Episode 14 The Culture Show

This programme contains some strong language. Hello and welcome to The

Culture Show from Mac Birmingham! Tonight we've got the female future

of rap - the maverick male artist who's making critical waves - and

the must-see movie that's setting the festival circuit on fire Coming

up: The art of Rashid Johnson. The rap of Angel Haze. The movie you

need to be name-checking - Beasts of the Southern Wild. And what's a

Blackta? First - it's swept up prizes at Cannes and Sundance, and

now Beasts of the Southern Wild is being tipped for an Oscar too. Not

bad for a movie made by a first time director with a miniature

budget and an untrained, unknown cast. Mark Kermode took the film

producer Mark Boothe to see it. day the storm is going to blow. The

waters will rise up so high, there ain't going to be no bathtub, just

a whole bunch of water. Beasts of the Southern Wild blends fantasy

and realism to create a powerful metaphor for a post-Katrina South.

The reserves are tested by a near biblical storm. Still searching for

the mother who swam away long ago, she must face her father's failing

health to survive the natural disaster that has engulfed her home.

While at the 56th BFI London Film Festival, the director told us

about working with the child star. It is about what it is like to go

through these catastrophes, but go through it at the age of six where

it is not a political issue, it is not an environmental issue, it is

an emotional issue where you see your home disappear, where you see

your parent disappear. How it feels to go through that and how you

conquer that with a spirit. So just having someone that young, there is

a purity to the way that a six- year-old thinks and the way that

they act. It is about, it is purely about love and emotion. She had

that. I'm your daddy. Argh! Who the man? I'm the man! Mark Boothe works

with emerging artists concerned with the moving image. In 2004, he

co-produced Bullet Boy which netted the lead actor an independent film

award for most promising newcomer. I was interested to find out what

he thought of Beasts of the Southern Wild. This is a film that

has wowed audiences. Does it deserve the praise? I think it does.

When you understand how this film was made, through an amazing

process and journey of working in the heart of the community,

crafting an amazing story. It's a Festival film and deserves the

praise. But also I think in a wider sense of film-making, certainly new

talent. There is an argument for saying it is partly authored by the

cast. In the case of the father, he was not an actor, he was cast from

the local bakery. He has said himself, "I lived through Katrina

and that is what I bring to the screen." It is his story. Yes. I

think that that really interesting convergence of storytelling along

with a more dramatic approach. You tap into something very different.

The fact that they took six months and went through five, something

like 4,000 kids to find the lead character, it is amazing. The idea

that that search took place in the community itself. As you say, to

find Dwight Henry, that idea about someone of the community being able

to tell a story, that relates directly to their own experience.

In a way, adding another layer of authenticity that we rarely get to

see. The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just

right. I think that blend of the post-Katrina aftermath and what

goes with any devastation - floods, tsunamis, it is all there. We have

seen first-hand what happens when a community that is so displaced from

modernity are equally affected by the forces of nature. And the

problems created by our own abuse I see everything that made me.

Flying around in invisible pieces. I see I'm a little piece of a big,

big universe. You have a movie that comes out that is totally left-

field and compounds everything. It provides not only a fresh benchmark,

but also inspiration to many other film-makers who don't want to

follow the traditional commercial Hollywood path. Thank you very much.

Cheers. Beasts of the Southern Wild is

released on the 19th of October. Now the rap of Angel Haze has been

setting the web ablaze - but she says she wants to be a rock star,

not a rap star, on the grounds that the former have more fun. Whichever

she ends up becoming, she's destined to be huge. Miranda Sawyer

went to meet her: Angel Haze can do nasty, romantic and she can do

philosophical. With her rapid-fire lyrics, she already owns New York,

now she has come over here to stake her claim on the UK. Welcome to The

Culture Show. Hip-hop is a confident environment. Do you feel

like you are the best? Yeah. Totally. I'm going to keep being

the best until someone decides they want to be better than me. It is

not going to happen any time soon. Hip-hop can suffer from really

strong stereotypes, particularly with women. Yeah. Do you try and

break out of that? Do you play with those games? No. For me, it is just

a matter of being myself. Some people can refuse to play the game

and change it by doing so. With me, it is always like just be you.

do you find being compared with people like Nicki Minaj? I think

that's hip-hop culture for you. Everybody gets compared to someone.

