Esther Iverem on Pride

"The environment created for the story is 70’s funk, that unmistakable combination of afros, sweat and vintage tunes (The O’Jay’s, The Brothers Johnson, etc.) that take us back to an era when recently won legal equality bumped hard against entrenched social inequality. Terrance Howard is excellent in his depiction of a man negotiating his way through these times and allowing his creativity, vision and spontaneity to change lives."

Read More...

All the Buffalo Girls...

Does Hip-Hop Hate Women?:
Noted Rap Artists and Activists Examine New Gender Politics

In 2005, Rap Sessions, a touring panel of noted rap artists and activists launched its first national tour of town hall-style meetings in 15 cities across the country, engaging communities and campuses in dialogues related to hip-hop art and issues.

On Wednesday, March 28th, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. , the Buffalo State College School of Education Office of the Dean, will host a Rap Sessions panel that addresses the topic "Does Hip-Hop hate Women?" The event, from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. in Bulger Communications Center North, is free and open to all. Panelists include:

* Bakari Kitwana-author of "The Hip-Hop Generation," and "Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop."

* Joan Morgan-author of "When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist."

* Mark Anthony Neal-author of "New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity."

* Byron Hurt-producer/director of "Beyond Beats and Rhymes," and "I am a Man: Black Masculinity in America."

* Tracy Sharpley-Whiting-author of "Pimps up, ho's down: Hip-Hop's hold on young black women."

* Raquel Rivera-author of "New York Rican from the Hip-Hop zone."

This event is sponsored by the Buffalo State College School of Education, School of Arts and Humanities, School of Natural and Social Sciences, School of Professions, Auxiliary Services Grant Allocation Committee, Black Active Minds, Office of Equity and Campus Diversity, Pan-African Student Organization, Office of Residence Life, Office of Student Life, University College.

Screening: New Orleans Music in Exile

Irma Thomas

The Institute for Critical U.S. Studies invites you to join Mark Anthony Neal, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies, and Darrell Stover, cultural historian and poet, (see bios below) for dinner and a screening of New Orleans Music in Exile,followed by conversation about Hurricane Katrina's continued impact on culture and community in New Orleans.

Tuesday, March 27th,
7:30-10
Duke University
The Mary Lou Williams Center
(201 West Union Building)

New Orleans Music in Exile is a 112 minute documentary by music documentarian Robert Mugge that explores the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on the music community of New Orleans. Robert Mugge creates an emotional portrait of horror, heartbreak, and hope as the musicians who lived through the disaster pick up the pieces and try to rebuild their lives. New Orleans artists comment on how broken levees, flood, looting, and black mold wreaked havoc on music and life in this colorful city. Film includes commentary from Dr. John, Cyril Neville, Kermit Ruffins, Irma Thomas and members of Cowboy Mouth, The Iguanas, and the Rebirth Brass Band. New Orleans Music in Exile had its East Coast premiere at the 2006 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

***

Darrell Stover is a cultural historian and poet who has been living in Cary, NC since 1996. He works as the Cultural Arts Program Specialist at the Page-Walker Arts and History Center for the Town of Cary. In that capacity he is responsible for special events programming such as Diwali, Kwanzaa, the MLK Dreamfest, Festival Ritmo Latino and a diverse array of courses and lectures. He previously worked in Durham, NC for 5 years as the Program Director at the Hayti Heritage Center for the St. Joseph's Historic Foundation where he was responsible for the Bull Durham Blues Festival, Black Diaspora Film Festival, ARTSQUEST Summer Camp, Raise-A-Reader/Tinker Toy Theatre, Poetry Power and presented other programs on the history and culture of African Americans and our African rootedness.

Mark Anthony Neal is Associate Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies and Director of the Institute for Critical U.S. Studies (ICUSS).

...I Wants to get FUNKED Up!

