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We open the show with Bobbi Martin’s "For the Love of Him." All the music played is from the 1970 Billboard Top 100, extending the discussion from last week's show on the political power of music.

Kate Millett’s 1970 book, Sexual Politics, is a classic text of Second Wave Feminism, finding sexism and subjection inherent in the institutions of marriage and the nuclear family. The ideology used to support this is located in the foundational sexual myths of Patriarchy--"Pandora’s Box" and Eve’s disobedience of the Father in Genesis. And central to the 20th Century’s narrative of what makes the Lesser sex lesser is Freud’s ascription of the so-called inferiority to penis envy and a castration complex. While Millett’s arguments and examples seem unassailable, did they have any effect on the social and political mores of the last 50 years?

Kate Millett is a feminist activist, writer, visual artist, teacher, and human rights advocate and a 2013 Inductee into The National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls NY, the birthplace of the American Suffragette Movement. Perhaps the most amazing consequence of the publication of Sexual Politics is the notice it received in the popular press: Kate Millett even appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in a portrait by Alice Neel. Forty-six years later, the racist, misogynist Donald Trump was chosen Time’s "Person of the Year" and the 45th President of the United States.

GUEST

Maggie Doherty is a lecturer at Harvard University who is working on a book called The Equivalents, about a remarkable friend group of five women writers and artists who met at the Radcliffe Institute in the early 1960s. She's published essays in journals and magazines such as The New Republic, Dissent, and n+1, among others.

RELATED

"What Kate Did" by Maggie Doherty

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"Sexual Politics and the Feminist Work that Remains Undone" by Rebecca Mead (New Yorker)

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What Makes Us Vulnerable: The Essential Ellen Willis

MUSIC

"For the Love of Him" by Bobbi Martin

"Evil Ways" by Santana

"All Through the Night" The Paris Sisters

"Band of Gold" by Freda Payne

"(I Know) I'm Losing You" by Rare Earth

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

We’re joined by guitarist, producer, composer and author Dave Randall. His book, Sound System, newly out from Pluto Press, is an insider’s view of the music industry, shedding light on the secrets of celebrity, commodification, and culture, and the system of music serving them. And yet music can be a force for social change, sounds made by us, for us. Randall’s question: how can we make music serve the interest of the many, rather than the few?

Dave Randall has toured the world playing guitar with Faithless, Dido, and Sinead O’Connor to name just a few. He’s also penned his own political song: "Freedom for Palestine," released in 2011, and brought out pointedly political music with his own band Slovo, whose song “Flags” opens the show.

In the conversation that follows over the next 90 minutes Dave Randall asserts that “the political power of culture” is too important to leave to the academics and hence his book. The two questions that guide this important work--one from Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On?", and one from V. I. Lenin by way of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, "What Is to Be Done?"--blend Pop music and politics to investigate the Sound System.

SEGMENT ONE

To begin I asked Dave for a bit of detail about his youth to see if their might be some clue there to his political interests. After that we discuss his song "Freedom for Palestine."

SEGMENT TWO

In this segment Randall contradicts Theodor Adorno’s position on pop vs classical music and offers as an example the song that first caused him to think politically, “Nelson Mandela” by the Special A.K.A. We begin though with a further investigation of the terms we use to describe political music.

SEGMENT THREE

In this segment we’ll center on Disco as a kind of protest form, and the backlash against it--but before that John Lennon gets cheeky in the Queen’s presence.

SEGMENT FOUR

For this segment we’ll move from Disco to Rave which may have no explicit political program to Rock against Racism, formed in 1976. And we’ll close the music of the sovereign nation that is Fela Kuti--the Nigerian multi-instrumentalist and activist whose music addresses the post-colonial corruption of military governments in Africa. But first, is feeling good a political statement?

SEGMENT FIVE

For this segment we’ll take a look at music directed against oppressive governments, from the neoliberal incubator of Chile in 1973 to the Arab Spring of 2010 that unleashed counter-revolutionary violence that continues today.