When Nicki Minaj came out, she was compared to Foxy Brown. It is a

rite of passage. # I don't need no friends... #

Explain about your background. grew up in Michigan. I was in a

cult. It is so weird to say "cult" because every time I say it I get

this look. I couldn't do the simplest things ever. Everything I

did had to revolve around church and God and hell... What was it

called? Love, Peace and The Holy Ghost. Where was your dad? He died

before I was born. That is a tough mixed-up childhood? Yeah. Was there

any music you heard within that cult? Was it just hymns? Yeah.

LAUGHTER You can sing one if you want! I hate them. No contemporary

music? No. It was considered secular. If you listened to it, you

were going to hell. Did I grew up in a house I couldn't even pick up

a play-phone, they would say it was the devil talking to you. You were

cursed. You couldn't do a lot of stuff. What was it like when you

first heard music? What was the first track you heard? The first

hip-hop song was Meet Me In The Trap. I started listening to Eminem.

Like, I like to think that I shaped myself after those type of artists

where you go through something with them on song and it means something.

How old were you when you discovered these artists? 16. Four

years ago! When did you start rapping? A year after that, 17.

That was a quick learning curve? Yes. That was one year? I'm a type

of person, when I see something, I have to learn about it. I was

learning what word play was and learning what all of it meant. And

delving into the root of all of it. In America, there's like a whole

entire cycle to, like, colour, race, gender, all that stuff. If you

understand the laws of it all, you understand how it works, you

understand how to bypass it. But in America, it is so difficult to be

black. # I'm running through the jungle...

Can I ask you a question? After being through the experience you

have been with your mum, do you believe in God now? Sometimes.

Sometimes. I think it is objective with me. Like, without a belief in

God, I don't think I would be here this far. So sometimes I do and

sometimes I'm like, yeah, no, it is too much, it is too time-consuming

for me. I could be living and stuff. That's good. Sometimes I do,

sometimes I don't. # You can hit it till your nose

Angel Haze's debut LP Reservation is available now. Next tonight,

Rashid Johnson is one of the most talked-about young artists on the

New York scene. A nominee for this year's Hugo Boss Prize, if he wins

he'll get a serious trophy in the form of a solo show at the city's

Guggenheim Museum. But you can see his work here in the UK right now,

at the South London Gallery - where It's probably fair to say that not

many people in this country are familiar with the name Rashid

Johnson. At least, not yet. But back in America he's been making

waves for a while now. He's only in his mid-30s but earlier this year

he had a mid-career retrospective in his home town of Chicago. His

work is often seen through the prism of race because it alludes to

African traditions and important black cultural figures, and he uses

all sorts of strange materials like black soap and shea butter. And

I've heard that he's putting the finishing touches to his new show

here at the South London Gallery using an old broom handle, and a

bucket of molten black wax. Johnson began his career as a

photographer, with a series of portraits of homeless black men.

And his work is bathed in the colour black: from scorched wood to

the black wax and soap glooped over his wall pieces.

His work has been described as "post black" - redefining what it

means to be black in a country that has been through the civil rights

movement and now has an established black middle class, and even a

black president. I wonder what Maybe you could explain a little

bit about where we are - what is this space that you've created? Why

are there these couches with zebra- striped patterns? It's interesting.

When I first started thinking about making this show, I had the

opportunity to visit the Freud Museum. In North London? Yeah. And

when I was there, I was looking at these daybeds. And I started

thinking about, like a group therapy scenario. Something that's

kind of followed my work a few times. This idea of healing. I

started thinking about if there was a potential disaster, there's a

shelter - people are often brought into, like a gymnasium, and there

are cots lined up. And those cots are a place for them to rest while

they deal with the destruction that's happened around them. So for

this show I was kind of thinking about entering that concept, but

instead of there being cots in a row you would have these daybeds in

a row, so the space could simultaneously be a place for

treatment, and healing. OK. Like psychoanalytic treatment. Something

else that's very noticeable immediately when you come in, is

that there are lots and lots of motifs that are extremely

individual - things that you've used before in your work. I mean,

that shelving-stack-cum-painting is quite familiar from some of your

earlier work. And over there we've got this, what do you call them?

