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				"id": "http://laze.micro.blog/2016/12/16/interview-aaron-jasinski.html",
				"title": "Interview: Aaron Jasinski",
				"content_html": "<div class=\"pre-commentary\"><p>I conducted this interview on December 16, 2016 for what was going to be the fourth episode of the Normal Bias podcast. Unfortunately, I never completed the episode. So, here we are in 2025 and I'm finally publishing the interview. If you like underground techno and electrionica from the early 90s, I encourage you to <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/URM2SOSideB/URM2+-+SO+-+Side+A.wav\">check out the tape we discuss, <i>So</i>, on the Internet Archive</a>.</p>\n<p>The interview is lightly edited for clarity. My end of the interview sounds kind of janky, mainly because I wasn't originally planning on my voice being in the episode.</p></div>\n<p>In the early 1990s I was just starting to review music and spent a good amount of time in random message forums talking to different folks, perhaps soliciting review copies of albums or demo tapes. One of the tapes that found its way into my collection was by URM2, called <em>So</em>. The J-Card was handwritten, the music actually went on longer than the cassette&rsquo;s runtime, and it was clearly homemade, but the quality of the techno/electronica music on it kept me engaged and was something I&rsquo;d return to even years later to listen to. Eventually, I made it a point to hunt down the artist thanks to the fact he put his name in the liner notes. At the end of 2016, we had a chance to talk.</p>\n<p>Over the years I ran Normal Bias, I posted a number of homemade demos, but I believe this was the first time I posted a tape that was forgotten by the artist himself.</p>\n<p><audio src=\"https://laze.net/uploads/2025/interview-with-aaron-jasinski-just-interview.mp3\" controls=\"controls\" preload=\"metadata\" class=\"img-center\"></audio></p>\n<img src=\"https://laze.net/uploads/2025/urm2so.png\" width=\"400\" alt=\"URM2 So cover art\" class=\"img-center\">\n<img src=\"https://laze.net/uploads/2025/urm2soliner-notes.png\" width=\"400\" alt=\"URM2 So liner notes\" class=\"img-center\">\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> I found it really interesting that when I first contacted you about this tape that you didn&rsquo;t recognize the name that you&rsquo;d released the tape under.</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> Yeah, that was kind of a trip. I didn&rsquo;t recognize the name. And subsequently to that first encounter I think I&rsquo;ve remembered where that name came from. I don&rsquo;t know if you were curious about that.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> That was my first question! Did the name of the band or the album (<em>So</em>) have any particular meaning?</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> It&rsquo;s really kind of dumb and nerdy. I don&rsquo;t know about you, but my dad is really good at the dad jokes and maybe I kind of inherited that. It was from a like a little pun story that he told us.</p>\n<p>He&rsquo;s an orchestra teacher, and I was in his orchestra class. I played bass in the school orchestra in high school, and he told us this weird story that had a really bad pun ending about hillbillies or rednecks going out duck hunting, and he wrote those letters U-R-M-2 or C-M-Ducks. But he wrote out just the letters and he asked people to try to decipher it. And it tells this little story. And I think that&rsquo;s where that part of that name comes from.</p>\n<p>So the letters themselves make, spell out the words U-R-M-2. I don&rsquo;t know if that even makes sense, but&hellip; I&rsquo;m trying to remember like 24 years ago. I think that&rsquo;s in whatever weird state that I was in at that time, I think I just pulled that out of somewhere.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> Right. Sometimes those things seem to come out of nowhere.</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> Yeah, yeah. Or you connect the dots in a strange way and I was like, &ldquo;Hey, that would be cool for the name of an album.&rdquo;</p>\n<p>I&rsquo;ve been trying to think of how you got that tape. And the only thing that I can think of was, about that time, I was going to dance parties and really early days of techno raves and stuff. I think I had put that compilation together, or something like it, and was trying to shop it around to DJs, just to get people to play my stuff and I thought that would be really cool to have it played in a dance club.