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Rihanna gives 1.67m to support LA domestic violence victims in lockdown

The singer joined with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to provide shelter, meals and counselling for families at risk in coronavirus pandemic

Rihanna has donated $2.1m (1.67m) to the Mayors Fund for Los Angeles to assist victims of domestic violence affected by the coronavirus lockdown. The singers Clara Lionel Foundation joined with Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey to donate matching sums to the drive. Their donations will cover 10 weeks of support, including shelter, meals and counselling for families experiencing domestic violence during the pandemic in greater Los Angeles.

Alyson Messenger, a managing staff lawyer with the Jenesse Center, a domestic violence organisation in South Los Angeles, told the Los Angeles Times last month that the lockdown was a worst-case scenario for anyone in an abusive relationship: Compound that with the fact that access to services is more difficult than ever.

UN secretary general Antnio Guterres tweeted on 6 April: Many women under lockdown for #COVID19 face violence where they should be safest: in their own homes. I urge all governments to put womens safety first as they respond to the pandemic.

In Chinas Hubei province, the centre of the initial outbreak, domestic violence reports to police more than tripled in a single county, from 47 cases in February 2019 to 162 this year. A quarter of British domestic violence charities said that they could not effectively support abuse victims during lockdown owing to technical issues, inability to meet victims and staff sickness.

A statement announcing the donations by Rihanna a domestic abuse survivor and Dorsey said: Victims of domestic violence exist all over the world, so this is just the beginning.

Last month, Rihannas Clara Lionel Foundation previously joined with Jay-Zs Shawn Carter Foundation to donate $2m (1.59m) to support undocumented workers, prisoners, homeless people, the elderly and children of frontline health workers in Los Angeles and New York during the Covid-19 outbreak. She also donated personal protective equipment to healthcare providers in New York State, and gave $5m ($4m) to global organisations to protect healthcare workers and marginalised communities.

Her father, Ronald Fenty, has been recovering from coronavirus after spending 14 days inside the Paragon Isolation Center in Barbados. He told the Sun: I thought I was going to die. He said his daughter sent a ventilator to his home, which ultimately he did not need.

The 32-year old singer is the latest musician to mobilise in the effort to assist healthcare providers and people affected by coronavirus. Lady Gaga has curated the benefit concert One World: Together at Home featuring performances from such artists as Gaga, Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Paul McCartney and Coldplays Chris Martin to be livestreamed globally and televised in the US on 18 April. The BBC will broadcast an adapted version the following day.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/apr/10/rihanna-1-point-coronavirus-lockdown-donation-los-angeles-domestic-violence

Erased from utopia: the hidden history of LA’s black and brown resistance

In an extract from Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties, Mike Davis and Jon Wiener look past the sun and surf to a radical fight for equality and justice

In August 1965, thousands of young Black people in Watts set fire to the illusion that Los Angeles was a youth paradise.

Since the debut of the TV show 77 Sunset Stripin 1958, followed by the first of the Gidgetromance films in 1959 and then the Beach Boys Surfin USA in 1963, teenagers in the rest of the country had become intoxicated with images of the endless summer that supposedly defined adolescence in southern California.

Edited out of utopia was the existence of a rapidly growing population of more than 1 million people of African, Asian, and Mexican ancestry. Their kids were restricted to a handful of beaches; everywhere else, they risked arrest by local cops or beatings by white gangs. As a result, Black surfers were almost as rare in LA as unicorns. Economic opportunity was also rationed.

Surfers
Surfers in Malibu, 1965. Photograph: Jonathan Blair/Corbis via Getty Images

During the first half of the 60s, hundreds of brand-new college classrooms beckoned to white kids with an offer of free higher education, while factories and construction sites begged for more workers. But failing inner-city high schools with extreme dropout rates reduced the college admissions of Black and brown youth to a small trickle. Despite virtually full employment for whites, Black youth joblessness dramatically increased, as did the index of residential segregation. If these were truly golden years of opportunity for white teenagers, their counterparts in South Central and East LA faced bleak, ultimately unendurable futures.

But LAs streets and campuses in the 60s also provided stages for many other groups to assert demands for free speech, equality, peace and justice. Initially these protests tended to be one-issue campaigns, but the grinding forces of repression above all the Vietnam draft and the LAPD drew them together in formal and informal alliances.

Thus LGBT activists coordinated actions with youth activists in protest of police and sheriffs dragnets on Sunset Strip, in turn making Free Huey one of their demands. When Black and Chicano high school kids blew out their campuses in 196869, several thousand white students walked out in solidarity. A brutal LAPD attack on thousands of middle-class antiwar protesters at the Century Plaza Hotel in 1967 hastened the development of a biracial coalition supporting Tom Bradley, a liberal Black council member, in his crusade to wrest City Hall from rightwing populist Sam Yorty.

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A air of Black Panther party buttons, one reading Free Huey in reference to Huey P Newton, co-founder of the party. Photograph: The Frent Collection/Corbis via Getty Images

In the same period, the antiwar movement joined hands with the Black Panthers to form Californias unique Peace and Freedom Party. There are many other examples. By 1968, as a result, the movement resembled the music of LA free jazz pianist Horace Tapscotts Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra: simultaneous solos together with unified crescendos. Historians of 60s protests have rarely studied the reciprocal influences and interactions across such broad spectrum of constituencies, and these linkages are too often neglected in memoirs, but they provide a principal terrain of our analysis.

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The 60s in LA have obvious bookends. The year 1960 saw the appearance of social forces that would coalesce into the movements of the era, along with the emergence of a new agenda for social change, especially around what might be called the issue of issues: racial segregation. In LA, those developments overlapped with the beginning of the regime of Sam Yorty, elected mayor in 1961. 1973, on the other hand, marked not only the end of protest in the streets but also the defeat of Yorty and the advent of the efficient, pro-business administration of Tom Bradley.

There were also three important turning points that subdivide the long decade. 1963 was a rollercoaster year that witnessed the first: the rise and fall of the United Civil Rights Committee, the most important attempt to integrate housing, schools and jobs in LA through non-violent protest and negotiation. (Only Detroit produced a larger and more ambitious civil rights united front during what contemporaries called Birmingham Summer.) In California it brought passage of the states first Fair Housing Act repealed by referendum the following year in an outburst of white backlash.