Rifle sights? Gun sights? That you've used before. Yeah, or

crosshairs. Are you trying to build up your own - mythology is not

quite the right word, but your own set of visual codes? Well, I think

there's a vocabulary, and it's one that I've become comfortable with

and I understand. So when I think about this gun sight, whether it's

being pointed at you, or you are the person pointing it. And so

maybe that description of violence, or scarring. The shea butter which

is very much a healing material. The black soap which is very much a

cleansing material, as well as a healing material. Why have you used

soap and not paint? Well, I always wanted to make an object that you

could potentially clean your body with. At the end of the day, you

could pull down the Rashid Johnson painting off the wall, and actually

clean yourself. Even without such high-falutin' conceptual stuff, I

find the work itself really appealing in purely formal terms of

"a thing that looks nice". These great gobbets of wax and soap form

a dense surface reminiscent of abstract expressionism, and in the

gestures and the pouring again there are references to mid-20th

century American painters like Frank Stella and Jackson Pollock.

In a work like this, this is actually flooring. Oh yeah! Parquet

flooring, you can see there. Right, so it's wood flooring. And then

it's burned with a torch to almost make it into my own charcoal. And

then the drawing is made on that built charcoal. But it's really the

elevation of the floor to the wall, right? Like, any inanimate object

would ideally want to be an artwork. You know? That would be - that's

the most magical position to occupy. Johnson grew up in a middle-class

black family who enthusiastically embraced the Afrocentrism movement

of the 1970s. His work is peppered with personal references: books

from his mother's shelves, significant albums, and exotic

touches like the zebra skins. So a lot of these things, when

people come to your work, what they need to understand is that lots of

these have personal, autobiographical meaning for you.

They do but they're also employable. I mean a work like this, you could

listen to the Blakey album while you're putting on shea butter and

reading the Ellis Cose book. Maybe you would understand how I came to

make it, because that's how I came to make it, was by listening to the

album, reading the book and putting on shea butter which I consistently

do throughout the day, which is why my skin is so soft. LAUGHTER

Rashid Johnson: Shelter is at the South London Gallery until 25th

November. Now back to that question - what's a Blackta? It's a black

actor and the name of Nathan Martello-White's new satire on the

highs and lows of trying to get your name up in lights - or a job,

at least. Lindsay Johns has been to the Young Vic Theatre to look in on

rehearsals. We all know it's tough making it as

an actor in any country, wherever you're from. But in Britain today,

is it even tougher as a young, black actor? It's this question,

and many others, that one actor- turned-playwright raises in his

debut play, Blackta. The play's about the frustrations

and obstacles faced by a group of jobbing actors, and it's set in a

never-ending audition room, where the characters are competing with

each other for a way out and their big break. It's a world where

fulfilling black stereotypes seems to be more important than any

measure of talent. Could you lean off, or lean yourself on bigger

things? But you're naturally big. What's that supposed to mean?

you know, your face is just naturally wide. And your stature,

bulky. Nah, bro. You're the buck! Got them slave genes, bruv. Them

"come build be a pyramid" genes! You're a joker. With fewer decent

parts for black actors, competition is fierce, but even among fellow

cast members? Now guys, be honest, we all know it's a such a small

world in the black British actor pool; you all know each other,

you're all going, often, for the same parts. Is there a genuine

sense of camaraderie, or is it fake? You bump into the same faces,

and at first it might be sort of like competition, but you kinda

help each other out, or if you don't go up for something or you

haven't get something. But on the other hand, I think that sometimes

the claustrophobia of it. Yeah. kind of, you know, it can create

tension. You want your friends to succeed, but you also want to

succeed, and it's hard sometimes watching people you've trained with.

