MF GALAXY

Wednesday 6pm Mountain Time FM88 Edmonton cjsr.com World Wide Untapped Alberta This Friday at the Arts Barns in Old Strathcona, check out Untapped Alberta, a showcase of remarkable local musical talent. Two of the featured performances will be by jazz-soul-R&B artist Krystle Dos Santos and the sensational hip hop group Politic Live. On Monday, Politic Live leader Arlo Maverick spoke with me by telephone about the politics of community-building for African-Canadian musicians. But he began by telling me about the gig itself. Ory Okolloh Ory Okolloh, Harvard-trained lawyer, Kenyan government transparency activist and blogger of the site called Mzalendo which provides “an unprecedented look at the doings of Kenya's parliament--information once unavailable to Kenyan citizens.” Her site tracks the performance of Kenya’s parliamentarians by using a vote tracker and offer articles and opinion pieces. She also blogs on Kenyan Pundit.com . Tonight, from a speech she delivered in June ...

FM88.5 Edmonton cjsr.com 6 PM Mountain Time Aside from the declaration that "the Blackman is God," no Five Percenter belief stirs outsider interest and anger as much as the use of the word “ Devil ,” especially in a racial context. Five Percenter beliefs about the origin of the current range of humanity state that 6,000 years ago, in a civilisation of Black scientists, a corrupt eugenicist named Yacub began a selective breeding programme to engineer a race of colourless people who would ultimately enslave the Earth in a matrix of lies. Most anti-racists and multiculturalists would understandably reject any such perspective in this or other theologies, including beliefs found in certain historical subsets of Judaism and Christianity that Africans are the cursed descendents of either Noah’s son Ham or Cain , the fratricidal brother of Abel , or the sexist concept that women are the cause of humanity’s downfall, found in the ancient Greek myth of Pandora, and...

FM 88.5 Edmonton cjsr.com 6 pm Mountain Time Many new-world religions, including Rastafarianism, Jehovah’s Witnessing and Christian Zionism, are millennarian, or focused on the doom of the corrupt world and the birth of a new and just one.   Those new-world faiths developed in the United States often include scientific and technological dimensions to their practices and beliefs, which to outsiders seem science fictional. For instance, Scientology describes an ancient galactic battle whose result is the imprisonment on Earth of thetans, entities which today are the source of all mental illness. Mormonism discusses an ancient universe filled with gods , and the promise that human beings can become gods if they perfect themselves; indeed, television producer Glen Larson used his faith as the foundation for his 1970s series Battlestar Galactica.   The Mormon community originally excluded Africans—alleged to be descendants of the cursed Ham and the fratricidal Cain—fr...

(ignore the "Barack Obama" title on the above Youtube video) FM88.5 Edmonton cjsr.com 6 pm Mountain Time If you’ve ever listened to hip hop, then you’ve heard the influence of this remarkable and mysterious community. They’re a decentralised, non-hierarchical society whose members number in the tens of thousands. Ch ances are you’re familiar with them even if you didn’t know it. Their most famous citizens include the Wu Tang Clan and members such as Method Man, the RZA and Raekwon, the singer Erykah Badu, the groups Brand Nubian and Poor Righteous Teachers, rappers Rakim, CL Smooth and Busta Rhymes, to name just a few. But their influence goes far beyond their population, because through hip hop, their teachings and vocabulary have become part of North American culture. Terms and phrases such as G, the bomb, break it down, manifest, represent, do the math, and peace were introduced, reinvigorated or redefined by them. Through their influence, the ph...