Saturday, June 27, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
Dear Michael: Love Letters from Cyberspece
Michael Jackson: Morning's End
by Jeff Chang
Many of his most affecting performances were about distance and displacement, the desire to be somewhere else, the inability to return to a lost past. Think of the songs that the hip-hop generation adored so much: “I’ll Be There”, “I Wanna Be Where You Are”, “Who’s Loving You”, “Maybe Tomorrow”, “All I Do Is Think Of You”, “Ready Or Not”. On these songs, Michael’s “knowingness” sounds more like fragility.
Read the Full Article @ Zentronix
***
Chasing Michael Jackson
by Teresa Wiltz
I remember covering Michael in 2004 as an arts writer for the Washington Post. He was making a tour through Capitol Hill, making nice with the Congressional Black Caucus and talking about AIDS in Africa and philanthropy, etc., etc. Not that the public was privy to any of this. “Covering” Michael Jackson on the Hill amounted to standing around and waiting for hours, and hours, and hours on end, interviewing fans who used to love him but were no longer sure he was a good role model. Keeping an eye trained on the door, lest the Altered One jet before you could get next to him. Feeling just a little foolish.
Read the Full Article @ The Root
by Jeff Chang
Many of his most affecting performances were about distance and displacement, the desire to be somewhere else, the inability to return to a lost past. Think of the songs that the hip-hop generation adored so much: “I’ll Be There”, “I Wanna Be Where You Are”, “Who’s Loving You”, “Maybe Tomorrow”, “All I Do Is Think Of You”, “Ready Or Not”. On these songs, Michael’s “knowingness” sounds more like fragility.
Read the Full Article @ Zentronix
***
Chasing Michael Jackson
by Teresa Wiltz
I remember covering Michael in 2004 as an arts writer for the Washington Post. He was making a tour through Capitol Hill, making nice with the Congressional Black Caucus and talking about AIDS in Africa and philanthropy, etc., etc. Not that the public was privy to any of this. “Covering” Michael Jackson on the Hill amounted to standing around and waiting for hours, and hours, and hours on end, interviewing fans who used to love him but were no longer sure he was a good role model. Keeping an eye trained on the door, lest the Altered One jet before you could get next to him. Feeling just a little foolish.
Read the Full Article @ The Root
Chatting Up Michael Joseph Jackson
CBCRadio
Q with John Ghomeshi
June 26: Michael Jackson Remembered. We'll talk to several cultural thinkers and musical figures about the life and legacy of the King of Pop. Plus, Friday LIVE guest, Homecookin', featuring four of Canada's top jazz and blues musicians.
Listen to Q
***
NPR's Tell Me More with Michel Martin
The King of Pop is Gone
Tell Me More, June 26, 2009 - The world is mourning the loss of a music icon. Michael Jackson died yesterday at the age of 50. Duke Professor Mark Anthony Neal and Journalist Bryan Monroe, former Editorial Director of Ebony Magazine, share their thoughts about Michael Jackson, his influence and his legacy.
Listen to Tell Me More
Jackson's Musical Peers Remember His Genius
Tell Me More, June 26, 2009 - Behind the scenes in the music industry, Michael Jackson was more than a star. He was a genius.
Record producer Kenny Gamble and Howard Hewett, lead singer of the 70s R&B group Shalamar, both worked closely with Jackson. They remember what it was like to share a studio with the 'King of Pop.'
Listen to Tell Me More
***
The Michael Eric Dyson Show
WEAA-FM Baltimore
The Life and Legacy of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson with Reverend Jesse Jackson, Professor James Braxton Peterson, Music Critic Ann Powers, BET Founder Robert Johnson, and Professor Mark Anthony Neal
Listen to the Michael Eric Dyson Show
***
Soundcheck with John Schaefer
WNYC-FM New York
Death of Thriller
Michael Jackson was one of the most successful and influential entertainers of the 20th Century. He won 13 Grammys and sold 50 million copies of his 1982 masterpiece, Thriller. But his fame and reputation declined starting in the 1990s. When he died yesterday at age 50, Jackson was attempting a comeback with 50 sold-out concert dates in London. Today, we look back at Jackson's career. Guests include: music critic Jody Rosen of Slate.com; Los Angeles Times chief pop music critic Ann Powers; Mark Anthony Neal, professor of black popular culture at Duke University and contributor to TheRoot.com; Susan Blond, founder and president of Susan Blond Inc. and a former Jackson publicist; Details magazine editor at large Jeff Gordinier; and Bruce Swedien, the recording engineer behind Thriller among other Jackson albums.
The Michael Eric Dyson Show
WEAA-FM Baltimore
The Life and Legacy of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson with Reverend Jesse Jackson, Professor James Braxton Peterson, Music Critic Ann Powers, BET Founder Robert Johnson, and Professor Mark Anthony Neal
Listen to the Michael Eric Dyson Show
***
Soundcheck with John Schaefer
WNYC-FM New York
Death of Thriller
Michael Jackson was one of the most successful and influential entertainers of the 20th Century. He won 13 Grammys and sold 50 million copies of his 1982 masterpiece, Thriller. But his fame and reputation declined starting in the 1990s. When he died yesterday at age 50, Jackson was attempting a comeback with 50 sold-out concert dates in London. Today, we look back at Jackson's career. Guests include: music critic Jody Rosen of Slate.com; Los Angeles Times chief pop music critic Ann Powers; Mark Anthony Neal, professor of black popular culture at Duke University and contributor to TheRoot.com; Susan Blond, founder and president of Susan Blond Inc. and a former Jackson publicist; Details magazine editor at large Jeff Gordinier; and Bruce Swedien, the recording engineer behind Thriller among other Jackson albums.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Conjuring Michael (the “uncut-before-u-git-the-academic-ish” mix)
Conjuring Michael (the “uncut-before-u-git-the-academic-ish” mix)
by Mark Anthony Neal
“Schumaw”—like some ancient African dialect that only he, James Brown, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Macy Gray, and quiet as it’s kept, Lil’ Wayne quite understand. Random utterings like “Mama-ko, mama-sa, ma-ka-ma-ko-ssa” and even Cameroonian musician Manu Dibango can’t quite claim it. The point is that this was some deep knowledge and there was never any explanation for it—like that riff in the middle of “Remember the Time” that can’t even be transcribed. Much the same with the infamous audition tape—the grainy black & white one, where the lil’ boy is singing JB and moving through an archive of masculine movements known only to Mr. Brown, Mr. Wilson—and quiet as it’s kept, Mr. Presley. Mr. Gordy was hooked, not quite knowing what he had and misreading the lil boy as some kind of novelty, like that lil blind boy, who asked for his freedom only to return with Music On My Mind under one arm and genius under the other. But that boy had almost a decade of seasoning before the breakthrough; this other cat was 10-years old, singing about stuff he ain’t supposed to know about.
Aks him who he dug and the boy say “William Hart.” What? Yeah, William Hart. Like what this 10-year-old know about The Delphonics, and then you listen to “Can You Remember?” from that first Jackson 5 joint and it’s like damn—this boy ain’t real. Smokey must have thought the same thing listening to the playback of “Who’s Lovin’ You?”—the b-side of the original hot ish, “I Want You Back.” Naw, Smokey, flip that ish over. I mean damn, you did write this joint right—and you did record this joint right? But damn if that ain’t yo’ song no mo’. And the rest was history.