Symposium: Eruptions of Funk
The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa
March 29-30, 2007

The English Department at The University of Alabama is pleased to welcome you to this year’s semi-annual symposium on African American culture. The featured speakers this year are Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Mark Anthony Neal, Cheryl Keyes, Kalamu ya Salaam, Tracie Morris, Rickey Vincent, and Thomas Sayers Ellis. Entitled “Eruptions of Funk,” the symposium is intended to provide a forum for cultural workers and enthusiasts of black culture to participate in dialogues about a wide range of artistic forms. In the process, we will engage the concepts implicit and explicit within Afro-vernacular culture, theorizing and historicizing some of the specific features and nuances of what many of us have come to identify as the funk. As suggested by the subtitle of Funkadelic’s 1978 recording of “Lunchmeataphobia (Think, It Ain’t Illegal Yet),” funkativity tends to resist either/or logic, instantiating kinesis as a discreet expression of (organic) intellectuality. The symposium, like African American cultural theory generally, recognizes no binary opposition between criticism and creativity, analysis and performativity. As such, we will attempt to propose an alternative to the one-dimensionality of many academic gatherings. So let’s Jam!!! And get down, knee-deep in the funk!

***

See Full Schedule

The Other Luther

In the decade before Luther Vandross became the signature brand in R&B, the only "Luther" that mattered in Soul music was Luther Ingram. Though many are familiar with his hit, "If Lovin' You is Wrong...", Ingram was often overshadowed by the leading lights of his generation--Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, and James Brown--and even that next tier: Isaac Hayes, Bill Withers, Al Green, and Donny Hathaway.

Ingram went home earlier this week. Here are a few tributes:

Remembrances
Luther Ingram's Lasting R&B Sound (NPR News & Notes)

Remembrances
Luther Ingram, R&B Singer, Dies at 69 (NPR All Things Considered)

Remembrances
Singer Luther Ingram Dies (NPR Day to Day)

Waffles and Beats: The Morgies' Gal Remix

Does Hip-Hop Hate Women?: Rap Sessions Comes to Spelman

Rap Sessions presents a diverse panel of leading hip-hop intellectuals to engage youth and community leaders in candid, compelling conversations about the ways the mainstreaming of hip-hop culture influences relationships between young women and men.

On March 20th, Rap Sessions’ interactive community dialogue will convene at Spelman College in collaboration with the Morehouse NAACP at the Cosby Auditorium. The Spelman event is part of a national hip-hop discussion tour that will convene in ten cities across the United States. Panelists include: Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University Black popular culture professor and author of four books including New Black Man); Hip-Hop journalist Joan Morgan (author of the groundbreaking When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist); rapper Yo-Yo aka Yolanda Whitaker (the Grammy nominated emcee from South Central, who now hosts a radio show on Los Angeles’ KDAY) and professor Tracy Sharpley-Whiting (director of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University and author of the recently released Pimps Up, Hos Down: Hip Hop and the New Gender Politics).

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Spelman College

Cosby Auditorium

6:30 pm

J-Pete is on the Mic

B-Boy Rules for Hip Hop Intellectuals:
The Heads that Don't Get Mention
by Dr. James Peterson