</p>\n<p>And I think I put together a couple of packages like that. I was just trying to hand them out to people. That&rsquo;s the only thing I can come up with and so I don&rsquo;t know how it got to you that way. Or maybe I sent it off in the mail to somebody&hellip;? I dunno.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> The only thing I could think was that around that time was right around when I started reviewing music. Were you on any online services at the time? GEnie, perhaps?</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> I think that was before I even knew what the internet was, I think. Maybe not. I think I might have sent it to some radio stations or something like that to try to get reviewed or something&hellip; so yeah, maybe somehow there&rsquo;s some kind of connection.</p>\n<p>Was that in the days of CompuServe and stuff?</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> Yeah, I was using GEnie and I think I was using Usenet at the time. And I know that CompuServe had Usenet access so it&rsquo;s possible, maybe that was where it came in.</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> Yeah, I think my dad had CompuServe, or he had some really early form of the internet, and maybe I found something on there about, you know, get your music reviewed and sent it off or something, I don&rsquo;t know.</p>\n<p>Man, that&rsquo;s like, that&rsquo;s ancient history. That&rsquo;s wild, that is wild.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> How old were you at time when you recorded this?</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> I must have been 18, probably. Did it have a date on it? I don&rsquo;t remember.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> It said 1992.</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> 92? Yeah, so I would have been 18. Yep. Senior year or right after senior year. Probably like the summer of that year.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> When I got the tape, it was all hand-labeled. It had a little something drawn on the cover. It was somewhat stylized, but it was on the Sony J-card and everything. So, I got it and I was like, OK, what&rsquo;s this? When I played it, honestly, I was surprised at how good the production value was for what I assumed was a homemade demo. What type of equipment did you record on? Where did you get the equipment? Was it something that you bought yourself or was it a gift?</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> So that all started about&hellip; it probably was Christmas, or whatever. I was about 16 1/2 or maybe almost 17. And, well, to back up even before that, where did I get the equipment and stuff or how did I record it?</p>\n<p>I&rsquo;ve been fascinated by electronic music since pretty young, probably since nine or ten. My dad being a music teacher, he&rsquo;s really into music and I remember him having this entire bookcase full of old LPs in the early 80s. He had a huge classical music collection, but he also had quite a few New Age type music, like Brian Eno, Tomita, who is a Japanese guy. I remember hearing Tomita&rsquo;s version of <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv707GLbFGw\"><em>The Planets</em></a>, which is all made on modular synthesizers. And we&rsquo;re talking like before MIDI or anything like that. I just remember being captivated in the concept of being able to create, what in my mind, seemed like any sound&hellip; just being able to create that on your own was just so awesome.</p>\n<p>Fast forward to 16- or 17-years-old, I was really into electronic, like, synth pop type stuff, Depeche Mode and all that kind of music, and I learned that those guys used samplers and samplers to me seemed even more amazing, that you could just take any sound and then repurpose it and bend it and craft it into your own musical purposes. So I became obsessed with trying to get a sampler and samplers at that time were thousands of dollars, like the EMU samplers or Yamaha.</p>\n<p>Then, I discovered the Ensoniq line of samplers, like the <a href=\"https://www.vintagesynth.com/ensoniq/eps-16\">EPS-16+</a>. That&rsquo;s the one that I started just obsessing over, and I would just spend all day pining for this sampler. I was thinking, &ldquo;How cool would it be to have a sequencer built in?&rdquo; It came with effects and stuff. Basically, it was an early workstation. It cost like $2,000.