[MUSIC PLAYING]
All right.
Good afternoon, everybody.
Thank you for joining us today.
Today's program presented as part of the Wignall Museum's
Home Edition, a series of curated artist talks,
workshops, and discussions featuring
artists and cultural workers.
My name is Rebecca Trawick.
I'm the director and curator at the Wignall Museum.
The museum is a teaching museum and interdisciplinary art space
that introduces Chaffey College students, faculty, staff,
and community members to innovative contemporary art
objects and ideas.
By fostering critical thinking, visual literacy, discourse,
and empathy, the museum seeks to enhance
the intellectual and cultural life of our community.
We want to take a moment to recognize that we're situated
on the Rancho Cucamonga campus of Chaffey College, which
resides on the traditional and unceded lands of the Tongva
people.
We offer our respect to the elders, both past, present
and future.
Hello.
My name is Roman Stollenwerk.
I'm the assistant curator at the Wignall
Museum of Contemporary Art.
And hello, everyone.
My name is Andy Hadle.
I'm the proprietor at the museum,
so let me give you a quick breakdown of today's program.
In a moment we're going to have Adam Martinez.
He will present for about a half an hour,
and then the remaining time we'll
have available for questions.
Thank you.
So we're thrilled to have Professor Adam D.
Martinez with us today and his presentation It
was all a zine--
Exploring the Intersection Between Hip-Hop Culture
and Zine Culture.
Adam Martinez is a Chicano musician,
poet, writer, and professor of English at Chaffey College.
Hailing from San Bernardino, California,
Martinez began rapping at 11 years old.
A decade later he played his first professional rap show
as Faimkills in 2008 at the University
of California, Riverside.
Throughout his academic career and into his professional life,
Martinez has placed focus on synthesizing hip-hop
with academia to engage in themes of identity, trauma,
mental health, love, and more.
As an educator, Martinez is indebted
and forever grateful to hip-hop and rap music.
Rocking hundreds of shows in his decade-long career
prepared him for the stage that is the classroom.
As a writer and poet, Martinez is the co-founder
of the digital literary zine, Pour Vida.
His first poetry manuscript, Remyth: A Postmodernist Ritual,
was the 2019 Inlandia Institute Hillary Gravendyk
Regional Winner and will be published in 2021.
So congratulations, Adam, and thank you for joining us.
Take it away.
Thank you very much.
I got to do my thing, just to make sure.
Just give me some thumbs up if you can hear me just fine.
Cool, cool.
So before we get started, I just want
to thank the Wignall, Rebecca, Roman,
Andy, just for having me as part of this Home Edition series.
I'm very humbled to be in the group
that you've chosen for this semester
and to be providing some conversation
and ways for our students and our community
to interact with each other during this crazy time.
So thank you again for your work.
All right, so I'm going to go ahead and share my screen.
All right, and so we begin.
As you all know, this is called It was all a zine.
And you'll see in a second why I chose
to call it It was all a zine.
But I wanted to just talk to you for a little bit about two
cultures that I find myself existing in and caring greatly
for.
It was all a zine.
"It was all a dream," the first lines of this Biggie song.
Here's a picture of Word Up!
Magazine.
I don't know if this is the actual cover that he's
talking about, but it's from 1990
and we see Heavy D and Salt-N-Pepa on-screen.
We don't see the limousine.
Maybe that's in the centerfold poster.
Who knows?
But in 1990, Biggie was 17 years old.
So this song is like it's this nostalgic coming of age,
thinking about childhood aspirations to become a rapper.
And we begin to question maybe where does he
get those aspirations.
Well, maybe he looks to Word Up!
Magazine.
Obviously, Biggie is from New York, the birthplace
of hip-hop, so he's seen it happen
in real-time, on the streets, in his neighborhoods.
But nonetheless, he's still referencing this magazine.
And so I think it's important to note that,
that he found it important enough to mention in a song
that this youth mag from the '80s, '90s--
I think it actually went into the 2000s,
but its heyday was the '80s and the '90s.
This youth magazine centered on rappers, on R&B singers.
It had posters of them, so it was elevating these artists.
It sounds like duh now because we
live in a super-celebrity culture
and we follow our favorite artists and all of this.
But back in the '80s and '90s, we're
still elevating these performers to a different degree.
And Word Up!
Magazine was essentially documenting the movement--
"party" photography, so block parties and shows.
There was photography of hip-hop culture happening
that people could see if they weren't right there front
and center with it.
