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Love, That's America
"Love, That's America" is a song written by Melvin Van Peebles in 1970 for his film '' Watermelon Man''. He re-recorded it for his 1971 album ''As Serious as a Heart-Attack''. In 2011, the song became associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement due to being used on videos featuring footage from the movement. Song development The song was written by Van Peebles for his only Hollywood production, ''Watermelon Man''. Van Peebles wrote the soundtrack himself, in order to have creative control. The song is narrated from the point of view of someone walking around America, and seeing "people run through the streets, blood streaming from where they been beat", and declaring "naw, this ain't America, you can't fool me". In 1970, the song was released as a single, and mentioned as a top pick in ''Billboards Oct 31, 1970 issue. Video The first video featuring video from Occupy Wall Street (mostly involving police brutality) and the audio from the song was uploaded to YouTube on Octobe ...
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Melvin Van Peebles
Melvin Van Peebles (born Melvin Peebles; August 21, 1932 – September 21, 2021) was an American actor, filmmaker, writer, and composer. He worked as an active filmmaker into the 2000s. His feature film debut, '' The Story of a Three-Day Pass'' (1967), was based on his own French-language novel ' and was shot in France, as it was difficult for a black American director to get work at the time. The film won an award at the San Francisco International Film Festival which gained him the interest of Hollywood studios, leading to his American feature debut '' Watermelon Man'', in 1970. Eschewing further overtures from Hollywood, he used the successes he had so far to bankroll his work as an independent filmmaker. In 1971, he released his best-known work, creating and starring in the film '' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song'', considered one of the earliest and best-regarded examples of the blaxploitation genre. He followed this up with the musical, '' Don't Play Us Cheap'', based on ...
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Watermelon Man (film)
''Watermelon Man'' is a 1970 American comedy film directed by Melvin Van Peebles and starring Godfrey Cambridge, Estelle Parsons, Howard Caine, D'Urville Martin, Kay Kimberley, Mantan Moreland, and Erin Moran. Written by Herman Raucher, it tells the story of an extremely bigoted 1960s-era white insurance salesman named Jeff Gerber, who wakes up one morning to find that he has become black. The premise for the film was inspired by Franz Kafka's ''Metamorphosis'', and by John Howard Griffin's autobiographical ''Black Like Me''. Van Peebles' only studio film, ''Watermelon Man'' was a financial success, but Van Peebles did not accept Columbia Pictures' three-picture contract, instead developing the independent film ''Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song''. The music for ''Watermelon Man'', written and performed by Van Peebles, was released on a soundtrack album, which spawned the single "Love, That's America". Plot Jeff Gerber lives in an average suburban neighborhood with his seemingly ...
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As Serious As A Heart-Attack
''As Serious as a Heart-Attack'' is a 1971 spoken word album by Melvin Van Peebles. This is Van Peebles third studio record. The album's cover can be briefly glimpsed on the bathroom door in Van Peebles' 1973 film '' Don't Play Us Cheap''. Track listing All tracks composed by Melvin Van Peebles Countryside 1 #"Rufus & Ruby" #"Mothers Prayer" #"The Country Brother & The City Sister" #"Chippin" Cityside 2 #"Just Don't Make No Sense" #"Dearmistuh" #" Love, That's America" #"I Remember" #"My Pal Johnny" Personnel Musicians * Rhetta Hughes - guest vocalist on "Mother's Prayer" *Doug Carn - keyboards *John Boudreaux Jr. - drums * Tom Scott, Albert Hall, Jr. - horns *William Henderson - strings *Clydie King, Venetta Fields Venetta Lee Fields (born 1941) is an American-born singer, musical theater actress and vocal coach. She was a backing vocalist for American and British rock and pop acts of the 1960s and 1970s, including Ike & Tina Turner, Pink Floyd, Humble Pie, ..., Rhetta H ...
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Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a protest movement against economic inequality and the influence of money in politics that began in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district, in September 2011. It gave rise to the wider Occupy movement in the United States and other countries. The Canadian anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters initiated the call for a protest. The main issues raised by Occupy Wall Street were social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the undue influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector. The OWS slogan, "We are the 99%", refers to income and wealth inequality in the U.S. between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population. To achieve their goals, protesters acted on consensus-based decisions made in general assemblies which emphasized redress through direct action over the petitioning to authorities. The protesters were forced out of Zuccotti Park on November 15, 201 ...
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Billboard (magazine)
''Billboard'' (stylized as ''billboard'') is an American music and entertainment magazine published weekly by Penske Media Corporation. The magazine provides music charts, news, video, opinion, reviews, events, and style related to the music industry. Its music charts include the Hot 100, the 200, and the Global 200, tracking the most popular albums and songs in different genres of music. It also hosts events, owns a publishing firm, and operates several TV shows. ''Billboard'' was founded in 1894 by William Donaldson and James Hennegan as a trade publication for bill posters. Donaldson later acquired Hennegan's interest in 1900 for $500. In the early years of the 20th century, it covered the entertainment industry, such as circuses, fairs, and burlesque shows, and also created a mail service for travelling entertainers. ''Billboard'' began focusing more on the music industry as the jukebox, phonograph, and radio became commonplace. Many topics it covered were spun-off int ...