I grew up in the Bricks. Newark New Jersey. Growing up in the hood, just as Hip Hop germinated in the post-industrial ghetto, was an acculturating and intellectually developmental experience. I heard Rappers Delight at the tender age of 8 and from that moment forward I owned the culture as a fully vested acolyte of the combination of Hip Hop's fundamental components, including (the four languages of Hip Hop) and others. I was consciously cognizant of the intellectualizing forces at work in my lived experiences with Hip Hop. The culture just sort of crept up on me in Newark. But after the success of Rappers Delight a chain reaction of radio acceptable singles exploded from the culture. I can remember when Kurtis Blow's The Breaks was a hit. Black/Urban radio in NYC played The Breaks only once or twice a day, but it was always at the same time and my brothers, sisters, and cousins when they were visiting would all gather together in the kitchen; that was where the loudest radio in our house was. And we would party around that one song. We engaged in this daily ritual not only because this was the hottest joint out at the time; not only because we could feel the power of a music and culture that belonged exclusively to us; but because Kurtis Blow's 'The Breaks,' much like Grandmaster Flash's 'The Message' were the first intellectual moments that the culture produced and projected at the national level. The ritualistic fervor with which we approached these listenings, memorized the words, and talked about the songs and the artists merely hinted at the signifying force of this moment. Consider the subtle theoretical abstractions from Kurtis Blow's first hit single that speak to the form of Hip Hop culture i.e., it is organized around break beats literally and the content of the lived experiences within the urban settings for Hip Hop culture at that time. "These are the Breaks!" although not a popular saying in any of speech communities of The Bricks, was the first codification of these lived experiences gesturing towards the nihilism that has so often been referred to in Hip Hop culture. An early intellectual moment to be sure: not simply because of the philosophical and theoretical potential of the tune, but because of its multifaceted aural-readability. Its ability to blur the boundaries of content and form even as it coerced us to move our bodies (dance) to its music suggests the multiple intellects that cohere around a thorough comprehension of The Breaks. The multiplicity of intelligences applies here as one considers the intellectual dexterity necessary to dance to this music even as one contemplates the breaks of inner city living in the 1980s.

This is an important point of entry for a discussion on the intellectuals of Hip Hop Culture because it produces the intersections between popular culture and academic theory, social critique, and community that are necessary for most of the intellectual litmus tests detailed to date (Cruse and others). Moreover, it points to a thesis around which the "B-Boy rules for Hip Hop Intellectuals" emerges. B-Boys or B-girls are those essential performers from sui generis moments of hip hop culture who danced to the manually-looped breaks of old soul and disco records. Breakin (or Break dancing) along with poppin/pop locking were early foundational forms of dance deriving from the culture itself. Break Dancing derives its name from the break beats that drove the music and culture at the outset. But B-Boying and B-girling came to take on more meaning and significance within the culture of Hip Hop than that singular meaning attached to those early performers who drove the kinesthetic energy of early Hip Hop jams. B-boys (in 2005) are known as guardians of the culture. They have earned this distinction over the decades because of the ascribed rules to b-boy-dom. B-boys had to be proficient in at least two elements of the culture. Authentic B-boys were participants in many aspects of the culture. A b-boy would not only break dance, but would also write graffiti and or MC and or DJ. Many embodied combinations of two or three elements. These rules were simple and only loosely patrolled, but the ideology that produces them demands multilevel engagement with the culture across elemental comfort zones. In this essay I simply want to extend these rules (through an intellectual transformation) to those figures who would/could be considered Hip Hop Intellectuals. First, some clarification of the B-Boy rules is necessary. By most conventional definitions B-boys are simply break dancers who embody the cultural roots of Hip Hop: i.e. they dress a certain way usually harkening back to hip hop style circa 1980, and they dance to the breaks recreating settings that reflect the original impulses of the culture. The only rule for B-boys is that they "live the lifestyle of b-boying."

Read more at Dr. Hip Hop's Blog

From the Diary of an Anxious Black Woman

The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy:
Black Feminism, Surrogate Motherhood, or Colonialist Fantasy?


I admit to being conflicted about Oprah Winfrey's new project: the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy. I watched her program "Building a Dream" when it aired on ABC last week - both last Monday night (Feb. 26) and Saturday evening (Mar. 3) to see if I could determine my feelings about this truly inspiring story of Oprah Winfrey keeping her promise to Nelson Mandela to build a school in South Africa for disadvantaged young girls with leadership potential. I wept at the girls' stories, I felt their glee and joyous expectations when they left their impoverished one-room shacks and moved into their luxurious dorm rooms at Oprah's $40 million academy. Surely, this could only be a positive story however you spin it, right?