My story with the boy started just a bit after that. Call it a serious boy crush and who could blame me, he was like the prettiest M’fer we’d ever seen, especially with the Apple Jack on his head. I talking from the beginning, like I listened to that ABC album on 8-Track—years before I figured out what the actual album sequencing was like. Years later I danced with my mother to that album’s “I Found that Girl” at my wedding. The boy was my first muse—literally. Used to copy lyrics from those early albums—“Darling Dear,” “Wings of Love,” “In Our Small Way”—and sent them in secret notes to the first shortie who really caught my eyes. Got the idea peeping an old episode of the ABC Afterschool Special where the boy’s “We’ve Got a Good Thing Going” played in the background and I got that queasy first love thing in my stomach. The song that’s on the album with the rat. Boy was on some queer ish even them. Shame the boy wasn’t free to be on some Ziggy Stardust ish, but what’s a little black boy to do in the mid-1970s.
Boy tried to get his own freedom in the late 1970s frequenting dance clubs like 54, checking the scene, watching cats like Gamble and Huff work the boards and when he and them other boys took control over their own music and that young boy hooked up with Q, all was magic. Young boy found his own muse in the scarecrow, easing on down the road to the Emerald City—“can you, feel it, brand day?”—and damn if those early videos for “Rock With You”, “Don’t Stop ‘Till You Get Enough” and “Can You Feel It” don’t feel inspired by The Wiz. Truth be told, Off the Wall was the crown jewel—ish was still innocent, earnest, organic. Thriller seemed contrived—like that young boy was trying to sell 20 million records. Find the boy’s true fans by asking “Thiller” or “Off the Wall”? If they say the former, than you know that were on some Johnny/Janie come-lately ish when that young boy took claim to the world.
The rest was a blur, like if you drop like 26 millions sales, what exactly do you do next? The young boy never figured that out and the less it was about the music, the more surreal the ish got. Then it became about young boys, ‘cept he was now a grown ass-man, though true be told, if I’m to believe that this grown ass man was fondling young boys, I also got to believe the ass whumpings that occurred at the hands of that once young boy’s daddy. That boy spent a lifetime seeking a meaningful freedom, perhaps from the tyranny of family, but later from the tyranny of celebrity. And yeah perhaps Mr. Presley, Ms. Monroe and those four British mop-tops could relate, but when that young boy was hitting his half half of them were dead—and they never had to deal with MTV and 24-hour cable networks in their prime.
I will shed a tear sometime soon, not for the man who breathed his last breath today, but for that young boy that helped to define the me that I be. That young boy was special and it’s that young boy that I choose to remember today.
Aks him who he dug and the boy say “William Hart.” What? Yeah, William Hart. Like what this 10-year-old know about The Delphonics, and then you listen to “Can You Remember?” from that first Jackson 5 joint and it’s like damn—this boy ain’t real. Smokey must have thought the same thing listening to the playback of “Who’s Lovin’ You?”—the b-side of the original hot ish, “I Want You Back.” Naw, Smokey, flip that ish over. I mean damn, you did write this joint right—and you did record this joint right? But damn if that ain’t yo’ song no mo’. And the rest was history.
My story with the boy started just a bit after that. Call it a serious boy crush and who could blame me, he was like the prettiest M’fer we’d ever seen, especially with the Apple Jack on his head. I talking from the beginning, like I listened to that ABC album on 8-Track—years before I figured out what the actual album sequencing was like. Years later I danced with my mother to that album’s “I Found that Girl” at my wedding. The boy was my first muse—literally. Used to copy lyrics from those early albums—“Darling Dear,” “Wings of Love,” “In Our Small Way”—and sent them in secret notes to the first shortie who really caught my eyes. Got the idea peeping an old episode of the ABC Afterschool Special where the boy’s “We’ve Got a Good Thing Going” played in the background and I got that queasy first love thing in my stomach. The song that’s on the album with the rat. Boy was on some queer ish even them. Shame the boy wasn’t free to be on some Ziggy Stardust ish, but what’s a little black boy to do in the mid-1970s.
Boy tried to get his own freedom in the late 1970s frequenting dance clubs like 54, checking the scene, watching cats like Gamble and Huff work the boards and when he and them other boys took control over their own music and that young boy hooked up with Q, all was magic. Young boy found his own muse in the scarecrow, easing on down the road to the Emerald City—“can you, feel it, brand day?”—and damn if those early videos for “Rock With You”, “Don’t Stop ‘Till You Get Enough” and “Can You Feel It” don’t feel inspired by The Wiz. Truth be told, Off the Wall was the crown jewel—ish was still innocent, earnest, organic. Thriller seemed contrived—like that young boy was trying to sell 20 million records. Find the boy’s true fans by asking “Thiller” or “Off the Wall”? If they say the former, than you know that were on some Johnny/Janie come-lately ish when that young boy took claim to the world.
The rest was a blur, like if you drop like 26 millions sales, what exactly do you do next? The young boy never figured that out and the less it was about the music, the more surreal the ish got. Then it became about young boys, ‘cept he was now a grown ass-man, though true be told, if I’m to believe that this grown ass man was fondling young boys, I also got to believe the ass whumpings that occurred at the hands of that once young boy’s daddy. That boy spent a lifetime seeking a meaningful freedom, perhaps from the tyranny of family, but later from the tyranny of celebrity. And yeah perhaps Mr. Presley, Ms. Monroe and those four British mop-tops could relate, but when that young boy was hitting his half half of them were dead—and they never had to deal with MTV and 24-hour cable networks in their prime.
I will shed a tear sometime soon, not for the man who breathed his last breath today, but for that young boy that helped to define the me that I be. That young boy was special and it’s that young boy that I choose to remember today.
Loving Michael
special to NewBlackMan
Loving Michael
by Stephane Dunn
The calls came fast – Michael Jackson was dead. The words flashed across the screen in typical pop news form – sensational and impersonal. I muted the television and stopped taking calls. It was not hot, shocking news to me. It was heartbreaking.
I want you back
Michael was my first crush. There were the posters on my wall and the journal entries about meeting and marrying him and protecting him all that might wound him.
Abc, 123
As a little girl, my cousins and I lip synced, kicked, and spun, trying to follow the studded bell bottoms of Michael and his brothers. In secret I wrote him letters by the dozens and sat in my room, daydreaming of our fairytale love story.
Just call my name and I’ll be there
Later, I ‘shook my body to the ground’ and grew into adolescence as Michael, the wide eyed cutie with the magical voice, eased out of the Afro on his way to the jheri curl and a solo career.
Keep on, don’t Stop ‘till you get enough
I moved beyond posters on the walls and accepted that he was a star flung too far for me to marry – though I hung on to the prayer that at least we’d meet. He was still my Michael and I stood applauding telling him to go on with his bad self as he moon-walked onto MTV and further into pop performance history.
Reaching out to touch a stranger
The lighter his skin got, the more that nose changed, the more I worried about him. But still the voice, the feet, and something of that little boy of long ago remained in the eyes. The awards, the glove, the sparkling sock, and the imitators came and went and the stories grew.
Just call my name and I’ll be there
Weird, bizarre, - the king of pop branded child molester, masked freak, wanna-be-white recluse, bad father. And he retreated even, from that beloved stage that had so long been home and went further in search, I believe, of a wonder-world fit for the child the spotlight and fame had stolen him from too early. And there he was – the barred topic, the disgraced has-been pop star, fallen prey to the world’s amnesia.
You’ve got a friend in me
They will say, are saying, he was a musical genius, a pop icon. They will catalog his ‘bizarre behavior’, trot long anonymous fans across the television screen, show images of flower tributes against the back drop of his pale face and ‘Michael Jackson 1958-2009.’ They will debate the sequence of his death, calculate his emotional state, review his achievements and cultural importance, and surmise on the future of his children.
I’ve been a victim of a selfish kind of love
None of it will mean much to me – not the images, the talk, and debates. I’ll be mourning my Michael, my first crush, the boy with James Brown and Jackie Wilson in his feet, the man with the sweetness and the haunted soul in his voice . . .
