American Life: The Bay to NYC
On April 19th, I participated in an pretty much art festival in NYC. Basically Neighborhood Public Radio headed by Lee Montgomery from the Mission District in SF was asked to be a part of the Whitney Biennial. The Whitney Museum rented out a shop two doors down from the museum so that people could setup their particular art. In this particular case, Lee setup his radio broadcast equipment.
Basically on this particular day, we were paying homage to art in partly of the hip hop sense and other things. Some of the artists who came through were Jim and Karla Murray, authors of the book “Burning New York”, Toofly, Michael A. Gonzales, Danny Barry, and many others I didn’t meet because I was pretty much DJing throughout the whole broadcast.
A perfect example of some of the art that was displayed is partly shown in the picture of me scratching. The pirate that you see is from the cover of one of Hip Hop Slam’s videos called “Pirate Fuckin Video” which was designed by Dawgisht of Alameda, CA.
What was cool was that there were just average everyday New Yorkers just stopping by looking in and taking in the art that was displayed and heard. At one point two people asked me to show them to scratch and explain to them the concept of the turntable on how it is used as an instrument.
Also another highlight of the evening was little Danny Barry (forgot his age) playing a few selections and then later freestyled with me while I was scratching and playing beats of my loop machine. Danny mentioned to that his teacher just taught him and others about improvising. I must say he did very well. He also became interested in scratching. So I took a little bit of time and showed him some basics.
Michael A. Gonzales, who is shown in the picture with Billy Jam is a writer of The Village Voice, who did a little spoken word on NPR as well.
I must say overall that I had a great time and with the turnout of the amount of people that came through, I truly believe and I quote my OkiZoo friend Dunn-D, “A Hip Hop renaissance is coming!” All photos were taken by Rachel Naber. LaterZzzz!
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