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Love Thats America Youtube
Love encompasses a range of strong and positive emotional and mental states, from the most sublime virtue or good habit, the deepest interpersonal affection, to the simplest pleasure. An example of this range of meanings is that the love of a mother differs from the love of a spouse, which differs from the love for food. Most commonly, love refers to a feeling of a strong attraction and emotional attachment.''Oxford Illustrated American Dictionary'' (1998) Love is considered to be both positive and negative, with its virtue representing human kindness, compassion, and affection, as "the unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another" and its vice representing human moral flaw, akin to vanity, selfishness, amour-propre, and egotism, as potentially leading people into a type of mania, obsessiveness or codependency. It may also describe compassionate and affectionate actions towards other humans, one's self, or animals.Fromm, Erich; ''The Art of Loving'', H ...
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Zebulon Cafe Concert
Zebulon Café Concert, also known as Zebulon, is a music venue, bar, and restaurant located in Los Angeles, California. Zebulon was originally located in Brooklyn, New York, where it operated as a combined café/bar and hosted live music until closing in December 2012. It was named as a critic's pick by ''New York'' magazine. More than four years after its original closure, Zebulon reopened in a new space in Los Angeles' Frogtown neighborhood in 2017. Owned by Guillaume Blestel and Joce and Jef Soubiran, Zebulon features nightly performances by local and international musicians and performers. Performances at the original Brooklyn location included Ravi Shankar and Melvin Van Peebles. Performances at the Los Angeles location have included artists such as Ty Segall, Kim Gordon, Blanck Mass, This Heat, Oh Sees, Black Midi Black MIDI is a music genre consisting of compositions that use MIDI files to create a song or a remix containing a large number of notes. People who make bla ...
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Brooklyn
Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. Kings County is the most populous Administrative divisions of New York (state)#County, county in the State of New York, and the County statistics of the United States#Most densely populated, second-most densely populated county in the United States, behind New York County (Manhattan). Brooklyn is also New York City's most populous borough,2010 Gazetteer for New York State
United States Census Bureau. Retrieved September 18, 2016.
with 2,736,074 residents in 2020. Named after the Dutch village of Breukelen, Brooklyn is located on the western portion of Long Island and shares a border with the borough of Queens. It has several bridge an ...
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Newsday
''Newsday'' is an American daily newspaper that primarily serves Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, although it is also sold throughout the New York metropolitan area. The slogan of the newspaper is "Newsday, Your Eye on LI", and formerly it was "Newsday, the Long Island Newspaper". The newspaper's headquarters is in Melville, New York, in Suffolk County. ''Newsday'' has won 19 Pulitzer Prizes and has been a finalist for 20 more. As of 2019, its weekday circulation of 250,000 was the 8th-highest in the United States, and the highest among suburban newspapers. By January 2014, ''Newsday''s total average circulation was 437,000 on weekdays, 434,000 on Saturdays and 495,000 on Sundays. As of June 2022, the paper had an average print circulation of 97,182. History Founded by Alicia Patterson and her husband, Harry Guggenheim, the publication was first produced on September 3, 1940 from Hempstead. For many years until a major redesign in the 1970s, ''Newsday'' co ...
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YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most visited website, after Google Search. YouTube has more than 2.5 billion monthly users who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos each day. , videos were being uploaded at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute. In October 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion. Google's ownership of YouTube expanded the site's business model, expanding from generating revenue from advertisements alone, to offering paid content such as movies and exclusive content produced by YouTube. It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subscription option for watching content without ads. YouTube also approved creators to participate in Google's AdSense program, which seeks to generate more revenue for both parties. ...
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Players' Club
The Players (often inaccurately called The Players Club) is a private social club founded in New York City by the noted 19th-century Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth. In 1888, Booth purchased an 1847 mansion at 16 Gramercy Park, reserved an upper floor for his residence, and turned the rest into a clubhouse. The building's interior and part of its exterior were designed by architect Stanford White; its entryway gaslights are among the few remaining examples in New York City. It is reportedly the oldest club in its original clubhouse and was named a National Historic Landmark in 1962. The Players serves as a social club but is also a repository of American and British theatre history, memorabilia, and theatrical artifacts. It has been reported to have the largest private collection of stage memorabilia, including costumes and weaponry, and owns portraits of its members, most notably a portrait of actor Joseph Jefferson painted by John Singer Sargent. A portrait of John Wilkes B ...
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