Oh I never can say good-bye . . .
by Stephane Dunn
The calls came fast – Michael Jackson was dead. The words flashed across the screen in typical pop news form – sensational and impersonal. I muted the television and stopped taking calls. It was not hot, shocking news to me. It was heartbreaking.
I want you back
Michael was my first crush. There were the posters on my wall and the journal entries about meeting and marrying him and protecting him all that might wound him.
Abc, 123
As a little girl, my cousins and I lip synced, kicked, and spun, trying to follow the studded bell bottoms of Michael and his brothers. In secret I wrote him letters by the dozens and sat in my room, daydreaming of our fairytale love story.
Just call my name and I’ll be there
Later, I ‘shook my body to the ground’ and grew into adolescence as Michael, the wide eyed cutie with the magical voice, eased out of the Afro on his way to the jheri curl and a solo career.
Keep on, don’t Stop ‘till you get enough
I moved beyond posters on the walls and accepted that he was a star flung too far for me to marry – though I hung on to the prayer that at least we’d meet. He was still my Michael and I stood applauding telling him to go on with his bad self as he moon-walked onto MTV and further into pop performance history.
Reaching out to touch a stranger
The lighter his skin got, the more that nose changed, the more I worried about him. But still the voice, the feet, and something of that little boy of long ago remained in the eyes. The awards, the glove, the sparkling sock, and the imitators came and went and the stories grew.
Just call my name and I’ll be there
Weird, bizarre, - the king of pop branded child molester, masked freak, wanna-be-white recluse, bad father. And he retreated even, from that beloved stage that had so long been home and went further in search, I believe, of a wonder-world fit for the child the spotlight and fame had stolen him from too early. And there he was – the barred topic, the disgraced has-been pop star, fallen prey to the world’s amnesia.
You’ve got a friend in me
They will say, are saying, he was a musical genius, a pop icon. They will catalog his ‘bizarre behavior’, trot long anonymous fans across the television screen, show images of flower tributes against the back drop of his pale face and ‘Michael Jackson 1958-2009.’ They will debate the sequence of his death, calculate his emotional state, review his achievements and cultural importance, and surmise on the future of his children.
I’ve been a victim of a selfish kind of love
None of it will mean much to me – not the images, the talk, and debates. I’ll be mourning my Michael, my first crush, the boy with James Brown and Jackie Wilson in his feet, the man with the sweetness and the haunted soul in his voice . . .
Oh I never can say good-bye . . .
***
Stephane Dunn, Ph.D, MFA, is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Morehouse College. She has also taught at Ohio State University. A scholarly and creative writer, she specializes in film, popular culture, literature and African American studies. She is the author of articles and commentaries and the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008).
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
The Persecution of Progressive Black Scholars
St. Clair Drake/Special to NewBlackMan
The Persecution of Progressive Black Scholars
by Christopher J. Metzler
Georgetown University
Institutions of higher education are supposed to be the place where the free market place of ideas takes hold. In fact, the basis for tenure has always been that academics should not be punished for speaking out. The theory is that such speaking out is protected even when university administration does not agree with the content of that speech. However, these same institutions are also political fiefdoms where tenure has been used and will continue to be used to punish those with whom the members of the promotion and tenure committee do not agree. In other words, academic freedom is only free when one agrees with those in power. All junior faculty understand very quickly that the definition of “scholarship” is a moving target and that if they wish tenure, they better move with the target. The hypocrisy of the promotion and tenure process (and I use the word process lightly) is that too many faculty are more about politics and less about scholarship. So, they play the game to get tenure and then when some of them get it, they punish the ideas of others they find unpopular by denying them tenure.
Progressive Black scholars find ourselves in a particular pickle. On the one hand, we want to advance ideas that look critically at the academy and simply not accept the status quo. On the other, if we are too progressive, then we will be Boyced. That is, we will be fired from predominately white institutions that will reduce our entire scholarly career to a warm bucket of spit. Of course I am not suggesting that all predominately white institutions will Boyce progressive Black scholars. I am suggesting that too many can and do.
First, regardless of whether one agrees with Dr. Watkins’ views or not, one cannot in good faith question his credential or his scholarship. One can disagree with it, one can dislike it, one can criticize but one cannot question its rigor, funny, I thought that this is what academic freedom is about. In fact, Syracuse University believed him to be of sufficient scholastic heft to hire him on tenure track in the first place. So, did he suddenly become a less than mediocre scholar after he joined the faculty? Of course not, in fact, an objective reading of his work suggests that he is a scholar who pushes his knowledge to a public that is very much outside “the ivory tower.” Perhaps the problem is that those judging scholarship should realize that scholarship as well as its consumption is evolving and that progressive black scholars such as Dr. Watkins must, if we are to be true to our mission, bring the scholarship to many who may never step foot on our campuses.
Second, it is not an understatement to say that Black male scholars do not dominate the ranks of predominately white institutions. It is also not an understatement to say that progressive Black scholars are in the numerical and scholastic minority at these same institutions. Thus, perhaps promotion and tenure committees should stop trying to pretend that they value our contributions and admit that far too many of them are more interested in visual representation (diversity for diversity sake) than diversity of thought, diversity of scholarship, diversity of methodology and diversity of thought. A reading of that which is considered “scholarly” by many of these committees reveals a common theme: protection of the status quo of ideas by a limited number of elite intellectuals. To be sure, one can argue that there is nothing wrong with this approach. I would argue that in the interest of transparency that promotion and tenure committees should not shrink from stating this since many of them believe it to be true. This way, progressive Black scholars will simply need not apply.
Third, for Black scholars, the reality of being Boyced stifles academic freedom and suffocates scholarship. Many of us will be loathe to publish anti-establishment scholarship for fear that ultra-right wing bloggers and T.V. entertainers can influence whether we are promoted or fired. We will also question whether the entertainers of whom I write are adjunct members of the committee with whom we should vet our scholarship before we publish it. Of course, some of them do not have the educational or scholarship credentials to judge our work in the first instance.
But, I digress.
The losers here will be students who will not be exposed to a panoply of ideas and approach to teaching and learning but to educational malnutrition in the form of anti-intellectual mediocrity. It will also be academic freedom which in too many of these institutions is simply not free.
How can institutions of higher learning justify living in a state of educational humdrum? Just ask the institutions that Boyce black progressive Black scholars.
***
Christopher J. Metzler, PhD is Associate Dean of Human Resources for the Masters of Professional Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining Georgetown University, he was on the faculty at Cornell University's ILR School where he directed the EEO and Diversity Studies program.
Mark Anthony Neal on the Michael Eric Dyson Show
from The Michael Eric Dyson Show (WEAA-FM--Baltimore)
The New Black Man:
Mark Anthony Neal’s “Overlooked Genius”
Throughout this month – - Black Music Month - – we’ve been hearing from some of the most influential artists in popular music, jazz, and Gospel.
We’ve heard Lalah Hathaway, Melba Moore, Nancy Wilson, Chuck D., Leela James, Sonny Rollins, CeCe Winans, and Jody Watley….
We’ve also dissected the use of AutoTune technology and talked with the Rev. Jesse Jackson about the reach of Tupac Shakur.
But we’re not done yet.
We haven’t hit on Black Radio for example.
On today’s show, Dyson talks to the New Black Man, which is the online blogging moniker of Mark Anthony Neal.
Professor Neal is also a student, and teacher, of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University.
He wants to talk about one old-school artist in particular this month…. whom he calls “an overlooked genius.” And it’s not me.
We’ve heard Lalah Hathaway, Melba Moore, Nancy Wilson, Chuck D., Leela James, Sonny Rollins, CeCe Winans, and Jody Watley….
We’ve also dissected the use of AutoTune technology and talked with the Rev. Jesse Jackson about the reach of Tupac Shakur.