</p>\n<p>I tried to save up money and my parents, out of the goodness of their heart, said that if I got a job they would help me buy one. They would lend me the money to get it and then I could pay them back. So I ended up working at Taco Time for a year-and-a-half. After having the job for a few months they did go ahead and supported my obsession to get this workstation. And that is what I made music on, just that, for about three years, from 16- to almost 19-years-old.</p>\n<p>So, the cassette you got was all done on an EPS-16+ from Ensoniq, recorded onto my dad&rsquo;s Tascam dual cassette. It was a pretty nice piece of hi-fi equipment. It wasn&rsquo;t professional, but it was pretty good for your home stereo system. I just adopted that and plugged it right into the outputs on the EPS and recorded it.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> I love that your parents waited for you to have been working there for a month or two just to make sure that you were actually gonna keep the job.</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> Yeah, exactly. I think they wanted to make sure that I was committed. Maybe it&rsquo;s just an artifact of my personality, but I remember just being sick. I had all the catalogs and had learned all the specs and everything and just being like, &ldquo;Oh man, how amazing would that be to just be able to make&hellip; I&rsquo;d have 16 tracks that I could put down and&hellip; it had two megabytes of memory and holy cow.&rdquo; It was pretty awesome.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> And did it live up to those expectations once you actually got it?</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> I gotta say it did. It was funny when I went into the music store to buy it, the guy was trying to get me to buy the Korg Wavestation, which had just come out at the time. The guy was trying to tell me that &ldquo;Oh, you know, samplers are kind of a thing of the past, nobody really uses samplers anymore. That&rsquo;s kind of a fad.&rdquo; But I knew what I wanted and I think my perspective was proved right over all the years. Sampling is huge, right?</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> Yeah, I would say so.</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> I got to know that that platform super well. It probably kept me out of trouble, but it also severely cramped my social life. Being able to be able to sit in your bedroom, you&rsquo;re like basically an early bedroom producer, headphones on&hellip; as I think you can tell from the music from that cassette, I was sampling TV and old movies and Monty Python and it all seems pretty cheesy now, but I remember at the time going, &ldquo;Man, nobody&rsquo;s doing stuff like this, this is cool!&rdquo;</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> Around that same time, I was just getting into doing sample-based hip-hop production, right about that same time, like &lsquo;92, &lsquo;93, just barely getting started. So, I definitely understand that those last couple years of high school, spending a lot of time with headphones on, and not necessarily out.</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> Yeah.</p>\n<p>So, production quality-wise, I come from a musical family and I loved music. As a teenager, I was exposed to quite a lot of different types of music and listened to a lot of music. I didn&rsquo;t have the technical knowledge or vocabulary or understanding of how to produce things but I could hear the professional sound. I was constantly trying to get that and didn&rsquo;t know why I couldn&rsquo;t get to it but was doing what I could just through hearing, experimentation and just through listening. So maybe you picked up on some of that production value, but I didn&rsquo;t even know what I was doing, you know? I didn&rsquo;t have much theory behind it.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> Yeah, I mean, when I got it, like I said, I was really impressed by it. I remember still playing that in my dorm room a couple of years later. And I&rsquo;m sure I probably even played it on one or two episodes of my college radio show at some point. So there you go, it did eventually pay off.<br>\n<br/><strong>Aaron:</strong> It&rsquo;s amazing, like, these little artifacts you create&hellip; it&rsquo;s sent out into the world and unbeknownst to you, while you&rsquo;re off doing other things, they&rsquo;re having their own life. That&rsquo;s just mind-blowing. Kind of creepy in a way, but I mean in a cool, sort of mystical kind of way.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> Yeah, I had a weird moment in the early 2000s, I had a guy contact me about sampling something I had produced back in college for a track he was doing. And I was like, first of all, &ldquo;How did you get that? I sold like three tapes. So you must have been one of those three people that bought it.