And so I think it's important to note that Word Up!
was a primary source of folks to get their information
and to document rap music before journalism as a whole let
hip-hop journalists into the fold and deemed hip-hop
something worthy enough to document and inform the rest
of the country about, and thereby the world.
So this was before magazines like The Source and Vibe, XXL.
Some of these have obviously folded at this point because
of the digital era.
But we still hear XXL does their Freshman 10 every year
and so that still sparks conversation.
But even though Word Up! was a nationwide publication,
I still think it's important to see it in terms of a zine
ethos, that it had a specific audience,
predominantly Black youth and then just fans of this
burgeoning culture, hip-hop.
And so I want to just step into zine culture a bit.
We're going to go back and forth between several different
cultures, and hopefully that shows
the intersection of them all.
And if you were able to come to, I
believe, the first of the series where Rebecca was giving
an introduction to zines, some of this stuff
may sound familiar to you.
But if zines are new to you, I want to share a bit.
So this is actually a cover of a zine
that I put together from my fall last year
English 77 Latinx Lit course.
So my final, I like to have the students create
their own zines.
So I know I see some of my students in my classes in here
today.
So if you're in my 77, you can expect
to do this here final in a couple weeks.
But we talked about all the themes in the course,
and they just combined all of their thoughts
in the individual zines that they made.
And from there I asked them to choose their most meaningful
page, and I scanned them.
And then I combined them all into this zine.
So this is actually in our Chaffey zine
database at this point.
I apologize for not adding any pictures from the inside,
but this is the cover.
I wanted to read a quick definition of zine culture
as told by a graphic designer and also a bit of the prompt
that I provide.
So Aaron White, this graphic designer,
says, "Zines are, at heart, independently created
and published magazines that tell niche stories for niche
audiences.
Historically, they've been venues for the counterculture
to freely share ideas.
They disseminate the voice of people under oppressive rule."
I find that definition by Mr. White just really spot on.
And so this is the intro paragraph from my English 77
zine final prompt.
"In short, a zine is a self-published, DIY,
do-it-yourself, personal magazine.
Zines can be about anything the creator wishes to publish.
Zines tend to be created as a means of rejecting
traditional publication rules.
They're often very personal and political,
emphasizing agency, asserting identity.
They usually mix media."
So some stuff can be hand-drawn.
Some stuff is digital, cutting and pasting,
all of those different forms of art
coalescing into this little, self-made booklet.
And then I have a quote within the prompt.
According to San-Antonio-based Xicana zine creator,
Daisy Salinas--
she makes a zine called Muchacha Fanzine--
she says, "Zines are a form of therapy, a therapeutic way
to share our struggles associated with racism, sexism,
abuse, culture, and colonialism."
And I just think that shows the importance and urgency
of zines themselves.
Sure, they can be fun, crafty--
hobbies-- but also there's urgency to it
and it lends voice.
It lends voice and it can grant people
power when they utilize it in such a way.
Pointing out way back, Common Sense by Thomas Paine
can be seen as a zine.
It was spoken in plain English.
It didn't have any lofty, complicated language
like you might see in your ballots right now.
But it was countercultural.
It was essentially calling for America to--
a democracy to happen, to step away from British monarchy.
And so I like to point that out here
because America was founded on counterculteralism.
Counterculteralism has been a part of our identity
as a nation.
And so we just see that counterculturalism
occurring in different ways and different voices
throughout the decades.
We have the "mime-o-graph," or mimeograph.
That was primarily the duplication process prior
to Xerox, and we all know Xerox.
We know photocopying.
That's the standard even now, from the mid-1900s to present.
And the reason I think it's important to point this out
is to think about the idea of access.
Well, who had access to these tools when they were just
beginning?
Now photocopying is pretty accessible,
but when was it not?
And so who had the power to duplicate an idea
and get it out to the world?
I think that's important to think about.
So stepping into the '60s and '70s as a starting
point here because there was so much anti-establishment stuff
going on.
We had all of these movements happening and a lot of dissent.
We have women's lib, civil rights, the Beats, the poets
and the writers, Black Arts Movement, Chicano Movement,
anti-war, gay and lesbian liberation, environmental.
And I think a lot of the ways that these movements were
getting their messages out was through alt newspapers
and underground comics.
And those are directly within the zine culture
because it's independent pressing and doing it yourself,
getting the word out by any means.
So here's a sample cover of Presence Zine, a poetry
zine by the Beats.