But we’re not done yet.
We haven’t hit on Black Radio for example.
On today’s show, Dyson talks to the New Black Man, which is the online blogging moniker of Mark Anthony Neal.
Professor Neal is also a student, and teacher, of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University.
He wants to talk about one old-school artist in particular this month…. whom he calls “an overlooked genius.” And it’s not me.
Listen @ The Michael Eric Dyson Show
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
A "Fatherless" Debate?
(Traditional) Fathers Don’t Always Know Best
by Kai Wright
The notion that kids can’t develop properly without a biological father was a lie when Dan Quayle asserted it in 1992, and it’s a lie when Barack Obama says it now.
Read the Full Essay @ The Root
New Muslim Cool
An Intimate Look at Hip-Hop’s Jihad
by Suad Abdul Khabeer
Real hip-hop heads know that Islam and hip-hop have been longtime friends, feeding off each other’s energy. Muslim ideals of self-respect and social change have inspired some of the greatest emcees, and hip-hop is giving voice to the dreams and daily struggles of a generation of Muslims. This cross-pollination between Islam and hip-hop is vividly illustrated in a new documentary, New Muslim Cool, which premieres tonight on PBS.
Directed by veteran filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, New Muslim Cool chronicles three years in the life of Hamza "Jason" Perez, a Puerto Rican Muslim, family man, emcee, interfaith prison chaplain and social activist.
So why is Hamza’s story called the New Muslim Cool? Because he is part of a generation of young Muslims who are coming of age in a post-9/11 America. They are tackling questions of race, faith, freedom and even, as Hamza does, questionable intrusions by the FBI. They unapologetically choose God and country; they are doing American Islam with style.
Read the Full Essay @ The Root
by Suad Abdul Khabeer
Real hip-hop heads know that Islam and hip-hop have been longtime friends, feeding off each other’s energy. Muslim ideals of self-respect and social change have inspired some of the greatest emcees, and hip-hop is giving voice to the dreams and daily struggles of a generation of Muslims. This cross-pollination between Islam and hip-hop is vividly illustrated in a new documentary, New Muslim Cool, which premieres tonight on PBS.
Directed by veteran filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, New Muslim Cool chronicles three years in the life of Hamza "Jason" Perez, a Puerto Rican Muslim, family man, emcee, interfaith prison chaplain and social activist.
So why is Hamza’s story called the New Muslim Cool? Because he is part of a generation of young Muslims who are coming of age in a post-9/11 America. They are tackling questions of race, faith, freedom and even, as Hamza does, questionable intrusions by the FBI. They unapologetically choose God and country; they are doing American Islam with style.
Read the Full Essay @ The Root
Monday, June 22, 2009
A Daughter's Reflection...
special to NewBlackMan
Oatmeal
by Stephane Dunn
My father (daddy) dies. He is in bed with his girlfriend and he wakes, says her name, gasps, and that’s it. He is gone. Heart attack. It’s March and three weeks after we’ve buried gramps, my mother’s daddy. And that’s the last time I spoke to my father. The day of that funeral. We chatted a few minutes about how it was time for a little reunion, maybe a barbeque in Fort Wayne where he lived and maybe May 22, his birthday and the birthday of his granddaughter, my sister’s then two year old. I tell him that anytime I listen to James Cleveland, I think of him and Sundays, getting ready for church and leaving, all except he, who always remained at home with Albertina Walker, James, and the Mighty Clouds of Joy, cooking up some good smelling roast or stew. He laughed a little, kind of sad, and that was it. He was dead three weeks later.
Don’t remember who called. Mama, I think, with that voice that said somebody died before the “I got some bad news” comes out. Still, I am surprised, too surprised to say much or think much. My older sister has to be told; my younger sister, daddy’s best thing, knows. She is crushed - two little kids of her own but now a little girl missing what she’d already lost and the chance that somehow that perfect arc of daddy and little girl love will return whole. My older sister is dry but full of stuff, a good deal held back and in; it comes out in funeral planning drama days later in Indiana when she ticks the girlfriend off and we have to pay for the burial instead of using money he’d supposedly put aside for that.
At the funeral, I sit in the front row - my brother, younger sister, then me and the older sister. The younger sister is beside herself, the coffin, the church, us in the front row, hits hard. Her father is really gone. She wails one line, ‘I’m not ready.” I take my place in front of the pulpit, off to one side of the coffin and stand beside the brother and older sister and pay homage. I come last or maybe next to last and talk about oatmeal. I think it is a poem, kind of, but really some words trying to say something about someone I’ve missed for years, someone I’ll keep missing. I could only eat daddy’s oatmeal. Only he made it perfectly, not too thick or thin and so pretty with just the right mix of cinnamon and butter and just a bit of sugar, so good I did not need toast or milk. I say that I haven’t eaten it, oatmeal, for years, not anybody’s even my own.
I cannot remember them all, but I know my words were all about oatmeal - the best oatmeal ever. I returned to my seat and held my wailing sister. Maybe I did not, could not wail or cry because I was there and I wasn’t. I’m in the black dress, the coffin, silver, a few feet away and my sister cries on my shoulder but I’m looking down high above the choir stand and the preachers, including my step dad pastor and I’m looking down, noting the too empty pews and the few familiar faces dotting benches. I see we four sitting on that front pew and my mother and some aunts a ways behind us and the little singing and organ playing going on. When it’s over and a cousin has preached his subject, about what I cannot recall, we walk down the aisle to the preacher’s ‘ashes to ashes’ and I greet a boyfriend from back in the day and an old high school friend and then there is the cemetery. The coffin goes down, down, down and too soon we’re back at the church where people eat chicken and exchange numbers. And that’s it.
A few months later on a Sunday summer morning, my off and on again poet boyfriend rises early and says come on. For some reason I don’t ask where or why just throw on sweats, a t-shirt, and some tennis shoes and mask my fast beating heart when he pulls the four-wheel out of the drive. We don’t go far from the beige subdivision but it seems miles away, the hidden little woods behind a school where we stop. There are trees undisturbed reaching up past the clouds and a little brook in the center of the tree clump. We sit on a fallen trunk, under another tree where the bright morning sun warms up and filters down through the leaves. We don’t speak. I feel something that’s been too far from me, quiet, calm. I raise my t-shirt, baring a breast and raise my chest and ask the sun to warm me all the way through. The poet leans over softly and kisses the breast then rises and walks off. I cover my breast and rise too but do not follow him. I head towards a tree frozen in convulsions and lean against the bewitched body and look up.
I imagine the trees really do go on and on as far away as daddy and gramps and grandmamma and further, maybe to where there actually is a heaven. I stretch against the bewitched one and stretch my neck trying to see that far. Without warning, there’s a wetness on my cheeks and a low sound. My Poet stays away and I cry and look up until it comes again - calm and quiet. Minutes later, we get back on the four-wheel but this time, I hop on the front and take that wheel. I forget to worry about going too fast or getting hit in the face with a branch or flying off the thing if we hit a curve too fast. I don’t know it then, but I will learn to make oatmeal that I like.
Don’t remember who called. Mama, I think, with that voice that said somebody died before the “I got some bad news” comes out. Still, I am surprised, too surprised to say much or think much. My older sister has to be told; my younger sister, daddy’s best thing, knows. She is crushed - two little kids of her own but now a little girl missing what she’d already lost and the chance that somehow that perfect arc of daddy and little girl love will return whole. My older sister is dry but full of stuff, a good deal held back and in; it comes out in funeral planning drama days later in Indiana when she ticks the girlfriend off and we have to pay for the burial instead of using money he’d supposedly put aside for that.