&rdquo; And yeah, it is kind of weird to think that that stuff lives on and probably still exists in numerous people&rsquo;s basements or the back of their closet or whatever.</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> Right, that&rsquo;s wild. Oh, man. Oh, that&rsquo;s quite cool.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> So you had mentioned sending it out to radio stations and to clubs. Did anything ever come from it, aside from this interview?</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> It&rsquo;s all kind of murky. I remember taking some tapes of my work to various raves or dance clubs and trying to approach a DJ and say, &ldquo;Hey man, I make music. Check out my stuff.&rdquo; Some of them were too cool or kind of gave me the cold shoulder, but a few of them were like &ldquo;Yeah, cool, I&rsquo;ll check it out,&rdquo; but no not directly. From that, nothing really came of it as far as getting notoriety or success or anything like that.</p>\n<p>I mostly was making music at that time just for myself, really. I don&rsquo;t think I even knew you could make a career out of it or how that would go. [I was] just kind of doing my own thing, because I enjoyed it.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> Do you remember if any of the songs on this particular tape stood out to you as a favorite?</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> I don&rsquo;t have copies of any of that stuff, which is too bad. I made a whole bunch more music, too, and I have no idea where all those cassettes went. But the stuff that you sent me, oh my gosh, I don&rsquo;t even remember what it&rsquo;s called now. But yeah, there are a few on there where listening to it, I recall making it. I remember designing the different instruments with the different patches and taking vocal samples and basically doing micro loops, shrinking them down to basically oscillators or sample-sized loops, and creating instruments out of those with filters applied on top.</p>\n<p>I&rsquo;m not saying I&rsquo;m really cool, but people just didn&rsquo;t do that really, I don&rsquo;t think, at that time. Or like scrolling through a sample with a loop to create some weird effects.</p>\n<p>And so hearing that, I was like, &ldquo;Oh yeah, I remember doing that, setting up those sounds and stuff.&rdquo; And definitely sampling some of the Monty Python stuff. I thought that was so cool at the time.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> Hey, it all worked in there, it made sense.<br>\n<br/>So&hellip; you thanked four people on this cassette. I don&rsquo;t know if you looked at the J-card again or not, but were any of these people&ndash;and I&rsquo;ll read you the names&ndash;were any of them special in any way? Like, did you end up marrying them or rooming with them at college?</p>\n<p>You had: Heidi, Charles, Brian B, and Carey.</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> How crazy.</p>\n<p>OK, so, Heidi was one of my best friends from high school, and I think I&rsquo;ve reconnected with her on Facebook, but we&rsquo;ve kind of drifted apart. Charles was another good friend. I stay in contact with him once in a while.</p>\n<p>[Brian B.] was a guy that I knew in high school that&hellip; we did theater, drama, together. If I recall, like, he liked my music, so I&rsquo;d give him tapes and he would kind of give me his feedback. And then Carey was my girlfriend at the time.</p>\n<p>And I didn&rsquo;t marry any of the people on that list. I stay in contact with like two out of the four, thanks to Facebook.</p>\n<p>Yeah, that&rsquo;s crazy, yeah. So that had to be senior year. That was like, that was my senior year crowd, or right after senior year of high school.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> What other music or art have you have you made or produced since that time period?</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> I&rsquo;ve always been into art, like painting and stuff and music. My two mistresses, I guess you could say. And I decided to choose one as a profession and so I chose art, visual arts and stuff. I got a degree in illustration and I&rsquo;ve had varying levels of success there. I currently work as a UI and graphic designer and artist for a small start-up, casual video game company.