tmottgogo mag - july 2014

TMOTTGoGo Magazine | July 2014 |

JULY 2014

4 REASONS NO ONE IS WATCHING YOUR VIDEOS

MARC CARY

UNLOCKING THE TRUTH

MARION BARRY

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Sometimes, an artist uploads a video on his YouTube channel of him playing an acoustic ver-sion of one of his songs. That channel has two subscribers, the artist has 300 Likes on Face-book, and barely 100 Twitter followers. The artist then wonders why his video didn’t “go viral.” This artist has failed to generate enough interest in the original recording of the song or create a loyal following. There-fore, it makes no sense to upload a rare version of a song, when it’s your fans that are rare.

If before you made your video, you said, “Let’s make a viral vid-eo,” then you’re doomed from the very start. Look up “viral” in a dictionary and you will realize your mistake. Focus on creating consistent content on which your audience can rely. Trust your audience to be of basic human

nature and want to share great videos they find. Create content with the purpose of increasing the watch time on your channel. By focusing on your channel’s watch time, consistency and quality of content, the views will naturally follow.

1. You Don’t Have Fans:

2. You Make“Viral” Videos:

4 Reasons Why No One Is Watching Your Videos


Use the annotations feature wisely and program your chan-nel. Anything else is annoying. This means don’t have “BUY MY ALBUM NOW!” covering important parts of your music video or your face when you’re talking/singing. Look to the best YouTube channels in your genre for programming guidance. For

example, renowned met-al label Nuclear Blast Records has one of the best-programmed chan-nels with episodes, se-ries and more. It respects its audience by giving them compelling things they want to see.

You may have great content, but if you leave the description blank and don’t have a relevant title or tags, you’re making it enormously difficult

for people who actually want to watch your videos to discover them. YouTube has an entire playbook on how to optimize your videos and channel, from metadata to thumbnails. Take a few minutes to read through it – you’ll be glad you did.

3. You’reAnnoying:

4. You Don’t Optimize YourVideos:

4 Reasons Why No One Is Watching Your Videos


Marc Cary came up playing in go-go bands in DC during the 1980s, when he was a founding member of the Hi Integrity Band. He played alongside leading lights of the city, people like Iceberg Slim and Meshell Ndegeocel-lo. Meanwhile, he showed amazing amounts of natural talent early on, and a number of the city’s jazz musicians took him under their wing. When Dizzy Gillespie heard a teenage Cary play in the Blues Alley youth band one day, he told the kid he should move to New York.

The youngster eventually took the trumpet legend’s advice, leaving UDC in 1990 to chase a career in New York. He soon fell in with jazz icons Arthur Taylor and Betty Carter and Abbey

Lincoln, and he toured and recorded

with young lions like Roy Hargrove. He spent 12 years in Abbey Lincoln’s band, all the while producing beats and records for major hip-hop artists such as Q-Tip out of his Harlem apartment. In 1999, Cary became the first person to win BET’s “Best New Artist” award—he was celebrated as a master jazz pi-anist who also could blend the pocket of go-go and the folk music of places like India and Mali. His album that year, Rhodes Ahead, Vol. 1, was an ahead-of-its-time mashup of go-go, house mu-sic, jazz and much more.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Marc’s first CD as a leader, and the 15th anniversary of Rhodes Ahead. In the intervening time he’s developed an international reputation and won prizes on both sides of the Atlantic (his latest album was “Album of the Year” accord-ing to Paris’s jazz radio station, for ex-ample). He returns to his hometown of DC this week to play three concerts—the culmination of those three nights is on Friday, when he reunites his Rhodes Ahead band for a special outdoor show just off U Street, at the lot at 945 Flor-ida Ave. NW. Expect Iceberg Slim, D. Floyd and other go-go luminaries who are close to Marc to be in attendance.

Marc C

ary


Brooklyn heavy metal band Unlocking The Truth has signed a 1.7 million dol-lar record contract with Sony.

The band, comprised of three 8th grad-ers, first made waves in Times Square and their performances quickly went viral.

The band, made up of guitarist Malcolm Brickhouse, 13, bassist Alec Atkins, 13, and drummer Jarad Dawkins, 12, was founded in 2007 and has been riding the lightning to metal fame thanks to a steady run of heavy-beyond-their-years busking in Times Square and Washing-ton Square Park . Now the Daily News reports that the boys have finalized a deal with Sony that could net them as much as $1.7 million over a possible 6 albums.

