President Obama Goes In on Ipods & Ipads-Says Don’t Let Them Get You Caught Up

President Obama said something very interesting this weekend when speaking at Hampton University. Yes he told the graduates that the world they are entering is gonna be rough. I mean he didn’t just come out and say it, but he was pretty much saying ‘Good luck on getting a job folks..‘

That in itself is worth noting, especially since he has those Goldman Sachs people around him who pretty much ripped us off and pushed us in the direction of economic enslavement.

But the thing that caught me was this quote

“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB0Paw-bNSg

That quote is rich and is something I think we need to pay attention to… Working in commercial radio there’ a few tricks I’ve seen pulled program directors who wished to move an audience in a particular direction. They would simply burn you out on a song a genre. The burn out would come by over exposing something or by playing something which was obviously below the standards desired by the audience..

When I read President Obama‘s quote I kept thinking about how I’m starting to hear people say they are burnt out over all the information they can get.. They complain about Information overload. This is compounded by the fact that we now have several generations of people who only want 30 second soundbites. We’re a headline news society that has allowed us to become ‘instant experts’ on topics which we are unwilling to follow-up on..The information is disposable. Tiger Woods having multiple affairs holds the same value as a natural disaster

If you don’t believe me, ask how many of us have followed up on the situation in Haiti? Do any of us even care about what’s going on? Would your interest be peaked if we started to hear new reports on the country? My guess is many would not be interested. I recall hearing folks complaining that all this information on Haiti was too much. People were looking for escapes. The news coming out of it was cheapened by network news outlets who tried to find ways to neatly package it.

They wanted a villain, a hero, some controversy and nice ending which in reality has yet to come for the millions still sleeping in tents and barely surviving.  But as far as the average person here.. We had a villain-Mother nature..and later  so-called looters’. Our  hero was Wyclef and all the celebrities who raised money.. later they tried to make Bill Clinton and George Bush heroes. The nice ending was we raised money and now its time to go on to the next.

The gadgets we have allow us that luxury and at a day and time where critical thinking is not be taught especially in the areas of media, after we tire of a story we push a button to distract and entertain ourselves even with the most horrific news.

Another case in point, many of us were fascinated with the size of the tornados in Mississippi the other week than we were concerned about the people killed by them. Between heated debates on immigration, the gulf coast oil spill, attempted bomb plots in Times Square and drama around financial reform, many of us have no more room to take in and react to the news about the devastating floods in Nashville. We’ve had too much information. We were so full on the neat little news packages we come to consume, by the time we surfed around to get info on the floods, it was only to be entertained. The devastation had not moved us to action or to even think critically and connect the dots to larger issues be it global warming, poverty or faulty infrastructure..

In any case I think Obama was on point with his remarks..I took from it he was saying do something with that information other then ‘be right in an on line debate’ or  treat it like a perverse form of entertainment. I also took from it not to get so caught up we stop actually engaging folks and tackling important issues at hand. In short don’t let iphones and ipads become the new television and rendering us to be new age couch potatoes

Something to ponder.. And just so you know today in Haiti they are having a protest in Port Au Prince around who gets to run the government.

Here’s the link to an article I read that has a nice take on Obama’s remarks

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/obamas-information-distraction-riff-a-real-issue/34220

Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner

Stormy Weather-We Remember the Great Lena Horne-Will You?

This has been a rough start to this year.. We’ve lost some legends… Guru, Dorothy Height, Benjamin Hooks..

The passing of Lena Horne is without a doubt is the end of a legend. Yes she lived a long a fruitful life…But sadly there are so many of us who step on stages all around the world and will not know her. Not only is she not known, she won’t even get a shout out..Don’t believe me?.. Check to see what your favorite radio station does this morning. Will they simply read the AP headlines and then jump into their tired old banter and contests or will they pull out a few songs and take some phone calls from elders in the community who clearly understood why Lena Horn was such a source of pride? Will they at least play her signature song ‘Stormy Weather’?

In the age of ‘branding’ and ‘market penetration’ where our most visible and popular entertainers will remain ‘safely silent’ in the wake of even the most pressing issues confronting us, Lena was one to give up the money and not perform at spots where our people were left out..

“I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn’t work for places that kept us out … it was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world,” she is quoted as saying.

How many of us would stop selling our souls to do right by the people who have less?  This was Lena Horne, hopefully all of us whether we are on stage or not allow a part of her to be manifested through us in the work we do..

-Davey D-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCG3kJtQBKo&a=CfVxg-oWYZA&playnext_from=ML

Lena Horne Dead: Singer Dies At 92

by VERENA DOBNIK

NEW YORK — Lena Horne, the enchanting jazz singer and actress who reviled the bigotry that allowed her to entertain white audiences but not socialize with them, slowing her rise to Broadway superstardom, died Sunday. She was 92.