I wasn't able to access it, though I wish I could.
I found it in a database at another college.
But it would be interesting to see just
which poets were found in that table of contents.
And I wanted to draw our attention
to the Beats and the Black Arts Movement
because they're directly related,
because here we have Amiri Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones.
The Black Arts Movement begins 1965 and goes until about 1974.
He was part of the Beat Generation.
And the reason or I guess you could say one of the reasons
that he founded the Black Arts Movement is
in a response to the assassination of Malcolm X.
And he moves from Manhattan up to Harlem.
So we think about Harlem.
Maybe we think about the Harlem Renaissance.
So in a way this becomes like a second Harlem Renaissance,
but there's a caveat.
There's more anger and frustration
because of what's going on there when he moves.
These leaders are being assassinated.
So he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School,
also known as BARTS.
And I think it's important to note why and how they utilized
that space.
So it was very anticapitalist in that it
wasn't just to put on productions and theater.
It was also used for discussions, for lectures,
for grassroots activism.
The space was not just to make money
like many other theaters during that time would have been,
to put on a production and sell tickets and fill the seats.
Of course, they had to keep the lights on,
so it's not like everything was free.
But it was also a space for all of that political action
to occur or at least get started.
And BARTS actually only lasted one year,
but Black Arts Movement just kept going.
And with the Black Arts Movement,
there's this sort of leaning into the diaspora.
So it's not just about what does it
mean to be an African-American artist or just person,
but also reconnecting to African ancestry
and putting that at the forefront
and reconnecting through the art.
So I want to read a quote of what the overall goal of Black
Arts Movement was.
"The creation of poetry, novels, visual arts, and theater
to reflect pride in Black history and culture.
This new emphasis was an affirmation
of the autonomy of Black artists to create
Black art for Black people as a means
to awaken Black consciousness and achieve liberation."
And so we see that, obviously, that he founded a theater.
And so they had impact in theater,
but they also had a profound impact on poetry
in this nation.
And so, yes, it was going on in Harlem, but how
did they essentially promote the messages of these artists
to get spread throughout the country?
We find that at the same time in the Midwest,
there's a lot of independent presses popping up
that are Black-owned, started in people's apartments
with a couple hundred bucks and a coffee machine.
And they're printing zines or independent magazines
that feature the poetry of many of the Black Arts Movement
artists.
So here's a couple of covers here that you can see.
Negro Digest and Black World are actually the same zine--
there was a name change--
a Johnson publication.
This is actually the Johnson that created Ebony and Jet
magazines, which are more popular, more mainstream,
in the supermarket.
And that's why Black World eventually
folds, because they weren't as profitable as Ebony and Jet.
And this here, you would call this a chapbook of poetry.
Again, I don't know what's going on specifically
in the Midwest and Chicago and Michigan,
where we see Broadside Press, Third World Press, Lotus Press.
They're all putting out these digests
and these independent magazines featuring Black artists
and Black writers, Black photography, all of that,
going back to that niche audience.
And so we can see here--
I don't know if you can see this,
but on the Negro Digest one we have the annual poetry issue.
Black World, we have "Poems by" right on the covers.
So it's clear that poetry was important to these publications
and getting those messages out in that way.
It was a key component.
So moving, we'll jump back, like I said, between Black Arts
Movement and hip-hop and punk, but let's step into the '70s
now.
And we see punk coming into its own.
We see hip-hop in its nascent stages.
And they're both very anti-establishment.
They're both rebellious.
They're both responses to disco.
If we think of disco in terms of capitalism
and what it represents and who's going to the Studio 54,
people are dressing all super-duper fancy
and drinking their rich drinks.
And punk and hip-hop are just like, this is not us.
This is not representing us.
We need something that represents us.
And so this is a cover of Slash, an alt zine.
And this style, if you've been to zinefest
or if you have any ideas about zines, this type of just style
probably comes to mind.
So the '70s is when zines as we think
about them, the aesthetic, that's when it really happened.
This is very aggressive.
It's black and white.
It's violent-looking.
Here, you may or may not know, this
is Debbie Harry from Blondie.
And this quote here is from their very first issue.
They come out the gate swinging.
"Enough is enough, partner!
About time we squeezed the pus out
and sent the filthy rich old farts of rock 'n'
roll to retirement homes in Florida where they belong."
So they mean business.
Again, this comes to the idea of geography and space
and who inhabits what space.