SEGMENT SIX

Eric Clapton covered Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff" in 1974 reaching no. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100. In 2003 Clapton’s version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Perhaps that should read Hall of Shame. Clapton’s appropriation of and mainstream success with Marley’s song must be paired with his own right wing politics and his outspoken racism, shouting out at a concert in 1976 "Keep Britain White!"

Society needs the artist and it has a right to demand of him that he should be conscious of his social function. This right was never doubted in any rising, as opposed to decaying, society. It was the ambition of the artist full of the ideas and experiences of his time not only to represent reality but to shape it. - Ernst Fischer, quoted in Sound System

GUEST

Dave Randall is a musician and activist. He has toured the world playing guitar with Faithless, Dido, and Sinead O’Connor to name just a few.

RELATED

Sound System—music and the fight to change the world (The Socialist Worker)

Sound System – a fascinating book of raves, riots and revolution...

This is a special 90-minute show, live from The Atlas Bar, featuring the music and protest politics of Fela Kuti, the Nigerian multi-instrumentalist, musician, composer, pioneer of the Afrobeat music genre, and human rights activist.

Fela Kuti died of complications from AIDS in 1997 at the age of 58 but his music has seen a resurgence even inspiring the perhaps dubious honor of a Broadway Musical based on a recent biography.

This is another episode in our continuing series with Rasul Mowatt: The Sounds of Resistance.

First, let’s acknowledge that all of life offers contradictions and Fela Kuti is no exception. This show highlights his critique primarily of corruption in government at all levels, from his birthplace, Abeokuta, to the Nigerian state and its military rulers, to the IMF, or International Monetary Fund. But of necessity we will be silent on other aspects of his work that many listeners might find objectionable.

Now, I’ve probably already started out on the wrong foot by calling the show “Becoming African in America”--but it struck me that Fela Kuti says something to this effect as reported in the biography Fela: This Bitch of a Life (the book I referenced above). In 1969 Los Angeles Fela is living with Black Power activist, Sandra Smith, who recommends The Autobiography of Malcolm X to him. He says of Sandra, “She was the one who opened my eyes. I swear, man! She’s the one who spoke to me about Africa! For the first time I heard things I’d never heard before about Africa!”

And it’s at this time too that he feels he has to create music that is specifically African.

...Africans have have to start feeling that we belong to any part of the continent. We should not limit our area of belinging to that small enclave cut out for us at the Berlin Conference in 1984-5. Africa has to open her doors to ever Black man in the world. Until Africa sees it that way, she won’t have made it yet, man. White people, wherever they are, have a sense of belonging. (Fela: This Bitch of a Life)

GUEST

Rasul Mowatt is Associate Professor of American Studies and Associate Chair and Associate Professor in Recreation, Park and Tourism Studies with the School of Public Health at Indiana University.

MUSIC

"It's Highlife Time"

"Zombie"

"Coffin for Head of State"

“Colonial Mentality”

“Opposite People”

“Shuffering and Shmiling"

"Sorrow, Tears, Blood"

"ITT (International Thief Thief)”

"Water No Get Enemy"

"ODOO" (Overtake Don Overtake Overtake)

RELATED

Fela Kuti: Chronicle of A Life Foretold by Lindsay Barrett

Sandra Smith Talks About Afrobeat's L.A. Origins

Special thanks to David DeBruicker and the Atlas Ballroom for hosting Interchange.

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Site Engineers: Jim Lang & Dan Withered

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

Next time on Interchange: Becoming African in America

We’ll be live from The Atlas Bar for a 90-minute special featuring the music and protest politics of Fela Kuti, the Nigerian multi-instrumentalist, musician, composer, pioneer of the Afrobeat music genre, and human rights activist. Fela Kuti died 1997 at the age of 58 but his music has seen a resurgence even inspiring the (perhaps dubious) honor of a Broadway Musical inspired by a recent biography, Fela: This Bitch of a Life. We’ll hear songs like "Zombie," "Coffin for Head State," "Water No Get Enemy," and many more. This is another episode in our continuing series with Rasul Mowatt: The Sounds of Resistance.

