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Category: bmusic

1 Movie Friday: Thank You…

  • September 9, 2011
  • by Crommunist
  • · blog · bmusic · funny · movie · religion

It’s my birthday today, and I usually take this time to reflect on the things that have happened over the last year. One of the things I’m most proud of is the way this blog has established itself. Obviously I will take the appropriate amount of credit for the success, but I’m not shy about saying that you readers are a major source of inspiration and motivation. I honestly wouldn’t have been able to do this without you, your comments and feedback, your e-mails, and the fact that there’s more of you every month.

But there’s someone even more important that I have to thank…

Fun fact: the guy who sings this song also sings the theme from Pokemon:

Obviously this is a joke (well, I hope it’s obvious but with some people you never know). I don’t believe in Satan, or any kind of supernatural force of evil. I leave such fantasizing and personification of human folly to theists. I’m not even really a big believer in the Satan of the LaVey church – the worship of the human spirit and individuality as supreme. But it is fun to see someone take the piss out of the cheesy gospel music that gives credit to a different deity for all the good things, without putting the corresponding blame on that entity for the bad stuff. Consistency is clearly not a virtue.

If there is a pro-Satan song that I like on its own merits, it would be this one by one of my all-time favourite bands. I’ll leave you with it for the weekend, and proceed to get my party on.

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7 Movie Friday: What God Said

  • July 29, 2011
  • by Crommunist
  • · blog · bmusic · critical thinking · forces of stupid · hate · movie · religion

I don’t really understand why it is that people can say the most evil things imaginable and have it excused as long as they claim divine warrant. You can call for genocide, rape, murder, mutilation, and condemn people as freely as you like, provided you are a man or woman “of God”.

The problem is that God is simply a reflection of what is inside us. When someone says “God hates fags”, they are saying “I hate fags”. When they say “the word of God says that a woman is the property of a man”, they mean “I don’t see women as human beings.” When they say “God wants us to have sex through a sheet with special underwear”, they’re saying… well actually I have no clue where that one comes from.

The remarkable thing isn’t that people will project their inner hatreds and mental problems onto a fictitious third party. That’s actually a fairly normal human quirk. The remarkable thing is that people actually listen to these clowns who claim to speak for the Almighty. If He really was almighty (assuming He even exists, which He doesn’t), he could speak unequivocally for himself; He wouldn’t need to go through puny, fallible, easily-duped humans.

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2 Movie Friday: Fear of Numbers

  • July 22, 2011
  • by Crommunist
  • · blog · bmusic · science

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Here’s why:

When Carl Sagan died, there was a hole left for a science educator that could engage with average people and get them excited by new scientific concepts. I feel like that role has gone to Dr. Tyson, though I’m sure he would forswear the comparison. I had a conversation with a couple of friends and raised the point that like basic math skills and basic language skills (although still not in many cases), it should be a prerequisite of having a career as a scientist that you can communicate your research with ordinary people (i.e., non-scientists). If the scientific community can’t manage to bring the fire of the gods to the people (I am making a Prometheus allusion), then what are they (we) doing this for?

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0 Movie Friday: Happy Canada Day!

  • July 1, 2011
  • by Crommunist
  • · blog · bmusic

Hello everyone! Happy Canada Day!

For my non-Canadian readers, I should explain. Canada Day celebrates the decisive battle at Confederation Hill where the upstart Canadian army fought nobly against the occupying Spanish forces to secure a Christian nation based on Jesus, maple syrup, and politeness.

Yeah, actually all of that is crap. It’s the day the British North America Act was signed in 1867, creating an independent nation known as Canada. It’s a much less violent version of Independence Day in the States (plus, fewer aliens).

Not only is it a holiday today, but my band is releasing our debut EP record tonight. I am very excited about this, since I’ve never cut a real CD before. It’ll be up on iTunes soon (possibly even today, in which case this sentence here will become a link to the album), and we are having a CD release party at our bar. So, rather than our usual fare of funny and/or provocative looks at religion or racism, I thought I would shamelessly self-promote by posting some of our own videos!

Here’s us doing a new original tune:

Here’s us doing Tiny Dancer by Elton John:

And here’s one where I’m singing:

You can find more videos here.

So yeah, looking forward to a fun day!

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2 Movie Friday: Ain’t No New Thing

  • June 3, 2011
  • by Crommunist
  • · blog · bmusic · history · race

Last Friday, a great American poet and musician died. Gil Scott Heron was a significant mouthpiece for the black community in the United States, exposing black and white audiences alike to the social and political issues happening with urban black people in the 1960s and 1970s. Part of a great tradition of blues musicians, Scott Heron blended their ability to evoke the pain and suffering of the working-class and poor black man and woman with the emerging scene of spoken-word poetry to pioneer a contemporary method of articulating the struggles of his own community.

