starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston on DVD and Blu-Ray October 25th.

Common Illuminati Symbols - A pyramid with an eye on top - A three-sided triangle - The number 666 - The marijuana leaf - An upside-down Star of David - A rainbow flag - Republican candidate Ron Paul - An exclamation

photo courtesy of Connor Donahue

Well, It looks like we all got served a slice of humble pie today. A recently posted Internet video entitled “9/11KonyTruth.mp4” has proven without a doubt that we are blind to the Illuminati’s vast presence and influence in the media and governments of the world.

Dartmouth College professor and former skeptic Jonathan Zimmerman had this to say: “It just all adds up. Since the video came out I’ve dedicated most of my time to finding holes in its theories but I simply can’t.” The 120 minute long documentary which states “Obama was on one of the planes” is theoretically bulletproof. The video goes on to reveal the Illuminati’s complex system of hidden clues and cryptic messages, as well as a list of prominent Illuminati members including Jay Z (Level 10b), Michael Bay (Level 8), Sean Turley (Level 7), Whitney Houston (Level 9 Status: Terminated) Barrack “Hussein” Osama* (Level 9) and Guy Fieri (Level 10a). The members on the list who were questioned have responded by denying any involvement whatsoever while sweating nervously and subsequently breaking down into tears and admitting everything.

The Illuminati take pleasure in hiding their orgy of lies right underneath our noses. Examples include freemason imagery in dollar bills, the Trayvon Martin case, and the scientific community. The periodic table, as shown in fig. 10a (see below) is rife with hidden symbolism. For example, direct your gaze at ele-

JUNE 2012 • LEO

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