Still Here, by Being Stubborn, Not Mellow, New York Times, August 7

Fox on Pimp Culture: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,97519,00.html
Hip hop videos: sex exploitation on the set: http://www.vh1.com/shows/dyn/vh1_news_presents/96137/episode.jhtml

Still Here, by Being Stubborn, Not Mellow

Separately, they’re the rappers Pimp C, left, and Bun B; together they’re known as UGK.

By KELEFA SANNEH
Published: August 7, 2007
The New York Times

What do rappers lose when they get older? In the case of Bun B and Pimp C, two rappers in their 30s from Port Arthur, Tex., who perform together as UGK, the answer is, not much.

Lots has happened to them since they first got together, in the late 1980s. They helped put nearby Houston on the hip-hop map, and they helped inspire a generation of Southern hip-hop stars, from OutKast to Lil Wayne. They had a fluke hit when Jay-Z invited them to add verses to his song “Big Pimpin’,” in 1999. Then they had an even flukier miss, a couple of years later, when record-company disputes sabotaged “Dirty Money,” the 2001 album that should have been their breakthrough. Soon after the album’s release, Pimp C went to prison, where he served almost four years on charges stemming from an aggravated-assault conviction. Bun B lobbied tirelessly for his imprisoned partner, shouting, “Free Pimp C!” whenever he got near a microphone, which was often.

Through it all, they have put together a solid ­ sometimes brilliant ­ series of albums, guest appearances and mixtape tracks. Almost from the start, UGK was known for tough but smooth rhymes delivered over elegant, leisurely beats. Their lyrics chronicle a Texan underworld full of pimps who talk slick, pushers who talk tough, snitches who talk too much. They are, among other things, astute chroniclers of Southern poverty, but they’re not particularly interested in being good guys.

They prove that once more on their long-awaited new double album, “Underground Kingz” (Jive), which arrives in stores today. In a silky song called “Gravy,” Bun B waxes physiological: “When I put one up in your dome/You’ll be leakin’ out plasma and pus, and your mouth’ll fill up with foam.”

Somehow, these two have grown older and wiser without outgrowing their genre; you never get the feeling that they think they’re too good for this kind of thing. Other veterans succeed by rising above the fray, but these two succeed by remaining part of it.

In 1992, when UGK made a major-label debut with “Too Hard to Swallow,” a long career hardly seemed guaranteed. On the contrary, some listeners probably thought these two were just a couple of Texas knuckleheads cashing in on the so-called gangsta-rap fad. And yet gangsta rap, broadly speaking ­ streetwise protagonists, explicit lyrics, hard-boiled stories ­ turned out to be hip-hop’s future, to the consternation of gripers past and present. Southern gangsta rap, in particular. It’s now clear that Bun B and Pimp C were ahead of their time.

Not that it would have mattered if they hadn’t been so obsessed with craft. Pimp C is the group’s main producer, and he has created a brilliantly effective template: hard, loping drums; slow-motion bass lines; suave nods to 1970s soul.

He’s also a flamboyant rapper, equipped with a pinched, braying voice and a tendency to lean hard into vowels, bending them to his will. (He also has a reputation for obstreperousness; he recently had to apologize to the entire city of Atlanta for claiming that it wasn’t really part of the South.)

Meanwhile, Bun B is the diplomatic wordsmith, respected and even beloved by his peers. He is equally capable of an unexpected insight or a brute-force barrage of steady syllables, with shifting stress patterns and varied line lengths to keep listeners off balance.

True to UGK form, the new CDs didn’t have a smooth voyage from recording studio to record store. The first single, “The Game Belongs to Me,” never caught on at radio, which helps explain why the album’s release date kept being moved back.

The second single is a glorious confection called “Int’l Players Anthem,” with a couple of spectacular guest verses from the members of OutKast and a lush beat (sampling Willie Hutch) by Three 6 Mafia. It’s just about perfect, and unexpectedly romantic, but it’s probably too unhurried ­ too stubborn, you might say ­ to be a pop hit.

In fact, stubbornness is one of this duo’s greatest virtues. You can hear it all over “Underground Kingz,” a double-album that’s solid to a fault. There are guests ranging from the dirty-rap pioneer Too $hort to the British motormouth Dizzee Rascal; from Z-Ro, the moody Houstonite, to Talib Kweli, the levelheaded Brooklynite. But most of the tracks were produced by or with Pimp C, who hews closely to the formula he invented. Fans have been waiting five years for a new UGK album, and apparently now it’s time to overdose.

There is plenty of old-fashioned trash talking here. More than once, Bun B reminds listen ers that he and his partner have brash new nicknames: Big Dick Cheney and Tony Snow. Throughout these two CDs, kilos are sold, foes are threatened, cars are painted and repainted, prostitutes are put in their place.

But you can also hear a bracing kind of clarity, and maybe it’s the kind that comes with age. In “Still Ridin’ Dirty,” Bun B provides some grim context for the unapologetic rhymes elsewhere on the album:

“You live by the gun, you’ll die by the slugs, man/You live off of fiends, you’ll die behind drugs, man.” This is an acknowledgment, but it’s not a disavowal. And in “How Long Can It Last,” he scoffs at the idea that drug dealers are having fun: “They wish they lived in the ’burbs, wish they didn’t have to hang/out on corners in low-income housing projects and slang.”

