The reporter with a sympathetic ear for the underdog is nothing new but it has, more or less, disappeared from broadcast screens. In the pursuit of reality TV, terrestrial channels have, Dixon argues, lost sight of reality.
Dixon's films are raw and the voices can be repetitive, yet you sense even from an old media perspective you would not want to censor them, either.
To the creative youth of Seattle, fans of Soul Gorilla's output, mainstream America’s ignorance of regional and urban aspirations, particularly black aspirations, is the pain that fuels their desire to populate Mixcast with characters from the Seattle and DC story lines.
While the drive behind Mixcast comes from that alienation it is nonetheless a creative force and also an entrepreneurial one.
The unheard but creative youth of America’s big cities see an opportunity to make their futures financially and artistically by networking the urban underground across the globe.
These are the dispossessed only in the sense that they did not, until now, possess a medium for communicating outside their immediate environment. Many though are already successful creatives and their means of communication is now at their door.
Gradually, as such marginalised voices aggregate into forceful cultural movements with a means of expression at their disposal, it will become necessary to re-evaluate our own cultural habits.
It may be the lasting impact of the web’s singular capacity to give expression to different value systems, that those of us who wish to can already escape our attention-deficit present and go to places like the DC abandominium.
As movies, the documentaries on Mixcast may not have the flair of a Michael Moore but then, they're all the better for that.
Article comments