Z Nightly Commentaries
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Recent Z Nightly Commentaries
Brutus: A Bantustan View of Global Financial Apartheid
Aug 30, 2007
In three months, the G20 group of major financial powers will join us in South Africa, hosted near Cape Town by the gregarious finance minister Trevor Manuel. As usual the ministers will wine and dine, and protesters will suck teargas.
Billet: Clear Channel, Payola, and How They Are Killing Radio
Aug 04, 2007
Have you ever wondered why mainstream radio is so redundant? Why we may hear the same song so many times in one day? Or why so many of the artists sound similar?
Bond: Who killed Sajida Khan?
Jul 18, 2007
Internationally-known environmental activist Sajida Khan passed away on Sunday night, July 15, in her Durban home. Aged 55, she was suffering her second bout of debilitating cancer, and chemotherapy had evacuated her beautiful long hair.
Brecher: A Moratorium Wired to Stop the War
Jul 06, 2007
A Moratorium Wired to Stop the War
Billet: I've Got a CrushÉ Oh God, Make it Stop!
Jun 30, 2007
It gets stuck in your head the way that only the worst music can. "The Macarena." "My Heart Will Go On." "Who Let the Dogs Out?" And now, Obama Girl. The kind of "artist" who has become determined to colonize our brains with the worst kind of mind-co
Blum: The Anti-Empire Report
Jun 23, 2007
What if NBC cheered on a military coup against Bush?
Billet: Hey Lizzie! Remember this one? God Save The Queen Thirty Years On
Jun 06, 2007
When Queen Elizabeth visited the States last month, the media circus would have made PT Barnum blush. Red carpets were unfurled and black ties adorned by the highest of state officials to welcome the consumate blue-blood, a woman whose utterly parasitic
Billet: Is Russell Simmons Playing Politics With Hip-Hop?
May 17, 2007
It's hard to know what to think about Russell Simmons' recent announcement about checking the content of hip-hop. There is no denying that most of us would like the words "bitch," "ho," and "nigger" to disappear from the English lexicon entirely. But al
Billet: The Mad, Loud and Brilliant World of Lester Bangs
May 05, 2007
Twenty-five years. In music, it's a span of time that can be an eternity, and yet last no longer the blink of an eye. So much can change. So much can stay the same.
Billet: Fake Plastic Tunes: Radiohead Buck Corporate Coffee
Apr 15, 2007
Artistic integrity breathed a sigh of relief last Thursday. The NME reports that rumors of Radiohead's possible signing with Hear Music are not true. In the world of almost-deals and broken contracts that is the music industry, this isn't particularly n
Blum: The Anti-Empire Report
Mar 21, 2007
Flash! This just in! The Cold War was not a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was a struggle between the United States and the Third World. What there was, was people all over the Third World fighting for economic and political c
Bond: Elite power and weakness across time and space
Mar 19, 2007
Who thinks coming hostilities with Iran are about military, material and religio-ideological support for Shiite militias, or even construction of a nuclear energy plant? Only in the context of a several-decade scan does the Bush regime's panicky neoconser
Billet: The Times They Are a Changin': The Shifting Winds of Protest Music
Mar 15, 2007
The subject has been brought up by so many writers that by now that it's almost clichŽ. It's been asked by musicians, activists old and new, and music journalists alike. And as it's become obvious just how devastating the US' very presence in Iraq has b
Billet: Bloc Party's A Weekend in the City: The Beauty and Ugliness of Modern Life
Mar 04, 2007
Bloc Party has definitely made a huge mark on modern music. Their debut album Silent Alarm displayed an energy and emotional honesty that clearly set them apart from most of the too-cool-for-school attitude of most "indie-rock" bands. It was this that p
Bond: From WSF 'NGO trade fair' to left politics?
Feb 01, 2007
A mixed message - combining celebration and autocritique - is in order, in the wake of the Nairobi World Social Forum. From January 20-25, the 60,000 registered participants heard triumphalist radical rhetoric and yet, too, witnessed persistent defeats f
Blum: The Anti-Empire Report Some things you need to know before the world ends
Jan 25, 2007
Johnny got his gun
Blum: The Anti-Empire Report Some things you need to know before the world ends
Dec 27, 2006
Designer monsters
Bond: Global capital still volatile, uneven, destructive
Dec 24, 2006
This month we've heard some surprisingly sanguine views from elites celebrating the fall in the value of the dollar.
Bond: The UNDP's wrong turn on water rights
Nov 27, 2006
A fortnight ago, the global launch of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report 2006 (HDR) was in Cape Town, an appropriate choice in a diabolical way. South Africa is apparently considered the UN's ideal-type setting - and
Aug 31, 2007
"Things get accepted into the mainstream and lose their edge." This is one of the first things Glen Friedman tells me in our conversation. Sitting in my Washington DC apartment, it's hard not to agree with Friedman. This is a city that young hipsters a