So, why was I bothered, not only at what was shown, but also what Oprah revealed later when she appeared on Ellen's talk show to tell us behind-the-scenes stories, like what had transpired after the lavish Christmas party that she hosted for the first 154 pupils at her exclusive new girls academy? Apparently, the students, who were unused to eating so much food, had eaten until they vomited. Worse, many more stuffed their pockets and their bras with the leftover food so they could bring it back to their families who were still deprived of such luxuries, subsequently spoiling their school uniforms so early in the game.

Sigh. Oprah, Oprah, I love ya, but I have to ask: should we really be encouraging South African youth to indulge in the worst forms of American material culture: including binge eating and self-absorption, for why were these young girls not even given containers for leftovers? Did you really think that young girls, who are raised in an African culture that often puts communities first over self, would just eat to their heart's content without also thinking about how they could provide their families with the same food they're eating? After all, these are girls with "leadership potential," and from what your program showed, they were also responsible daughters and granddaughters who have already assumed the role of caregiver and provider. Of course they were going to stuff their bras and pockets with food to take back home: they were not simply going to eat just to fill their stomachs and their stomachs alone! They couldn't think of themselves, they had to think of their family as well.

Read more at Diary of an Anxious Black Woman

Under the Radar: Baudrillard Goes Home

Jean Baudrillard, 77; kept a sharp eye on blurry reality
By Elaine Woo,

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 11, 2007

The death Tuesday in Paris of French theoretician Jean Baudrillard prompted some unusual Internet postings, including "Baudrillard's Death Did Not Happen," "Jean Baudrillard did not take place," "Baudrillard did not exist" and "Jean Baudrillard is survived by his simulacrum."

These were, oddly enough, tributes, offered in the spirit of a guru of postmodern thought who exerted enormous influence on contemporary artists and writers, including the creators of "The Matrix" movies. The postings were plays on the claim Baudrillard, 77, had made about the Gulf War of 1991 — namely, that it "did not take place."

That war was, in his view, largely a television event, experienced by the masses more like a video game than an actual situation of violence and death. His assertion, infuriating to many, illustrated his big idea: that we no longer can distinguish between imitation and reality — and that we sometimes prefer the imitations because they seem more real than life.

This state of what Baudrillard called "hyperreality" explains why we are swamped by TV "reality shows," which are anything but. And it accounts for the perennial allure of Disneyland, which he said is "presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real."

Disneyland is what Baudrillard called a "simulacrum," a copy more perfect than the original, such as the replicants who cause havoc in the sci-fi film classic "Blade Runner" or the alternate universes depicted in the blockbuster "Matrix" movies. Asked once to describe himself, he said, "What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself."

He makes somewhat of a cameo in the first "Matrix" film, when the character played by Keanu Reeves opens a copy of Baudrillard's seminal work, "Simulacra and Simulation," to reveal a hollow, which he uses to hide a stash of pirated computer disks. Moviegoers hip to Baudrillard loved the joke — phony disks in a phony book about modern society's inability to tell the phony from the real — but the theorist said the movie misinterpreted his ideas.

The movie nonetheless "transformed him," Larissa MacFarquhar wrote in a 2005 New Yorker story, "from a cult figure into an extremely famous cult figure." Its false representation of a theory about false representation made the irony dizzyingly complete.

A small, round man who was authentically French in his love of cigarettes and drinking wine at midday, Baudrillard was accustomed to having his theories mangled. His ideas, like those of fellow French intellectual Jacques Derrida, could be maddeningly dense.

Read More...

Cynthia Fuchs on Paul Robeson

Today, Paul Robeson seems impossible. How could one man have accomplished so much, commanded such respect, be so large and legendary, even during his lifetime?


