This is already snowballing into something bigger.

I woke up this morning to the usual coffee, smokes and words and an article I’d been meaning to get to for a while. Back in March, over at Esther Ivereem’s excellent Seeing Black site, black American experimental musician Morgan Craft asked the question where are the young Black America experimental musicians under 50?

While I was waiting for approval to join the discussion on their forum I said fuck it, and figured I’d just start a list.

It’s getting to be a pretty long fucking list.

Which is great news for a longer, more involved project I’m working on (hint: black, white, read all over an bigger than a breadbox) but bad news for someone who’s on deadline and needs to be writing. So in the interest of brevity, and me getting my ass to work on time, here’s the 1st ten. There a couple of gimme’s and a few you probably haven’t heard, or at least heard much of.  I’ll post another 10 later. The rest I think I’ll just keep in the pocket for now.

I was pretty liberal with what defines avant garde and experimental, and there’s some punk, some rock and a little hip hop and out there R&B.  We can follow the Rob Fields school and label them all as Black Rock or we can classify the groups as “other” or just wait ’til some young enterprising music journalist finds a way to lump them all together, (or at least until I’ve had enough coffee to start being creative for the morning).

But until then…

Onyx Ashanti

Walter Kitundu

The New Bloods

Tamar Kali

Broun Fellinis

Beat$treat$

Osunlade

Janelle Monae

DJ Spooky

The Oxbow

Of course there are tons of people to include, but one thing I noticed was a lack of female and LGBT artists. I know damned well there are a lot more woman and brown queerfolk making music and art these days. If you are one or know one, hit me at kwan dot booth at gmail dot com.

So I’m involved in this event so I have an admitted bias, but hell-it’s gonna be one fly ass event so I think it’s warranted, yes?

Prosody Castle and Otherside Media Present

Urban Real(i)ty

Nov. 18th, 2-5pm

Art by

Danny King

Lara Durback

Erika Staiti

Peter Spannagle

Crude

2AM

Kristian

 

Words by

Aimee Suzara

d scot miller

Ayodele Nzinga

Shawn Taylor

Chris Stroffolino

Phill Weber

Kwan Booth

This Sunday evening come explore Oakland’s out of the way art locals, murals and site specific instillations at this touring art exhibit and poetry reading. For Urban Real(i)ty, the Gallery of Urban Art is packing loads of visitors into vans and shepherding them around the city for a look at some of the out of the way art that makes the town that creative mecca we all love. There will be pieces created just for the show by street artists Crude and Safety 1st alongside fine art instillations by Lara Durback and Erika Staiti, a tour of east Oakland murals and tons of surprises.

After the reading will be a poetry reading from lyrical legends including Aimee Suzara, Shawn Taylor, d scot miller and even yours truly, as well as a gallery show by Oakland Artist Danny King.

Prosody Castle and Otherside Media Present

Urban Real(i)ty
$5
2-5pm

Gallery of Urban Art

1746 13th (at Wood)
www.galleryofurbanart.org
http://www.prosodycastle.blogspot.com

Heavy Hitterz Street Art & Graffiti Show
So these Speaker Fruits cats throw a pretty damned good party. This past Friday at Age Song gallery in San Francisco, SF along with Daniel Fleres, fabric8, and Phoneticontrol brought in around 80 artists from around the world for Heavy Hitterz, one of the best graffiti/street/comic art shows I’ve been to in a minute.
Local heads like Romanowski and Mildred mixed it up with emerging artists from around the continental US, Honolulu, Hong Kong, Japan, France, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.
Brown bag 40’s were flowing, David Choong Lee blessed the spot with a live painting session and Celskiii, Deanndroid, and shredO dropped the ill soul and old school jams. Not a bad night in the city. See the pictures for more.
-kwan

More inside…

Heavy Hitterz runs through November 17 at Age Song Gallery-580 Hayes St. in San Francisco-and ends with a fashion show and party from 9pm-2am.