Too Much Time on Their Hands: The Vick Generation

Too Much Time on Their Hands
by Mark Anthony Neal

Michael Vick stands in judgment, and it goes without saying that a generation of young black male athletes also stand in judgment. More than Allen Iverson, Kobe Bryant and Pacman “sometimes you need to just call a dangerous psychopath a ‘dangerous’ psychopath” Jones, Michael Vick has now become the stand-in for all that ails professional sports. And it’s not fair, but Michael Vick and his generational cohorts should know better.

The current crop of black male athletes are more visible and better compensated than every generation of black athletes that came before them. And for some of these young athletes, they believe they are beyond reproach because of it, particularly if said criticism comes from the generation of black athletes who toiled on fields, courts and tracks without the glamour and prestige that these young athletes now take for granted. I’m always reminded of Vince Coleman, a former major league baseball player who, months after signing a free-agent contract with the New York Mets in 1991, claimed that he didn’t know who Curt Flood was. It was Flood who, 20 years earlier, challenged the reserve clause in baseball, which essentially made baseball players little more than salaried chattel. Flood was the reason why Coleman and countless others can become free agents and sell their talents to the highest bidder.

As we witness the wealthiest generation of professional athletes ever, increasingly the professionalization process is beginning in childhood, as kids as young as seven and eight years of age are already being prepared for lives in professional sports. It is in this context that many of these athletes, particularly if they are black males, are denied the fullest range of social and cultural experience. The by-product is a generation of young rich athletes who, when they are not toiling for the NBA or NFL, are sitting at home playing video games 10 hours a day, before they hit the club. Lots of money and too much time on their hands and it explains, in part, why figures like Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan might gamble away millions of dollars, why former NBA star Jayson Williams (the black one) might be sitting in his bedroom playing with guns, or why an athlete might become interested in betting on dog fights. The irony is that given their largely unprecedented wealth, this is a generation of athletes who could truly afford to experience the world in ways that their predecessors could only imagine.

Read the full essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

Next Generation, Next Level

from Richard Prince's Journal-isms

From Washington Post to NAACP
Jabari Asim of "Book World" to Edit the Crisis

Jabari Asim, deputy editor of the Washington Post's Book World section, has been named editor of the NAACP's venerable magazine the Crisis, publisher Roger Wilkins told Journal-isms on Monday.

Asim is author of the recently published book "The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why" and has written children's books as well as a collection of essays, "Not Guilty: 12 Black Men Speak Out on Law Justice and Life."

His low-keyed style stands in marked contrast to that of George E. Curry, the high-profile editor of the late Emerge magazine and former editor of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service, which services the black press. Curry turned down an offer to edit the magazine in June after weeks of negotiations.

"The board is very happy," said Wilkins, who chairs the Crisis editorial board, calling Asim "an intelligent young man who has a passion for magazines and a passion for the concerns of black people and the work that the NAACP is doing and has done."

When Asim was promoted to deputy editor of the Post book section in 2005, Book World editor Marie Arana said, "Jabari has been an editor here for almost nine years now. He came to us from the arts pages of the St. Louis Post Dispatch and has built a reputation on this staff as an intrepid editor with a fearsome, green pen. He is more than passing wise about many subjects, ranging from poetry to literature to hard-nosed books on race and cultural issues. He is a thoughtful, always interesting writer, with a number of very good books to his credit."

Asim also wrote occasional columns for the Washington Post Web site.

In "The N Word," published in March, "Asim collects a wide array of facts and significant moments from American history, politics, science, entertainment and literature to marshal his impassioned argument that this word means black folks no good, and never has. Most Americans would agree with that, though few realize the extent to which whites went to keep the social order in place," Erin Aubry Kaplan wrote in the Los Angeles Times.

The Crisis was founded in 1910 by activist-scholar W.E.B. DuBois and is distributed free to NAACP members. Published every two months, it claims a circulation of 250,000.