At the funeral, I sit in the front row - my brother, younger sister, then me and the older sister. The younger sister is beside herself, the coffin, the church, us in the front row, hits hard. Her father is really gone. She wails one line, ‘I’m not ready.” I take my place in front of the pulpit, off to one side of the coffin and stand beside the brother and older sister and pay homage. I come last or maybe next to last and talk about oatmeal. I think it is a poem, kind of, but really some words trying to say something about someone I’ve missed for years, someone I’ll keep missing. I could only eat daddy’s oatmeal. Only he made it perfectly, not too thick or thin and so pretty with just the right mix of cinnamon and butter and just a bit of sugar, so good I did not need toast or milk. I say that I haven’t eaten it, oatmeal, for years, not anybody’s even my own.
I cannot remember them all, but I know my words were all about oatmeal - the best oatmeal ever. I returned to my seat and held my wailing sister. Maybe I did not, could not wail or cry because I was there and I wasn’t. I’m in the black dress, the coffin, silver, a few feet away and my sister cries on my shoulder but I’m looking down high above the choir stand and the preachers, including my step dad pastor and I’m looking down, noting the too empty pews and the few familiar faces dotting benches. I see we four sitting on that front pew and my mother and some aunts a ways behind us and the little singing and organ playing going on. When it’s over and a cousin has preached his subject, about what I cannot recall, we walk down the aisle to the preacher’s ‘ashes to ashes’ and I greet a boyfriend from back in the day and an old high school friend and then there is the cemetery. The coffin goes down, down, down and too soon we’re back at the church where people eat chicken and exchange numbers. And that’s it.
A few months later on a Sunday summer morning, my off and on again poet boyfriend rises early and says come on. For some reason I don’t ask where or why just throw on sweats, a t-shirt, and some tennis shoes and mask my fast beating heart when he pulls the four-wheel out of the drive. We don’t go far from the beige subdivision but it seems miles away, the hidden little woods behind a school where we stop. There are trees undisturbed reaching up past the clouds and a little brook in the center of the tree clump. We sit on a fallen trunk, under another tree where the bright morning sun warms up and filters down through the leaves. We don’t speak. I feel something that’s been too far from me, quiet, calm. I raise my t-shirt, baring a breast and raise my chest and ask the sun to warm me all the way through. The poet leans over softly and kisses the breast then rises and walks off. I cover my breast and rise too but do not follow him. I head towards a tree frozen in convulsions and lean against the bewitched body and look up.
I imagine the trees really do go on and on as far away as daddy and gramps and grandmamma and further, maybe to where there actually is a heaven. I stretch against the bewitched one and stretch my neck trying to see that far. Without warning, there’s a wetness on my cheeks and a low sound. My Poet stays away and I cry and look up until it comes again - calm and quiet. Minutes later, we get back on the four-wheel but this time, I hop on the front and take that wheel. I forget to worry about going too fast or getting hit in the face with a branch or flying off the thing if we hit a curve too fast. I don’t know it then, but I will learn to make oatmeal that I like.
***
Stephane Dunn, Ph.D, MFA, is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Morehouse College. She has also taught at Ohio State University. A scholarly and creative writer, she specializes in film, popular culture, literature and African American studies. She is the author of articles and commentaries and the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008).
Rethinking Juneteenth
The Truth About Juneteenth
by Thavolia Glymph
Juneteenth, widely celebrated throughout the United States, is now a commemorative holiday in 31 states. On Thursday the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and the long century of segregation and discrimination that followed its end. This, for some, long-awaited, and for others, disappointing, resolution appears to have been deliberately timed to pass on the eve of Juneteenth. It is unsurprising given the popular history of Juneteenth. And it is also troubling.
Juneteenth has in popular renderings come to be understood as the date Union Gen. Gordon Granger, arriving in Galveston on June 19, 1865, brought the news of emancipation and set Texas slaves free. From a strictly historical point of view one might think January 1, 1863, the date the Emancipation Proclamation was announced, or December 6, 1865, the date the 13th Amendment was ratified, would be more appropriate dates to commemorate.
Today, Juneteenth is celebrated as something even grander, a "holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States" or as the state of Virginia's 'Juneteenth State Holiday Observance Resolution of 2007,' put it, Juneteenth represents the day Gordon notified "the last enslaved Americans of their new status almost two and one-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation." Other state, senate and congressional resolutions and media accounts all offer up similar narratives. Strictly speaking, Juneteenth does not represent any of these things.
Read the Full Essay @ THE GRIO
***
Thavolia Glymph is a professor of history and African and African American Studies at Duke University, specializing in Southern History. Her most recently published work is Out Of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), co-winner of the 2009 Philip Taft Book Prize.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Fathers and Sons; Black Men and Baseball (for Byron Hurt)
Fathers and Sons; Black Men and Baseball (for Byron Hurt)
by Mark Anthony Neal
My father had gone home to glory, months before the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president. In the difficult days before his death, there was little opportunity even to talk about such a possibility, but I have vivid memories of my father’s reaction to another "Black first." It was the fall of 1974 when the Cleveland Indians, broke one of the last racial barriers in professional sports, by naming Frank Robinson their manager. My father’s joy was palpable—one of the lasting memories that I have of him.
It was only two years before Frank Robinson was named the Cleveland manager, that another Robinson, the legendary Jackie Robinson threw out the first pitch before a world series game between the Cincinnati Reds and Oakland Athletics. Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s infamous color barrier in 1947, becoming the first black to play in the league since Moses Fleetwood Walker was effectively banned from the American Association and National Leagues (precursors the current league) in 1889. Robinson took the opportunity that day in October of 1972 to announce his hope that one day he could attend such a game and see a black manager in one of the dugouts. It would be Jackie Robinson’s last public appearance; He died on October 24, 1972 at the young age of 53. I can remember my father, trying to get his 6-year-old son—oblivious to the Jim Crow segregation that defined his father’s existence—to understand the significance of Jackie Robinson’s life and death.
My father was never much of a race man, but his sense of racial accomplishment was intimately tied to the black men he watched play professional baseball. Born in 1935, my father was of a generation of black men who clearly smelled of freedom in ways that their fathers could never imagine, but were still reigned in by very real social constraints. In men like Frank Robinson, Jackie Robinson, Juan Marachial, Henry Aaron, Elston Howard, Bob Gibson, Roberto Clemente and especially Willie Mays—the first generation of Black superstars in baseball—my father saw the possibilities of that freedom, even if it could only then be realized on the playing field. Indeed Mays’s boyish swagger—the way he loped to the batter’s box, the casual style in which he employed his signature basket catch, the way his cap always came off as he ran the bases—was an inspiration for many a boy, regardless of race.
It was my father’s love of Mays that essentially made me a baseball fan. My father could barely contain himself when Mays was traded from the San Francisco Giants to the New York Mets in May of 1972. If I was gonna be a baseball fan, I had little choice but to be a New York Met fan, despite the fact that Yankee Stadium was less than 10 minutes away from our Bronx tenement building. In the early 1970s, the New York Mets had few black ball players and none that could be called major stars, but the names of Cleon Jones, John Milner and Tommy Agee, became part of my everyday vocabulary. Though Mays was well past his prime when he was traded to the Mets, he was still a marquee name for a team that would never quite escape the shadow of their cross-town rivals, The Yankees. Until George Steinbrenner took over the Yankees in 1973, the team seemed to relish in the whiteness of their legacy.
It was during this time that my father and I began our Sunday ritual; a morning spent listening to the music of Gospel groups like the Mighty Clouds of Joy and the Pilgrim Jubilee Singers and an afternoon of watching Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner announce Met games. The most memorable times though were the Sundays when we could head out to Flushing, NY and to see the team play in person. At the time I couldn’t fully appreciate what it meant to see Willie Mays in the flesh, despite his diminished talents. It was much the same way at a 1973 game between the Mets and the Atlanta Braves, where Hank Aaron hit two-home runs during his last push towards Babe Ruth’s career total of 714 homeruns. It was with my father that I watched Mays’s last hurrah, during the 1973 World Series, when the great player’s age finally betrayed him in ways that could no longer be ignored.