When they say "the rich old farts of rock 'n' roll,"
I mean, they might be referring to folks like Elvis
at that point.
They want something new.
They want a voice that represents them.
If we're talking about zines being the voice for the people
or of the people, Elvis is not cutting it, I suppose,
for these youths.
And so keeping in the '70s, but jumping into hip-hop,
we get in Bronx, New York, 1973, DJ Kool Herc.
Here's a picture of him doing his thing.
And here's an actual invitation to the party
that kicked off hip-hop.
He didn't know that, but that's what happened.
So Kool Herc was born in Kingston, Jamaica.
And so he still has those traditions in him
from Kingston, so the ideas of toasting
that sound selectors would use when they're DJ-ing.
So what Kool Herc would do was, his father had a band
and they would play local community events and family
events.
And in between their sets, he would jump on his tables
and he would play music.
And he would toast.
He would just talk over the songs and stuff.
And he ends up inventing the Merry-Go-Round technique,
what we in hip-hop would refer to as the breakbeat.
He basically noticed that people would
wait for a certain part of the song to go and do their thing.
And breakdancing, that's where we get that term from,
the breakbeat.
And so he's looping.
He's duplicating these four bars, eight bars,
on his two turntables and doing the crossfader
and just making that go on and on and on,
like we duplicate zines and send that message out
over and over if we're able to.
But it's argued at this point how many elements there
are in hip-hop.
But from the beginning the four pillars are these--
MC-ing, graffiti, breakdancing, and DJ-ing.
And so hip-hop, if you think about those things
and what's required to do them, it's about movement.
Whether it's physical, it's mental, spiritual, verbal,
it's active.
And so I want to call back to the ways
that the Black Arts Movement and hip-hop are so closely knit.
So I made some crazy, conspiracy-theory-looking
arrows between all of these.
So this left side is Black Arts Movement and the right
is hip-hop.
So again, the movement, whether it's
rocking the crowd with your mouth or your body,
or if you're doing graffiti and you
have to climb on gates and walls to go spray paint,
it's all active.
It's all movement.
It's all urgent.
It's life.
It's vitality.
And so the Black Arts Movement poet, Nikki Giovanni,
called hip-hop the new Civil Rights Movement.
So now we're challenging oppression.
We're giving voice.
Baraka shares the same sentiment.
He says, "Where the music goes, that's where the people go.
The music reflects the people."
So we're talking about the messages
of the Black experience, exuberance and joy,
but also that pain and anger and frustration.
It's all of those things, but it's getting that message out.
So all of these, Black Arts Movement, punk, zine culture,
hip-hop, they're all rebellious.
They're meant to be rebellious.
And so the question becomes, yes, we
have this movement going on here locally.
How do we get this message out further?
Well, obviously, it's word-of-mouth.
It's the underground, but part of that is zines.
On a micro-level, starting a zine
and getting the word out that way
really helped these movements progress.
And so now I want to bring together
the idea of punk culture and hip-hop culture
and the idea of cultural exchange.
So here we have just some photos from back in the beginning.
We have Debbie Harry, Grandmaster Flash, Fab 5
Freddy, Tracy Wormworth, Chris Klein.
Chris Klein and Debbie Harry are both from Blondie.
And then Grandmaster Flash is a world-famous DJ.
Fab 5 Freddy is just a mover and shaker.
He knows everybody.
He's connecting people between new wave
and hip-hop and everything in between.
And then here I apologize for this blurry photo.
It's the best I could find, but we have Malcolm McLaren here
and The World's Famous Supreme Team, which
was a DJ crew from Jersey.
And I don't know if you can tell,
but you see them wearing these buffalo hats.
And you might think, oh, Pharrell wears those hats.
Well, Pharrell is sampling this '80s vibe right here.
And so Malcolm McLaren was the manager for the punk band Sex
Pistols and the manager for the new wave band Bow Wow Wow.
And what happens is he ends up going
to a block party in New York and he sees Zulu Nation performing.
And he's just struck.
He's like, what is this going on?
This is amazing.
This is awesome.
So he tries his hand at it as, I guess you can say, a musician.
And I mean, then we get the idea of appropriation
versus cultural exchange and where is the line of that.
And so some people would argue that Malcolm McLaren is
an appropriator and he has been from the jump.
Others would say, no, he helped push hip-hop further.
But I think it's important to note
this is a quote from Debbie Harry of Blondie.
And we're going to watch a little clip of "Rapture."