Scott Heron’s musical style laid the foundation for the next generation of musicians and artists to perform the same function – funk and soul in the 1970s, followed by hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s. While he is often credited with the appellation, Scott Heron eschewed being thought of as the forefather of hip-hop music:

Shame on every writer who reported Gil Scott-Heron’s death with the blurb, “Godfather of Rap,” writers who have—per Angela Davis’ observations—totally missed the point of the man’s career. It was a term that Gil Scott-Heron was not ambivalent about: “There seems to be a need within our community to have what the griot provided supplied in terms of chronology; a way to identify and classify events in black culture that were both historically influential and still relevant (Now and Then: The Poems of Gil Scott Hereon, xiv).

This is less Scott-Heron distancing himself from Hip-hop (though he would do so from time to time), but more a recognition that what he did, sat at the feet of traditions that came before him. He writes, “there were poets before me who had great influence on the language and the way it was performed and recorded: Oscar Brown, Jr., Melvin Van Peebles, and Amiri Baraka were all published and well respected for their poetry, plays, songs and range of other artistic achievements when the only thing I was taping were my ankles before basketball practice.” (xiv)

Scott was perhaps best known for his immortal work The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.

But I think my favourite work of his is a poem called simply Brother:

We deal in too many externals, brother
Always afros, handshakes and dashikis
Never can a man build a working structure for black capitalism
Always does the man read Mao or Fanon
I think I know you would-be black revolutionaries too well
Standing on a box on the corner,
Talking about blowing the white man away
That’s now where it’s at yet, brother
Calling this man an Uncle Tom and telling this woman to get an afro
But you won’t speak to her if she looks like hell, now will you brother
Some of us been checking your act out kinda close
And by now its looking kinda shaky the way you been rushin’ people with your super black bag
Jumping down on some black men with both feet cause they’re after their BA
But you’re never around when your BA is in danger…I mean your black ass
I think it was a little too easy for you to forget that you were a negro before Malcolm
You drove your white girl through the village every Friday night while the grassroots stared in envy and drank wine,
Do you remember?
You need to get your memory banks organized brother.
Show that man you call an Uncle Tom just where he’s wrong
Show that woman that you’re a sincere black man
All we need to do is see you shut up and be black
Help that woman
Help that man
That’s what brothers are for, brother

As a musician, I recognize the importance of history. We all build our lives on the shoulders of those that have come before us, and we hope to add a little piece to their legacy. If we can’t do that, we can at least try and bring the work of those others to a new audience. What we cannot do, what we must not do, is pass off the works of others as original material, and divorce it from its origins. To sever that link to history is to lose all meaning, all context, all life from art, rendering it meaningless.

We’re used to having white people try to rob us
Ain’t no new thing, we have dug his game
Charlie Parker will live on
John Coltrane will live on
Eric Dolphy will live on
Billie Holiday will live on
Jimi Hendrix and Clifford Brown and Lee Morgan will live on
And on in the sunshine of their accomplishments
The glory of the dimensions that they added to our lives [emphasis mine]

Gil Scott Heron is dead. A tireless voice for the American black community has fallen silent, but has left a long legacy that lives on in those that carry that voice forward to a new generation.

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0 Today’s word boner…

  • May 26, 2011
  • by Crommunist
  • · blog · bmusic · law · news · politics · racism

Is brought to you by guitar legend Carlos Santana:

“This law is not correct. It’s a cruel law, actually, This is about fear. Stop shucking and jiving. People are afraid we’re going to steal your job. No we aren’t. You’re not going to change sheets and clean toilets. I would invite all Latin people to do nothing for about two weeks so you can see who really, really is running the economy. Who cleans the sheets? Who cleans the toilets? Who babysits? I am here to give voice to the invisible.”

It’s not so much what he said, it’s more where he said it – at an Atlanta Braves baseball game commemorating the civil rights movement. In front of a crowd of thousands, Mr. Santana had the courage and poise to call out not only Major League Baseball, but the fans sitting in the bleachers, for turning a blind eye toward racism happening right now and choosing instead to pat themselves on the back for how tolerant they’ve been.

He had more:

“Most people at this point they are either afraid to really say what needs to be said, this is the United States the land of the free. If people want the immigration law to keep passing in every state then everybody should get out and just leave the American Indians here. This is about Civil Rights.”

He then proceeded to shred the guitar so hard that all the women in the audience became pregnant [citation needed].

While I don’t usually care about the political positions of celebrities, I am impressed with what it takes to stand up in front of thousands of people and point out their complicit hypocrisy. It helps that he’s right, too.