“What started out as play dates went to Times Square and now this. It’s been one great thing after another,” Daw-

kins’s mother, Tabatha, told the News. The boys competed in the Apollo Theater’s amateur night (under the name Tears of Blood, no less) and have unleashed their middle-school riffage at venues like Webster Hall and the Coachella music festival. Unlocking the Truth is currently tour-ing the country as a part of the Vans Warped Tour and recently took time off from pre-algebra class to open for Gun N Roses in Las Vegas.

Unlocking Th

e Truth


Thought You Knew Marion Barry’s Story?Now Hear Him Tell It

In his new book, Mayor for Life: The Incredible Story of Marion Barry Jr., Barry details his fall into cocaine and what the drugs cost him, plus the leg-acy he wishes he had.

By: Stephen A. Crockett Jr.

It’s the 1980s and cocaine is being sucked up the nostrils of some of the world’s elite. Mayor Marion Barry is at an exclusive party in the nation’s cap-ital on 11th Street Northwest.

A woman has been hitting the bath-room all night, so he figures she is bumping coke. He has been to par-

ties before and seen this scene unfold, these types of trips to the bathroom, the insistent sniffing afterward. He knows that if cocaine is here, he shouldn’t be. But two things are working well this night: The woman is dope and he has been drinking.

She hits the bathroom and toots up, then walks out and turns to him. “That’s some good s--t. You want some?” she asks him. “This makes my p--sy hot.”

That is how D.C. lost its second black mayor.

The pretty, unnamed woman with the


addiction would pass Marion Barry a business card with coke at the tip. Caught inside a Hennessy-and-cola-in-duced pretty-woman-sex-driven-I-run-this-city haze, he took a hit.

That is how the habit started, and for years he would chase that high that made him feel like he had “ejaculated,” until it led him to the Vista Hotel, the FBI and his infamous line “The bitch set me up.”

The sting and the spectacularly vivid public downfall of the mayor smoking crack went viral without the Internet. It appeared on newspapers, magazines and T-shirts alike. Thanks to the recent crack-smoking antics of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, Barry’s story has gained a second life. The sordid tale of that night

at a hotel, with the woman and the crack pipe, has become the story that Marion Barry has been trying to rewrite ever since his arrest.

Barry hopes his new book, Mayor for Life: The Incredible Story of Marion Barry Jr., will help set the record straight on what he considers a publicly embar-rassing moment in a lifetime of struggle by a righteous man who makes no apol-ogies for his indignant crusade fighting injustices against black people.

“Hundreds of interviews, hundreds of stories, hundreds of photographs, have been done about Marion Barry,” he told The Root. “They all deal with the ‘what’ of Marion Barry, but none of those arti-cles deal with the ‘who’ Marion Barry re-ally is. So I decided to put it down in my own words, the ‘who.’ That I was born poor and black in the Delta of Mississip-pi to parents who were sharecroppers who made three to four thousand dol-lars a year before my mother said, ‘I’m tired of that.’ “

“I’m Tired of That”

That could have been the name of Bar-ry’s book, which was just released.

It has been 24 years since the night in 1990 when Barry walked into the Vista to meet Hazel Diane “Rasheeda” Moore and walked out in handcuffs. Twen-ty-four years since he put that pipe to his lips and inhaled. Twenty-four years since the former mayor-turned-Ward 8 councilman has had to talk about what that meant to him and the city. And for that, Barry says he has made amends: “I have apologized to the city. I have apologized to the nation. I apologized to my son Chris. We are a nation of sec-ond chances.”

Barry’s list of second chances started long before his post-Vista rehabilita-


tion crusade. In March 1977, during his second term as a councilman-at-large, Barry was on his way to his coun-cil chamber offices. A security guard warned that something was going on on the fifth floor and that Barry needed to be careful.

As soon as Barry stepped off the eleva-tor, he was shot. A group of Hanafi Mus-lims had taken some 13 hostages in the district building. They were angry about what they felt was mistreatment by the government. Barry just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The media made him out as a hero.

“I remember one of the news reporters saying, ‘That’s a crazy way to get elect-ed mayor,’ “ he writes. “I wasn’t even thinking about becoming mayor at that moment; I was only thinking about be-ing alive.”

It was a tragic moment that, with the media’s help, built a mystique around the already enigmatic Barry, who at the time was known for his brash ways, Afro, dashiki and ability to speak both the language of the government and the language of his people.