</p>\n<p>I have done some music work, freelance type stuff for Microsoft. I&rsquo;ve done some audio work for the company I work for, just on the side. I&rsquo;ve won some remix contests, I guess you could say, in the music world. Mostly, I still make music kind of just for myself, just because I like it and the internet definitely has allowed for a platform that you can share that. So, you know, I put stuff up on SoundCloud.</p>\n<p>But man, over the last 20 years there&rsquo;s a lot of stuff I guess I could go into. Do you remember the mp3.com days?</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> Oh yeah, yeah.</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> Remember &lsquo;99 and 2000? That was like a dream come true. You put up music, people listened to it, and you got paid. That was the coolest thing. I did that in college and made a decent chunk of money for just making music out of my bedroom. I actually met some pretty cool people that way that I still stay in contact with. That was the salad days of the internet back then.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> I think some of that stuff has started to pop back up on the Internet Archive. Remember the <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/@iuma_archive\">IUMA, the Internet Underground Music Archive</a>? That might have even predated <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/mp3-com-rescue-barge\">mp3.com</a> by a little tiny bit. But I know that a lot of the stuff that had been on there has gotten pulled back up from the original servers or something up onto the Internet Archive. So you may have some more stuff up there that you may not know about.</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> Oh, I&rsquo;ll volunteer this. I probably should throw this in there because I think it&rsquo;s kind of an interesting connecting link. One of my biggest, or most, I guess you could say, public successes in art, like my painting and stuff, was in working with the music artist BT. I did the album art for his <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/These_Hopeful_Machines\">[<em>These] Hopeful Machines</em></a> album. That was kind of a cool connection. I was commissioned by him and his record label to do the artwork. Simultaneously, I&rsquo;m like, &ldquo;Hey man, I make electronic music too!&rdquo; Not that anything came of that, but it&rsquo;s just kind of cool, the two interests of mine connected, and that album was really good.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan:</strong> That&rsquo;s good, yeah, you don&rsquo;t want the one you do the album cover art for to be it a dud.</p>\n<p><strong>Aaron:</strong> I think he won a Grammy for that and the artwork was all over some iPod commercials. So, it was kind of cool to go, &ldquo;Hey, well, that&rsquo;s some of my artwork up there.&rdquo; Personally, I thought that was kind of neat how some of my artwork was visible in the music world.</p>\n<p><em>As this interview is finally being posted in 2025, you can find Aaron&rsquo;s music on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/artist/5E2xU74raXsdW9uXde8l1r?si=U8rwkRl3QxCxHy7bsLlYLw\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/jasinski\">Soundcloud</a>, and <a href=\"https://jasinski.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>. His art is at <a href=\"https://www.aaronjasinski.com/\">his website</a> and on <a href=\"https://www.deviantart.com/jasinski\">Deviantart</a>.</em></p>\n",
				"date_published": "2016-12-16T12:00:00-04:00",
				"url": "https://laze.net/2016/12/16/interview-aaron-jasinski.html",
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				"id": "http://laze.micro.blog/2013/07/01/vhs-memories.html",
				"title": "VHS Memories",
				"content_html": "<p>A <a href=\"https://projection-booth.blogspot.com/2013/06/episode-119-vhs-extravaganza.html\">recent episode</a> of The Projection Booth podcast (one I started listening to because I’ve enjoyed Mike’s <a href=\"https://www.impossiblefunky.com/\"><em>Cashiers du Cinemart</em></a> magazine) focused on the subject of VHS. While most folks have moved way beyond VHS (and physical formats in general), the giant cassettes have made a comeback in recent years with new producers popping up and collectible tapes fetching hundreds and hundreds of dollars on eBay. How popular have they gotten? Enough for this episode to be <strong>over four hours long</strong> featuring interviews with directors of four separate documentaries in the works about VHS (<strong>ETA:</strong> a few weeks later, they did a <a href=\"https://projection-booth.blogspot.com/2013/07/special-report-revenge-of-vhs.html\">2 1/2 hour follow-up!