Watts Uprising, 50 Years Later

DJ Lynnée Denise entered her second quarter as an adjunct professor in the Pan African Studies Department at California State University Los Angeles. She taught a range of literature, music, and history courses related to Black American and African Diasporic social experiences. Last fall, Lynnée was invited to speak at the "Relations of Protest: Lessons from Watts" being presented in the 50th Anniversary year of the Watts Uprising. The event was co-sponsored by the Pan-African Studies Department with the Cross Cultural Center and the American Communities Program.  Drawing from her ‘Black Protest Music’ course her talk examined the role of music as a restorative force following the uprising and pulled footage from the Watts Cultural Festival’s WattStax concert from 1972. She built a discussion around a clip from the concert which featured Stax label artists The Emotions, performing the Black gospel classic “Peace Be Still.”

The clip, represented the label’s attempt to speak to the working class people whose soul music was rooted in the Black church and the blues tradition, and whose lives and daily experiences had been questionably ignored by Stax’s label rival Motown. Lynnée asserted that “Motown’s highly commodifiable soul music, to some degree, represented Black middle class aspirations of integration and of attaining the traditional American dream.” Motown’s movement to California, following Detroit’s 1967 uprising, she shared, was read by many as a further attempt by the label to disassociate itself from the political turmoil that centered black rage in the Motor City. Watts had a reason to be proud of its use of the arts to heal a community torn by poverty, police brutality and limited resources to help its residents access social mobility. The program ended by highlighting contemporary artists, namely Khalil Joseph, who are using film to resituate Watts in the public imagination. Joseph calls on the cultural work of the LA Rebellion, a crew of Black UCLA film students from the 1960s-70s who used the camera and filmmaking as a way to place Watts in its social and cultural context, Charles Burnett and his film “Killer of Sheep,” epitomizes this effort. 

Black Sci-fi Writers and Artists Gather at Princeton for 'Ferguson is the Future'

This past September DJ lynnée denise participated in a historic event hosted by Princeton University's newly accredited African American Department, “Ferguson is the Future.” The symposium brought together a multigenerational panel of speculative fiction writers, activists, filmmakers, academics, and artists to discuss the historical, present-and-future manifestations of a social reality they wish to create and thrive in. A well executed conference,  the organizers,  Moya Bailey, Ruha Benjamin and Ayana Jameson set out to shift the national conversation on police brutality and structural racism, exploring words, images and sounds created by Black science fictionists around the nation. 

lynnée denise's work in spaces like these is to introduce organizers and fellow participants to new ways of engaging the DJ,  moving the understanding of a DJ from the restrictive role of purveyor of party music, to one that sees the DJ as a cultural archivist whose work, more often than not, happens outside of the context of a club or the dance floor.  lynnée denise presented on “Music Technology and Rhythm Justice.” She spoke to a range of topics related to L.A. and Pacific Northwest artists who are pushing the boundaries of the city’s post 92 Rebellion identity. She used the work of filmmaker Khalil Joseph and underground sci-fi soul music produced by groups like Shabazz Palaces and Flying Lotus to speak to this underground community of visionary futurists.

The event featured some of brightest minds in the world of Black Speculative Fiction and brought in other genre stretching artist activists like the hyper-talented Be Steadwell and visual artist John Jennings to extend the reach of this dialogue. ‘Ferguson is the Future’ was successful in that it brought a special kind of attention to the role that radical imagination must play in the restructuring of a system rooted in strategies that simply transform the violent methods by which savage social inequalities and racialized brutality are enforced.