Exactly. People you've worked with doing really well, and you're not

doing as well. You kind of understand that we're not in

control of who gets it, so let's be cool with each other. Are there

times when you walk into that audition room, or the casting room,

and you read the character and you're up for another, yet another,

drug dealer or "you get me blud?" thug, and your heart just sinks and

you go "No, can't do this again"? Sometimes you get a bit frustrated

because if it's a A black agent or black lawyer or something like that,

there's always this breakdown that he's kinda made it out of this

world of destitution. Yeah, yeah. And chaos. And his dad was on

crack! Blah, blah, blah, and it's just sort of like, why can't he

just be a guy who went to a good school. Middle class, university.

And he became an agent, like a black James Bond? Brown, would you

like to come through? Oh, but, Black's in at 10. They'd like to

see you first. In Blackta, the characters don't have names -

they're just skin tones. Provocative? Or is there a point to

prove? For me it's quite derogatory to define people by colour. You

know, I think you define people by their individuality, and the merit

on who they are as people. There are, kind of, issues with how fair

you are and how dark you are in relation to how attractive you are.

And also the guys that I was hanging out with, who I loosely

based the play off, erm, were all different spectrums of that - there

was a mixed-race guy, there was a brown-skinned guy, and they all had

their own takes on why, or why not, they were getting roles or not

getting roles. So, I wanted to explore that, yeah. It's different

for you anyway. How? You're yellow. What the fuck's that got to do with

it? They looks at you differently. Not even in a better way,

necessarily, but word on the grape is being yellow's an advantage -

within reason. That's actually bullshit. And what about the

experiences of the actors in the real world? The guys that tend to

get the villainous roles, or whatever, are darker skinned. When

I went to drama school, I played a lot of villains - which I loved, it

was great, because they've got so much depth to them, but when I came

out - nah. One crazy one - it was one of my first auditions, erm, and

it was in a hotel, I was at the bottom of the stairs - I got there,

I thought my time was 12 o'clock - I got there and there's just all

these black actors, just in a line. And every actor was just coming

past me on the way out saying "Don't go in there, man, it's

degrading, don't go in there". And I was like, "You know what? I need

this job!" So, I get to the top, I get into the room, the guy is there

and he's like "Hi! How are you doing? Nice - have you read the

signs?". I said "Yeah, I read the signs", and he's like, "OK, can you

rap?". So I was like, "It's nothing to do with the piece, but you want

me to rap? No!" You are a prime black buck. You epitomise black in

essence. We looked at all the African American stars that we

aspired to be like, or we admire, or are doing really well. They all

kind of are big... They are ripped. They look good. And I'm looking at

me and I'm, like, boy, you have some work to do! You have a bit of

the pigeon-chest? Let's do some push-ups right now! In 2002, an

unknown British actor from East London, frustrated with

opportunities at home, moved to America. Idris Elba, burst onto the

scene playing the brooding Baltimore gangster, Stringer Bell

in the award-winning TV series, The Wire. I think we can work this out.

They said that? It is the perfect time for them, man. Your name is

ringing out. Why not quit while we are ahead? And only last year, the

Birmingham-born actor, David Harewood, became a household name

playing the uncompromising CIA boss in hit-drama, Homeland. We are

about projecting military power now. His success as a pivotal character

in Homeland prompted him to say that all black British actors had

to go to America if they were serious about making it big.

this show, in Blackta, two or three of the actors are thinking about

going over. I have been ten years into this acting. I'm considering

going to America. What do you do, all this black British talent, just

decamping across the pond? You do your thing. I'm writing material

now. I'm trying to create my own thing. I want the good actors

around. There is a wealth of talent. I want to use it. I want to create

material that they can express themselves in fully. Do you reckon

in this country right now, we are ready for young black British

talent to be black and British and not American? We are ready!

LAUGHTER I have been ready, like. Blackta is at the Young Vic from

26th October until 17th November. Next week on The Culture Show, Mark

Kermode presents a special programme on the director Sam

Mendes, who's just made Skyfall - the upcoming Bond film. We'll leave

you tonight though, with a look at Mac Birmingham's current show - the