Recent Events
The band continues to operate on a national level, coordinating between distant members and working with activists and organizations across the country including having a track featured on the May 2012 release of “Occupy This Album”, a benefit album for the Occupy Movement featuring 99 tracks for the 99%. Junkyard Empire’s “Rebellion Politik” title track is featured alongside notable artists such as Tom Morello, of Rage Against the Machine, Anti-Flag, Willie Nelson, Jackson Brown, Ani DiFranco among others.
Junkyard Empire was also featured in a chapter of the (2012) book Hip-Hop(e): The Cultural Practice and Critical Pedagogy of International Hip-Hop, edited by Brad Porfilio and Michael Viola. The chapter, “Rebellion Politik: A Tale of Critical Resistance Through Hip-Hop from St. Paul to Havana” was authored by Brian Lozenski and discusses the theoretical development of Rebellion Politik, which has become the band’s operating strategy. Junkyard Empire’s experience as a U.S. hip-hop band touring Cuba with a message of political dissent is also covered in the chapter.
Currently, Brian Lozenski is finishing his Ph.D at the University of Minnesota, while Christopher Cox is completing his MSc in Political Science, focusing on Radical Political Economy and Comparative Politics at Portland State University. Bryan Berry still lives in Brooklyn and is working as a Linux open-source developer for Liquid Galaxy. Graham O’Brien has opened his own music studio, The Bellows in Saint Paul, MN and continues to do world class production work while playing drums with the rootsy rock hip-hop trio No Bird Sing. Bassist Steve Hogan also works as a recording engineer and plays bass in numerous projects.
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Famous quotes containing the word events:
“The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one’s way to where the country is.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire—thinner than the paper on which it is printed—then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)