</a>). Having grown up on VHS, practically living at Medford’s mom-and-pop rental shop (first West Coast Video, then Couch Potatoes, which existed up until just a couple of years ago) and still owning a pretty sizable VHS collection, I was enthralled by this look back at the history of the format, the huge cultural impact it had allowing people to not only bring movies home to watch but to <em>record content from television</em>, and the recent resurgence the format has seen. One of the movies featured in the episode is <a href=\"https://www.rewindthismovie.com/\"><em>Rewind This!</em></a>, a film whose <a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rewindthis/rewind-this\">Kickstarter campaign</a> I tossed a few bucks at a while back. It looks like it’s going to a fun flick, as does the last one featured in the episode, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/plasticmoviesrewound\"><em>Plastic Movies Rewound</em></a>. The latter will feature a 30-minute segment on forgotten and virtually unknown alternate formats that go way beyond Beta, Laserdisc, and Videodisc.</p>\n<p>The Projection Booth solicited call-in contributions, so I shared my memories. It can be heard at about 42 minutes in, or being the egomaniac I am, I trimmed it down to just my portion so I could embed it here:</p>\n<p><audio src=\"https://laze.net/uploads/2024/projectbooth-excerpt.mp3\" controls=\"controls\" preload=\"metadata\"></audio></p>\n<p>In the first story, I discuss my attempts at copying tapes as a teenager. I would rent a bunch of movies on the cheapest day of the week from the local video store and the copy the ones I didn’t have a chance to watch (or that I really liked) using a crappy portable VCR that I’d rent from the public library for $1. Unfortunately, thanks to annoying (but admittedly clever) copy protection schemes like <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fBTYbm3CZQ\">Macrovision</a>, copies would fade in and out making them barely watchable. (Side note: how can there be no videos on YouTube with examples of what copies of copy protected videos looked like?).</p>\n<p>In the second story, I talk about Movie Mania at the former Pennsuaken Mart in New Jersey. Movie Mania still exists at the “new” mart in Willingboro, but I haven’t visited so I can’t compare it, but the original was a wonderful place where the most obscure titles could be found and if not found, ordered. Indeed, I special ordered both <em>Anguish</em> and the big box version of <em>Zombie</em> for significantly less that they would have cost me paying <a href=\"https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-430258.html\">“Rental-Only” pricing</a>.</p>\n<p>I admit to having some level of nostalgia related to VHS, but it’s not so much for the format itself. After all, the movies released on VHS were rarely letterboxed (at least until near the end of the format’s lifecycle) and the quality was not-so-hot compared to the formats that replaced it. What I <em>am</em> nostalgic for is the community that surrounded the VHS era. I practically lived at West Coast Video (and later, Couch Potatoes) and any money that I earned that didn’t go to CDs from Tunes went to renting movies. And rarely did I rent the blockbuster of the day. Instead, I was renting catalog horror titles–the weirder the better–or old, mid-80s WWF tapes. Usually the local video shop didn’t hassle me about renting R-rated films at 15-years-old, but every so often I’d run into an overzealous new clerk that was adamant about being an upstanding citizen.</p>\n<p>There was also the thrill of visiting video shops in new towns or, when I was in college, making a trip to TLA Video in Philly since it was near where my dad worked. Their selection blew my mind and started to introduce me to the more obscure titles by foreign directors that I loved. I’d watched Peter Jackson’s ultra-bloody <em>Dead/Alive</em> probably two dozen times on the screener copy my friend Dave gave me, but it wasn’t until TLA that I was able to see his earlier work like <em>Bad Taste</em> or the sick <em>Meet the Feebles</em>. Likewise for the harder-to-find (at the time) Argento and Fulci films and even more obscure arthouse flicks I was just starting to get into.</p>\n<p>I won’t lie: I love being able to stream movies from Netflix at will or being able to watch random Weng Weng movies in full on YouTube, just like I wouldn’t give up my MP3 collection and music streaming subscription for anything. But I still appreciate physical formats and, even more, the community surrounding and experience of finding, renting, and buying movies (and music) at brick-and-mortar stores. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some sort of mini-resurgence of video stores in a few years the same way new record shops have started popping up. But, for now, I admit to longing a bit for the Friday night trip to the rental store to stock up on videos for weekend viewing.</p>\n<p>Recently, I’ve been feeling a bit of an urge to revisit a lot of the old media that’s in my basement. Someday.</p>\n",