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2 Movie Friday: Proposition 8 – The Musical

  • March 4, 2011
  • by Crommunist
  • · blog · bmusic · funny · hate · LGBT · movie

Sometimes hypocrisy goes best when set to a brilliant Broadway score:

Alternative ending: Jesus fails to pop into existence because he’s a fictional character. Batman appears instead.

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3 Religious chicken and homophobic egg

  • February 23, 2011
  • by Crommunist
  • · blog · bmusic · culture · hate · LGBT · religion

The three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) get the bulk of the attention in North American media. This is partially due to their immense familiarity and power in the world, partially due to number of believers in North America, and partially due to the fact that they stem from a common root. As a result, the way we think of religion as a concept tends to be coloured by those particular traditions. It is important to note that besides these three, their bizarre offshots (which would include Mormonism, Baha’i, Jehova’s Witnesses, and others), and the so-called “Eastern” religions (chiefly Hinduism and Buddhism), there are a number of religions that are seemingly created uniquely, or at least which weave together a number of other traditions into a new narrative.

Religions like these allow us to examine the way in which humans are able to craft new creation mythologies and rites of worship, and give us a clue into how the older traditions may have gotten their start. Aside from Scientology, which gained its notoriety by systematically making bizarre and grandiose claims while defrauding its adherents of their lives and human rights (which is, I realize, a fair cop for pretty much any religion) and Vodun, which has been mischaracterized and caricatured by Christians into something far more bizarre than anything anyone actually practices, this phenomenon of a completely new religion is probably no better and popularly exemplified than it is by Rastafari*.

Rastafari is a somewhat bizarre patchwork of beliefs, stitching together Christianity, pre-Christian Judaism, African mysticism, post-slavery Afrocentric thought, and the worship of a former political leader in Ethiopia. As a general movement it is mostly harmless, as the main underlying philosophy is an existential exploration of man’s relationship with the divine and with other human beings, often fueled by smoking marijuana. It is, interestingly, difficult to divorce Rastafari from its roots deep within post-slavery Jamaican culture. As such, it is hard to tell where Rastafari ends and Jamaican culture begins, which makes this issue far more interesting:

On November 27th, 2010, protesters in Sacramento, CA gathered outside musical artist Capleton’s reggae-dancehall concert to oppose the violent gay-bashing ideas his lyrics promote.  This wasn’t the first protest against reggae artists calling for violent homophobic acts in their music.  Other reggae artists criticized and boycotted over the last decade for anti-homosexual lyrics include Beenie Man, Buju Banton, Sizzla, Elephant Man, T.O.K., Bounty Killa and Vybz Kartel.

A major leader in the campaign against the homophobia found in dancehall music (the reggae spinoff popular in United States and western Europe) is Stop Murder Music, who eventually initiated the “Reggae Compassionate Act”.  This contract requires artists who sign it to preclude all homophobic sentiment from their future music and to vow against further reproductions of prior songs which promoted intolerance or killing of gay individuals—thus ensuring that their music will no longer be subject to boycott.  The original problem that lingers past these artist’s vows of free-but-destructive-speech abstinence, however, is the defense originally used to justify the lyrics:  Homophobia is a cultural, even religious value.

One of the knotty problems when considering the intersection between religion and homophobia (and to anyone who wants to claim that “homophobia” just means “fear of gay people” and therefore doesn’t apply to their particular gay-bashing agenda, please take your pedantry and shove it somewhere uncomfortable – adults are talking) is that there is a real chicken-egg conundrum to resolve. Are people homophobic because their religion instructs them to be so, or does a homophobic society spawn a homophobic religion?

Having been to the Caribbean a handful of times, and having half of my family members being of Caribbean extract, I can claim a bit of familiarity with the culture. As with any group of people among whom machismo and “manliness” is considered a high virtue, homophobia is endemic. After all, what greater abdication of the rightful role of a man could there be than mincing around like a goddamn fairy? Add to this male-centred mentality the extreme anti-gay sentiment of colonial Britain and you have a culture that is richly steeped in the hatred and persecution of gay men (and it is predominantly men – Caribbean lesbians seem to by and large escape the kind of hatred they experience in places like South Africa and the Congo).

It is mostly inevitable that a religion that comes from such a background is going to have homophobic elements. I say mostly inevitable because, by a strict interpretation of Rastafari, there’s really no doctrinal reason why homosexuality is wrong – to get there, one must invoke the Old and New Testaments. Additionally, considering that the reggae prophets of Rastafari (Desmond Decker, Peter Tosh, Bob Marley) chose to spend their time concerned with uplifting the human spirit and avoiding hatred, the focus of contemporary reggae and dancehall music on gay hatred seems like the result of foreign influences rather than something that sprung through the religion itself.