1965, of course, saw the second turning point, the so-called Watts Riots. The third, 1969, began as a year of hope with a strong coalition of white liberals, Blacks and newly minted Chicanos supporting Bradley for mayor. He led the polls until election eve, when Yorty counterattacked with a vicious barrage of racist and red-baiting appeals to white voters. Bradleys defeat foreclosed, at least for the foreseeable future, any concessions to the citys minorities or liberal voters. Moreover, it was immediately followed by sinister campaigns, involving the FBI, the district attorneys office, and both the LAPD and LA county sheriffs, to destroy the Panthers, Brown Berets and other radical groups.

Joan
Joan Didion evoked a sense of dread in her essay collection The White Album. Photograph: Julian Wasser/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

This is the true context underlying the creeping sense of dread and imminent chaos famously evoked by Joan Didion in her 1979 essay collection, The White Album. If helter skelter was unleashed after 1970, the Manson gang were bit players compared to the institutions of law and order. For the past half century, a number of stereotypes have framed our recollections of this age of revolt, but the Los Angeles experience confounds most cliches. In the standard narrative, for instance, college students, organized as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Free Speech Movement (FSM) in Berkeley, were the principal social actors, and the great engine rooms of protest were found at huge public university campuses in places like Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor, and Kent. (The exceptions, according to this narrative, were some historical Black colleges and Ivy League Columbia.)

In Los Angeles, however, it was junior and senior high schools that were the principal battlefields, and the majority of protesters were Black and brown. Indeed, as many as 20,000 inner-city teenagers and their white Westside allies participated in walkouts and demonstrations between 1967 and 1970. Members of college radical groups as well as the Black Panther party played significant roles as advisers to these protests, but the indigenous teenage leadership was most important. These struggles recruited hundreds of kids to groups like the Panthers and Brown Berets and gave birth to a unique high school New Left formation, the Red Tide.

The terrain of college protest in Los Angeles also differed from that of the mainstream. Of the two flagship local universities, the University of Southern California was a citadel of campus Republicanism, birthplace of Nixons so-called USC Mafia (and, as it turned out, the alma mater of several Watergate conspirators). UCLA, for its part, saw only episodic mass protests, most notably during Nixons invasion of Cambodia in spring 1970. The real homes of sustained student activism were the three inner-city community colleges (LA City College, Southwest College and East LA College), along with Cal State LA and Valley State (later Cal State, Northridge).

The latter was the site of a 196970 uprising by the Black Student Union and SDS that was quelled by police batons, mass arrests, and a staggering 1,730 felony charges against Black students: repression on a scale that rivaled or exceeded the more famous battles at San Francisco State.

The
The Black Panther minister of information, Eldridge Cleaver, addresses an estimated 7,500 students at UCLA in 1968. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

Historians and political scientists have generally conceded that the one hundred or so ghetto insurrections of the 1960s should be regarded as genuine protests, but they have usually described them as leading to mere chaos and demoralization. Conventionally, rioters have been portrayed as the opposites of organizers and builders. This does not describe events in Los Angeles.

The 1965 explosion unified and energized a generation of young Black people, ended gang conflict for a number of years, and catalyzed the extraordinary Watts Renaissance, the citys most important arts and literary movement of the decade. Black Power became an aspiration shared by thousands, and in 1967 this grassroots unity found expression in the emergence of LAs Black Congress the more radical successor to the United Civil Rights Committee. It included SNCC, the Black Student Alliance, the Che-Lumumba Club of the Communist Party, the Black Panthers, and the powerful Us organization (or Organization Us) led by Ron Karenga. (The congress would later be destroyed by a violent conflict between Us and the Panthers, instigated and fueled by the FBIs secret Cointelpro program.)

Contests over public space were also extraordinarily important in Los Angeles. In part this was the legacy of earlier decades when the LAPDs notorious Red Squad had been the enforcer of the anti-union open shop doctrine, and when city hall supplied draconian anti-picketing and antifree speech ordinances. The 60s saw a renewal of this unsavory tradition.

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Police search African American youths in 1966. Photograph: Everett/Rex Shutterstock

The LAPD, aided by the LA county sheriffs, conducted an unending siege of bohemian Venice, tried to drive teenyboppers and hippies off Sunset Strip, regularly broke up peaceful love-ins and rallies in Griffith and Elysian Parks, suppressed lowriders on Whittier Boulevard, harassed kids selling the underground LA Free Press, raided coffeehouses and folk clubs, and invoked obscenity as an excuse to crack down on artists, poets and theater groups. No other major city outside of the deep south was subjected to such a fanatic and all-encompassing campaign to police space and control the night. Along with minorities, many young whites were also routinely victimized, leading hatred of the LAPD to grow into a common culture of resistance.

The cops, however, had a formidable opponent in the ACLU of Southern California, the national organizations most hard-charging and activist affiliate. When national ACLU director Roger Baldwin and a majority of the national leadership publicly embraced anti-communism in the late 1940s, AL Wirin, ACLU SoCals legendary chief counsel, pointedly challenged the ban on representing Communist party members in trial proceedings, taking on several cases in private practice.

Moreover, in 1952, the local branch chose as its new director Eason Monroe, a state college professor from San Francisco who had been fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. A decade later, Monroe charted a novel course for the affiliate by not only defending the local civil rights coalition in court but also joining in its leadership. Significantly, it was an ACLU team, led by UCLA professor John Caughey and his wife LaRee, that launched the legendary 1963 lawsuit to force integration of LAs de facto Jim Crow school system an effort that would reverberate for three decades. No other ACLU branch claimed such a large role in the decades protest movements.

Understanding Los Angeles in the 60s also requires rewriting the histories of gay liberation and the womens movement. Indeed, New York City was not the origin and center of everything. Los Angeles had the first gay street protest in America over police raids on the Black Cat Bar in Silver Lake, two years before the Stonewall uprising; it had the first gay church the Metropolitan community church, now the largest gay institution in the world; and it had the first officially recognized gay pride parade on Hollywood Boulevard in 1970. LA also witnessed the nations first police raid on a womens health clinic, following which the organizers were tried for practicing medicine without a license.