"The white man gives out his medicine at the same time as his poison." Fela: This Bitch of a Life

Becoming African in America, the music and life of Fela Kuti, next time on Interchange, Live from the Atlas Bar, Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. on WFHB.

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We open with "Little Girl Blue," written by Rodgers and Hart in 1935, and here performed by Nina Simone. The song counsels the “little girl” to simply surrender because

All you can count on is the raindrops

That fall on little girl blue.

That Little Girl Blue comes tonight in the form Offred, the protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, turned film in 1990 and starring Natasha Richardson, and now turned into the longer form television serial produced by HULU.

For this Interchange I’ve taken from the past in order to comment on the repetitions of history.

First, I’ve borrowed from my first program on WFHB, The Custom House. In 2013 I interviewed Purnima Bose about Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction to coincide with a Books Unbound production of the novel. And of course, the discussion is timely and relevant in light of the seemingly eternal recurrence of theocratic impulses in the human, especially when those impulses are useful to men in power.

I’ve also borrowed the music off of the soundtrack to the 1990 film of The Handmaid’s Tale.

And here’s something borrowed from Melville who offers, in The Confidence Man and idea of why we read novels and go to plays. These must conform to reality--but offer a kind of hyperbole upon it. "[I]n books of fiction, readers look not only for more entertainment, but, at bottom, even for more reality, than real life itself can show. Thus, though they want novelty, they want nature, too; but nature unfettered, exhilarated, in effect transformed. In this way of thinking, the people in a fiction, like the people in a play, must dress as nobody exactly dresses, talk as nobody exactly talks, act as nobody exactly acts. It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie."

And finally, I’ve borrowed Margaret Atwood. She will appear courtesy of a 2006 interview with Bill Moyers on his "Faith and Reason" program.

Here is Atwood's response to those who might object to the assertion that the catastrophe of The Handmaid’s Tale cannot happen here. "Wanna bet?"

GUEST

Purnima Bose is Associate Professor in the English and the International Studies Department at Indiana University in Bloomington.

RELATED

Bill Moyers interview with Margaret Atwood (2006)

From Hannah Arendt to The Handmaid's Tale: Margaret Atwood and lit scholars talk dystopia in the age of Trump (CBC/Radio-Canada)

MUSIC

"Little Girl Blue" performed by Nina Simone

"Shall We Gather at the River?" performed by The Hee Haw Gospel Quartet

“Save a Soul in Every Town” performed by The Christians

"Whispering Hope" performed by Pat Boone

"Crazy" by Willie Nelson

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

Today’s show is about for-profit colleges and universities--or the Predatory Education Business. If you’re surprised to hear predatory and for-profit used interchangeably to describe this industry, you won’t be at the end of the show.

Two things must spring to mind when one says “for profit” education: University of Phoenix and Trump University. The first graduates only 5% of their enrolled student body according to the 2012 US Senate Report on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; the second recently settled a $25 million dollar lawsuit which claimed the “college” defrauded students.

And now this: As reported on April 27th in The Chronicle of Higher Education (a week after we recorded this conversation) Purdue University in Indiana will buy the for-profit Kaplan University.

Kaplan will become a “nonprofit, public-benefit corporation” that “will operate as a new Indiana public university, as authorized by the Indiana legislature, affiliated with Purdue University and focused on expanding access to education for nontraditional adult learners.”

This is an example of a trend A. J. Angulo warns against in his book--the University following the lead of the For-Profit model in finding and exploiting a “non-traditional” student market of online-learners while employing an assembly-line precariat labor force in the form of the “adjunct instructor.” But now with the imprimatur and brand of a respected Public University.

In the Purdue press release Former Obama Admin Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan is quoted:

I’ve always had great respect for Gov. Daniels, and I’m excited by this opportunity for a world-class university to expand its reach and help educate adult learners by acquiring a strong for-profit college. This is a first, and if successful, could help create a new model for what it means to be a land-grant institution.

