Z Needs Your Help!
If MTV is the massive, monolithic bastion of music’s lowest common denominator, then their yearly Video Music Awards are the hulking, empty-headed…
Alexander Billet
I'm a music journalist, writer and activist living in Chicago, and sit on the editorial board at Red Wedge magazine. A regular contributor to SocialistWorker.org, the Electronic Intifada and Green Left Weekly, my articles have also appeared at TheNation.com, Z Magazine, New Politics, CounterPunch, PopMatters.com, Dissident Voice, the International Socialist Review, the Washington Peace Letter, MR Zine and Razorcake.org among others.One of my articles “Is Russell Simmons Playing Politics with Hip-Hop?” appears in the academic collection At Issue: Should Music Lyrics Be Censored For Violence and Exploitation? released in 2008 by Greenhaven Press. My first book, Shake the City! How Crisis and Resistance Are Reshaping Music, is currently being written and will be released in early 2014.I have discussed music and politics on WBEZ's "Eight Forty-Eight," on Radio Free Adelaide in Australia and W.E.A.L.L.B.E. radio show. I'm a member of the National Writers Union/UAW 1981, a founder of Punks Against Apartheid and is a longtime activist in various movements for civil rights, economic justice and international solidarity. If you're interested, an archive of my work can be seen at my website Rebel Frequencies, and I can be reached at [email protected], or through my Facebook and Twitter.
In the five years since the release of his searing debut Blood and Fire, Baltimore-based MC Son of Nun has gone from playing…
Expectations have run high for Nas’ new album Untitled. It seems impossible to read a review of it without references to his…
Listening to Liz Phair’s debut Exile in Guyville, recently reissued by ATO Records after years out of print, it’s striking how fresh…
We live in a society that makes scapegoats of people: immigrants, women, people of color, gays and lesbians or anyone else who…
"With the Sean Bell situation, New York is basically saying ‘fuck niggas.’" Who in their right minds can honestly disagree with these…
Bo Diddley was known for many things; his rectangular home-made guitars, his dark sunglasses, the energetic performances he was able to conduct…
"Art and politics don’t mix." So we are told time and again whenever an artist or musician dares to speak out and…
There is something obscenely wrong with what sits in the former location of CBGB. Some of what defined the legendary rock club…
What is the human cost of war? Ask Tomas Young. In 2004 an Iraqi insurgent’s bullet ripped through his spine, paralyzing him…