Finally, the course of events in Los Angeles challenged the myth that the Old Left was irrelevant in the 60s and that the New Left had invented itself ex nihilo. The Communist party, for its part, never appears in the standard narrative except as an unattractive corpse. But in Los Angeles its most unruly and dissident branch remained very much alive under the charismatic and eventually heretical leadership of Dorothy Healey.

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Two young Chicano men during a protest in Los Angeles, 1970. Photograph: BBC/David Fenton/Getty Images

Despite the partys devastating losses following Soviet secretary Nikita Khrushchevs 1956 Crimes of Stalin speech, Healey was determined to resurrect what she could of the 1940s Popular Front and to reach out to the new radicals on campus, in the ghettos and in the barrios. Still under the threat of a prison sentence, she found a niche at KPFK, the new 75,000-watt Pacifica Radio FM station, in 1959, where her Communist Commentaryimpressed even hostile listeners with its intelligence and wit although it almost cost the station its license. In 1966 she ran in the primary for county tax assessor and received a staggering 85,000 votes. By then the local Communist party had confidentially rebuilt many of its links with progressives in the Democratic party and had assumed an important role in the Peace Action Council. Its youth members, relatively unconstrained by a party line or adult control, played innovative roles in the early 60s, including participation in Southern Freedom Rides, and later, more influentially, as the Che-Lumumba Club which would become the political base of Angela Davis. For two generations Healey defined radicalism in the public eye.

This is a movement history of Los Angeles that looks at the city from the vantage points of its flatland neighborhoods and bohemian beaches where the young heroes of this story lived. We have tried to give human faces to social forces, to understand rebellion as a constant debate about goals and tactics, and to recall the passions of struggle, especially the power of love. It was also important to describe in some detail the machinery of racial oppression that kept good schools, well-paid jobs and suburban homes out of the reach of people living inside the citys ghettos and barrios.

At epic moments in the long decade the United Civil Rights campaign in 1963, the Watts uprising in 1965, and the wave of high school revolts from 1966 to 1969 the movement tried mightily to break through to the other side, only to face the batons and drawn guns of the LAPD. By 1973, repression had dug nearly 100 graves and put more than 10,000 protesters in jail or prison. An enormous effort has been made to trivialize the 60s and to bury its dreams in a paupers grave. But its unruly ghost, like that of the 1930s, still shakes its chains in the nightmares of elites.

  • Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties, by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener (Verso), is out now

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/los-angeles-black-brown-activism-1960s

Bird launches Scoot Mopeds in Austin ahead of SXSW

The Scoot Moped — an electric moped born out of Bird’s acquisition of Scoot — will launch in Austin five months after unveiling the shared micromobility vehicle.

The new moped is the latest effort by Bird to diversify its product offerings to capture more customers. The Scoot Mopeds, which are now available on the Bird app, feature large-volume tires, hydraulic disc brakes, two side mirrors, an LCD display for vehicle speed information, as well as two sizes of helmets, which are stored in a box on the vehicle. Users of the Scoot Moped must be 18 years or older and have a valid driver’s license. 

Bird first unveiled the Scoot Moped in October following its acquisition of Scoot. Initially the mopeds were piloted in Los Angeles, according to Bird. The Austin launch, which kicks off the week before the city’s SXSW music, tech, film and comedy festival begins, marks the official rollout of the Scoot Mopeds. The SXSW festival has not been cancelled yet, although numerous companies are pulling out over concerns of the coronavirus. SXSW organizers said March 2 that the “2020 event is proceeding with safety as a top priority.”

The Scoot Mopeds will join a bevy of shared mobility vehicles that are already on Austin’s city streets. The Austin City Council approved in February 2018 the creation of a “dockless” bike-share pilot program. Some companies were already operating these services; this action created a regulatory framework. But then scooters came en masse.

The scooters upended bike share, and prompted companies to take some of their bikes off the streets due to lack of demand, according to several city officials who spoke to TechCrunch during SXSW 2019.

Bird is “working closely with the city to help achieve the goal of 50-50 mode shift by 2039 and looks forward to collaborating on more solutions in support of the Austin Strategic Mobility Plan,” Blanca Laborde, a government partnerships team member for Bird, said in a statement. “We think Austinites are going to love this new way to get around.”

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/bird-launches-scoot-mopeds-in-austin-ahead-of-sxsw/

‘I don’t get an extra check for locking you up’: a week with an LA probation officer

Working for the county probation department, the largest in the nation, means being equal parts social worker and law enforcement

On a Tuesday morning in October, Los Angeles deputy probation officer Booker Waugh made his way down a nearly sheer hillside, just a few feet from the entrance to the 10 freeway heading east.

Waugh, 48, was conducting a field visit to one of his probationers, a man named Joshua Bey. Bey lives in the affluent neighborhood of Cheviot Hills not in a stately colonial house but in an orange tent, pitched between the freeway and a retaining wall, buffeted by old window blinds and a blanket decorated with kittens.

Hidden from the cars racing by below and the $2m homes above, Beys world is invisible unless you know where to look.

Waugh

  • Waugh cruises the Skid Row area of downtown Los Angeles.

Booker Waugh does. Waugh is an officer with the Los Angeles county probation department, the largest agency of its kind in the nation. It oversees more than 35,000 adults under community supervision, meaning probation or parole.

Twenty of Waughs 38 clients are homeless. We do this every day, Waugh says about the challenges of his work. You cant let hopelessness get the best of you.

More than 4.5 million people in the US were under community supervision in 2016, the last year for which the justice department has released data. Thats twice as many people as the number of people incarcerated, and a 239% increase since 1980, according to a study from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

There isnt enough data on probation to determine the cause of this explosive growth with certainty, but we do know that the increase in probation has far outpaced any increase in crime. That suggests that departments have become more liberal with their use of probation. In the past few years, those liberal policies have been challenged by activists, scholars, and a remarkable number of top brass probation officials who aim to revamp what they view as a bloated, ineffective system.

But within individual departments, there are many probation officers like Waugh: drawn to the work because they want to help people who are struggling, and who see the job as equal parts social work and law enforcement.

