E*Rock Interview @ XLR8R
I love this guy’s work!
I’ve been pretty much incognito for a a couple weeks, posting random things on here, but I really haven’t been checked into everything because I’ve been out filming interviews with people in Ohio in the time leading up to the elections. Before I got out here I thought I had a sense of what I would find, and I wasn’t all wrong, but going through small towns like Chillicothe and meeting people who have a real yearning for a change in this country has humbled me and reminded me that under the surface of a lot of the stereotyping and back and forth about the conservative heartland versus the liberal coastal mindset lies a deep need on both sides of the coin to bring about a better time for the US, as corny as that might sound. People out here are struggling, and when Obama said that (and was vilified for, perhaps rightly so depending on who you ask) people out here cling to religion or guns or whatever else in the face of that adversity, he wasn’t too far off the mark. We stopped into a church the other night here in Chillicothe (widely recognized as the bellwether town in the bellwether state) and several of the people in the church group echoed the idea that in times of uncertainty and turmoil they turn to their faith to keep their moral center intact. Unfortunately for a lot of these people, the mainstream media comes in and talks to them and gets maybe a sound byte or two and then only uses statements that may be perceived as ignorant from an outside perspective, and in some cases they might be, but what a lot of people fail to realize is that they will also turn around and repudiate those same statements when faced with the facts and true sincerity. The editor of the Chillicothe Gazette, a guy named Mike Throne, told us that the other day he was at an Obama rally and he talked to a woman who had been a McCain - Palin supporter who told him that seeing Obama speak had called her vote into question, because she saw that he was truly a sincere person. People out here have something like a 6th sense for that when they meet you in person, and so far everyone has been incredibly nice to us (if not always necessarily cooperative in talking on camera). In any case we are hustling on, and I’m going to be out here for the rest of the month until I go back to Maryland to vote on November 4th, and then it’s out to France on November 12th; hopefully we will have a good amount of material to put a short documentary together so it’s more than just a series of random interviews. You can follow our progress at http://seanmattison.com/swingstatesmovie, which I’ll be updating as often as we have internet access (about every other day). Harry Mattison and Steamclam should be coming out tomorrow night, at which point we will probably head up to Cleveland and Youngstown to look for more stories.
The second order of business is that Blu seems to have taken the rap game and just run away with it completely. His new(ish) album (with Mainframe) that came out a little under a month ago is straight firreee. Could be one of my top 2 or 3 hip hop albums of 2008…
BLU & MAINFRAME - JOHNSON & JOHNSON (rapidshare)