Though I have remained a baseball fan for much of my life, girls and hip-hop would capture my attention in the decade after Mays’s retirement. There were few games that my father and I watched together as time progressed, though we excitedly discussed the emergence of Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Godden as the New York Mets first homegrown black superstars in the mid-1980s. There was a silence between my father and I, when both of those men succumbed to the pitfalls of being young, black and famous in New York City; my father all too aware of the brutal ways that dreams were deferred for black men of his generation and I all too aware of the young black men of my generation, who lived tragic lives, far from the back pages of the New York Daily News.
I lament that my father and I never attended a baseball game together as adults—as men who could reflect on the beauty of the game along with the challenges that we faced as black men, fathers and loving husbands. My father’s absence hit home months ago, as I watched the opening of the New York Mets' new stadium Citi Field. On hand for the opening festivities was Rachel Robinson, the 87-year-old widow of Jackie Robinson. In tribute to Robinson, Citi Field features the Jackie Robinson Rotunda where visitors can view memorabilia and video presentations of Robinson during his playing days. Sometime this summer I hope to visit Citi Field with my own children and though my father will not be there, I know that he will be there in spirit, as I tell my daughters about this game of baseball and its importance to their grand-father.
***
Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books and currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for New York University Press. He is Professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University in Durham, NC.
by Mark Anthony Neal
My father had gone home to glory, months before the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president. In the difficult days before his death, there was little opportunity even to talk about such a possibility, but I have vivid memories of my father’s reaction to another "Black first." It was the fall of 1974 when the Cleveland Indians, broke one of the last racial barriers in professional sports, by naming Frank Robinson their manager. My father’s joy was palpable—one of the lasting memories that I have of him.
It was only two years before Frank Robinson was named the Cleveland manager, that another Robinson, the legendary Jackie Robinson threw out the first pitch before a world series game between the Cincinnati Reds and Oakland Athletics. Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s infamous color barrier in 1947, becoming the first black to play in the league since Moses Fleetwood Walker was effectively banned from the American Association and National Leagues (precursors the current league) in 1889. Robinson took the opportunity that day in October of 1972 to announce his hope that one day he could attend such a game and see a black manager in one of the dugouts. It would be Jackie Robinson’s last public appearance; He died on October 24, 1972 at the young age of 53. I can remember my father, trying to get his 6-year-old son—oblivious to the Jim Crow segregation that defined his father’s existence—to understand the significance of Jackie Robinson’s life and death.
My father was never much of a race man, but his sense of racial accomplishment was intimately tied to the black men he watched play professional baseball. Born in 1935, my father was of a generation of black men who clearly smelled of freedom in ways that their fathers could never imagine, but were still reigned in by very real social constraints. In men like Frank Robinson, Jackie Robinson, Juan Marachial, Henry Aaron, Elston Howard, Bob Gibson, Roberto Clemente and especially Willie Mays—the first generation of Black superstars in baseball—my father saw the possibilities of that freedom, even if it could only then be realized on the playing field. Indeed Mays’s boyish swagger—the way he loped to the batter’s box, the casual style in which he employed his signature basket catch, the way his cap always came off as he ran the bases—was an inspiration for many a boy, regardless of race.
It was my father’s love of Mays that essentially made me a baseball fan. My father could barely contain himself when Mays was traded from the San Francisco Giants to the New York Mets in May of 1972. If I was gonna be a baseball fan, I had little choice but to be a New York Met fan, despite the fact that Yankee Stadium was less than 10 minutes away from our Bronx tenement building. In the early 1970s, the New York Mets had few black ball players and none that could be called major stars, but the names of Cleon Jones, John Milner and Tommy Agee, became part of my everyday vocabulary. Though Mays was well past his prime when he was traded to the Mets, he was still a marquee name for a team that would never quite escape the shadow of their cross-town rivals, The Yankees. Until George Steinbrenner took over the Yankees in 1973, the team seemed to relish in the whiteness of their legacy.
It was during this time that my father and I began our Sunday ritual; a morning spent listening to the music of Gospel groups like the Mighty Clouds of Joy and the Pilgrim Jubilee Singers and an afternoon of watching Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner announce Met games. The most memorable times though were the Sundays when we could head out to Flushing, NY and to see the team play in person. At the time I couldn’t fully appreciate what it meant to see Willie Mays in the flesh, despite his diminished talents. It was much the same way at a 1973 game between the Mets and the Atlanta Braves, where Hank Aaron hit two-home runs during his last push towards Babe Ruth’s career total of 714 homeruns. It was with my father that I watched Mays’s last hurrah, during the 1973 World Series, when the great player’s age finally betrayed him in ways that could no longer be ignored.
Though I have remained a baseball fan for much of my life, girls and hip-hop would capture my attention in the decade after Mays’s retirement. There were few games that my father and I watched together as time progressed, though we excitedly discussed the emergence of Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Godden as the New York Mets first homegrown black superstars in the mid-1980s. There was a silence between my father and I, when both of those men succumbed to the pitfalls of being young, black and famous in New York City; my father all too aware of the brutal ways that dreams were deferred for black men of his generation and I all too aware of the young black men of my generation, who lived tragic lives, far from the back pages of the New York Daily News.
I lament that my father and I never attended a baseball game together as adults—as men who could reflect on the beauty of the game along with the challenges that we faced as black men, fathers and loving husbands. My father’s absence hit home months ago, as I watched the opening of the New York Mets' new stadium Citi Field. On hand for the opening festivities was Rachel Robinson, the 87-year-old widow of Jackie Robinson. In tribute to Robinson, Citi Field features the Jackie Robinson Rotunda where visitors can view memorabilia and video presentations of Robinson during his playing days. Sometime this summer I hope to visit Citi Field with my own children and though my father will not be there, I know that he will be there in spirit, as I tell my daughters about this game of baseball and its importance to their grand-father.
***
Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books and currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for New York University Press. He is Professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University in Durham, NC.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Chatting Up (Black) Fatherhood
"Fatherhood" (2000) by Ruth Bloch/Weinstein Gallery
REINVENTING DAD
Pacifica Radio 99.5 FM WBAI
Women, Body & Soul
Hosted by Nathalie Thandiwe
Interview with guests Professor Mark Anthony Neal, father and author of New Black Man, along with hip hop musician, educator and father, Bomani Armah (Peek-a-Boo, Read a Book, Grown Ass Man), as the discuss how men and families can benefit from the reinvention of fatherhood.
Listen to the Interview @
WOMAN, BODY & SOUL
***
HOW DID YOU LEARN TO BE A FATHER?
NPR's Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan
Talk of the Nation, June 18, 2009 · Men who become fathers learn quite suddenly that the learning curve is steep and kids don't come with a user's manual. The curve can be more dramatic for men who grew up without dads.
Author Abdul Ali and Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal talk about how they learned fatherhood.
Listen to the Interview @
REINVENTING DAD
Pacifica Radio 99.5 FM WBAI
Women, Body & Soul
Hosted by Nathalie Thandiwe
Interview with guests Professor Mark Anthony Neal, father and author of New Black Man, along with hip hop musician, educator and father, Bomani Armah (Peek-a-Boo, Read a Book, Grown Ass Man), as the discuss how men and families can benefit from the reinvention of fatherhood.
Listen to the Interview @
WOMAN, BODY & SOUL
***
HOW DID YOU LEARN TO BE A FATHER?