Waugh, who has lived in south-central Los Angeles his entire life except for a stint attending the University of Hawaii, is a 15-year veteran of the probation department. Like most officers, he started his career in the county juvenile facilities.

I dont get an extra check for locking your ass up, Waugh says he tells new clients. Im here to work with you, Im here to help you. The less work I have to do the better.

Joshua Bey

  • Left: Waugh pays a visit to Joshua Beys encampment near the 10 freeway. Right: Joshua Bey in his tent, which is hidden between a hedge and a retaining wall.

On days when he goes into the field, Waugh sets out in the white Ford Taurus provided by the department, the radio tuned to a 90s hip hop station. He visits clients in their home, shelter, tent or place of work, if they have one, and tries to get a sense of how the client is navigating re-entry from lockup. Are they employed? Sober? Lucid? He asks them if they need anything he can help provide, from facilitating a ride to mental health services to providing train fare.

At a shelter in Santa Monica, Waugh meets a client of three months, Earl Love.

Loves hands tremble from Parkinsons disease and, like a significant amount of probationers in Los Angeles county, he has been diagnosed with a mental health condition. Waugh visits him once a month, and has connected Love to a telecare medical team so he doesnt have to travel to get support.

Love was incarcerated for most of his 46 years, he says. Ive been in the struggle all my life.

Waugh

  • Waugh visits Earl Love, 46, a client at a Santa Monica homeless shelter who has been diagnosed with a mental health condition.

Later in the day, Waughs off to the jungle, the south-central Los Angeles neighborhood named after both its foliage and what Waugh calls its antics.

Hes visiting 55-year-old Derek Williams. Williams joined a gang in the late 1970s, but says hes done with that lifestyle. I dont carry guns anymore. I hear a car backfire, he mimics being startled. Im shell-shocked.

Williams says his probation has gone smoothly because he is unencumbered by mental health struggles and has been able to comply with probation rules, which are strict. Requirements vary. All probationers have to call in to a special phone line daily, report to their officers regularly, submit to drug tests when instructed and not carry weapons. Many must attend mental health or substance abuse classes. Some cant be around gang members if they have an injunction, others cant open a checking account if they were charged with fraud, still others cant access the internet unsupervised if they were charged with sexually assaulting a minor.

Those rules are there to help probationers, Waugh says, a safeguard to keep them from doing the same things again and again. Probationers can choose whether to follow them or not, he says. Still, he concedes, the rules stringency can be a setup for failure; if work hours coincide with required mental health treatment, for example, a probationer who skips the appointment to keep a job may end up back in jail.

The rules also make finding work challenging for those in re-entry under the best of circumstances even more difficult. Probationers may be told to come in to the office for a pop-up urine test with next to no notice, and given a narrow window of time within which to complete the test, though Waugh says they try to accommodate clients schedules.

Even for a probationer who truly wants to play by the rules and finish probation, its not easy. There are lots of barriers to being successful, Brian Lovins, the former assistant director of Harris county community supervision and corrections department and an advocate for probation reform, points out. People dont operate individually, theres a host of family and social systems that keep them pressured into where they are in the world.

The

Waughs

Waughs

Love

  • Top left: Derek Williams peers out of the window in his apartment building. Top right: Jeffrey Chenevert, a truck driver and entrepreneur, visits the west LA office. Bottom left: Jarrad Durke, a homeless US Navy veteran, is at the west LA office for his monthly check-in. Bottom right: EarlLove shows off his photography.

Like most other probation officers in what Waugh calls inner-city Los Angeles, he currently has close to twice the number of clients he is supposed to manage. This means he gets less time than hed like with clients, and he has to make some choices about where to direct his energy.

You tend to drift toward the guys who want to help themselves versus the guys who keep getting arrested over and over, Waugh says. You have to decipher who wants my help and who is just here because they got put on probation out of jail.

Today, however, he passes the time in his cubicle, surrounded by Lakers paraphernalia and a Colin Kaepernick action figure.

Waughs client Jeffrey Chenevert, 46, comes by for an office visit. Hes been working with Waugh for two and a half months and has failed two drug tests. Chenevert says his medications are affecting the test results.

Waugh tells him to bring in the medications at his next visit so he can determine whether thats the case. But if you mess up again, he warns, Ill send the results in and youll be locked up again.

Waugh

  • Waugh waits in the corridor at the central arraignment court in downtown Los Angeles.

Because this is Los Angeles, Waugh spends a lot of time in his car. He drives from his west Los Angeles office to the central arraignment court downtown, where his client Keion Anderson is appearing before a judge on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon.

Arrested 20 days earlier, Anderson stands silently in a plexiglass enclosure, craning his head downward to speak through a small opening in the wall when called upon to answer a question. Waugh is there to speak on Andersons behalf, telling the judge that prior to the arrest Anderson had been reporting consistently. The judge rules that Anderson should be released soon and must report to Waughs office within 48 hours.

Waugh makes his way back to the west side, passing through the vast Skid Row area. The day is bright, sunny and warm. Men and women sitting in lawn chairs line the sidewalks, the Twice as Nice ice cream truck has carnival music blasting through its speakers.

Waugh parks and strolls down the middle of Crocker Street, as tents, carts and stacks of possessions dont leave enough room on the sidewalk for pedestrians. A former client, Donald Smith, 64, spots Waugh and shouts gleefully. Smith, a veteran originally from Alabama, was Waughs client for two years, through last spring. He soon begs off, confessing that hes high on meth and doesnt want Waugh to see him like this.

Imma call you when Im sober, he tells Waugh. I love you with all my heart.

He walks away. Waugh stands still for a moment, moved by the encounter. Hes glad that seeing him gave Smith a moment of reckoning. Just from that, being embarrassed, that might straighten him out.

Whether or not Waughs actions can really affect the course of Smiths life is debatable. Still, Waugh is on the front lines of the system, and its up to him to keep faith enough to carry on with the work.

This is cool, he says. This is why I do it.

Walking

  • Walking through the Skid Row area of LA, Waugh runs into a former client.

