Watch: Reggae – The Story of Jamaican Music (documentary)

Bunny Wailer, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh (pre-dreadlocks)

All three episodes from the 2002 BBC documentary Reggae: The Story Of Jamaican Music have been kindly uploaded to Youtube, and you can watch them here now. The series, comprised of three hour long episodes, details the beginnings of the genre, from the invention of ska at the end of British rule in Jamaica, right up to the turn of the century.

Watch: The Murder of Fred Hampton (documentary)

The Murder of Fred Hampton began as a film portrait of Hampton and his leadership of the Illinois Black Panther Party, but half way through filming, Hampton was killed by Chicago police. In an infamous moment in Chicago history and politics, over a dozen armed officers from Illinois State’s Attorney’s Office, in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department and FBI, burst into Hampton’s apartment on December 4, 1969 while its occupants were sleeping, killing Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark and brutalizing the remaining occupants including Hampton’s pregnant girlfriend. In ten minutes, 99 rounds were fired by the police during the raid, two of which were point blank shots to Hampton’s head. Filmmakers Mike Gray and Howard Alk arrived a few hours later to shoot film footage of the crime scene that was later used to contradict news reports and police testimony.

The pre-dawn raid was organized to serve a warrant for illegal weapons. Originally the officers claimed self-defense, stating the Panthers fired multiple shots at the officers first. The only shot fired by the Panthers was later determined by a 1970 Federal grand jury to be a reflexive reaction in Clark’s death convulsions after being shot by the raiding team while he was holding a shotgun. The same grand jury concluded that the original investigations by the Chicago Police internal investigation division and the Cook county coroners’ office  were complete shams, with each officer being asked questions which had been previously written up and given to them, along with a set of answers. The 243 page report would go on to say, “Physical evidence, standing alone and unexplained, is sufficient to establish probable cause to charge the officers with a willful violation of these survivors’ civil rights.”

Read more about Fred Hampton’s death here

Read the declassified FBI files on Hampton here

Music Archive: James Brown Live at the Boston Garden – April 5, 1968

This is the actual April 5, 1968 concert James Brown gave at the Boston Garden on the day following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jump ahead to to the 7:20 mark if you want to skip the introduction by MC Danny Ray.

According to the History Channel: 

On the morning after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., city officials in Boston, Massachusetts, were scrambling to prepare for an expected second straight night of violent unrest. Similar preparations were being made in cities across America, including in the nation’s capital, where armed units of the regular Army patrolled outside the White House and U.S. Capitol following President Johnson’s state-of-emergency declaration. But Boston would be nearly alone among America’s major cities in remaining quiet and calm that turbulent Friday night, thanks in large part to one of the least quiet and calm musical performers of all time. On the night of April 5, 1968, James Brown kept the peace in Boston by the sheer force of his music and his personal charisma.

Brown’s appearance that night at the Boston Garden had been scheduled for months, but it nearly didn’t happen. Following a long night of riots and fires in the predominantly black Roxbury and South End sections of the city, Boston’s young mayor, Kevin White, gave serious consideration to canceling an event that some feared would bring the same kind of violence into the city’s center. The racial component of those fears was very much on the surface of a city in which school integration and mandatory busing had played a major role in the recent mayoral election. Mayor White faced a politically impossible choice: anger black Bostonians by canceling Brown’s concert over transparently racial fears, or antagonize the law-and-order crowd by simply ignoring those fears. The idea that resolved the mayor’s dilemma came from a young, African American city councilman name Tom Atkins, who proposed going on with the concert, but finding a way to mount a free, live broadcast of the show in the hopes of keeping most Bostonians at home in front of their TV sets rather than on the streets.

Atkins and White convinced public television station WGBH to carry the concert on short notice, but convincing James Brown took some doing. Due to a non-compete agreement relating to an upcoming televised concert, Brown stood to lose roughly $60,000 if his Boston show were televised. Ever the savvy businessman, James Brown made his financial needs known to Mayor White, who made the very wise decision to meet them.

The broadcast of Brown’s concert had the exact effect it was intended to, as Boston saw less crime that night than would be expected on a perfectly normal Friday in April. There was a moment, however, when it appeared that the plan might backfire. As a handful of young, male fans—most, but not all of them black—began climbing on stage mid-concert, white Boston policemen began forcefully pushing them back. Sensing the volatility of the situation, Brown urged the cops to back away from the stage, then addressed the crowd. “Wait a minute, wait a minute now WAIT!” Brown said. “Step down, now, be a gentleman….Now I asked the police to step back, because I think I can get some respect from my own people.”

Brown successfully restored order while keeping the police away from the crowd, and continued the successful peacekeeping concert in honor of the slain Dr. King on this day in 1968.

Watch: “Party Monster – The Shockumentary”

Party Monster: The Shockumentary is a 1998 documentary film detailing the rise of the club kid phenomenon of the late 80′s and early 90′s in New York City, the life of club kid and party promoter Michael Alig and Alig’s eventual murder (with Robert “Freeze” Riggs) of fellow club kid and drug dealer Angel Melendez. Produced by World of Wonder and based in part on the James St. James book on the murder, Disco Bloodbath, the film combines interview footage from Alig, St. James, scene watchers like Michael Musto and a number of other former club kids with archive footage from various parties and dramatic re-enactments. The book and this film also served as the basis for the 2003 film, Party Monster, starring Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green and Chloë Sevingny.

Cub Kids on Donahue circa 1993.

Watch: “Karakuri” – A Mini Doc About Traditional Japanese Self-Operating Machines

According to the filmmaker Matthew Allard:

Japan has always been on the forefront of cutting edge robotics. Its roots can be traced back 200-300 years ago during the Edo period when skilled craftsmen created automata (self-operating machines). Using nothing more than pulleys and weights they were able to make the Karakuri (Japanese automata) perform amazing tasks.

Japan’s modern day robots can be traced back to the Karakuri. Today Hideki Higashino is one of the few remaining craftsmen who is determined to keep the history and tradition of Japanese Karakuri alive.

Learn more about Karakuri here