Paul Robeson: Showing a Little Grit
by Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters Film and TV Editor

I have never separated my work as an artist and my work as a human being. I have always put it even more strongly, that to me, my art is always a weapon.
—Paul Robeson, Pacifica Radio interview (1958)

He defined social responsibility, and above all, he defined artistic responsibility.
—Ruby Dee, Our Paul: Remembering Paul Robeson

Trouble is my buddy.
—Brutus Jones (Paul Robeson), The Emperor Jones

Today, Paul Robeson seems impossible. How could one man have accomplished so much, commanded such respect, be so large and legendary, even during his lifetime (1898–1976)? It sounds reductive to attribute his success to genius, too easy to call him destined for greatness. Even if they might be true, such stories leave out the sheer will it must have taken for Robeson, son of a runaway slave, to find himself in so many ways, and even more to the point, to make himself known—boldly, bravely, and magnificently.

Criterion’s new box set, Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist, offers multiple introductions to Robeson’s work, starting with new digital transfers of eight films (he appeared in 11 during his lifetime). These range from Oscar Micheaux’s 1925 silent film Body and Soul and Sanders of the River (Zoltan Korda, 1935), to the jazzily fragmented fiercely forward-looking Borderline (Kenneth Macpherson, 1930) and the socialist pro-union documentary he narrated, Native Land (Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand, 1942), to a thoughtful, still defiant 1958 Pacifica Radio interview. In every performance, he refused to accept conventions and expanded options. This at a time when “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks”, in Donald Bogle‘s famous phrasing, were the common opportunities for black film actors.

Most certainly, Robeson demonstrated remarkable dignity and challenged expectations. As Sidney Poitier says in the Oscar-winning short documentary Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist (Saul J. Turell, 1979), “No one who has ever heard Paul Robeson sing “Old Man River” will ever forget it.” True, but he sang it many times and in multiple contexts. Poitier observes that when he performed the song during WWII, he turned it “from a song of lament into a song of political protest”, altering the lyrics to point out institutional racism and injustice, at least for those listeners paying attention (for example, “Git a little drunk,/An’ you land in jail”, for example, becomes “You show a little grit and/You lands in jail").

Read Full Essay...

Can Pookie (& Nay-Nay) Get Some Love?

Who is Obama's 'Cousin Pookie'?
By JONATHAN TILOVE

In his sermon Sunday at Brown Chapel in Selma, Ala., Barack Obama declared: "If Cousin Pookie would vote, if Uncle Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching SportsCenter and go register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.''

It wasn't the first time the Illinois senator and presidential aspirant has invoked "Pookie'' in gently scolding terms, and his mention was met with affirmations of recognition at the church.

But for those not in the know, the question remains: Who is this Pookie?

The Obama campaign didn't respond to requests for details. But Newhouse News Service asked some of America's best minds on black culture, language and politics.

In their interviews and e-mails, Pookie emerges as a stock character of the black popular imagination, a name that has come to personify the kind of layabout kin who, if endearing, is also a source of some embarrassment and consternation to his more successful relations. And, it turns out, in his use of Pookie, Obama reveals something about himself.

"Pookie means a whole lot of different things; none of them are good,'' said Kevin Gray, a South Carolina writer and activist. "Pookie's always the foil.''

To linguist and writer John McWhorter, Pookie is the kind of ghetto character played by Cedric the Entertainer or Chris Tucker in one of those "Barbershop'' or "Friday'' movies. In the 1960s and '70s, he would have gone by Leroy, Tyrone or Otis.

Pookie, according to Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and writer about race, is "nearly a pop-culture folk-figure in black circles.'' He is the average black every-youth.

While Gray said Pookie goes way back, Mark Anthony Neal, professor of black popular culture at Duke University, believes he has come into his own only in the last decade, as a "metaphor for kin ... who everybody knows is just a little trifling and a little lazy.''

Neal believes Pookie's rise is linked to the growth of the black middle class, and "intimately connected to some of the anxieties that the black middle class has with regards to their relatives who have not been as financially successful. I'm sure Sen. Obama has a few Pookies in his own family.''

"It's a real strong use of language,'' said Bakari Kitwana, the hip-hop writer, lecturer and activist. In dropping Pookie's name, Obama is signaling to those who question his blackness — because his mother was white and his father an African without slave ancestry — that he is not an outsider to black life.