This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/05/los-angeles-county-parole-officer-probation

US rapper Pop Smoke, 20, shot and killed in home invasion

Two masked and hooded men are reported to have attacked the rapper, regarded as one of the most promising talents in the US

New York rapper Pop Smoke has been shot and killed in an apparent home invasion, according to multiple sources speaking to NBC and TMZ.

The rapper, real name Bashar Jackson, 20, was at home in Hollywood, Los Angeles, when two men wearing hoodies and masks entered the house and fired multiple shots, according to police sources quoted by TMZ. He was pronounced dead at a hospital in West Hollywood early on Wednesday.

The two men are apparently at large. Another man was briefly detained by police but released soon after.

On Tuesday, Jackson had posed for Instagram photos holding stacks of money in a luxury SUV outside a house in Los Angeles. He had located himself in the city earlier in the day on his Instagram stories. A friend had also posted photos of the pair together outside the house with an address number visible, while Jackson himself had posted footage of bags with labels including his address, leading to fears that the house was subsequently targeted in a robbery.

Jacksons career was beginning to take off. By blending the sound of the UK and US drill scenes often in collaboration with British producer 808Melo with gruffly delivered lyrics, he was being talked about as one of the most promising young MCs in the US. Primarily based in New York, he collaborated with rappers including Travis Scott, Nicki Minaj, Skepta and Quavo, and the video to his signature track Welcome to the Party has been viewed 23m times on YouTube. His album Meet the Woo 2 reached No 7 in the US charts when it was released earlier this month.

Jackson was arrested in January after allegedly stealing a Rolls-Royce he had borrowed for a music video, transporting it across the country to New York. The prosecutor claimed he was affiliated with the Crips gang. He pleaded not guilty to the theft and was released on $250,000 bail and barred from having contact with gang members.

In October, he had been prevented from performing at the Rolling Loud music festival in Queens, with New York police contending he was affiliated with recent acts of violence city-wide, though without making charges.

Musicians paying tribute included Chance the Rapper, 50 Cent, Kehlani and Nicki Minaj, who wrote: The Bible tells us that jealousy is as cruel as the grave. Unbelievable. Rest In Peace, Pop.

He is the latest in a spate of US rappers to be violently killed. XXXTentacion was killed aged 20 in June 2018 after he was robbed at a Florida motorcycle dealership; Nipsey Hussle, 33, was shot and killed in Los Angeles in March 2019. Other young and highly successful rappers, including Mac Miller, Lil Peep and Juice WRLD, have recently died from drug overdoses.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/19/us-rapper-pop-smoke-20-shot-and-killed-in-home-invasion

‘An American dream’: singer Andy Madadian becomes first Iranian on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame

Musician dubbed the Persian Bono fled Iran at age 22 and built a genre-blending career in Los Angeles

At age 22, Andy Madadian fled Iran with nothing, moved to Los Angeles and started playing guitar at nightclubs to pay rent.

Now 63, the internationally celebrated pop singer says hes ready for another new beginning: Madadian is getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first Iranian artist to earn the honor.

Many people may wonder: would you have a new beginning after 14 albums? Madadian said days before the ceremony unveiling his groundbreaking star. But to me its new because a lot of Americans are just discovering me and my music. Im hoping this Hollywood star will open some doors. We have a lot of great Iranian artists here in LA, and the western world has not discovered them yet.

Sometimes nicknamed the Persian Bono or Persian Elvis, the Iranian-Armenian American artist is being honored on the Hollywood Boulevard sidewalk on Friday, after two tumultuous weeks of escalating conflict between Tehran, where he was raised, and the US, the country he has called home for decades.

Its a very difficult position to be in as an Iranian American artist, because whatever I produce is for my people my American people, my Iranian people, my Armenian people, he said on a recent afternoon, seated inside a bakery in Encino in the San Fernando Valley, not far from his home. Unfortunately, all of them are in some kind of a clash.

Madadian grew up 7,000 miles away in Irans capital, in a neighborhood home to many Armenians. Born in 1956, he shared a single room with his parents, grandmother and five siblings, and for much of his early childhood, the family didnt have any electricity or running water. But we had love and music, he recalled.

He excelled in math in school and some expected him to go into economics, but he always knew he would be a musician. His dad, who worked in road construction, helped him take out a loan to buy a guitar from a neighbor when he was 14 years old, and Madadian quickly started playing gigs with other singers to pay off the debt.

While others around him were interested in Iranian music, Madadian took a liking to British and American rock, falling in love with Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Rod Stewart, Kansas and Chicago. I was much more rebellious, he said. Ray Charles was his vocal idol. A CBS recording branch in Iran discovered him when he was about 22 and helped him record a song he wrote in English, with plans to pitch him as an Iranian Rod Stewart given his similar raspy voice.

Enthralled with American-style music, Madadian knew he wanted to move to the US. But when he finally came to America, it wasnt just to pursue his dreams. When the revolution broke out in 1979, many were forced to flee, and Madadian lost contact with the producers who had recorded the single. (Maybe its better it didnt come out, because my English was not good.)

He got a student visa to play soccer for California State University, Los Angeles, and started playing guitar at nightclubs when he was not in school. He took the bus everywhere and invested whatever cash he saved in his instruments and paying for music lessons: To me, that was success.

He later formed a duo with another Persian singer, Kouros Shahmiri, and the two released several albums before Madadian went solo. Madadian eventually began working with the LA-based Iranian lyricist Paksima Zakipour, and in Persian markets, they became known as the Elton John and Bernie Taupin of the Iranian industry.

Over the years, Madadian has fused styles of his Iranian-Armenian heritage with western dance music, Spanish flamenco guitar, African rhythms and more. He has long attracted audiences overseas but also got mainstream US attention in 2009 when he collaborated with Jon Bon Jovi to record a Stand By Me cover in English and Farsi to show solidarity with protesters in Iran.

Bon Jovi learned the Farsi lyrics in a day, and Iranian fans thought he sang with a cute accent, Madadian said. This is a New Jersey kid singing Farsi for the first time.

Joe Jackson, Michael Jacksons father, introduced Madadian to his daughter La Toya Jackson and the two recorded a song in Farsi called Tehran in 2016. The song, like much of Madadians work, was hugely popular in Iran, though all of his music is officially banned by the Iranian government. Bootlegged versions of his music have spread across the country, but he doesnt make any money off of album sales there.