Bun B and Pimp C are keenly attuned to the way these antiheroes make a virtue of necessity, the way a struggle to survive comes to seem like a swashbuckling adventure. Indeed, they are never more vehement than when they’re expounding on the aesthetics and ethics of street life. At one point, Bun B lists the group’s core values: honor, respect, valor and guts. (Actually, “guts” isn’t the word he uses, but it’s close enough.)

And in “Take tha Hood Back,” Bun B fulminates against would-be kingpins who are “really hustlin’ wrong” by associating with snitches, and he sounds like the exasperated elder he is when he huffs, “I’m teachin’ classes: Dope Slangin’ 101.” Kids today: they just don’t sell crack the way they used to.

Like all veterans, these two look back fondly on the world that made them. It’s nostalgia, but if anything, it’s nostalgia for a crueler world, not a gentler one. All these years later, their seeming nihilism seems more like integrity: a clear-eyed commitment to an old-fashioned ideal, despite its contradictions.

Surely this is part of the reason they have lasted so long, and aged so well. In their rhymes you can hear the irrational, irresistible process by which bad old days are transformed into good ones.

Thailand's child trafficking industry, July 7, 2007

By Thembi Mutch
BBC News, Thailand


A report from the US state department has criticised Thailand for not doing enough to combat the illegal trafficking of women and children from Burma, Cambodia, Laos and China. Thembi Mutch meets women and children who have been caught up in Thailand's trafficking business.


Many bar girls are sending money to their families back home

"I came with my aunt from the countryside to work in the seaside resort of Pattaya," Keng says. She pauses.

"I worked as a waiter in a bar near here. At first I didn't realise it was even possible for men to have sex with men, or boys, and at that time I still looked like a boy. I was only 16 and my family had various problems, so I was just working everything out."

Keng is 22, very slim, and now an incredibly beautiful woman.

The operation to change from a man to a woman took place last year. It cost her several thousand dollars, which she earned as a prostitute on the streets.

There is nothing about her that suggests she was ever male - her voice is soft and she is dainty and feminine. I find myself really liking her quiet dignity and gentle manner.


"I do other work," she says. "I go to Bangkok, to the Grand Plaza or to the station, and collect boys between the ages of 11 and 13. I bring them back here to the bar. I usually try and get 10 boys or so, but if there have been police raids in Bangkok it can be harder to find boys.

"When I approach them I have to be very careful. For the first few days they obey me - some of them haven't eaten properly for weeks - but we still lock them in the attic at the bar, partly so they won't escape, partly so that the police or rescue agencies can't find them."

Child trafficking

Keng is a trafficker - a trafficker of children, into prostitution, mostly for Western men.

She tells me how she hires a van and goes to the countryside if she cannot find children in the city.

Keng herself was trafficked, says my researcher, and she is just as much of a victim, he argues, as the children she traffics. She has no other job options open to her, and she is shunned publicly in shops, restaurants and bars outside the red light district where she works.

Keng points to a child sitting on the road across from us: "That one," she says, "is from Cambodia. He was living on the street in Bangkok."

Later we interview this boy, Suni, who is jittery and incredibly nervous, and constantly smokes. He says he is 10.

He describes having sex with various men in a detached and disturbing way. He is more animated talking about the money he earns to play computer games or buy speed to get him through the night.

"You know," Keng says, "he has got a much better life with me than he ever had at home or on the street."

Groomed for sex

Prey Vang Province is one of the poorest regions in Cambodia. It is easy to cross from there into Thailand so each year thousands of children are trafficked across the border, often by parents.

In Buddhist cultures the debt owed to parents by children is deeply imbued into families, especially in the countryside where the idea of destiny is wholeheartedly embraced

One mother there told me how, two years ago, she had travelled to Pnomh Penh with three of her children to beg on the streets. She is illiterate, owns no land and this was a last, desperate bid to survive.

On the second day in the city, her nine-year-old girl disappeared. She is convinced her daughter was kidnapped for sex work.

Three other mothers she knows in the village tell a similar story.

In another village, a group of girls aged between seven and 13 tell me their experiences. They are articulate and open.

Four of them had been kidnapped and groomed for sex work for a month. They had travelled to the city with their families to beg, but once there, had been coaxed by the offer of a meal into a house in a suburb. Then they were locked away and made to watch pornography. Two girls escaped, and the other two were rescued.

Buddhist culture

In Buddhist cultures the debt owed to parents by children is deeply imbued into families, especially in the countryside where the idea of destiny is wholeheartedly embraced.

But poverty and a desire not to confront difficult issues - especially those around sexuality, rape and prostitution - means that many issues just get swept under the carpet.

Sometimes it is just greed that makes parents turn a blind eye to what they are letting their own children in for. But mostly, say the experts, it is ignorance and a lack of opportunities.

Those who have already been trafficked know the dangers. I asked the girls in the village what their advice to other children might be to avoid being preyed on by traffickers.

The youngest replies: "It's really difficult if your mum asks you to get money to feed the family, you want to help. But it's best to go to school, and not to beg."

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday 7 July 2007 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.