				"date_published": "2013-07-01T12:00:00-04:00",
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				"id": "http://laze.micro.blog/2004/11/23/fray-day-fredericksburg.html",
				"title": "Fray Day 8 - Fredericksburg",
				"content_html": "<div class=\"pre-commentary\">Links have been updated with pointers to archived versions.</div>\n<p>Two years ago, I volunteered at <a href=\"https://web.archive.org/web/20040305221725/http://fray.org/6/dc/\">Fray Day 6 in DC</a> (well, VA, but same difference). It was a lot of fun and I&rsquo;ve enjoyed listening to other Fray events, so this year I decided to participate. Fray Day 8 DC was on a weeknight, deep in the city so I opted to head down to Fredericksburg back to my alma mater for a <a href=\"https://web.archive.org/web/20041207024422/http://fray.com/events/fray_day_8_fredericksburg/index.html\">separate event</a> on Saturday night. It was very sparsely attended and held not in a coffee house, but in a classroom. Nevertheless, the performers were good and it gave me a little practice for my first attempt at open mic storytelling.</p>\n<p>I ain&rsquo;t very good at it, though. Lots of &ldquo;uhs&rdquo; and a definite problem with intonation. Despite all that, I decided to record myself with my Muvo so that I could post my &ldquo;performance&rdquo; here.</p>\n<p>So, take a listen to &ldquo;Dut Dut - A Fray Day Story.&rdquo; Be kind.</p>\n<p><audio src=\"https://laze.net/uploads/2025/dut-dut-fray-day-8-fredericksburg-2004-11-201.mp3\" controls=\"controls\" preload=\"metadata\" width=\"100%\"></audio></p>\n<p><a href=\"https://laze.net/transcripts/2025/09/24/2407.html\" class=\"transcript_link\">Transcript</a></p>\n",
				"date_published": "2004-11-23T14:00:00-04:00",
				"url": "https://laze.net/2004/11/23/fray-day-fredericksburg.html",
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			},
			{
				"id": "http://laze.micro.blog/1996/02/27/interview-c-delores-tucker.html",
				"title": "Interview: C. Delores Tucker",
				"content_html": "<div class=\"pre-commentary\">This (brief) interview was conducted on February 27, 1996 at Mary Washington College, where she came to speak. Despite the brevity of the chat, there's a lot to be said about this interview, so I wrote up a <a href=\"https://laze.net/2026/05/22/that-time-i-interviewed-a.html\">separate post in 2026</a> outlining my recollections 30 years later.</div>\n<p><audio src=\"https://laze.net/uploads/2026/c-delores-tucker-1996-02-27.mp3\" controls=\"controls\" preload=\"metadata\" class=\"img-center\"></audio></p>\n<p><strong>LAZE</strong>: A lot of the hip-hop community has taken offense to what they consider to be generalizations that you’ve made, and by looking at the actions of only a few artists, do you feel you’re dwelling too much on the negative side rather than when the overall music is generally positive?</p>\n<p><strong>C. DELORES TUCKER</strong>: I’m not complaining about hip-hop. I’m talking about gangster porno rap, which is a rap that glorifies murder, rape, drugs, guns, and is very misogynistic toward women, calling women demeaning names. That is the kind of rap, gangster porno rap, that we’re against, not hip-hop and not rap in its purest form.</p>\n<p><strong>LAZE</strong>: Michael Franti of Spearhead had written an article for the Internet in which he says he is deeply offended that you and your campaign are targeting gangster rap music &ldquo;rather than dealing with more pressing issues to the African American race such as corruption in the government, homelessness situation, and health care.&rdquo;</p>\n<p><strong>TUCKER</strong>: That is our primary mission, is to bring to government women and men who understand that the social, economic, and educational issues are those which should be priority items on the agenda of America.</p>\n<p>We’ve just launched a Black Women’s Voter Crusade to get everyone registered to vote so that we can remove from office those persons who feel that it is not the government’s responsibility to provide education and economic opportunities to our people.</p>\n<p>That’s our primary mission.</p>\n<p>When the women in the entertainment industry came to us and asked us to help them, that’s when we got into this whole entertainment area and they give us our direction.