Breathe In- Breathe Out

I hope you enjoyed the song that I used to start the seminar on monday. For me, it is really atmospheric, thought provoking and soulful in the tradition of the very best music inspired by the urban environment. Black Star are Brooklyn rappers Mos Def and Talib Kweli and their only album ' Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star' was released in 1998. The title is a reference to the Black Star Line, a shipping line founded by Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. Many respected lists rightfully have it as an all-time classic of hip-hop. Watch the video of the sing here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeTnog5RRQo

I think you'll agree it does the song justice.

The song that I played- 'Respiration'- also features Chicago rapper Common. I previously played two of his tracks in class, 'The Corner' and 'I Used to Love H.E.R.'. Why use hip-hop in an academic context? Surely academia is about 'high culture' and hip-hop is base, popular or 'low culture'? Not at all. Well, first hip-hop is an example of what Paul Gilroy, in his famous text The Black Atlantic calls 'expressive culture', creative acts that communicate socio-cultural, ideological, political, aesthetic and personal aspects of living. In other words, hip-hop offers access to the experience of groups that we may not be able to access otherwise, often because these are groups that tend to be 'spoken for' rather than heard speaking for themselves. Hip-hop offers a counter culture to that of modernity, it supplies for its intended audience some of the courage needed to go on living in the present. Hip-hop stars like Mos Def can be said to act like 'organic intellectuals'. This is a notion used by Antonio Gramsci to describe working class intellectuals who, unlike bourgeois intellectuals, maintain links with local issues and struggles that connect to the people and their experiences. They also use their grounded positionality to cultivate strategies for helping their communities to develop a self-inspired, organic consciousness. Second, and this is a related point, the best hip-hop lyrics can be used to reinforce aspects of academic theory and they can also be used to get us to think about academic ideas in a new light. The main refrain of the song, that evokes a living, breathing city- 'breath in, breath out' is fascinating and can be thought of against many academic understandings of the city- dual city, bulimic city, centripetal/ centrifugal space etc. The hip-hop lyrics offer a more poetic reading of the city that demands reflection. Try for yourself!

Obsessed With Gloom? Urbex and the other city

I certainly don't wish to base all my entries on articles that have appeared in the Evening Standard but there was a fantastic piece on monday about urban exploration, or 'urbex' for short.

Urbex is the art of accessing or trespassing parts of the city that are 'off limits'. Very often this involves entering abandoned industrial sites such as factories, decaying prisons, hospitals or lunatic asylums and below ground sites such as catacombs, tunnels or 'ghost' tube stations (stations that are no longer in service). Urban explorers are often interested in photography and they attempt to capture the full beauty of decrepitude in their photos (the amazing photo above is of Essex County Lunatic Asylum at Warley and was taken by Simon Cornwell).

Urban exploring often involves trespassing but rarely breaking and entering. Urbexers don't believe in vandalising the buildings, they simply want to preserve the decay they find in the hidden histories of the city. However, it can be a dangerous hobby as many old buildings have rotting floors, asbestos and faulty electrics.

If you're interested, check out this website: http://www.simoncornwell.com/urbex/frames.htm

Or this forum:

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/

For an academic analysis of fascination for urban ruins look at Tim Edensor's excellent book, 'Industrial Ruins'

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Industrial-Ruins-Space-Aesthetics-Materiality/dp/1845200772/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268826782&sr=1-1

I guess an interest in the hidden or secret history of the city is very much a result of people's growing boredom with the gentrified, ordered, pacified spaces of consumption that characterise so much of the modern metropolis. There is always the other city, no matter how hard we try to repress it.

Dual City- London's Dispossessed

Next week we begin topic four which links together the notion that 'global cities' such as London and New York are increasingly divided between the very, very rich and very, very poor with street crime and corporate crime. In preparation for this I suggest that you follow the Evening Standard this week as they are running a 5-day special on 'the dispossessed'. The tag line for yesterday's first instalment was: 'London is a shameful tale of two cities. In the richest capital in Europe almost half our children live below the poverty line. These families are cut off from the life most Londoners take for granted. They are the dispossessed'. Yesterday's issue had a feature on modern day pauper's graves (harking back to Victorian London- those who went on the walk will remember this) and single mum who who lives on an estate in Southwark just four stops from the financial centre of Canary Wharf although she has never seen it up close. While people in London's reviralised Docklands bring home huge salaries and live in multi-million pound apartments, she cannot afford a cot for her baby.

It promises to be an interesting series of reports... every night this week in the Evening Standard.