The Land-Grant College and Online Education: What can Duncan mean? The land-grant institution was created during the Civil War "in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life." Here is a purported intention that online education will prepare the class of workers who have "lost" in the current economic reality to discover new "professions" in life. Available statistics into the actual success of those pursuing education via an online program is abysmal: 5% of University of Phoenix "edusumers" complete their degree programs (stats in HELP report of 2012); in 2010 the 2-year program of Bridgepoint Education had an 85% dropout rate.

GUEST

A. J. Angulo is Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and author of Diploma Mills How For-Profit Colleges Stiffed Students, Taxpayers, and the American Dream (Johns Hopkins University Press) and Empire and Education (Palgrave Macmillan).

RELATED

How the Financing of Colleges May Lead to Disaster! by Rana Foroohar (New York Review of Books)

Betsy DeVos’s Hiring of For-Profit College Official Raises Impartiality Issues by Patricia Cohen (New York Times)

Purdue U. Buys Mega For-Profit Kaplan U., Plans to Turn It Into a ‘Public University’ by Andy Thomason (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Direct action and reform politics meet in Apartheid South Africa in playwright Athol Fugard’s 1989 play My Children! My Africa! Within the ruling class, apartheid violence of white South Africa sits a play with a seeming taste for moderation and order in debate, and the recognition of the political uses of speech. But the debate is not just between the obvious: black and white, powerful and powerless, privileged and impoverished. It’s also between old and young, tradition and revolution, male and female, private and public, talk and action.

Our show is in two parts:

Part one centers on a local production of Fugard’s play directed by Indiana University professor Murray McGibbon set to open on April 27th. I’ll speak with McGibbon, who is South African, about his assertion that “The play is a plea for education over violence, and thoughtful consideration rather than hotheadedness.” We’re also joined by Tara Chiusano, who plays Isabelle, and Yusuf Agunbiade, who plays Thami.

For Part Two I’m joined by Michelle Moyd, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University and Associate Director of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society. Our discussion works to apply Fugard’s play to the US and in particular to discussions of the liberal humanism of university education and a concern about collaborating with the oppressor within institutional walls.

Our opening song is Johnny Dyani’s “Song for Biko” off of the 1979 album of the same name--all of the music in the show will be feature Dyani.

Johnny Dyani, double bassist and pianist, was born and grew up in Duncan Village, a township of the South African city of East London. In the early 1960s, he was a member of South Africa's first integrated jazz band, The Blue Notes. In 1964, the band fled South Africa to seek musical and political freedom. “Song for Biko” refers to Stephen Biko, the South African anti-apartheid activist, African nationalist and African socialist who, in 1977, was tortured, beaten, and murdered by state security services at Walmer Police Station in Port Elizabeth.

GUESTS

Director Murray McGibbon, currently a professor of acting and directing at Indiana University, also hails from South Africa, and has enjoyed a rich international career. For six years, he served as artistic director for the Playhouse Company in Durban, and directed 40 productions with the theatre during his tenure. Though a lifelong fan of Fugard, this will be the first time McGibbon tackles My Children! My Africa!.

Tara Chiusano (Isabelle) is a second year Acting M.F.A. student at IU.

Yusuf Agunbiade is a recent graduate of Indiana University.

Michelle Moyd is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University and Associate Director of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society. She is the author of Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa.

RELATED

Behind the Curtain: ‘My Children! My Africa!’ by Jennifer Pacenza

Bantu Education

Overcoming Apartheid Policies Yesterday and Today: An Interview with a Former Bantu Education Student and Present-Day Activist

MUSIC

Johnny Dyani

"Song For Biko"

"We Will Be Together"

"Blame It On the Boers"

"Jo'burg-New York"

"Heart With a Minor's Face"

NEXT TIME

"Pred Ed" - The Predatory Practices of Diploma Mills

Next time on Interchange: “The Stones of Reason”

Direct action and reform politics meet in Apartheid South Africa in playwright Athol Fugard’s 1989 My Children! My Africa! Within the ruling class apartheid violence of white South Africa sits a play with a taste for moderation and order in debate, and the recognition of the political uses of speech. But the debate is not just between the obvious: black and white, powerful and powerless, privileged and impoverished. It’s also between old and young, tradition and revolution, male and female, private and public, talk and action.