As with the anti-gay movement in Uganda, Iran’s bizarre treatment of its homosexual population, and the simmering hatred of gay people (again, predominantly men) here in North America, this intrusion of homophobia into the cultural expression of Rastafari seems to be the pre-existing anti-gay sentiment of adherents being masked as a religious tenet. Of course this kind of hatred tends to be self-feeding as people come to sincerely believe that YahwAlladdha (or Jah, as the case may be) cares more about where your neighbour puts his penis than He does about you specifically inciting violence against one of His creations.

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*I must insist that people remove the term “Rastafarianism” from their vocabulary – the doctrine explicitly rejects “isms”, and even if you don’t care if they don’t think they’re an “ism”, Rastas find such classification offensive. You don’t call Jews “Heebs” simply because they are descended from ancient Hebrews – there’s no need to be unnecessarily offensive.

6 Movie Friday: Show me a God

  • January 28, 2011
  • by Crommunist
  • · blog · bmusic · movie · religion · skepticism

There’s never been a conscientious believer who has gone through life completely free of doubt. There is an interesting passage in Mark 9 in which Jesus is asked to heal a child with epilepsy, and the father is told that all he has to do is believe hard enough, and his son will be cured (Jesus was an early Deepak Chopra, apparently). The distraught father says “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief!” and his son is immediately cured.

The story is complete bullshit, to be sure, but that line “I believe, help me overcome my unbelief” has been uttered, in various permutations, by the lips of the faithful for as long as people have been told to believe in ridiculous stories and impossible propositions with no evidence.

Tech N9ne turned it into a song:

There is an entire branch of theology called “theodicy” that is devoted to trying to square the circle of things in the world that are evil with the idea of a benevolent creator. Guys like Ken Ham, Ray Comfort and Hugh Ross make the claim that suffering is intentionally introduced into the universe to test mankind’s resolve to turn away from sin. If mankind is able to bear up under the crushing weight of temptation and overcome evil, then he is rewarded with eternal bliss in heaven (citation needed). Of course this is a facile explanation that falls apart under even casual scrutiny. Why would a loving god make such a test? Why not make it easier to be good? Why not create mankind with an inner drive to be good? Why punish those who are innocent of any misdeeds, while rewarding those who sin? Why bother testing us at all if it knows who will pass and who will fail a priori?

The other explanations are that YahwAlladdha is not good at all, but a petty heartless trickster who delights in human suffering, or that it is completely indifferent to the suffering of its creation.

Or, more parsimoniously, that it doesn’t exist at all and you’re wasting your time asking stupid questions.

While there are a lot of reasons to hold onto religion in the black community (community organization has traditionally centred on church groups, the belief in ultimate justice helps you ignore many of the day-to-day injustice you see around you), I am glad to see/hear influential voices within the hip-hop community begin to broach the taboo around criticizing religion. Maybe none are so poignant as this track from The Roots:

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P.S. Sorry about the embedding. VEVO is… I have mixed feelings.

2 Movie Friday: What are you doing New Year’s Eve?

  • December 31, 2010
  • by Crommunist
  • · blog · bmusic

I occasionally make reference to my life and work as a scientist when discussing the various skeptical topics that come up on this blog. I’ve been told that approaching some of these topics with a scientific eye helps make them more easily comprehensible to those of us who are more academically-minded, rather than invoking legal or emotional rhetoric to make my arguments. For me, science is the filter through which I see the world – I try to approach all things analytically and apportion my belief in them to the evidence. It’s not surprising to me that this colours my blogging, although it is certainly not something I make a concerted effort to do.

What I don’t talk about much is the other part of my life. I have a pretty cool Clark Kent/Superman thing going on, wherein I am a fuddy-duddy glasses-wearing nerd by day, and rock star by night. In addition to being a classically-trained viola player, I have been dabbling in guitar since I was in high school, and have been singing since I was old enough to carry a tune. My music is perhaps not as big an influence over my writing and daily life as my scientific background is, but music still plays a big role in my life.

I do have a band here in Vancouver called CROWN, in which I play a number of instruments and sing. It’s a cool thing to be part of a collaboration between a number of great musicians, and we have what I think is a pretty unique sound.

Here’s us doing a cover of “Steal My Kisses” by Ben Harper with me on vocals:

Covering Chris Isaac’s “Wicked Game” with Paul on lead vocals and me on viola:

And doing an original tune called “Never Let You Go” with Stuart on vocals:

We play down at a pub called the King’s Head in Kitsilano on Fridays and Sundays, which is a lot of fun. Of course none of this has anything to do with the usual fare of this blog; we just happen to be playing a gig for New Year’s Eve tonight so I thought I’d let you know what I was up to.

What are you doing tonight?

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