Because of the ban on his work, Madadian hasnt been back to Iran in the 41 years since he left. While some Iranian pop stars are exiled, Madadian hasnt tried to return and doesnt know what would happen if he did.

We
We have a lot of great Iranian artists here in LA, and the western world has not discovered them yet, Madadian said. Photograph: Courtesy Andy Madadian

Its the country I grew up in and I love beautiful people, beautiful place, beautiful culture, he said. I would like to go back when its a free democratic country, and my music is not banned but is on the radio and TV. One of my biggest wishes is that one day Iran and America will be good friends where we can visit and play in both countries, and live in both countries.

A vegetarian whose charity work focuses on animal rights, Madadian said he stays away from political activism. But he noted that that the devastating deaths from the Tehran plane crash caused by an accidental military strike were weighing heavy on him as he prepared to celebrate his Hollywood star and the triumph it represented for Iranian Americans.

Madadian will receive his star alongside a number of world-famous American musicians joining this year, including Elvis Costello, Billy Idol, Alicia Keys, 50 Cent and Muddy Waters.

The honor is a full circle moment for the artist, who remembered his first gigs in LA 40 years ago, which he would promote by posting flyers along lampposts on Hollywood Boulevard.

Ive lived most of my life in Los Angeles, so I am truly an Iranian-Armenian American and can say this is an American dream, he said, adding, The majority of Iranian artists live in LA. This is our Hollywood, also.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/15/andy-madadian-iran-hollywood-walk-of-fame-star

TikTok inks licensing deal with Merlin to use music from independent labels in videos and new Resso streaming service

TikTok, the fast-growing user-generated video app from China’s ByteDance, has been building a new music streaming service to compete against the likes of Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. And today it’s announcing a deal that helps pave the way for a global launch of it. It has inked a licensing deal with Merlin, the global agency that represents tens of thousands of independent music labels and hundreds of thousands of artists, for music from those labels to be used legally on the TikTok platform anywhere that the app is available.

The news is significant because this is the first major music licensing deal announced by TikTok as part of its wider efforts in the music industry. Notably, it’s not the first: I’ve confirmed TikTok has actually secured other major labels but has been restricted from going public on the details.

The Merlin deal is therefore a template of what TikTok is likely signing with others: it includes both its mainstay short-form videos — where music plays a key role (the app, before it was acquired by ByteDance, was even called “Musically”) — as well as new music streaming services.

Specifically, a source close to TikTok has confirmed to TechCrunch that the licensing deal covers its upcoming music subscription service Resso.

Resso was long-rumoured and eventually spotted in the wild at the end of last year when ByteDance tested the app in India and Indonesia. ByteDance owns the Resso trademark, so it’s a good bet that it will make its way to other markets soon. (Possibly with features that differentiate this later entrant from others in the market? Recall ByteDance acquired an AI-based music startup called Jukedeck last year.)

“Independent artists and labels are such a crucial part of music creation and consumption on TikTok,” said Ole Obermann, global head of music for TikTok, in a statement. “We’re excited to partner with Merlin to bring their family of labels to the TikTok community. The breadth and diversity of the catalogue presents our users with an even larger canvas from which to create, while giving independent artists the opportunity to connect with TikTok’s diverse community.”

Music is a fundamental part of the TikTok experience, and this deal covers everything that’s there today — videos created by TikTok users, sponsored videos created for marketing — as well as whatever is coming up around the corner.

A music streaming app, which TikTok has reportedly been gearing up to launch for some time, is one way that the company could help generate revenue. Despite being one of the most popular apps of 2019, monetisation has largely eluded the company up to now.

One reason why monetising may happen is because of the lack of deals at the other end of the chain. As of December, TikTok reportedly had yet to sign any deals with the “majors” — Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music. From what we understand, Merlin is the first big deal of its kind announced by the company, but others are already in place.

In any case, the company is ramping up its bigger music operation.

Obermann, who was hired away from Warner Music last year, in turn hired another former Warner colleague, Tracy Gardner, who now leads label licensing for the company. And just yesterday, the company opened an office in Los Angeles, the heart of the music industry.

The move to bring more licensed music usage to TikTok (and other ByteDance apps) is significant for other reasons, too.

On one hand, it’s about labels trying to evolve with the times, collecting revenues wherever audiences happen to be, whether that is in short-form user-generated video, in advertising that runs alongside that or in a new music service capitalising on the new vogue for streamed media.

“This partnership with TikTok is very significant for us,” said Jeremy Sirota, CEO, Merlin, in a statement. “We are seeing a new generation of music services and a new era of music-related consumption, much of it driven by the global demand for independent music. Merlin members are increasingly using TikTok for their marketing campaigns, and today’s partnership ensures that they and their artists can also build new and incremental revenue streams.”

Times are changing in the music industry. Sirota himself only joined Merlin earlier this month, after working on music efforts at Facebook for the last couple of years (and before that at Warner Music, like TikTok’s two key executives).

On the other hand, the deal is significant also because it underscores how TikTok is increasingly working to legitimise itself in the wider tech and media marketplace.

While ByteDance’s acquisition of TikTok continues to face regulatory scrutiny, the company has been working on ways to assert its independence from China’s control, which has included many clarifications about where its content is hosted (not China! it says) and even a search for a new U.S.-based CEO. On another front, more licensing deals should also help the company with the many legal and PR issues that have been hanging over it concerning how it pays out when music is used in its popular app.

Updated with clarification that Obermann works for TikTok, not ByteDance, and the news that there are other music deals in place that have yet to be announced.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/tiktok-inks-licensing-deal-with-merlin-to-use-music-from-independent-labels-in-videos-and-new-resso-streaming-service/

Domio raises $100M in equity and debt to take on Airbnb and hotels with its curated apartments

Airbnb has well and truly disrupted the world of travel accommodation, changing the conversation not just around how people discover and book places to stay, but what they expect when they get there, and what they expect to pay. Today, one of the startups riding that wave is announcing a significant round of funding to fuel its own contribution to the marketplace.