Victoria L. Valentine announced in December she was stepping down as Crisis editor after six years. Phil W. Petrie has been interim editor. There were as many as 30 candidates to succeed Valentine.

Working at the NAACP is not without its challenges. On June 7, the organization announced it was cutting about 40 percent of the staff positions at its Baltimore headquarters and planned to temporarily close its seven regional offices to cover three years of budget shortfalls, as Kelly Brewington reported in the Baltimore Sun.

NAACP Chairman Julian Bond told Journal-isms in June that the Crisis would continue the "noble tradition" started by DuBois. "We want the magazine to prosper and continue to be the kind of fighting magazine that it is. It's an advocacy magazine, and that's what we want it to be," he said.

The hiring of Asim away from the Post continues a recent trend of black-owned publications selecting editors who have worked in the mainstream press. Bryan Monroe, editorial director of Ebony and Jet magazines, who came from the defunct Knight Ridder Co., is another example. Asim starts Aug. 20.

Jessica Simpson - Glamorous Pics

More of the Summer of Soul '67

from NPR's Tell Me More w/Michel Martin

1967's 'Summer of Soul' - Part II

Tell Me More, July 27, 2007 · In the second installment of the series on 1967's "Summer of Soul," pop culture expert Mark Anthony Neal discusses four Soul and R&B hits from the historic summer. Among other things, the music helped mold a new identity for black men in America.

Listen Here

Maureen Mahon on Betty Davis

Betty’s Back
she brought serious funk the first time around. time to find out what you missed.
by Maureen Mahon

The funky, stylish, sexy, and provocative singer Betty Davis is back, having emerged from a reclusive retirement to promote the reissue of her first two albums, Betty Davis (1973) and They Say I’m Different, (1974) on Light in the Attic Records. I recently reached the funk cult heroine at her home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for a phone conversation about her career.

Discussions of Betty Davis typically refer to her connection to Miles Davis. Their 1968 marriage was short-lived, but was a formative period for the jazz great. Under his hip young wife’s tutelage, he began to explore rock, notably the music of Betty’s friend Jimi Hendrix. The new sounds helped shape Davis’s ground-shifting 1969 recording Bitches Brew, which Betty is said to have helped name. While the role of Betty Davis the muse is an undeniable part of her biography, equally important is the story of Betty Davis the musician, creative visionary, and artist in her own right.

Born in Durham, North Carolina, and raised in Pittsburgh, Davis attributes her first exposure to music to her maternal grandmother, a music lover who played her large collection of blues records for her grandchildren. Davis lists blues greats like Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton, and Koko Taylor as her earliest influences. While an old-style blues attitude informs her lyrics, she also drew on the music of her contemporaries. She admired Sly Stone’s arrangements (the Family Stone’s drummer Gregg Errico produced her first album) and Hendrix’s approach to his instrument, especially “the amount of bottom that he put on his guitar,” she said. “He used his guitar almost like a bass player would use his bass.”

A former model and one-time Jet Beauty, Davis wore an enormous Afro and an electric smile, but she was more than another pretty face. She was the rare female recording artist who wrote, performed, and produced her own music. Davis did the arrangements for Betty Davis and produced her subsequent releases, They Say I’m Different, Nasty Gal (1975), and Crashin’ From Passion (1979). “I was just interested in keeping the sound pure,” she explained. She is matter-of-fact about these accomplishments. “I’ve been writing music since I was 12 years old,” she said. “I always thought of myself as a songwriter more so than an artist.” In fact, some of her earliest material was performed by other acts. In 1967, the black rock ’n’ roll group The Chambers Brothers recorded her composition “Uptown” for their The Time Has Come album, and in the early 1970s, she wrote material for the Commodores, helping the fledgling band secure a deal at Motown. But it was when she began to write for herself that her artistic vision came into full flower.

Read the Full Essay @ EbonyJet.com

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Maureen Mahon is an associate professor of anthropology at UCLA. She is the author of Right To Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race (Duke University Press)

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