NPR's Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan
Talk of the Nation, June 18, 2009 · Men who become fathers learn quite suddenly that the learning curve is steep and kids don't come with a user's manual. The curve can be more dramatic for men who grew up without dads.
Author Abdul Ali and Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal talk about how they learned fatherhood.
Listen to the Interview @
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
ON-THE-AIR: Re-inventing Fatherhood
Woman, Body and Soul
Hosted by Nathalie Thandiwe.
WBAI-FM--NYC--Pacifica Radio (99.5)
Thursday June 18, 2009
12:00 noon - 1:00pm
Live Stream @ WBAI.ORG
***
THE FATHERLESS DAUGHTER
with guest Jonetta Rose Barras, author of Whatever Happened to Daddy's Little Girl?
author, columnist and DC Politics radio host (WPFW, Tuesdays @ 11 am)
Jonetta Rose Barras speaks about the Impact of Fatherlessness.
- What happens to girls who grow up without their father?
- How does it shape their growth, life choices and relationships?
- For those who mourn or rage at this loss, where is the healing?
REINVENTING DAD
with guests Professor Mark Anthony Neal, father and author of New Black Man, along with hip hop musician, educator and father, Bomani Armah (Peek-a-Boo, Read a Book, Grown Ass Man).
Mark Anthony Neal and Bomani Armah discuss how men and families can benefit from the reinvention of fatherhood.
- How does our concept of masculinity inform fatherhood and how does it confine fathers?
- What role is there for fathers who cannot provide materially for their children/ families?
- How does feminism fit into fatherhood?
Book Review: Ain't I a Feminist?: African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom
special to NewBlackMan
Ain’t I a Feminist?:
African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom
by Aaronette White
(State University of New York Press, 2008)
Reviewed by Chantel K. Liggett
***
In Ain’t I a Feminist, Aaronette White proves that progressive feminist thought and action is not foreign to present-day African American men. Even more important, however, is the way in which she helps to “demystify the process” leading these men to, and sustaining their investments in, various forms of lived feminism (199). While brilliantly organizing the narratives of the twenty self-identified feminist, profeminist, or anti-sexist men she studied into seven thematic chapters, providing helpful contextualizations and frameworks within which to understand their experiences, the evaluation she does is so fluid and congruent with the men’s experiences, it undeniably gives their words and thought processes precedence over any theory or analysis thereof. As she puts it, “how men learn to confront patriarchy and become feminists can be understood through the narratives of those who are living the experience”(193). In permitting her subjects to lead by example, White provides what can be thought of as a blueprint for the cultivation of black male feminism.
The key ingredients of lived black male feminism are “humility, emotional openness, empathy, nurturing, dialog, accountability, mutuality, power sharing, and nonviolence,” offers White, focusing on the way feminist values are internalized and continually practiced on a day-to-day basis by the men in her study (199). Beyond questioning societal structures and practices like marriage, monogamy, religion, Black Power nationalist movements, violence, workplace gender dynamics, female domesticity, homophobia/heterosexism, and authoritative or removed fatherhood, these men reflect critically on their humanity, personal development, and relationships; White centers these processes as providing a wealth of knowledge about the implementation of feminist thought. Quoting James Baldwin as saying, “Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master,” she points to the importance of feminist men striving to occupy social positions more meaningful than those of dominators (59).
More than once White uses the phrase “vigilant practices” to describe the behavioral work of feminist men. Giving credit where credit is due, she does not overlook negative bouts in the men’s feminist development, which she calls “contamination” experiences, and outlines the difficultly with which men maintain feminist lifestyles. As one of her participants says, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing one has “already made it” as a feminist, when feminism is really a continual process of revaluation and renewal (122). Another participant offers that Black male feminists also sometimes (accidentally or purposely) revert to the “male thing” (104). Elaborating on this, White states, “Feminist Black men’s use of male dominant behaviors can be subtle, unconscious, and used as a coping device when they feel threatened” (101). Given that feminism requires a radical resocialization of males, she stresses that male feminists need not be flawless, and that it would be unrealistic to expect them to. “Egalitarianism requires not perfection but effort mixed with humility,” she says, demonstrating the importance of willingness in feminist development (96). A large portion of such willingness takes the form of speaking about, listening to, and being perceptive of both ‘larger’ issues and everyday occurrences regarding gender; what White chronicles the power of in Ain’t I a Feminist is the recurrence of such seemingly simply acts. Furthermore, in “directing attention to these practices,” White “counters the popular tendency to view a person’s gender identity as fixed or as developed primarily through childhood socialization,” instead naming it an ongoing, conscious process that individuals have a large degree of control over(84).
Aaronette White further commits to detailing and addressing the patterns of specific environments and resources that have had the biggest influence on her subjects’ feminist development. Demonstrating that becoming a feminist is not something one does alone, White seeks to pinpoint what has led these men in that direction, coming to the solid conclusion that intimate friendships or romances with feminist women and institutional settings that support feminist thinking are the key portals through which they gain access and further their development. Speaking of the importance of his romantic and sexual attraction to a feminist woman in aiding his feminist development, one subject says, “I don’t believe many men will put much effort into trying to correct themselves if the person who is trying to correct them is not someone who they are committed to and who is important to them” (89). As White highlights, many of the men in her study posited feminist-thinking women as strong, firm, and challenging, prompting, if not forcing, them to reevaluate patriarchal beliefs and practices. In this way, White emphasizes the importance of female feminist thinkers opening up to and working with men, and vice versa, as opposed to having separatist movements. Friendships with feminist women offer men “insider perspectives” (112), she says, and such relationships frequently provide “constructive criticism,” “practicing ground,” “safe spaces” for feminist growth (116). Furthermore, simply being around other feminists helped her subjects legitimate or free their potential male feminist identities, in providing a “mutually understood and shared relational reality that affirms another’s identity” (121).
The men’s reliance on institutional encouragement and support of feminist thought is most evident in Chapter Four, titled “Turning Points,” in which White charts the men’s substantial shifts in their thoughts about or relationship to feminism. “Their exposure to open-minded and radical, social justice-oriented institutions,” most often universities, “and their active participation to support racial and economic injustice often provided the foundation for subsequent feminist views and practices,” she observes (87). White utilizes these findings by challenging black feminists and their communities to recreate such environments where they are lacking, to facilitate the development of feminist consciousnesses in willing boys and men who would not otherwise have access. She boldly recommends the development women’s studies curricula in elementary and high schools and calls for a multiplicity of community campaigns that would allow black men to develop feminist consciousness in settings closer to home, providing her readers a lasting challenge.
Notably, aside from chronicling the paths of twenty black men to feminism, White’s groundbreaking work demonstrates effortlessly that “when one is pressured to view one’s humanity in terms of ‘being a man’ or ‘being a woman,’ what it means to be human is lost, truncated, stereotyped, and taken less seriously” (120). What these men gain from their commitment to feminism is indefinable but shines through their stories, impossible to ignore. In giving public voice to these men in the way she has, White sets forth a compelling model for other present-day as well as future men to grab on to.
***
Ain’t I a Feminist?:
African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom
by Aaronette White
(State University of New York Press, 2008)
Reviewed by Chantel K. Liggett
***
In Ain’t I a Feminist, Aaronette White proves that progressive feminist thought and action is not foreign to present-day African American men. Even more important, however, is the way in which she helps to “demystify the process” leading these men to, and sustaining their investments in, various forms of lived feminism (199). While brilliantly organizing the narratives of the twenty self-identified feminist, profeminist, or anti-sexist men she studied into seven thematic chapters, providing helpful contextualizations and frameworks within which to understand their experiences, the evaluation she does is so fluid and congruent with the men’s experiences, it undeniably gives their words and thought processes precedence over any theory or analysis thereof. As she puts it, “how men learn to confront patriarchy and become feminists can be understood through the narratives of those who are living the experience”(193). In permitting her subjects to lead by example, White provides what can be thought of as a blueprint for the cultivation of black male feminism.