What most people didn’t know was that under that dashiki for a short period of time, Barry sometimes carried a gun.

Mayor for Life

MarionBarryKen Cummins, a Washing-ton City Paper Loose Lips columnist, created the “mayor for life” moniker, and it was never meant to be a good thing.

“I didn’t intend for it to be positive,” Cummins told the Washington Post. “It was meant to be satirical—not flatter-ing. It was a spoof, basically saying that we would never get rid of this guy ... in another world or another culture, he’d

be dictator.

But the name stuck, and there is a truth to the title. Barry is still sought out for political endorsements; there are sev-eral ‘80s babies who were saved from the streets through his Mayor Summer Youth Employment programs (I am one of them). There is a reason the eco-nomically disadvantaged in Ward 8 still consider him a hero, because Barry is loved—and not despite his misdeeds, but because of them.

His failings as a husband and as a per-son made him closer to them than any policy ever could. He wasn’t too big not to fall into the trap of drugs in a city crip-pled by drugs. Even his response, “G--damn, the bitch set me up,” somehow made him more man, less politician. Someone they could relate to.

There are two truths that should be pointed out here. The first is that black people overwhelmingly believe that law-enforcement institutions aren’t above corruption, and the second is that this doesn’t mean Marion Barry was not at fault.

Barry believes that the FBI not only set him up but also wanted to kill him. He claims that he was too powerful a mov-ing force in the black community, and that as such, the FBI was not going to stop until he was dead.

“That was the first time in history where they allowed someone to inhale a sub-stance,” he writes. “Usually they would barge in before you inhaled. So they wanted me to overdose on some potent stuff. And they pushed it on me. You can see it on the tape.”

But Barry admits he shouldn’t have been there that night, in that room with Rasheeda Moore, who was work-


ing with the FBI to bring Barry to the hotel. Bar-ry claims that he would find out later that the FBI even babysat her kids while she was participat-ing in the sting.

Mary and Barry

Growing up hearing his name called in a rap-id-fire D.C. slang, I al-ways thought folks were referencing two people: “Mary and Barry” is how he was known to me until one day I saw his name spelled on the news. It never hit me that this fig-ure, this polarizing icon of D.C. history, was all one man.

It is still shocking that at 78 years old, Barry is just as char-ismatic, charming and confident as he ever was. He is part preacher and part pimp. He is compassionate in his story-telling of how his mother sent him out to get switches for lying, and endearing when he mentions his son Chris’ recent 34th birthday. He is touching when he notes that God saved him that day in ‘77 when the bullet was inches from his heart, and most compelling when he writes about his childhood in the Mis-sissippi Delta.

He is convincing when he mentions that he wants his book to be educational and that it’s a triumph of spirit, and you can see the pulpit form around him as he says, “If you are knocked down, look up; and if you look up, you can get up; and if you can get up, you can go up.”

But there is a disingenuous feel to parts of his story, a mashup of truths that don’t seem feasible.

While he states clearly that he was ful-ly aware of cocaine in the ‘80s, he is floored when he arrives at the Vista, al-most dumbfounded to see that there is crack (crack!).

He dismisses his first marriage to Blanche Evans in a sentence, and makes his marriage to Effi sound like a sitcom: he as the befuddled mayor who can’t seem to keep it in his pants, and she as the strong black woman made of understandings and hymnals.

He will claim that the media was hunt-ing him down, even creating situations that had him cheating on his wife, and then note that he “ ... got involved with women who sometimes were not good for me.” and justify this by explaining that, “ ... as a man, you get involved with women anyway because you still have human needs: emotional, physi-cal, spiritual, intellectual.”


But that is the Mary to his Barry that comes with the show. Somewhere in the words and the wisdom of it all, you find yourself 15 bucks lighter than when the conversation started, but content that you got what you paid for. That is magic of Marion Barry. He is a master politician even when he isn’t running for office.

“I don’t want my life and legacy to be about what happened to me at the Vista hotel,” he writes. “That is why it was so important to write this book. I want peo-ple to know all the details of my life and the battles I’ve won for so many thou-sands of poor, underrepresented and left-out black folks in America.”

The book will have a life of its own. People will have their opinions about the man and his legacy, but Barry would like a few words, his words, to be writ-ten on his tombstone when that day comes.

“That I cared deeply,” he said, “and that I shared the gift that God gave me.”

Stephen A. Crockett Jr. is associate ed-itor of news at The Root. Follow him on Twitter.

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