She raps on it.
But she says, "It's the first piece of music with rap in it
that went to number one.
I don't pretend to be a rapper.
It was an homage to the form and to the idea of it.
But a lot of rappers have told me over the years
that that was the first rap song that they had ever heard,
because rap really wasn't on the radio in the beginning.
It wasn't really looked at very highly by the industry.
Having 'Rapture' go to number one sort
of legitimized it, in a way.
The hip-hop kids and the punk kids always
felt related, because we were all deconstructing
culture in a way."
And so to me, I mean, it's even hard for me
to say because I'm a non-Black person of color within hip-hop.
Even though hip-hop was created by Blacks and Latinos,
it's not my job to say, oh, this person is appropriating.
This person's not.
But to me, when I read this and she's reflecting on it
all these decades later, it sounds
like she was not appropriating and she had the blessing
of the hip-hoppers.
And they welcomed her into their sphere
and she was appreciating it.
And I just think it's interesting
that she's very aware that, between people like Malcolm
McLaren or the Beastie Boys or "Rapture" by Blondie,
it took a white face to help push
hip-hop into a more mainstream place, a more mainstream space.
So it's interesting.
It's great.
And then it's like, oh, but why couldn't it
just happen on its own merit to begin with, kind of thing.
So still thinking about the '80s and thinking
about getting that message of hip-hop out there
and how it took a new wave band to do their interpretation
of it to make it bigger, I wanted
to turn our attention to this quote
that I found from the author Michael Eric Dyson.
A lot of times you might hear people say, well, yeah,
I listen to rap.
I don't listen to it for a message or anything.
It gets me, like it gets me lit.
It gets me.
I get to dance and all of this kind of stuff.
And that's part of it.
That's part of hip-hop, is parties and it's fun
and it's celebratory.
And I wholeheartedly agree with Dyson
when he says the connection between Black Arts
Movement and hip-hop couldn't be clearer.
To discredit hip-hop as mere entertainment
is to overlook "the spiritual crisis passed
on to the hip-hop generation by older generations.
It also cites the initiative and ingenuity of poor Black youth
who filled a leadership vacuum with artistic expression."
And so here we have the album cover
of Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions
to Hold Us Back.
There's Chuck D. They just put an album out,
but this is from the '80s, '90s.
So some of you may be like, who?
Who?
Public Enemy?
Very politically charged rap group, very important rap group
to hip-hop.
And the reason I put them here is because, to echo Dyson,
Chuck D called rap music the CNN for the Black community.
So there's this journalistic flavor to hip-hop,
and when we think of news and journalism--
well, at least me--
I think about zines.
You can get alternative news from alternative newspapers,
the stuff that major news is not talking about,
but is still important to a specific group of people.
And so I thought that was really important.
So again, we're talking about how do we get this message out
there?
Right now at this point in time, it
might seem like not a big deal because hip-hop is everywhere.
But up until, I mean, even in the early 2000s, it was still--
now it's everywhere.
But I think a key democratization of messaging
comes in the '80s when Kinko's decides
to open up chain stores.
So now, going back to that slide about the technology,
now everyone can go to a Kinko's and print up
their zine or their promotional materials
for a show or stuff like that.
Before, they worked mostly with colleges and stuff.
Then they said, well, small businesses can use this,
so let's start opening chains.
And so, speaking of small businesses,
the '80s is when punk labels--
independent punk labels-- started
popping up and thriving, so Rough Trade Records, 4AD,
stuff like that.
They were using zines as a tool.
They were using them to promote their bands,
to promote the shows that they were doing,
and to capture their fan base and have something tangible
that they can all relate to.
And so this leads us straight into the '90s with riot grrrl,
and hip-hop also has a zine moment.
I think it's completely in part because of riot grrrl.
Riot grrrl reintroduces zine culture to Generation X.
We see riot grrrl now at zinefests,
and so it has continued to thrive over the decades.
But just a little bit about riot grrrl,
if you've never heard of it, is an underground feminist punk
culture or movement that used zines and music as a way
to claim space for women.
Since it started more within the realm of punk,
it was specifically looking at punk shows
and making sure that women at punk shows were safe
and that they could be in the front
and rage just like every other guy.
But then it extends to the larger,
the patriarchal societies that women have
to function in and survive in.
So the roots here are, again, localized in the Pacific
Northwest.
And then we eventually see this turning into the perzines
open up conversations about grassroots
organizing and addressing violence
in all forms against all genders.
