John Jackson, Jr. On Chip Saltsman

from The Annals of Anthroman

Saltsman's "We Hate the USA" CD

by John L. Jackson, Jr.



As one of the many Americans considering a descent on the inauguration ceremonies next month, even without any actual tickets in hand (and nary a perfunctory response to my queries about possibly obtaining some from my local Congressman), I have been following the "transition" fairly closely. And I'm not just talking about the president elect's cabinet picks. I also mean his decisions for the ceremony itself. The brilliant choice of poet Elizabeth Alexander; the more controversial decision to ask Rick Warren to offer up the day's prayer.



Obama is certainly trying to demonstrate his commitment to an inclusive political conversation that allows for many different ideological positions. Frank Rich persuasively challenges the limits and contours of that move vis-a-vis the Warren choice in today's New York Times. But it is clear why Obama feels he has to make such massive gestures in the direction of political inclusion. To his opponents, he represents the unassimilable anti-American. He is the butt of jokes. The threat from within.



Just think about Chip Saltsman's version of holiday gift-giving this year. Saltsman was national campaign adviser for Mike Huckabee during his failed presidential run, and Saltsman is now one of the people vying for head of the RNC. This weekend, we also found out that he sent a CD out to RNC members (as a Christmas gift) that included the song youtubed above, "Barack, The Magic Negro."



But the CD didn't just showcase that gem. According to Rebecca Sinderbrand's CNN report, the CD itself was titled "We Hate the USA," and boasted tunes that poked fun at many other political figures.



According to Sinderbrand and The Hill, the CD included the following song titles: "John Edwards's Poverty Tour," "Wright place, wrong pastor," "Ivory and Ebony" and "The Star Spanglish Banner."



The Star Spanglish Banner?



Saltsman has dismissed the controversy out of hand, describing the CD as a harmelss spoof. "I think most people recognize political satire when they see it," he said. "I think RNC members understand that."



But it is clear that Saltsman comes close to trafficking in the very forms of small-minded xenophobia, race-baiting, partisan hypocrisy, and fear-mongering that helped cost John McCain the 2008 election. To many critics, such a CD looks like political pandering (and scapegoating) at its worst -- and doesn't nearly imply the kind of forward-thinking sensibility needed to take the Republican party where it needs to go. If anything, it appears to be a surefire recipe for many more electoral defeats at the hands of a browning electorate.



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John L. Jackson, Jr. is an Anthropologist, academic and filmmaker born in Brooklyn, New York.

Barack the First Hip-Hop President?

from The Green Institute

"For me its not only about holding Obama, the House of Representatives, or the United States Senate accountable. Holding public officials accountable is important, but building a multi-racial social justice movement is a necessity for our very existence."

Why President Elect Barack Obama is not the first Hip Hop President
by Rosa A. Clemente

"Each generation out of relative obscurity, must discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it."-- Frantz Fanon

It has been 45 days since the Hip Hop generation helped usher in the first Black male President of the United States of America. Since that historic night, many within Hip Hop culture, like writer Greg Kot of the Boston Globe, entrepreneur Russell Simmons, artists Common, Jay-Z and P. Diddy, have declared President-Elect Obama the first Hip Hop president. In my humble opinion they are wrong, dead wrong. It does not matter how many Hip Hop pundits, non-profit organizations, and recognizable figures within the culture declare it. Much like an MC or B-Girl battle, I'm ready to challenge that declaration.

As a long time community organizer and Hip Hop activist and journalist, I have always followed a rule: never allow someone to become your priority while you become his or her option. For President Elect Barack Obama and the entire Democrat Party leadership in this country, the

Hip Hop generation has never been a priority, we have always been an option and that option is used mostly to get out the vote during elections. Efforts like Vote or Die, Generation Vote, Rock the Vote, Respect my Vote, do not empower a generation - they are catchy slogans emblazoned on pretty white tees that offer empty rhetoric. At the end of the day, those G.O.T.V. efforts become guaranteed votes for the Democratic Party and often fail to educate their followers about candidates that run outside of the two-party system.

I believe that like many before him, President-Elect Barack Obama's campaign used Hip Hop to create excitement amongst young people in this country, but we must clearly see through the $750 million bling-bling marketing haze of his campaign. The few times he was pressed on his association to Hip Hop, he spoke about offensive rap lyrics and Black men having respect for themselves by pulling up their pants. I do not recall one specific mention of the political victories and social consciousness brought out by millions in the culture. Just because you brush off your shoulders, fist bump the future First Lady, or play a mean game of street ball, that does not make you Hip Hop. What we have now is an Obama administration that came into power with the promise of change, but is remixing that promise by sampling from the Bill Clinton Presidency, including Hillary herself, and this new remix will do nothing to change the mass conditions of our people.