"If you get it you get it, and if you don't, you don't care,'' Kitwana said. "I have a Pookie in my family.''

Read Full Essay...

I Don't Get Liturgical Dance, But...

from The New York Times

Moved by the Spirit to Dance With the Lord
By JULIE BLOOM

WHILE teenage ballerinas and midriff-baring hip- hoppers cluster in the halls of the New Dance Group building on West 38th Street in Midtown Manhattan, inside one studio a very different type of dance class is starting. Twenty-five women are bowed on their knees in a circle, eyes closed, their foreheads resting on the floor.

“We thank you, God, that you created the dance and you made it pure. Father, we want to dance your words through our limbs.” Wendy Heagy’s voice rises as she leads the circle in prayer. She is the founder of Raise Him Up Praise Dance School and Ministry, and she is about to start her Saturday class.

“We thank you for our physical bodies, for lining up every muscle and every joint,” Ms. Heagy continues. “We don’t want to just be dancers. We want to be ministers of you, Lord God.”

The class, mostly African-Americans ranging in age from early 20s through mid-60s and clad in warm-up clothes, several with scripture written on the backs of their T-shirts, answers loudly, “Amen.”

Ms. Heagy begins by leading what appears to be a very secular warm-up: head rolls with feet in parallel second position while an upbeat jazz version of the Lord’s Prayer plays on the stereo. She is a soothing yet demanding teacher, “Pull in your tummy and squeeze your bum,” she chides. “What are our arms doing? Our palms?” she asks, as she paces the front of the room. “They’re open, because we are praising him.”

Praise dance is a form of worship that seeks to articulate the word and spirit of God through the body. Though it is far from a new phenomenon — in biblical times, dancing was embraced during celebrations and worship — it was forced out of the Christian church during the Reformation, and has been fully welcomed back only in the past 20 or so years. In recent years praise dance has become an increasingly popular part of church services across the country, particularly among America’s growing Pentecostal movement, and it has emerged in New York too, where experts say one in 10 people is Pentecostal.

Read full article...

Panel Discussion: “All the News That’s Fit to Print?: Hip-Hop, Urban Culture and Mainstream Print Journalism

“All the News That’s Fit to Print?:
Hip-Hop, Urban Culture and Mainstream Print Journalism”

A Panel Discussion Featuring

Kelefa Sanneh, music critic, The New York Times

Scott Poulson-Bryant, former staff writer, Vibe Magazine and author of Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America

Bakari Kitwana, former editor, The Source Magazine and the author of Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in America

Moderated by Joan Morgan, Visiting Instructor, Duke University and author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist

Thursday, March 8, 2007
5:00 pm
The John Hope Franklin Center
Room 240
Duke University

Rap Sessions Begins at Purdue University

Black Cultural Center town hall to focus on hip hop, women

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University's Black Cultural Center will bring in some of the nation's leading hip-hop intellectuals, activists and authors to discuss "Does Hip Hop Hate Women? A Community Dialogue."

The town hall format meeting will be at 7 p.m. March 5 in Stewart Center's Fowler Hall.

"The gender crisis facing the hip-hop generation is a major hot-button issue for those both outside and within the hip-hop community," said BCC director Renee Thomas. "The community dialogue on hip hop and gender will provide a safe, healthy forum for Purdue students and the community to participate in the discussion."

Audience members will take part in a comprehensive discussion of hip hop's gender crisis that touches on each of the following:

* Hip hop's impact on the self-image of an entire generation of girls.

* The connections between domestic violence and hip hop's popular culture messages.

* How the popular images and representations associated with hip hop affect the culture's perception in the larger society and world.

* The misogyny and homophobic behavior in our national culture that predates hip hop's emergence.

"This is the first time we've tried this format, and we're hoping to get a lively discussion between our community and these highly sought-after individuals who are experts in an art form that often is controversial," Thomas said. "This new multifaceted approach will engage the entire audience. The issues involved with hip hop include not only gender but race, and the discussion should be educational as well as enlightening."