And so here's the cover for Bikini Kill Girl Power.
Kathleen Hanna is an icon of riot grrrl
and just a punk icon in general.
Right here we have Kathleen Hanna and this is Ad-Rock from
the Beastie Boys, hip-hop and--
I think you can call them-- punk icons.
But they look like just a couple chums.
Maybe they're on tour together.
But no.
They're actually married, so this
is a literal marriage of punk culture and hip-hop culture.
And so here is Grand Royal.
This is the Beastie Boys' limited six
issues of their zine.
So to me these don't look like zines.
These look a little more higher production value.
They look like magazines.
They look like they might be expensive.
But nonetheless, it shows that there
were hip-hoppers that were using zines
to engage with their fan base.
But I think there's a difference between an established
act using zines versus people within the hip-hop community
or people within the punk community
using zines for themselves to speak for themselves.
So here, here we have hip-hop zine moment in the '90s,
and these were primarily fanzines.
And some of them, you can see, have that same aesthetic
that we talked about earlier, that classic zine
aesthetic of black and white and just copy duplication.
Some of them look a little more like production value,
if you want to call it that.
But I think it's important to note
that these are the faces that some of the biggest
names in hip-hop media cut their teeth, like,
for example, Sacha Jenkins, who is the creative director
of Mass Appeal.
He started with, I believe, Graphic Scenes & X-Plicit
Language and Ego Trip.
And then all of these were very regional-based.
They were covering their local scenes.
They were giving space to up-and-coming artists,
like, for example, here.
Caught in the Middle was a Chicago-based zine.
And this is Common when he was still going by Common Sense.
This very well may be his first interview that he did,
and it was in a zine.
But you can see from all of these covers,
like these two especially or these three that
look very zine-ish, they're also throwing
in that hip-hop flavor.
We see graffiti.
And then we see just a lot of names
that weren't big names at the time when they happened,
so it did give that space for those voices.
We also think of Elliott Wilson, who is now
the creator of Rap Radar.
You may have seen him interview.
He did a really in-depth, one-on-one interview with Drake
in Drake's Calabasas mansion or whatever.
But it's like this guy who built this Rap Radar website started
in zine culture.
And so let's quickly look at some zines
from today, from this point in time.
Here we have Kanye's Yeezy fashion zine.
So the zine itself becomes a piece of art
and a piece of merch, but it's really
used to sell his clothing line.
And then we have Frank Ocean, who in 2016 released
the Boys Don't Cry zine, which is really stylized
and it elevates the zine to another level.
I think he did limited runs.
And it's a very long zine, like 300 pages,
and there's photography, personal essays.
I think this one's really important, especially
because Frank Ocean is such a modern-day icon
in hip-hop culture.
And he's also part of the LGBTQIA+ community, so I mean,
let's not sugarcoat anything.
There has been transphobia, homophobia, obviously misogyny
within rap music.
But this is a beautiful way that that is changing and shifting.
There's a shift happening within the culture.
And it's great that he's able to present a zine
to show that crossover.
Here we have a comic book cover, Hip Hop Family Tree.
This basically covers the beginnings of hip-hop hop.
And this started on a website, serialized on a website called
Boing Boing.
And Boing Boing started as a zine in 1988.
So it's just all of these little connections.
And lastly, this is not a zine.
This is 21 Savage and Metro Boomin's latest album,
Savage Mode 2.
But if you remember, if you're from hip-hop
and you've been dabbling in it for decades and such,
this is a callback because zine culture is graphic design when
it comes right down to it.
There's a huge graphic design component in it.
And so this was created by Pen & Pixel, which
was a graphic design team from the '90s and 2000s that
would work with independent hip-hop labels like No Limit
and Cash Money and other Bay Area artists.
And they would do these covers.
So it's aspirational.
It's capitalist.
Obviously, by looking at the artwork,
it's shiny and diamonds.
But also it's rejecting that traditional trajectory
because Cash Money and No Limit were indie
and they were distributing on their own.
And so it's all rooted in that DIY culture.
So wrapping things up here, here's the overlap.
I put a big question mark because I want you to think
about it, but just thinking about all of these different
facets of hip-hop culture and zine culture--
cutting and pasting, duplicating,
collage, self-publishing, voice, and then
thinking about hip-hop culture with the breakbeat
and the looping, sampling, putting together
mixtapes, all of the elements, knowledge
of self, graphic design and innovation and storytelling.