Domio, a startup that designs and then rents out apart-hotels with kitchens and other full-home experiences, has raised $100 million ($50 million in equity and $50 million in debt) to expand its business in the U.S. and globally to 25 markets by next year, up from 12 today. Its target customers are millennials traveling in groups or families swayed by the size and scope of the accommodation — typically five times bigger than the average hotel room — as well as the price, which is on average 25% cheaper than a hotel room.

The Series B, which actually closed in August of this year, was led by GGV Capital, with participation from Eldridge Industries, 3L Capital, Tribeca Venture Partners, SoftBank NY, Tenaya Capital and Upper90. Upper90 also led the debt round, which will be used to lease and set up new properties.

Domio is not disclosing its valuation, but Jay Roberts, the founder and CEO, said in an interview that it’s a “huge upround” and around 50x the valuation it had in its seed round and that the company has tripled its revenues in the last year. Prior to this, Domio had only raised around $17 million, according to data from PitchBook.

For some comparisons, Sonder — another company that rents out serviced apartments to the kind of travelers who have a taste for boutique hotels — earlier this year raised $225 million at a valuation north of $1 billion. Others like Guesty, which are building platforms for others to list and manage their apartments on platforms like Airbnb, recently raised $35 million with a valuation likely in the range of $180 million to $200 million. Airbnb is estimated to be valued around $31 billion.

Domio plays in an interesting corner of the market. For starters, it focuses its accommodations at many of the same demographics as Airbnb. But where Airbnb offers a veritable hodgepodge of rooms and homes — some are people’s homes, some are vacation places, some never had and never will have a private occupant, and across all those the range of quality varies wildly — Domio offers predictability and consistency with its (possibly more anodyne) inventory.

“We are competing with amateur hosts on Airbnb,” said Roberts, who previously worked in real estate investment banking. “This is the next step, a modern brand, the next Marriott but with a more tech-powered brain and operating model.” These are not to be confused with something like Hilton’s Homewood Suites, Roberts stressed to me. He referred to Homewood as “a soulless hotel chain.”

“Domio is the anti-hotel chain,” he added.

Roberts is also quick to describe how Domio is not a real estate company as much as it is a tech-powered business. For starters, it uses quant-style algorithms that it’s built in-house to identify regions where it wants to build out its business, basing it not just on what consumers are searching for, but also weather patterns, economic indicators and other factors. After identifying a city or other location, it works on securing properties.

It typically sets up its accommodations in newer or completely new buildings, where developers — at least up to now — are not usually constructing with short-term rentals in mind. Instead, they are considering an option like Domio as an alternative to selling as condominiums or apartments, something that might come up if they are sensing that there is a softening in the market. “We typically have 75%-78% occupancy,” Roberts said. He added that hotels on average have occupancy rates in the high 60% nationally.

As Domio lengthens its track record — its 12 U.S. markets include Miami, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Phoenix — Roberts says that they’re getting a more select seat at the table in conversations.

“Investors are starting to go out to buy properties on our behalf and lease them to us,” he said. This gives the startup a much more favorable rate and terms on those deals. “The next step is that Domio will manage these directly.” The most recent property it signed, he noted, includes a Whole Foods at the ground level, and a gym.

Using technology to identify where to grow is not the only area where tech plays a role. Roberts said that the company is now working on an app — yet to be released — that will be the epicenter of how guests interact to book places and manage their experience once there.

“Everything you can do by speaking to a human in a traditional hotel you will be able to do with the Domio app,” he said. That will include ordering room service, getting more towels, booking experiences and getting restaurant recommendations. “You can book your Uber through the Domio app, or sync your Spotify account to play music in the apartment.

And there are plans to extend the retail experience using the app. Roberts says it will be a “shoppable” experience where, if you like a sofa or piece of art in the place where you’re staying, you can order it for your own home. You can even order the same wallpaper that’s been designed to decorate Domio apartments.

Ripe for the booking

Although Airbnb has grown to be nearly as ubiquitous as hotels (and perhaps even more prominent, depending on who you are talking to), the wider travel and accommodation market is still ripe for the taking, estimated to reach $171 billion by 2023 and the highest growth sector in the travel industry.

“Airbnb has taught us that hotels are not the only place to stay,” said Hans Tung, GGV’s managing partner. “Domio is capitalizing on the global shift in short-term travel and the consumer demand for branded experiences. From my travels around the world, there is a large, underserved audience — millennials, families, business teams — who prefer the combined benefits of an apartment and hotel in a single branded experience.”

I mentioned to Roberts that the leasing model reminded me a little of WeWork, which itself does not own the property it curates and turns into office space for its tenants. (The SoftBank investor connection is interesting in that regard.) Roberts was very quick to say that it’s not the same kind of business, even if both are based around leased property re-rented out to tenants.

“One of the things we liked about Domio is that is very capital-efficient,” said Tung, “focusing on the model and payback period. The short-term nature of customer stays and the combination of experience/price required to maintain loyal customers are natural enforcers of efficient unit economics.”

“For GGV, Domio stands out in two ways,” he continued. “First, CEO Jay Roberts and the Domio team’s emphasis on execution is impressive, with expansion into 12 cities in just three years. They have the right combination of vision, speed and agility. Domio’s model can readily tap into the global opportunity as they have ambition to scale to new markets. The global travel and tourism spend is $2.8 trillion with 5 billion annual tourists. Global travelers like having the flexibility and convenience of both an apartment and hotel — with Domio they can have both.”

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/17/domio-raises-100m-in-equity-and-debt-to-take-on-airbnb-and-hotels-with-its-curated-apartments/

Morrissey performs in LA wearing explicit anti-Guardian vest

Former Smiths frontman and supporter of far-right party For Britain has criticised the UK newspaper in the past

Morrissey has performed in Los Angeles wearing a vest with the slogan Fuck the Guardian.

The former Smiths frontman wore the top during a concert at the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday, weeks after he described this newspaper as the voice of all that is wrong and sad about modern Britain.

The 60-year-old singer, who has repeatedly expressed support for the far-right party For Britain, has increasingly been lashing out at the Guardian in recent months.

Writing on his personal website in May, Morrissey claimed he was the victim of an inexhaustible hate campaign by the Guardian, imploring his supporters: Please do not buy this wretched hate-paper, whose every 2019 utterance echoes the late Mary Whitehouse.

