Tried and True Attention-Getting Tactics

Mad Squirrel with friend

A One-Question Interview with Mad Squirrel
The Forest Fires Collective is an insanely-dope hip-hop group that started in San Francisco a few years ago. Currently, the FFC is inactive, as key members of the crew have left the Bay Area to commit more time to personal projects like having real jobs and starting families. Mad Squirrel is one of the group's MCs and he's also a really interesting guy. I asked him one question (which was actually a statement with a question mark tacked on the end) and he went on and on. Bless him.

So when the FFC started, you had basically moved to San Francisco for a year to participate in hip-hop and write about it for your Ph.D. thesis?

Yeah. I was inspired by a whole new world of independent hip-hop that I discovered over the Internet. I had a friend in San Francisco and on a trip back east he put me up on the Industry Records Beats and Lyrics compilation. Through that, I discovered a whole gang of West Coast underground artists. Then after some serious online activity, a few trips out to the Bay, and a drunken Wednesday night in a Northampton hotel room with the Living Legends and Hieroglyphics, the project was pretty much together.

There was also this point where I was giving a noon brown bag lecture to my anthropology department at Syracuse University. The moment I finished the talk, one of the big professors in the department stood up and said "Forget Africa, you have to do your dissertation on hip-hop."

Mark Onstad – AKA Access – was also a constant source of support and criticism. Man, there were periods there when we were exchanging 10-page emails every night. I would show him a three-page proposal, and he would send me back eight pages where he spent a paragraph discussing the contradictions and inaccuracies in each sentence. Then I would have to respond and defend myself. We both lost a lot of sleep around that.


Mad Squirrel by himself

Well, I knew from listening to the music, visiting the Bay, and from participating in the now-defunct Legends Labyrinth online forum that Amoeba Music was the spot. The year before I started fieldwork, there was this point where I was working two summer jobs. The first was a $5.35 per hour job at a record store where some of the staff was cool but the big bosses treated me like dirt. The second was at a cool-as-hell downtown restaurant where I made good money, there were tons of beautiful girls on staff, and they really loved me. Well, when school started back up, I chose to keep the crappy record store job specifically because I thought it would increase my chances of getting a job at Amoeba when I got to the Bay the following year.

So, around November I sent a letter to Amoeba saying that I was going to be out there for a year and thought that Amoeba would be the best place for me to work to support myself. I had sent in a few grant applications but wasn’t too optimistic about getting funded. Furthermore, I didn’t want to leave my entire graduate career in the hands of a funding agency. So I decided to just go out to the Bay and find work. So I get this email back from Karen Pearson – an amazing woman and boss – at Amoeba saying something like "I’m sorry, I know a year might seem like a long time to you, but in retail it goes by in the blink of an eye and we really can’t spend time training and investing in people who we know are going to leave so soon." But then the last sentence said, "But I noticed that you have had some other Karens in your work history" – at both the record store and the restaurant my bosses were named Karen – "Give us a call when you get to town." I knew that I was a good worker and I knew I would do well in the interview, so from there I pretty much very good about the job.

Once I got to Amoeba, the first two friends I made were Feller Quentin, and this other cat, who although he wasn’t too into hip hop had started the hip-hop open mic that was at the Rockin’ Java coffee shop next door to Amoeba. Feller and the FFC folks and that open mic were the most important realms of hip-hop activity for me while I was in the Bay. I did get a small research grant, but not enough to support living and going out in SF. I really credit the Amoeba job with everything. That is how I met or got introduced to the places where I met my closest friends. It also gave me an identity as a real person, not just some researcher who came around periodically when he was looking for someone to interview. I’m shy enough as it is. Some people don’t believe that.

After close to two years of post-fieldwork writing – and believe me I spent many a weekend night working past midnight – the dissertation was well received. I passed my defense with distinction and with no revisions, and I also won the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs outstanding dissertation award. I was really honored by that. Especially by the fact that such a prestigious and traditional school like Maxwell (ranked as the top public policy school in the nation by US News and World Report) gave such an award to a participant-observation based thesis on underground hip-hop. I was also fortunate to get a tenure-track job right off the bat at Virginia Tech. And regardless of what they tell you, Southwest Virginia is a special place on this planet, especially if you like music and culture.