And if you don't know, now you know.
So again, these are just some keywords
that I thought were important for that overlap,
that intersection between hip-hop culture and zine
culture.
And I really want to encourage you,
all of you, any of you who find yourself
a part of hip-hop culture to try using zines to negotiate
and expand your identity.
It's a fun activity.
It's a reflective activity.
And I just think it's very useful in that way.
So my last thing here is I actually created a zine
and sent it to Rebecca, a zine version of this presentation.
So you don't have to contact me for the works cited.
[LAUGHTER]
But if you know anyone that needs to take English here
at Chaffey, send them my way.
We'll make zines together.
As far as any of my writers in here, photographers,
illustrators, as Rebecca mentioned,
I do run a digital zine called Pour Vida
and we're always looking for submissions.
So if you would like to start practicing-- we
use it as a space to practice what it means to publish and go
through that process.
So if that's something you're interested in, please reach out
to pourvidazine@gmail.com
And in this very last picture I just wanted
to share how I as a rapper have used zine culture.
I recently put an album out called Ikov earlier this year.
And as a merch piece, I created a lyrics
zine where I put all the lyrics and I put mini personal essays
and some photos that I took.
And I got some duplications of it.
So we'd love to open it up to questions.
I know Roman and Andy and I have a few,
but we also absolutely want to give the audience
an opportunity to ask any questions you have of Adam
while we have him here.
So you can either put it in the chat and we'll moderate,
or you can raise your hand and unmute
and ask yourself, whatever you're most comfortable with.
And if we have awkward silences, we'll
fill them in with our own questions.
Oh, wait.
"Adam, where can we find your zines and your CD?"
Oh.
Hmm.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm on Bandcamp.
I could put the link in the chat if you'd like,
but that's where I put all my merch, just because they're
very awesome about working with independent artists.
In fact, ever since COVID began, they've
been waiving their fees once a month
so that all the profit goes directly to the artist.
So if there's any artist in here, any musicians,
or have friends, make sure you let
them know that Bandcamp is rather
supportive at this time of artists going through what
we're going through, or what full-time artists are
going through.
Excellent.
So we had that.
So I have a question for you, Adam.
Yes?
So you're primarily an educator now, seemingly a very good one.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you for that presentation.
But I was wondering, do you still perform as Faimkills,
for instance?
I would like to say yes.
We'll see when we can start performing again with COVID.
But the last show that I did was actually
with Professor Emily Koenig, who is also in here supporting--
shouts out.
We put on the Hip Hop Studies Summit.
It feels like over a year ago, but it
was this past February 2020 and that
was the last time I performed in that capacity.
But I'm absolutely open to performing.
I love performing.
I feel like being an educator is performing.
We're all performing here right now
by giving this presentation.
So Crystal has a question from the chat.
She says, "What's the biggest challenge of being an artist?"
Ooh.
That's a big--
Big one.
--one.
That's a big one.
[LAUGHTER]
Crystal.
Thanks for coming, by the way.
Make sure to write about this for extra credit reflection.
Crystal's in one of my courses.
For me, I would say the biggest challenge has been keeping
my spirit and not comparing, not comparing myself to my peers.
And that can be very difficult with social media and the way
that social media has been such a great tool
for the independent artist.
But at the same time, it can be the devil
because you look at your peers and it
might look like they're accelerating
at an incredible pace, rather than what you're doing.
And if you let that get to you, that's
going to breed a lot of not good emotions.
And that's going to affect your art.
So just not comparing, for me, is the biggest challenge.
That's great advice for anybody in a creative industry now.
Absolutely.
So we have another from Chris.
"With zine culture, do you find yourself
liking more underground zines?
Do you find it more authentic, in a sense?"
That's a great question.
Yes.
Whenever I go to a zinefest, I'm not looking for anything
in particular.
I like the zine to find me.
I like walking around and just finding--
perzines I like a lot, personal zines,
because you get to learn about someone that's willing to bare
themselves to you, a stranger.
And there is authenticity to that.
And if we go back to the idea of Frank Ocean or Kanye
or the Beastie Boys ones, where they
are calling them zines, but they've got access
to great printers and all of that stuff,
it does lose a bit of its authenticity and urgency.
Here's a question from Lucy in the chat.
"Is there someone you would look forward
to collaborating with in the future
or rapping with or making zines, for instance?"
Ooh.
As far as zines go-- and I know that someone from the group was
in the series--
Curious Publishing is really interesting.