During a May performance on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Morrissey decided to wear a For Britain badge. In June, he reaffirmed his support for the party in an interview with his nephew, published again on his own website.

Earlier this month he ejected an anti-far-right protester from his concert in Portland. The protester had been carrying two posters, one which depicted the logo of For Britain struck through by a red line, while the other read: Bigmouth indeed.

Writing in the Guardian in July, comedian and former Morrissey fan Stewart Lee said he found the best way to deal with the singer was to simply stop listening to him. Suddenly, I just didnt want Morrissey in my home any more. And I couldnt imagine any circumstances under which I would ever listen to him again, he wrote.

The same month, Billy Bragg condemned Morrissey for sharing a video from a YouTube channel that argued that the British establishment was using Stormzy to promote multiculturalism at the expense of white culture.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/oct/27/morrissey-performs-in-la-wearing-fuck-the-guardian-t-shirt

Jana Hunter: ‘I spent most of my life hiding from myself’

The singer, who identifies as transmasculine, talks about his politically risky new album and the difficulties behind his transition

In November of 2005, Jana Hunter released a collection of songs recorded almost entirely alone over a decade, titled Blank Unstaring Heirs of Doom. It was Hunters first solo album after years of collaborating with the 2000s freak-folk mainstay Devendra Banhart. The album contained short songs (mostly hovering around the two-minute mark) that were haunting and wistful, with muddled vocals and warped instrumentation, and earned Hunter glowing reviews and a proper spot in the then blossoming world of blog-approved indie music.

Blank Unstaring Heirs of Doom ends with an exclamation point, a surprising stylistic shift in the form of a pop song called K, which is based around a video game-like electronic loop, interwoven with ghostly vocal ahs and twangs of guitar. The lyrics are a blend of mundane lightness and hints at darkness: Id love to see you Saturday afternoon / Id spin you out and show you what youre worth / Id love to hold your backbone in my hands / Id be your favorite cartoon. The song now feels prescient, a glimpse of the themes and sounds that permeate The Competition, the fourth album from Lower Dens, Hunters band with drummer Nate Nelson, which formed in 2009.

While on the surface, Hunters early songs may appear to be more intimate and confessional by nature of their genres styling, he says the pop songs on The Competition are his most honest yet. I spent most of my life hiding from myself, said Hunter, on the phone from Los Angeles, where he moved from Baltimore on Thanksgiving day in 2018 (though he still spends a lot of time there). Ive tried to limit myself with past albums, Hunter said. I wanted to push myself to write songs that felt a little less restrictive.

Hunter is more nervous about releasing this album than he ever has been with anything before. I wanted to risk more vulnerability. I feel like I got to that place.

Hunter
Hunter in the video for the song I Drive. Photograph: Torso

Hunter was assigned female at birth. In a 2015 essay for Cosmopolitan, he described telling his parents he was a boy when he was three or four years old, the fifth child in a family of eight kids, and their dismissal of it: It wasnt until I was an adult that I realized there was more to that conversation than my childish fancy. He identifies as transmasculine, which he explains as identifying more as a man on some days and more as a woman on others. Its not more toward one side of the binary or the other.

The Competition was mostly written over a period of three years, in bursts of inspiration and creativity that were bordered by difficult periods that necessitated breaks from music to cope with mental health issues. For him, transitioning was bound up in those issues. When I was a kid I did express my gender identity and it didnt go over very well, Hunter said. That stuff has colored my whole life.

The album also interweaves his personal experiences with politics. (The press release calls it a pop album that is politically urgent.) Hunter says writing the first single, Young Republicans, felt politically risky. In the video for the song, directed by Raul Gonzo, Hunter acts as a narrator, singing in a glittering black bomber jacket as a bleak, Twin Peaks-esque montage plays out. A blond woman suns herself while glaring at detectives investigating a crime. A man in a white tennis outfit glares at a woman repairing his television. The whole thing ends with a group of preppy people in red suits pledging to the American flag before feasting on Hunter, who is lying face-up on a dining table with his torso sliced open. He used to follow the news closely but had to take a break in the Trump era, so he follows journalists he respects instead: And I worry that theyre just losing their minds.

The video for Young Republicans, a song Hunter said felt politically risky.

The song sounds like a crisp 80s dance pop hit, with all the requisite electronic synths, bleeps and bloops, but with an eeriness thats unsettling, lyrics about people who just dont fit in and a world thats burning. Stylistically, the whole album is a giant leap away from the Heirs of Doom era (with the exception of K), and from the first Lower Dens album, 2010s Twin-Hand Movement (NPR described Lower Dens at the time as a blissful swarm of feedback). As a child, Hunter listened to mini-cassettes via headphones with a Fisher-Price Pocket Rocker, escaping into pop songs and a world where he imagined anything was possible. For this album, he says, he wanted to recreate that feeling: I wanted to write songs that might have the potential to do that. He says the ideal way to listen to it would be with headphones, to get the feeling of not being in a physical space (whereas his older, more lo-fi recordings could be described as all about physical space, with the echoes and reverb of wherever they were recorded ingrained in the songs).

Hunter has experimented with a progression of musical styles over the last 14 years, and The Competition is the latest iteration of that, but thankfully the core elements of his singular songwriting are still always present the unusual chord shifts, the serene vocals, the way Hunter invites listeners to settle into a song and become transfixed by it (the best example of this might be the gorgeous song Brains, from their 2012 album Nootropics), the sense of hopefulness thats always present, even if its nearly imperceptible.

I love the textures they use in their production and the songwriting is always heartfelt, said :3LON (Elon Battle), a Baltimore electronic musician who appears on four songs on The Competition. I love working with artists that push the boundaries of societal norms. :3LON lends a vocal complexity to I Drive, a song Hunter says is about feeling rejected by his family, leaving behind obligations to people who dont love or care about you, being with and about people who do. Its a feeling so strong its driving me. Thats the driving Im doing.

While Hunter views The Competition as an escape, at the same time he hopes its deeply confessional nature might serve as a beacon for others struggling with their own realities: Anguish is how we start looking for other people to connect to.

  • The Competition is out now

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/sep/23/jana-hunter-the-competition-interview