Horne died at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, according to hospital spokeswoman Gloria Chin. Chin would not release any other details.

Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often overshadowed her sultry voice, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her success.

“I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept,” she once said. “I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked.”

In the 1940s, she was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub and among a handful with a Hollywood contract.

In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical “Stormy Weather.” Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her signature piece.

On screen, on records and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne was at home vocally with a wide musical range, from blues and jazz to the sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in songs like “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”

In her first big Broadway success, as the star of “Jamaica” in 1957, reviewer Richard Watts Jr. called her “one of the incomparable performers of our time.” Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her “the best female singer of songs.”

But Horne was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation of racism.

“I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn’t work for places that kept us out … it was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world,” she said in Brian Lanker’s book “I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.”

While at MGM, she starred in the all-black “Cabin in the Sky,” in 1943, but in most of her other movies, she appeared only in musical numbers that could be cut in the racially insensitive South without affecting the story. These included “I Dood It,” a Red Skelton comedy, “Thousands Cheer” and “Swing Fever,” all in 1943; “Broadway Rhythm” in 1944; and “Ziegfeld Follies” in 1946.

“Metro’s cowardice deprived the musical of one of the great singing actresses,” film historian John Kobal wrote.

Early in her career Horne cultivated an aloof style out of self-preservation, becoming “a woman the audience can’t reach and therefore can’t hurt” she once said.

Later she embraced activism, breaking loose as a voice for civil rights and as an artist. In the last decades of her life, she rode a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American popular music.

Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” won a special Tony Award. In it, the 64-year-old singer used two renditions – one straight and the other gut-wrenching – of “Stormy Weather” to give audiences a glimpse of the spiritual odyssey of her five-decade career.

A sometimes savage critic, John Simon, wrote that she was “ageless. … tempered like steel, baked like clay, annealed like glass; life has chiseled, burnished, refined her.”

When Halle Berry became the first black woman to win the best actress Oscar in 2002, she sobbed: “This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. … It’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, the great-granddaughter of a freed slave, was born in Brooklyn June 30, 1917, to a leading family in the black bourgeoisie. Her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her 1986 book “The Hornes: An American Family” that among their relatives was a college girlfriend of W.E.B. Du Bois and a black adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Dropping out of school at 16 to support her ailing mother, Horne joined the chorus line at the Cotton Club, the fabled Harlem night spot where the entertainers were black and the clientele white.

She left the club in 1935 to tour with Noble Sissle’s orchestra, billed as Helena Horne, the name she continued using when she joined Charlie Barnet’s white orchestra in 1940.

A movie offer from MGM came when she headlined a show at the Little Troc nightclub with the Katherine Dunham dancers in 1942.

Her success led some blacks to accuse Horne of trying to “pass” in a white world with her light complexion. Max Factor even developed an “Egyptian” makeup shade especially for the budding actress while she was at MGM.

But in his book “Gotta Sing Gotta Dance: A Pictorial History of Film Musicals,” Kobal wrote that she refused to go along with the studio’s efforts to portray her as an exotic Latin American.

“I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become,” Horne once said. “I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

Horne was only 2 when her grandmother, a prominent member of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she avoided activism until 1945 when she was entertaining at an Army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting up front while black American soldiers were consigned to the rear.

That pivotal moment channeled her anger into something useful.

She got involved in various social and political organizations and – along with her friendship with Paul Robeson – got her name onto blacklists during the red-hunting McCarthy era.

By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963 joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Horne also spoke at a rally that same year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination.

It was also in the mid-’60s that she put out an autobiography, “Lena,” with author Richard Schickel.

The next decade brought her first to a low point, then to a fresh burst of artistry.

She had married MGM music director Lennie Hayton, a white man, in Paris in 1947 after her first overseas engagements in France and England. An earlier marriage to Louis J. Jones had ended in divorce in 1944 after producing daughter Gail and a son, Teddy.

In the 2009 biography “Stormy Weather,” author James Gavin recounts that when Horne was asked by a lover why she’d married a white man, she replied: “To get even with him.”

Her father, her son and her husband, Hayton, all died in 1970-71, and the grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing to perform or even see anyone but her closest friends. One of them, comedian Alan King, took months persuading her to return to the stage, with results that surprised her.

“I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters,” she said. “It was a long time, but when it came I truly began to live.”

And she discovered that time had mellowed her bitterness.

“I wouldn’t trade my life for anything,” she said, “because being black made me understand.”

original story: http://huff.to/9X1IFs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCvqTRHGIrg&feature=related