</p>\n<p>But right now we’re going to be working on political empowerment for our people. We were able to increase the number of women in government. We were able to get women and men elected who would vote and create legislation that would provide scholarships and educational programs and telling this government it’s cheaper to train and job than it is to jail.</p>\n<p>That’s our primary mission.</p>\n<p>We have met with the Defense Department and told them it’s time for them to use these military bases to provide training centers and to provide academy accommodations for young people. They used to be used to train young men for war and death, now we’re saying let’s use them to train young women and young people for jobs and security in life.</p>\n<p><strong>LAZE</strong>: One of the artists that you had targeted heavily was Tupac, who while living a hard life has done songs such as “Dear Mama”, which was a dedication to his single mother for bringing him up, “Keep Your Head Up,” which was a dedication to black women in general, and “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” which was about a young teenage girl being a single mother.</p>\n<p>Do you feel that even though these were choices as singles and thereby getting more exposure and airplay, that the other songs that deal more harshly with reality overshadow these positive messages?</p>\n<p><strong>TUCKER</strong>: The majority of his songs is encouraging young people to rob stores, to blow MFers to the moon. It’s telling them to use drugs by saying that smoking pot is the American dream. It’s telling them to&ndash;his latest song is one that’s using the F word and telling me why girls are called bitches because of what they do.</p>\n<p>His messages mainly are encouraging young people to use drugs, to kill, to rape, to slam the women down on the floor, and if one F’s one, all of them F’s one. These are negative messages that are far greater than any single record that he does which has any merit.</p>\n<p><strong>LAZE</strong>: How do you feel about Reverend Calvin Butts' choice of fighting rap music with a steamrolling approach?</p>\n<p><strong>TUCKER</strong>: Well, he started it, but he’s kind of not doing too much now, and he was out there at the beginning, but he’s not there now, and we’ve been carrying on this fight for three years, and we’re going to continue it until it stops or we stop, until it dies or we die.</p>\n<p><strong>LAZE</strong>: Okay, and that brings me to my final question. What do you view as your ideal solution to the problem of gangster rap?</p>\n<p><strong>TUCKER</strong>: That these, the record industry, the recording industry, and those who are responsible for promoting this music around the world begin to undo the harm and begin to give contracts and opportunities for young people with positive messages.</p>\n<p>My office is full of albums and records of those young people who have positive messages to give, and we want the industry to begin to promote that and to stop doing offensive music which offends African American people and teaches their young people to do destructive and demeaning acts which will only place them as we see increasing numbers under court jurisdiction.</p>\n<p>It is a crime that we are promoting these kinds of messages which I say are actually the whole gangster rap industry, I have long said it’s drug-driven, race-driven, and greed-driven. The publicist for Snoop Doggy Dogg said he does this for money, and we have got to do like the other people have done, like the Jewish people made Michael Jackson take out offensive words that were offensive to the Jewish people.</p>\n<p>That’s what we must do, and I applaud them, and I’m asking now all of our people, every group of people, wherever offensive words are said in any context, we should demand that it be stopped because we don’t want negative images, stereotypical images being placed in the minds and hearts of our children. That makes them feel they cannot achieve, that they are hopeless when they are not. We need to let them hear messages that they are the descendants of kings and queens of Africa, and there are Mandelas inside of them. Here’s a man that stayed in prison 27 years and walked out and became president of South Africa.</p>\n<p>This is the kind of hope, the kind of messages we need to give our young people, and I hope that we will see that day come soon.</p>\n",
				"date_published": "1996-02-27T15:00:00-04:00",
				"url": "https://laze.net/1996/02/27/interview-c-delores-tucker.html",
				"tags": ["Interviews"],
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