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Hip-Hop Canada - Interview with Rodrigo Bascunan by Lola Plaku
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By Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce
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Enter the Babylon System, by Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce, is a Canadian look at gun culture as it affects our world, in this generation.
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Bascunan and Pearce have used their industry credentials to gain access to some of the major players in the multi-billion-dollar hip-hop industry and in the multi-billion-dollar gun industry.
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Interview with Rodrigo Bascunan by Lola Plaku
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So Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce use these 360 pages of hard evidence and facts, to create awareness about the problems of gun violence as a result of stronger societal issues.
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Editor's note: To find out more about Enter The Babylon System: Unpacking Gun Culture from Samuel Colt to 50 Cent, you can visit www.enterthebabylonsystem.com and make sure you pick up a copy at a local bookstore to support Rodrigo and Chris's work.
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Bascunan and Pearce's top five positive hip hop records:
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By Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce
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"Our society still sees violence as a means to solve problems," Bascunan says in an interview.Violent media are "really just a reflection of our cultural values."
Where Bascunan and Pearce hit their stride, unsurprisingly, is in their examination of the increasingly nihilistic messages of mainstream hip hop.
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It's a stance many rappers in the book cling to - and one that Bascunan and Pearce quickly grew weary of.
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"Most of the artists are really aware of what they're doing, but I think a lot of them simply don't care that they're doing it," Bascunan says.
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Bascunan and Pearce keep up a frenetic pace in their journalistic-style book, tossing in quotes from rap songs, charts, drawings and sidebars.
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By Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce
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Toronto-based Rodrigo Bascunan and Vancouver's Christian Pearce run the hip-hop magazine Pound.
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Bascunan and Pearce also delve into the role of guns in the North American political landscape, though not with the level of humour used in Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine.
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Though their book concentrates on the U.S., Bascunan and Pearce don't let us forget that Canada is immersed in gun culture too, with one in four homes reportedly having a firearm.
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Pound Magazine founders Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce changed the way Toronto read and collected magazines.
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From Hip-Hop heads to political junkies, Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce strive to provide the means to comprehend a seemingly impenetrable system.
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By Rodrigo Bascunan & Christian Pearce (Random House)
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For journalists Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce, Howard is an apt entry point into a broader debate into rap culture, in particular its growing obsession with guns.
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"(50 Cent is) pimping gun fantasies, but so are … The Punisher, Gun World, Mr. And Mrs. Smith, Mail Call and (video game) 25 To Life," Bascunan and Pearce write.
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As ugly as gun-glorifying gangsta rap is, Bascunan and Pearce submit it's also symptomatic of global gun disease.
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When pressed for an interview and a tour of their facility, the company's president not only warn of legal action for their "inexorable interest," Bascunan and Pearce were lectured on the Second Amendment in the U.S. Constitution.
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"Poverty is the biggest factor in gang violence, but when they promote violence and desensitize people to real suffering, video games, movies and rap music change how society perceives and responds to the problem," Bascunan and Pearce write.
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BY RODRIGO BASCUNAN and CHRISTIAN PEARCE
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The authors, Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce, ought to know: They publish a magazine, Pound, devoted to this subculture.
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The dynamic duo of Bascunan and Pearce have this to say: "Rap music may have picked up the torch of gun glorification in America, but that flame has been burning since before William F. Cody began mythologizing frontier life …. Whatever blame is due some emcees for gun violence, at least as much is due outside of hip-hop…"
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Bascunan and Pearce go on to name more of the primary culprits: gun manufacturers, governments, corporate media.
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Rodrigo Bascunan is the publisher of Pound and lives in Toronto; Christian Pearce is the magazine's editor and a Vancouver law student.
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There are large profits to be made in the drug industry, but Bascunan and Pearce appear not to understand the full implications of this.
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Bascunan and Pearce claim that gun companies don't take proper precautions against theft, but in making that argument they rely on newspaper articles and unsubstantiated claims by anti-gun propagandists.
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Bascunan and Pearce contradict their rant against gun companies when, early on, they make a curious admission: "Few would deny that rap music plays a role in the problem with guns - especially not us."
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"We definitely debated it," said Bascunan, 30, of the provocative cover.
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"When we started the book, we felt a bit of backlash from the hip-hop community: `Here goes someone else exploiting rap music and perpetuating the worst stereotypes about it,'" acknowledged Bascunan."That's not at all what this book's about.
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This speaks to a larger societal problem in which violence and sex sell well, said Bascunan.
"That's not a hip-hop problem," he declared.
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Enter the Babylon System, written by Pound Magazine co-founders Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce, hit the book shelves this week, and is sure to make an impact just like the subjects it covers.
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Rodrigo Bascunan, Christian Pearce; $29.95 cloth 978-0-679-31388-5, 368 pp., 6 x 9¼ , Random House Canada , Jan.
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Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce, co-founders of the hip-hop music and culture magazine Pound, do their best in this new book to bring the debate back.
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Hip-hop music is a major player in the tragedy, too, and Bascunan and Pearce don't shy away from this.
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Best of all, Bascunan and Pearce seem to really have the inside story on gun culture, particularly in hip-hop.
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Enter the Babylon System by Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce isn't the easiest read, particularly for those not immersed in hip hop.
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Rodrigo Bascunan - a co-owner of the foremost Canadian hip hop magazine, Pound - is not one to argue with the social scientists.While writing a fascinating new book with co-author Christian Pearce - Enter The Babylon System: Unpacking Gun Culture From Samuel Colt to 50 Cent - Bascunan heard the same excuses, repeatedly, from record company executives; and from hip hop artists themselves.
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"When it served them, they would say that they were role models, and that they have positive influence," says Bascunan, who lives in Toronto, and resembles a rap artist himself.
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Bascunan opposes that, pointing out that censorship will simply make violent hip hop seem more like an outlaw culture and therefore more attractive to the white suburban males who listen to it the most.
The issue became somewhat more than hypothetical in Toronto this week, when local rapper Alias Donmillion pleaded guilty to three firearms charges and was sentenced to more than two years' imprisonment.Alias - with a new album, a new single and a new video in rotation on Much Music - pleaded guilty to firing a .380 calibre semi-automatic handgun on a downtown street.When caught by police, he had the gun, spent shell casings and almost 11 grams of crack.It was, he told a reporter over a phone line at the Don Jail, a "dumb" thing to do.
Of that there is no doubt.But when Donmillion gets out of jail and heads to the studio to record his next album, will he confess his dumbness and decry drug-and-gun gangsta culture?Or will he bask in his real-life criminal bona fides and turn his incarceration into a NWA style gangland epic?
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The first time Rodrigo Bascunan saw a real gun he was 6 years old.It was shown to him by his friend's dad who had been in the military.
"He was sort of a gun enthusiast," remembers Bascunan.
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For their book, Bascunan and Pearce decided to focus on gun violence because they felt it played a prominent role in the hip-hop community.
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"The hip-hop community had already lost a lot of rappers to gun violence," Bascunan says."We interviewed over 100 rappers for this book and talked to them about the role guns play in their lives.Not a single rapper we spoke to didn't have a story about being shot, seeing someone get shot or shooting someone themselves."
Bascunan found some of the rappers' attitudes around gun violence a little troubling.
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