In Van Jones new book, The Green Collar Economy, Van says, "It is time to change from fighting against something to fighting for something." For me that statement encapsulates why I chose to accept Cynthia's McKinney's invitation to be her running mate and why the Green Party made history by choosing us as the first women-of-color ticket in American Presidential politics. I accepted the call because I was no longer interested in fighting against the Democratic or Republican Party.

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Rosa Clemente, former Green Party Vice-Presidential Candidate, and her daughter Alicia-Maria, live in North Carolina. This the first in a series of four articles commissioned for the Green Institute by Rosa Clemente.

Eartha Kitt in Boomerang 1992

Remembering Eartha Kitt...

Filtering Kanye

from The Root

In 808s and Heartbreak,Kanye West filters his grief with the help of Auto-Tune.

Kanye's Pity Party
By Mark Anthony Neal | TheRoot.com

Dec. 16, 2008--For those who like to draw a line in the sand to distinguish between "real" hip-hop and that which is not-so-real, Kanye West has shown a consistent ability to blur the line. Since his 2004 breakthrough album, The College Dropout, there have been many rap artists as prolific and visible. But where so many of his peers simply have collections of songs, West has amassed a body of work—and there are few who could claim that since "Rapper's Delight." It is this body of work and the devoted fan base that comes with it that allows West to take risks; and this partially explains the oddity that 808s and Heartbreak represents.

808s and Heartbreak is the artistic culmination of a year of tumult in West's life, beginning with the tragic death of his mother, Dr. Donda West, after botched plastic surgery, and his breakup with longtime girlfriend and fiancé Alexis Phifer. What is quite clear, even after a quick listen, is that West would like to publicly mourn the death of his mother, but his bitterness toward Phifer becomes the default emotion. If there were an artist within hip-hop who would have license to mourn, especially for his mother, it would be West, but he chooses not to take us there—or so it seems.

One of the marked differences between 808s and Heartbreak and West's previous efforts is his reliance on Auto-Tune, the audio processor, which corrects the pitch in singing performances. As described by the New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, "Auto-Tunes locates the pitch of a recorded vocal and moves that recorded information to the nearest 'correct' note in a scale, which is selected by the user." Though Auto-Tune has been used by many mainstream performers, the technology found a new purpose among a young generation of hip-hop and R&B performers, notably T-Pain, who has translated his marginal skills as a vocalist and creation of memorable hooks, into a career of some distinction. And Kanye West is just the latest of several high-profile rap and R&B acts to experiment with the new technology.

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Tricia Rose on Afro-Futurism

Brother from Another Planet

Sun Ra was from Alabama - or from Saturn - depending on who you ask. He’s not the only musician to ride on the Mothership Connection. As professor Tricia Rose points out, the Afro-futurist urge to escape Earth continues to this day. Produced by Studio 360's Derek John.

hat-tip to Professor Kim

"Cadillac Records" and Black Manhood

from Vibe.com

Critical Noir
Never See a Man Cry
by Mark Anthony Neal

Cadillac Records, the new film about the rise of the Chess record label, its co-founder Leonard Chess and the label's signature act Muddy Waters, takes a great many historical liberties. Written out of this fictional account of the birth of Chicago Blues are Leonard Chess's brother Phil and a rich musical history that also included John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson II, groundbreaking Doo-Wop acts like The Flamingoes and The Moonglows, Bo Diddley, Billy Stewart and The Dells, among others. One of film's strengths--and the reason why Cadillac Records is such a compelling story--is its documentation of the relationship between the music produced by a generation of black male artists, many of them recent transplants from the deep South, and their sense of manhood.

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NBM Booknotes: December 2008

The Hip Hop Wars
What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop--and Why it Matters
by Tricia Rose
Published by Basic Civitas Books

Hip-hop is in crisis. For the past dozen years, the most commercially successful hip-hop has become increasingly saturated with caricatures of black gangstas, thugs, pimps, and ’hos. The controversy surrounding hip-hop is worth attending to and examining with a critical eye because, as scholar and cultural critic Tricia Rose argues, hip-hop has become a primary means by which we talk about race in the United States. In The Hip-Hop Wars, Rose explores the most crucial issues underlying the polarized claims on each side of the debate: Does hip-hop cause violence, or merely reflect a violent ghetto culture? Is hip-hop sexist, or are its detractors simply anti-sex? Does the portrayal of black culture in hip-hop undermine black advancement? A potent exploration of a divisive and important subject, The Hip-Hop Wars concludes with a call for the regalvanization of the progressive and creative heart of hip-hop. What Rose calls for is not a sanitized vision of the form, but one that more accurately reflects a much richer space of culture, politics, anger, and yes, sex, than the current ubiquitous images in sound and video currently provide.

