AMC 2006: Truth to power, then what?

The Allied Media Conference had its second keynote on Friday evening. (We had the keynote address that morning, so having two keynote is a little weird, but, okay...) The theme was “From Truth to Power: because being right is not enough.” The panelists, author Jeff Chang, Radio Rootz founder Deepa Fernandes and cinematographer Jackie Salloum focused on indie media's role is organizing for social justice.

Solloum spoke about her film, Sling Shot: Hip-Hop, a documentary about her trip to Gaza to meet the first Hip-Hop MCs in the region. Twenty minutes away, in Palestine, the Palestinean MCs were unaware their counterparts. Her film chronicles the lives of the Palestinean performers as they go to their first show – they look extremely American in numbered sports jerseys and shorts – and the context in which they live, in a country divided by a separation wall, stopped by Israeli soldiers demanding ID.

“Who controls our news, how powerful that is in the very fight for our lives,” Fernandes says. “We need to build a social movement with that at the center...How do we go beyond just speaking to ourselves? How do we get out there?”

She remarks that there is a revolutionary, ground-level media movement spreading in Venezuala. She says there is media-centered organizing going on in Venezuala's poorest neighborhoods.

She continues, speaking about the coup that temporarily deposed Hugo Chavez, saying that during the coup in the 1990s, the state television showed cooking shows and other light fare. This reminded me of how Cincinnati's local mainstream media betrayed the city by running regular programming during the riots. It disgusted me to see sit-coms running as conflict raced through the streets.

She says that the poor worked to get the street level news out by using cell phones, pirate radio and text messaging.

“People realized that controlling the media was at the center of winning a greater battle,” Fernandes says.

Chang says that many people he meets across the country are angered at the way Hip-Hop is portrayed by mainstream media.

“People feel very disempowered...isolated,” he says.

As a kid growing up in Hawaii he heard Rapper's Delight and describes the experience as empowering and as a revela tion. It connected him to the lives of inner city black kids he'd never seen. That's part of Hip-Hop's transactional cultural exchange.

Chang says, just as Hip-Hop's roots have grown and empowered listeners, its commercial branches have become twisted and gnarled.

“We have people like 50 Cent selling his get rich or die philosophy...he's the McDonalds of Hip-Hop...people (have been) turned into consumers...if you're down with 50 you wear a certain type of clothes.”

Chang says media like that has caused the people of the United States have become culturally isolated and to have lost their imagination.

“What does it look like if we win,” he asks. He says that, through Hip-Hop, we won – a marginalized art form became mainstream, but, almost overnight, it was also lost, and mainstreamed, co-opted.

Chang says that media activists need to consider what it will look like if we win and how we can keep a win from being co-opted.