" O Criminal rapacious skies with bloody waves of pain. Dirty mountain travesty above the corpse strewn plain." Erasing heinous history with a brilliant plan to keep people stupid, join us as we listen and learn from Angelo Earl who enlightens about a deep history of Black music and exploitation.

A veteran of the recording industry, Producer of Soulstreet Records, you will shortly hear some of his work as performer of electric guitar on Al Green's "He Is The Light", Bobby Rush's "Southern Soul", the Bar-kays' "The Real Thing", He also contributed vocal work on Isaac Hayes' "Branded", and toured with both with the Jackson family and with the Funk Brothers.

Today he devotes some of his time to the Blues Hall of Fame Museum in Memphis opened in 2015 and run by the Blues Foundation. Well aware of how the Blues and even the history of Civil Rights have been commodified and mined for tourist dollars in the southern states, he conveys, "there is more to life than memorabilia," Together, we tackle the disturbing paradox, of reverence and museumification of Black music across the South, just at the same time Human Rights Watch denounces the state takeover and repeal of voting rights that has left Mississippi, the state with the highest black population in the US without any statewide political representation in 2026 as America celebrates 250 years of a revolution again the lack of representation in the British parliament.

(See: https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/18/black-voting-rights-in-mississippi)

Stay tuned to learn about:

• the hard core of the Blues,
• the "gladiator syndrome" that runs America
• first hand memory of learning about the assassination of Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Junior live on television.

Check out the great community and educational work of the Blues Foundation here: https://www.facebook.com/TheBluesFoundation/

"I wish they all could be Kabbalah Girls!" Miracle waters and mysterious red strings, scanning ancient texts instead of actually reading. One of the more curious tales of democratising mysticism is surely the move into Kabbalah by the reigning Girl queens of provocative glam and uninhibited sexuality: Madonna, Britney Spears and now at least somewhat Arianna Grande,. From the start they mixed in a dose of the naughty Catholic schoolgirl with classic 3rd wave feminism of girl power and deliberately pseudo adolescent girlie culture. Madonna took on the name Esther, donated reportedly up to $30 million dollars to the Kabbalah Center, specifically the K school and the program "spirituality for kids." She would introduce Brittney Spears who studied for a few years and had a Kabbalah themed wedding in 2004. Arianna Grande turned away from strict Catholic teaching on Homosexuality and embraced formulas for manifesting offered by the Kabbalah Center even crediting it for her success.

Come learn about Kabbalah basics, what are the Sefirot? What is this Jewish version of divine incarnation, and the controversy over how old it actually is and when it started.

It would come as a surprise if not a shock to middle aged rabbis who kept the secrets carefully guarded for centuries, so much ash that Kabbalah became the very prototype for hidden mystical traditions inside major world religions.The attraction of female pop stars makes perfect sense for the mystical map of the Sefirot or spheres reveal the emanations of the divine into the earthly sphere beginning with the earthly female, moving into and onto even the sexual members themselves both female then male. This is quite the alternative model of the made human of the divine than that offered by Catholicism's notion of of original sin, in other words . unavoidable condition of inherited guilt transmitted specifically by sex became a foundational doctrine of the Catholic Church. So here we have another compelling case of mysticism making musical innovation combined with the cultural politics of 3rd wave feminism.

Please stay tuned at the end for an intro and more background on this podcast, "Music and Global Politics".

In addition to Madonna's "Isaac" from her "Confessions on a Dance Floor," album, check out her video for "Die Another Day."

For Kabbalah Center reading check out Yehuda Berg's "72 Names of God," for a more scholarly approach look up Gershom Scholem's "On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism."

"I recommend you find you a gun, it's too late it's already begun....your neighbours hate you and always did, all this time chomping at the bit." Chilling and arresting lyrics from the Americana raconteur, punk-bluegrass veteran and self-described "Jew from Oklahoma, Mark Rubin. Loudly sounding the warning bells of fascist return, Rubin mines deep into the Americana underbelly of prejudice and mayhem but also the fount of musical wisdom found in folk. A former roadie for the Flaming Lips, he was a co-founder of the classic Americana band "Bad Livers" who pioneered alternative bluegrass in the late 1980s. A master of tuba and the string bass, he hosted radio in Austin, and produced music for Richard Linklater. HIs most recent work out of New Orleans, finds him mining radical Yiddish traditions of resistance poetry and partisan activity on his two most recent releases: 2021's "Triumph of Assimilation," and 2025's "Dispatches from a World Gone Mad." Strangely enough, he mines the Southern Jewish experience to make sense of MAGA today. He is drawing upon the work of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience opened in 2021 in New Orleans where he contributes in a supervisory role. Perhaps this unique minority perspective of this group gave them something of a head start in facing that not so subtle climate of intimidation, southern gothic horror of terror wrapped in the homespun. It is in the South where we find a next chapter of the Anglo tradition of the iron first inside the soft velvet glove, whose ways could not prevent the greatest flowering of musical genres in the modern world. We discuss it all directly from New Orleans Congo Square, a musically sacred patch of ground where drumming from the Kongo met stringed melodies from Senegambia which over time led to jazz, blues and rock and roll. Happy listening ahead.

Please check out Mark's website and band camp below, where you can find a string of his latest single releases:

https://www.jewofoklahoma.com

https://jewofoklahoma.bandcamp.com/