Virginia Film Festival

Join the VAFF for a conversation around the new documentary Beastie Boys Story with a conversation with 9 Pillars HipHop Cultural Fest Director, Cullen Wade,  Assistant Professor of Hip Hop and the Global South, A.D. Carson (UVA), and  Assistant Professor of American Studies and Media Studies and the pop critic for Slate magazine, Jack Hamilton (UVA).

This event is part of the Virginia Film Festival’s new Beyond the Screen: A Virtual Conversation Series.  All discussions in the series will be free, open to the public, livestreamed on Zoom, and archived on the VAFF’s YouTube channel. Pre-registration is required to attend the livestreamed Zoom conversations. Related films are available to rent or purchase through various streaming platforms prior to the scheduled discussion. For more information on how to pre-register for each virtual conversation and where to stream each film, visit virginiafilmfestival.org/year-round-events.

More about the participants:

JACK HAMILTON – UVA Assistant Professor of American Studies and Media Studies, Pop Critic for Slate: Dr. Hamilton joined the Media Studies faculty in the Fall of 2014 and has a joint appointment with the American Studies program. He is a cultural historian who studies sound, media, and popular culture, and his other areas of interest include film, sports, television, and journalism. His first book, Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Harvard UP, 2016), focused on the transatlantic interplay of popular music and racial thought during the 1960s, and explores how rock and roll music moved from an interracial form to being widely understood as a “white” one by the end of the decade. Since its publication Just around Midnight has received Honorable Mention for the Woody Guthrie Award (Outstanding Book) from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, won a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Award, and been chosen as one of the three best non-fiction books of 2016 by Splice Magazine. In 2017 PopMatters named Just around Midnight one of the “10 Conversation-Shifting Books about Music” of the past ten years. Dr. Hamilton is currently working on a book about music and technology since the 1960s. Since 2013 he has also been the pop critic for Slate magazine where he writes about music, sports, and other areas of culture, and in 2016 he hosted the Slate podcast series “Pop, Race, and the ‘60s”. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NPR, ESPN, Transition, L.A. Review of Books, and many other venues. Prior to arriving at UVA he received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, and was the inaugural postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Colorado – Boulder’s Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture.

A.D. CARSON – UVA Assistant Professor of Hip Hop and the Global South:  A.D. Carson is a performance artist and educator from Decatur, Illinois. He received his Ph.D. in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design at Clemson University doing work that focuses on race, literature, history, and rhetorical performances. A 2016 recipient of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for Excellence in Service at Clemson, Carson worked with students, staff, faculty, and community members to raise awareness of historic, entrenched racism at the university through his See the Stripes campaign, which takes its name from his 2014 poem. His dissertation, “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions,” is a digital archive that features a 34 track rap album and was recognized by the Graduate Student Government as the 2017 Outstanding Dissertation. Carson is an award-winning artist with essays, music, and poetry published at a variety of diverse venues such as The Guardian, Quiddity International Literary Journal and Public-Radio Program, and Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, among others. His essay “Trimalchio from Chicago: Flashing Lights and the Great Kanye in West Egg” appears in The Cultural Impact of Kanye West (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and “Oedipus—Not So Complex: A Blueprint for Literary Education” is in Jay-Z: Essays on Hip Hop’s Philosopher King (McFarland & Co., 2011). Carson has written a novel, COLD, which hybridizes poetry, rap lyrics, and prose, and The City: [un]poems, thoughts, rhymes & miscellany, a collection of poems, short stories, and essays. Carson is currently assistant professor in Hip-Hop and the Global South at the University of Virginia.

CULLEN WADE – Director of 9 Pillars HipHop Cultural Festival: Cullen Wade is an educator, rapper, promoter and writer based in Charlottesville, VA. He is the co-founder and director of the Nine Pillars Hiphop Cultural Fest, cohost of the Arts & Crass Film Podcast, and teaches audio and video production at Monticello High School.

More about the film: 

Beastie Boys’ Mike Diamond and Adam Horovitz tell you an intimate, personal story of their band and 40 years of friendship in this live documentary experience, directed by their longtime friend and collaborator, and their former grandfather, filmmaker Spike Jonze. Beastie Boys Story premiered on the heels of the 26th anniversary of the release of Beastie Boys’ No. 1 charting 1994 album, Ill Communication. The film reunites Diamond and Horovitz with Jonze over 25 years after he directed their music video for the album’s immortal hit single, Sabotage.

Available to stream on Apple TV+: https://apple.co/3cWa5Ih