A local production directed by IU professor Murray McGibbon is set to open on April 27th, and I’ll speak two of the play's three actors, and McGibbon, who is South African. He has asserted that Fugard's "play is a plea for education over violence, and thoughtful consideration rather than hotheadedness.” We’ll also be joined by Michelle Moyd, assistant professor of history at Indiana University, to ask, who’s writing this curriculum of reason, deliberation, and moderation?

The Stones of Reason, next time on Interchange, Tuesdays at 5:30 p.m. on WFHB.

We open with "What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye because it is the title track from his 1971 album--one that for me expresses both the popular awareness of the catastrophic actions of Western Militarism and Capitalism--but as well seems a kind of funeral dirge on the capability of protest movements to make real difference as opposed to a cosmetic one.

Hearing Gaye sing about fish full of mercury in 1971 and having only a public awareness that humans ought not eat fish with mercury in it--and be sure to get proper labeling on Starkist cans--not that there should be no more poisoning of the planet, leaves one amazed at the power of complacency in life. This is the way it is. But there WERE protests, and Rachel Carson did write the book on our self-inflicted ecological disasters that continues to be read and taught in schools, and protest did seem to stop a war...

But, what happened to the American left after the Sixties? This the question LA Kauffman seeks to answer in her book, Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism. The book examines how movements from ACT UP to Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter have used disruptive tactics to catalyze change against long odds, creating a new kind of decentralized and multi-vocal radical politics in the process. But to what effect? When has direct action made an enormous, undeniable difference? And what subtle, but positive changes have been brought about, at least in part, by non-violent direct action?

GUEST

L.A. Kauffman has spent more than thirty years immersed in radical movements as a participant, strategist, journalist, and observer. She has been called a “virtuoso organizer” by journalist Scott Sherman for her role in saving community gardens and public libraries in New York City from development. Kauffman coordinated the grassroots mobilizing efforts for the huge protests against the Iraq war in 2003–04. Her writings on American radicalism and social movement history have been published in The Nation, n+1, The Baffler, and many other outlets.

MUSIC

“What’s Going On," Marvin Gaye

"Shut Um Down," Gil Scott-Heron

"Glad to be Gay," Tom Robinson Band

"Let’s Lynch the Landlord," The Dead Kennedys

"Sasol," Amandla - the African National Congress Cultural Group

RELATED

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Ending a war, inventing a movement: Mayday 1971 by L.A. Kauffman

PHOTO: Mobilus In Mobili

NEXT UP

"The Stones of Reason"

Direct action and reform politics meet in Apartheid South Africa in playwright Athol Fugard’s 1989 My Children! My Africa! Within the ruling class, apartheid violence of white South Africa sits a play with a taste for moderation and order in debate, and the recognition of the political uses of speech. But the debate is not just between the obvious: black and white, powerful and powerless, privileged and impoverished. It’s also between old and young, tradition and revolution, male and female, private and public, talk and action.

A local production directed by IU professor Murray McGibbon is set to open on April 27th, and I’ll speak with McGibbon, who is South African, about his assertion that “The play is a plea for education over violence, and thoughtful consideration rather than hotheadedness.” But...

What happened to the American left after the Sixties? This the question L.A. Kauffman seeks to answer in her book, Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism. The book examines how movements from ACT UP to Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter have used disruptive tactics to catalyze change against long odds, creating a new kind of decentralized and multi-vocal radical politics in the process. But to what effect? When has direct action made an enormous, undeniable difference? And what subtle, but positive changes have been brought about, at least in part, by non-violent direct action?

GUEST

L.A. Kauffman has spent more than thirty years immersed in radical movements, as a journalist, historian, organizer, and strategist. Her writings on grassroots activism and social movement history have been published in The Nation, The Progressive, Mother Jones, the Village Voice, Salon, n+1, The Baffler, and many other outlets. She served as executive editor for the radical theory journal Socialist Review and as an award-winning national political columnist for SF Weekly, focusing on dissent and activism.

Reinventing Radicalism, next time on Interchange, Tuesdays at 5:30 pm on WFHB