Michael Watts

Michael J. Watts (born England, 1951) was "Class of 1963" Professor of Geography and Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a leading critical intellectual figure of the academic left.

Background

Raised between Bath and Bristol in the UK, Watts received his bachelor's degree in Geography University College London in 1972 and his PhD in 1979 from the University of Michigan. His PhD work was on agrarian change and politics in Northern Nigeria, published as Silent Violence in 1983. He joined the faculty of the Geography Department at UC Berkeley in 1979, and served from 1994 to 2004 as Director of the Institute of International Studies, a program that promotes cross-disciplinary global and transnational research and training. He has supervised 75 PhD students and post-docs.

Watts was named a 2003 Guggenheim fellow for his research on oil politics in Nigeria, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2004), and the Smuts Lecturer at Cambridge University in 2007. In 2004 he was awarded the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.

Michael Watts (journalist)

Michael Watts (born 18 October 1938) is a British journalist and broadcaster best known for his ‘Inspector Watts’ column in the Sunday Express and other publications, which ran for over 35 years.

Journalism career

Watts, born in Nottinghamshire and educated at Nottingham High School, began in journalism at age 16 as a reporter on the Nottingham Evening News. After four years there, he became London editor of The Viewer television magazine for a year, before joining the Sunday Express in 1960. There, he was variously gossip column editor, deputy news editor, and deputy editor in Manchester, and started the paper's Town Talk diary.

In 1969 he began The World of Michael Watts, a consumer column laced with social comment and humour. This concluded with the Great Corny Joke Contest, offering a cash prize of a "Crisp Oncer" - at £1 "the meanest prize in Fleet Street", and one which became relatively meaner as the years passed. In the 1980s, as the pound coin was replacing the pound note, Watts bought several hundreds of the latter from a bank so that the Crisp Oncer prize could continue. In carrying out investigations and taking up readers' battles with companies and bureaucracy, Michael Watts became known as "Inspector Watts" - and the column continued for 22 years, until he left the Sunday Express.

Swishahouse

Swishahouse is a Houston, Texas-based independent southern rap record label.

History

Swishahouse was founded in North Houston in the late 1990s by Michael '5000' Watts (Co-CEO) and OG Ron C as a response to the popularity of chopped and screwed music from Houston's south side. The label began by distributing mixtape series such as Before da Kappa, After da Kappa, Choppin Em Up and Fuck Action (which featured chopped and screwed versions of R&B songs). Acres Homes/Northside/Homestead are where many of the current/former artists hail.

A song that originally appeared on the compilation album The Day Hell Broke Loose 2, Mike Jones' "Still Tippin'", achieved mainstream success in 2004, leading to Swishahouse signing a national distribution deal with Asylum Records. Jones released his major label debut, Who Is Mike Jones?, on Swishahouse/Warner Bros. in April 2005; the album was certified platinum that June.

Aftermath A&R Angelo Sanders said that the great advantage to independents like Swishahouse is that, "They're able to get their product out on the streets to specific regions at a greater speed than a major ... They're able to flood that whole Texas market with a product before the majors are able to notice what is going on out there."