I Mix What I Like!: A Mixtape Manifesto - Softcover

Ball, Jared A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1849350574 ISBN 13: 9781849350570

Publisher: AK Press, 2011

Synopsis

"Jared Ball is determined to rescue hip hop and left activism from increasingly subversive corporate control. This book is a manifesto that needs to be read, argued about, and yelled from the rooftops. Let the bricks fly!"—Todd Steven Burroughs, co-author of Civil Rights Chronicle

"The Funkiest Journalist breaks it all down for all servants of Soul/Funk music and Art in the 21st Century. His Mixtape Manifesto explains what we are up against battling corporate empires that control the coveted consumer-merchant access points, and offers us an option to distribute, connect, and popularize our culture."—Head Roc, political hip-hop artist

"The revolutionary power of this book lies in its capacity to interrogate staid constructs of thought and re-pose vital questions pertaining to 'emancipatory journalism.' For the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all."—Frank B. Wilderson, III, author of Incognegro

In a moment of increasing corporate control in the music industry, Jared A. Ball analyzes the colonization and control of popular music and posits the homemade hip-hop mixtape as an emancipatory tool for community resistance. Equally at home in a post-colonial studies class and on the shelves of an indie record store, I Mix What I Like! is a revolutionary investigation of the cultural dimension of anti-racist organizing in African America.

Jared A. Ball, PhD, (a.k.a. The Funkiest Journalist) is the host of FreeMix Radio, and assistant professor of communication studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland.

About this title

From the Back Cover

In the proud tradition of Fanon, Cabral, Malcolm X, and Steve Biko, Jared Ball speaks in the voice of the decolonial Other, offering a much-needed mind transplant to anyone preferring to ignore the liberatory potential inhering in the hip-hop phenomenon of mixtape.—Ward Churchill / Author of A Little Matter of Genocide

In a moment of increasing corporate control in the music industry, where three major labels call the shots on which artists are heard and seen, Jared Ball analyzes the colonization and control of popular music and posits the homemade hip-hop mixtape as an emancipatory tool for community resistance. I Mix What I Like! is a revolutionary investigation of the cultural dimension of anti-racist organizing in the Black community.

Blending together elements from internal colonialism theory, cultural studies, political science, and his own experience on the mic, Jared positions the so-called “hip-hop nation” as an extension of the internal colony that is modern African America, and suggests that the low-tech hip-hop mixtape may be one of the best weapons we have against Empire.

Jared A. Ball, PhD, (a.k.a. The Funkinest Journalist) is the host of FreeMix Radio, and associate professor of communication studies at Morgan State University.

Praise for I Mix What I Like:

"With this book, Jared Ball correctly and cogently posits hip-hop in its rightful place―as the most important literary form to emerge from the 20th century."—Boots Riley / The Coup

"The value of a committed, revolutionary PhD with an ear for the truth and skills on the mic and turntable? Priceless."—Glen Ford / Executive Editor of BlackAgendaReport.com

"Jared Ball’s carefully constructed narrative draws upon an extraordinary range of analytical and evidentiary sources to provide a concise explanation of the mixtape movement. Simultaneously, he uses this history to illuminate how the media promotes ideological interests, and how those interests serve not simply the corporate bottom line, but the much larger political objective of assigning each of us our “place” in society. I Mix What I Like! serves as both an example of emancipatory journalism and a model for emancipated thinking, without which we will be consigned to struggling for a kinder, gentler subjugation rather than true human liberation."—Natsu Taylor Saito / Author of Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law

"Dr. Ball has created a twenty-first century Black radical manifesto that samples and remixes the best of the radical and anti-imperialist tradition. I Mix What I Like! recognizes the colonized nature of contemporary Hip Hop and the colonized context of the people from which Hip Hop emerged. In the tradition of Noam Chomsky and Public Enemy, Jared Ball brings the noise to the status quo and lays out his vision of Mixtape emancipatory journalism as the liberatory mass medium for today and the future. I strongly recommend this work for all those interested in reflecting upon the theory and practice of struggling for social justice in today’s America."—Dedrick Muhammad / NAACP / Author of Understanding Racial Inequality in the Obama Era

"One way to prevent the appropriation of a revolutionary culture―one that expresses the desires and visions of the oppressed to fight for liberation and self-determination―is to smuggle the word as if it is a liberatory tool, replicating the clandestine, anti-colonial and resistant drum of the maroon. Jared Ball’s concept of “mixtape radio” follows that tradition with an irreverence that we so sorely need."—Claude Marks / Freedom Archives

About the Author

Jared A. Ball: Jared A. Ball is a founding member of several grassroots Washington, DC-based organizations. He is frequently heard on radio stations in the Washington D.C. area and is the founder and producer of FreeMix Radio: The Original Mixtape Radio Show, an emancipatory journalistic political mixtape. Ball is assistant professor of communication studies at Morgan State University where his research interests include the development of alternative/underground journalism and cultural expression as mechanisms of social movements and political organization

James Turner: James Turner is the founder of the Africana Studies and Research Center--founded 1969--and a professor of African and African American Politics and Social Policy at Cornell University. He also organized Cornell's Council on African Studies, forming a basis for the university's interdisciplinary African Studies. Turner holds a B.S. from Central Michigan University, an M.A. from Northwestern University, a certificate in African Studies from Northwestern's African Studies Center, and a Ph.D. from the Union Graduate School in Cincinnati.

Edition details

• Publisher: AK Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1849350574
• ISBN 13: 9781849350570
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240