Tricia Rose was born and raised in New York City. She has taught at NYU, University of California at Santa Cruz and is now a Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.



Ain't I a Feminist?
African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom
by Aaronette M. White
Published by SUNY Press

Interview-based study of contemporary African American feminist men.

Ain’t I a Feminist? presents the life stories of twenty African American men who identify themselves as feminists, centering on the turning points in their lives that shaped and strengthened their commitment to feminism, as well as the ways they practice feminism with women, children, and other men. In her analysis, Aaronette M. White highlights feminist fathering practices; how men establish egalitarian relationships with women; the variety of Black masculinities; and the interplay of race, gender, class, and sexuality politics in American society. Coming from a wide range of family backgrounds, ages, geographical locations, sexualities, and occupations, each man also shares what he experiences as the personal benefits of feminism, and how feminism contributes to his efforts towards social change. Focusing on the creative agency of Black men to redefine the assumptions and practices of manhood, the author also offers recommendations regarding the socialization of African American boys and the reeducation of African American men in the interest of strengthening their communities.

“This powerful book makes a unique and substantive contribution to the fields of women’s studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, psychology, and sociology. It will surely garner a great deal of attention in the academy.” — Aída Hurtado, author of Voicing Chicana Feminisms: Young Women Speak Out on Sexuality and Identity

Aaronette M. White is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.


Out of the House of Bondage
The Transformation of the Plantation Household
by Thavolia Glymph
Published by Cambridge University Press

The plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production. This fundamental fact has generally been overshadowed by popular and scholarly images of the plantation household as the source of slavery's redeeming qualities, where ‘gentle’ mistresses ministered to ‘loyal’ slaves. This book recounts a very different story. The very notion of a private sphere, as divorced from the immoral excesses of chattel slavery as from the amoral logic of market laws, functioned to conceal from public scrutiny the day-to-day struggles between enslaved women and their mistresses, subsumed within a logic of patriarchy. One of emancipation's unsung consequences was precisely the exposure to public view of the unbridgeable social distance between the women on whose labor the plantation household relied and the women who employed them. This is a story of race and gender, nation and citizenship, freedom and bondage in the nineteenth century South; a big abstract story that is composed of equally big personal stories.

Focuses on the plantation household as a site of production and thus class relations and violence • Unique analysis of the precise forms of struggle and negotiations that led to the transformation of the plantation home in the Civil War era • Places black and white women at the center of an analysis of the plantation household

Thavolia Glymph is Associate Professor of History and African & African-American Studies at Duke University.

TV-One's "Unsung" Tributes Forgotten Stars

from Vibe.com

CRITICAL NOIR
TV-One's "Unsung" Strikes the Right Chord
by Mark Anthony Neal

Like its predecessor Black Entertainment Television's, TV-One, the cable television networked owned by the Radio-One family, attempted to strike the right balance in terms of syndicated reruns and original series. TV-One, perhaps benefiting from BET's longtime decision to abandon middle-age audiences, has proved successful in at least locating a niche market of over-30 something African-Americans. Though the network has tried to put a fresh coat of paint on 15-year-old favorites like Martin and Living Single (the recent cast reunion of the later show being an example), it has proved far more capable than its competition to produce original programming. Though Baisden at Night is a mixed-bagged (it simply lacks the energy and cohesiveness of the drive-time radio program)shows like G. Garvin's Turn Up the Heat and Gospel of Music with Jeff Major are high points of the network's programming, though neither will have audiences forgetting the wealth of programming on the Food Network or the old BET stalwart, Bobby Jones Gospel. Fresh off of their live coverage of the Democratic National Convention, late last month TV-One unveiled what is perhaps its first legitimate original hit, the music documentary series Unsung.

The formula of Unsung is not original--it draws liberally on many of the conventions that made VH-1's series Behind the Music so compelling. Where Unsung succeeds in its ability to locate compelling human stories behind musical figures that are quite beloved among black music fans, though largely obscure to mainstream audiences. The Debarge Family, the Clark Sisters, Donny Hathaway and Phyllis Hyman are simply not figures that would register to traditional mainstream audiences and as such TV-One should be commended for the willingness to tell the stories of those who would not necessarily generate the kind of cross-over appeal that documentaries on the lives of well-known tragic figures like Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye or Otis Redding might have. And while the stories of the aforementioned artists deserved to be told and deserved to be told from a distinct African-American perspective, as TV-One's publicity for the series rightfully suggest, Unsung allows tribute to artists who simply aren't going to get the recognition that they deserve.

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