The discussion will be moderated by Bakari Kitwana, author and co-founder of the National Hip Hop Political Convention. Panelists include Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, author of "The Black Feminist Reader"; Joan Morgan, author of "When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks it Down"; Raquel Rivera, author of "New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone"; and Mark Anthony Neal, author of "New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity," "That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader" and several other books.

For information, call the Black Cultural Center at (765) 494-3092.

Esther Iverem and MAN on KPFK

Samm Brown's FOR THE RECORD KPFK

Broadcast Date: Sunday, March 04, 2007 2-3 PM (PST)
Subject: JAMES BROWN: SOUL BROTHER #1

Host: Samm Brown III
Cohost: LISA BONNER

CONFIRMED GUEST(S) INCLUDE:

1. DR. MARK ANTHONY NEAL, Ph.D., Associate Professor Black Popular Culture, African-American Studies, Duke University, author of: Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture, The Last Soul Brother: James Brown);

2. ESTHER IVEREM, (Journalist, author and poet founder of the SeeingBlack.com, a web site she founded in 2001, a former staff writer for The Washington Post, New York Newsday, The New York Times and contributing critic for BET.com and Pacifica Radio);

3. CAMILLE SOLARI, (Director and co-producer of the documentary: "Life On The Road with Mr. and Mrs. Brown" -- about the last two years of legendary Godfather of soul James Brown life featuring his wife and lead vocalist Tomi Rae Brown)

Continuing our Black History Month expanded coverage, we'll be taking a look at the life of the legendary "Godfather of Soul", the "hardest working man in show business", and "Soul Brother #1", James Brown -- as seen through the eyes of a journalist/author, professor/author, and a documentary filmmaker.

Join us at 2 pm for what will be an hour of provocative thought, and educational entertainment.

Shelton J. Lee at 50

Spike Lee is 50
by FERENTZ LAFARGUE

While reading Black Enterprise the other day I saw something that took me by surprise. Spike Lee is 50. BE’s special entertainment issue did a profile on Mr. Shelton J. Lee who’s better known as Spike Lee, and guess what, Spike Lee is 50 years old—or at least he will be on March 20th.

But since I’m a proponent of the New Afrikan birthday system, he’s already 50.

Let that marinate for a second, Spike Lee is 50.

So what you say?

A friend of mine Phil likes to tell this story about when Lee’s movies first appeared in the 80s they were like rock concerts, or rather rap concerts, because previously white movie theatre lines were now teeming with young black moviegoers. When She’s Gotta Have it came out in 1986 The Beastie Boys had people rocking out with Licensed to Ill, we were swooning under Anita Baker’s Rapture, Run DMC was instigating us into Raising Hell, and the Notorious one was Duran Duran not B.I.G.

Public Enemy, the rap group, who Lee was often associated with earlier in his career were signing their first Def Jam contract back in 1986. Now as Chuck D tours college campuses and Flava Flav blurs the line between reality and minstrelsy, Spike Lee instructs us about what really happened with the Levees.

Spike Lee is 50?

But since I’m a proponent of the New Afrikan birthday system, he’s already 50.

Let that marinate for a second, Spike Lee is 50.

So what you say?

A friend of mine Phil likes to tell this story about when Lee’s movies first appeared in the 80s they were like rock concerts, or rather rap concerts, because previously white movie theatre lines were now teeming with young black moviegoers. When She’s Gotta Have it came out in 1986 The Beastie Boys had people rocking out with Licensed to Ill, we were swooning under Anita Baker’s Rapture, Run DMC was instigating us into Raising Hell, and the Notorious one was Duran Duran not B.I.G.

Public Enemy, the rap group, who Lee was often associated with earlier in his career were signing their first Def Jam contract back in 1986. Now as Chuck D tours college campuses and Flava Flav blurs the line between reality and minstrelsy, Spike Lee instructs us about what really happened with the Levees.

Spike Lee is 50?

Read more at The Nightshift Chronicles