Mad Squirrel is working on turning his dissertation on underground hip-hop into a book. While he's finishing that up, you should download "Ask Who to Ask" by the Forest Fires Collective (Mad Squirrel's the second rapper on the track) and visit Access Hip-Hop to buy FFC's music.

"It sucks when you can step outside yourself for a second and realize that you're acting like an asshole." - Ben

To everyone I know (including you, Ben):

Paragraph One: You need to realize that you're worth way more than all this worrying. Each and every one of you would be a whole lot better off if you went into the next stage of whatever endeavor you're facing confident in the fact that you fucking rock. You simply don't believe in yourself as much as I believe in you. That's the only thing that's wrong with you.

Paragraph Two: I could do a great job selling you to the world. Have anyone you want call me for a reference. I'll tell them about what smart, inventive, and all-around great people you are. I'll tell them they need you way the fuck more than you need them. I'll definitely mention that you're energetic, funny, and fucking terrific. I'll make sure they know that you deserve to get whatever you want in life.

Paragraph Three: It's true, I'm an obnoxious self-helpy clown with a penchant for dramatizing the mundane. I can't help it. It's just the way I react to the gross feeling I get when my rad friends don't think as highly of themselves as I do.

Much love,
L. Ron Money

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Os Mutantes

I heard a rumor that all three members of Os Mutantes really and truly believed in themselves. That's why they were able to make awesome songs like "Bat Macumba."

Found in an Obscure and Frightening Place, Part One: Found on a Bulletin Board at a Senior Center in Santee, CA

Shit Is Mad Crazy
by Bert "Creepy" Crawley

Yessir, the problem with people these days is that they're satisfied with sameness. This nation's become one big bland ball of similarity. You can't tell the cities apart. You can't tell cabs from cop cars, whores from hipsters, or drunks muttering to themselves on the sidewalk from suit-and-tie stiffs yapping on those wacky phones that fit in your ear. And dare I say it? You can't tell the blacks from the whites.

My generation respected differentiation. Sue us, but we liked labels. A man was a man and a woman was a woman. It was clear who the enemy was and we could at least take an educated guess at where he was hiding. Things just used to feel more right with this country and I'm not saying it had everything to do with having a president who knew how to string together a series of words in a clever and comical way, but it sure as shit didn't hurt.

In conclusion, the problem with people today is that they're satisfied with sameness. Thank you for your time - I'm Bert Crawley and I'm 119 years old.

Bert Crawley is the author of such flyers as "Anatomy of the Tricky Tranny" and "Crawley on Crawley." His hobbies include mailing anonymous threats to his next door neighbor, sitting back, and imagining the look on that precious little prick's face when he reads what's in store for him if he doesn't take that "America Is the Real Terrorist" bumper sticker off of his fucking Prius.

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Desmond Dekker

This Is Not Your College Roommate's Reggae: Hey, did someone say old timey? Desmond Dekker & The Aces' 1968 hit "The Israelites" came 15 full years before the first documented case of a wealthy blonde girl wearing her hair in dreads. Now that's a long-ass time ago!

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Anyway, I'm back. Not much to report - the tour was both a bust and a blast. Plenty of ups and downs, to say the least. I didn't sell a single copy of the multimedia comedy project I was pushing ("Laffs.com," get it now!), but a mysterious man who attended my reading at the Borders in Hayward reported that he laughed so hard at my "Eight Former First Ladies I'd Like to See Naked" routine that he coughed up blood, which I felt was a rather rad compliment. Then he asked me to join him for a steak at the Black Angus in the strip mall across the street. Unaccustomed to dining with strange men, I accepted - but not without a certain caution. As we approached the beefery, I noticed that the bulbs inside the giant plastic "B" and "g" on the restaurant's sign were out, so that it effectively read "lack Anus." I took this to be an omen (of what, I cannot say) and ran like hell.