It would be cool to collaborate with them in the zine capacity.
And as far as collaborating musically,
I guess there's a couple of local artists
that I've been peers with for many years,
that we just never got around to getting a collaboration.
So I can't think of anyone specifically right now.
There's an artist named Phantom Thrett.
He runs a record shop called Serious Cartoons
in San Bernardino.
And we were on the same indie label
and we've gone on tour together, but we never got in the studio
together and recorded a song.
So he's someone that I would still like to work with.
There's a couple questions asking where folks can
find zines in their community.
Hmm.
Great question.
I think it's weird right now because all of the great,
little, pop-up zine stuff right now is on hold or it's only
online, but--
[INAUDIBLE]
Oh, that's a good point.
My fiance just reminded me.
A Shop Called Quest is a comic book store.
There's one in Claremont and there's one in Redlands.
They actually have a section of local zines.
Claremont Library.
And then when things get back--
well, I don't want to say back to normal-- when we're
able to get out there safely again,
there's all kinds of zinefests.
Chaffey, we have a great zinefest
and I look forward to that coming back.
Also, Redlands does one.
Sometimes you can find people at the Redlands Sunday art walks.
Any kind of art walks that local communities do,
there's typically zinesters at those.
Good.
Courtney has a question.
"As a performer and creator, can you
recall some of the lyrics of your very first works?"
Like you want me to do them, or do I just
remember them, Courtney, Courtney Mack in the Bay Area?
I feel like I do remember them.
I have my old rap notebook somewhere in storage
that have all of those awful, awful beginner's
type of raps in them.
But I don't remember any off the top of my head.
I don't even remember any of my raps right now.
I remember my prompts from my essays right about now.
Good question, though.
Thanks, everybody, for amazing questions.
So I want to be respectful of everyone's time,
and I know we're nearing the end, sadly.
But a couple quick, I hope, final questions.
So Adam, what are you watching, reading, listening to,
or looking at right now that you're really
excited about or inspired by, that you'd
like to share with us?
All right, so hear me out.
I know I look like I'm 17 or something, but I'm in my 30s
and so I'm out of the TikTok generation.
But I always hear my students talking about TikTok,
and my fiancee started talking about TikTok.
And so I finally gave in and I downloaded TikTok.
And I watch TikToks.
And actually I know there was a lot of stuff going
on with the idea of digital blackface and just people
taking up space where other voices should be.
But when you find those voices, it's really amazing.
I'm learning so much, so many stories
and so much about others' languages
and just Indigenous traditions and healing and also a lot of
cool "how to do" stuff.
My fiance and I just bought a home,
and so we go to TikTok first and then look up
hashtags of how to do such-and-such.
So this might be a weird answer, but TikTok
is what I've been looking at, reading, and watching.
All right.
You might get this old lady to take a look.
[LAUGHTER]
Really, I'm telling you.
And then final question.
I mean, I know you've mentioned actually a lot of artists.
But are there a few right now whose work
you'd like to amplify, "artist" meaning zinesters, DJs,
anyone in the hip-hop world, anywhere, really?
Yeah.
I want to shout out my brother, Noa James.
He was like my mentor.
He was the first dude that encouraged me to actually do
it, man, just do it.
Just do it.
And he's still making wonderful strides.
He's a community leader.
He participated in the Hip Hop Studies Summit in February
and we're hoping to have him back again.
And I just want to encourage people to check him out.
It's Noa James, N-O-A space James.
He's just about positivity and I've
seen his growth as a human.
And he really injects that into his music.
He's been putting out a lot of stuff this year.
I couldn't even tell you what to look at this year
because he's put out several projects.
But check him out.
He's on Bandcamp.
He's on Instagram, Spotify, all of that.
If you like anime, if you like Dragon Ball,
he has a cool song about being like Majin Buu.
So check out Noa James.
Excellent.
Thank you so much, Adam.
Thank you.
What an honor to spend time with you today.
And thanks for your amazing and informative presentation.
Very cool.
And I want to thank you all who spent some time with us today.
Thanks for joining.
We also ask that all of you complete a very quick survey,
so the link is on the screen here.
It takes a couple minutes, but it really
helps us to evaluate our programming
and provide you all with information
that you want to see.
But again, a huge thanks to you all, and thank you so much,
Adam.
What fun.
Thank you--
Take care, everybody.
Yes.
Have a good one, everybody.
[MUSIC PLAYING]