The key ingredients of lived black male feminism are “humility, emotional openness, empathy, nurturing, dialog, accountability, mutuality, power sharing, and nonviolence,” offers White, focusing on the way feminist values are internalized and continually practiced on a day-to-day basis by the men in her study (199). Beyond questioning societal structures and practices like marriage, monogamy, religion, Black Power nationalist movements, violence, workplace gender dynamics, female domesticity, homophobia/heterosexism, and authoritative or removed fatherhood, these men reflect critically on their humanity, personal development, and relationships; White centers these processes as providing a wealth of knowledge about the implementation of feminist thought. Quoting James Baldwin as saying, “Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master,” she points to the importance of feminist men striving to occupy social positions more meaningful than those of dominators (59).
More than once White uses the phrase “vigilant practices” to describe the behavioral work of feminist men. Giving credit where credit is due, she does not overlook negative bouts in the men’s feminist development, which she calls “contamination” experiences, and outlines the difficultly with which men maintain feminist lifestyles. As one of her participants says, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing one has “already made it” as a feminist, when feminism is really a continual process of revaluation and renewal (122). Another participant offers that Black male feminists also sometimes (accidentally or purposely) revert to the “male thing” (104). Elaborating on this, White states, “Feminist Black men’s use of male dominant behaviors can be subtle, unconscious, and used as a coping device when they feel threatened” (101). Given that feminism requires a radical resocialization of males, she stresses that male feminists need not be flawless, and that it would be unrealistic to expect them to. “Egalitarianism requires not perfection but effort mixed with humility,” she says, demonstrating the importance of willingness in feminist development (96). A large portion of such willingness takes the form of speaking about, listening to, and being perceptive of both ‘larger’ issues and everyday occurrences regarding gender; what White chronicles the power of in Ain’t I a Feminist is the recurrence of such seemingly simply acts. Furthermore, in “directing attention to these practices,” White “counters the popular tendency to view a person’s gender identity as fixed or as developed primarily through childhood socialization,” instead naming it an ongoing, conscious process that individuals have a large degree of control over(84).
Aaronette White further commits to detailing and addressing the patterns of specific environments and resources that have had the biggest influence on her subjects’ feminist development. Demonstrating that becoming a feminist is not something one does alone, White seeks to pinpoint what has led these men in that direction, coming to the solid conclusion that intimate friendships or romances with feminist women and institutional settings that support feminist thinking are the key portals through which they gain access and further their development. Speaking of the importance of his romantic and sexual attraction to a feminist woman in aiding his feminist development, one subject says, “I don’t believe many men will put much effort into trying to correct themselves if the person who is trying to correct them is not someone who they are committed to and who is important to them” (89). As White highlights, many of the men in her study posited feminist-thinking women as strong, firm, and challenging, prompting, if not forcing, them to reevaluate patriarchal beliefs and practices. In this way, White emphasizes the importance of female feminist thinkers opening up to and working with men, and vice versa, as opposed to having separatist movements. Friendships with feminist women offer men “insider perspectives” (112), she says, and such relationships frequently provide “constructive criticism,” “practicing ground,” “safe spaces” for feminist growth (116). Furthermore, simply being around other feminists helped her subjects legitimate or free their potential male feminist identities, in providing a “mutually understood and shared relational reality that affirms another’s identity” (121).
The men’s reliance on institutional encouragement and support of feminist thought is most evident in Chapter Four, titled “Turning Points,” in which White charts the men’s substantial shifts in their thoughts about or relationship to feminism. “Their exposure to open-minded and radical, social justice-oriented institutions,” most often universities, “and their active participation to support racial and economic injustice often provided the foundation for subsequent feminist views and practices,” she observes (87). White utilizes these findings by challenging black feminists and their communities to recreate such environments where they are lacking, to facilitate the development of feminist consciousnesses in willing boys and men who would not otherwise have access. She boldly recommends the development women’s studies curricula in elementary and high schools and calls for a multiplicity of community campaigns that would allow black men to develop feminist consciousness in settings closer to home, providing her readers a lasting challenge.
Notably, aside from chronicling the paths of twenty black men to feminism, White’s groundbreaking work demonstrates effortlessly that “when one is pressured to view one’s humanity in terms of ‘being a man’ or ‘being a woman,’ what it means to be human is lost, truncated, stereotyped, and taken less seriously” (120). What these men gain from their commitment to feminism is indefinable but shines through their stories, impossible to ignore. In giving public voice to these men in the way she has, White sets forth a compelling model for other present-day as well as future men to grab on to.
***
Chantel K. Liggett is an undergraduate at Duke University pursuing a Women's Studies Major and Study of Sexualities Certificate. She is currently conducting research on 'queer' resistance to concrete categories of identity by Dutch nationals and Surinamese migrants in Amsterdam
Black Music Month 2009--The Genius of Rev. James Cleveland
Cleveland never achieved the crossover success of some contemporary Gospel artists, but in his day he was a leading light.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Black Music Month Classics: Songs of the Sad Minstrel
BLACK MUSIC MONTH CLASSICS
Songs of the Sad Minstrel
by Mark Anthony Neal
There’s rarely a moment when John Smith aka Lil’ Jon flashes across the television screen that the “coon” meter lodged deep within my consciousness begins to vibrate. It’s not that Smith’s antics offend me—I’ve long argued that there’s often an untapped complexity attached to even the most lurid of stereotypical racial images, particularly those created by blacks themselves. Indeed Smith is part of a tradition that has produced Stepin’ Fetchit (Lincoln Perry), Butterfly McQueen, Mantan Moreland, or any shuckin’ and jivin’ plantation “darky” that understood that their ability to sing and dance (or break tackles or finish line tapes) went a long way towards self-preservation. If such antics spared you the rod two centuries ago, it can surely earn you seven-figure salaries in this era of global digitized blackness.
Perhaps the truest genius of this tradition—call it blackface minstrelsy, the coon-show, samboisms—was Bert Williams. Almost a full century before hip-hop became sonic blackface, Williams donned the burnt cork and with partner George Walker became the most popular black performers in the United States. The recent release of a collection of recordings that Williams and Walker recorded from 1901-1909, allows us to again revisit the travails of the sad minstrel.
Williams was born in 1874 in the British West Indies of relative privilege. His family later moved to Florida, ultimately settling in Riverside, California, very far removed from the “plantation tales” that Walker and Williams would ultimately perform on Broadway. A natural mimic, Williams began to look for work in the traveling medicine shows (exhibitions where “quacks” sold ointments and the like) and it is there that he met Walker. As Walker wrote in 1906, “My experience with the quack doctors taught me…that white people are always interested in what they call ‘darky’ singing and dancing.”
What particularly caught the attention of Walker and Williams were the numbers of white minstrels, who “blackened up” often billing themselves as “coons”. Unable to compete with these white performers, Williams and Walker came up with a clever marketing scheme—they began to sell themselves as “Two Real Coons”. At their artistic peak in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Williams and Walker could claim to have mounted the first all-black musical on Broadway (1903’s In Dahomey) and an international following as the most popular purveyors of the dance the Cake Walk. After Walker’s death in 1909, Williams became the first black artist featured in the Ziegfeld Follies.
What Williams and Walkers understood then and what so many black performers have come to realize since is that white mainstream interest in blackness is often predicated on their belief that what they are consuming is “authentic”, whether they are capable of discerning black authenticity or not. In the spirit of Mark Twain’s desire for the “real nigger show,” black artists have often found it financially lucrative to give white audiences the “real” that they so desire. Williams and Walker were no different. For example songs like “I Don’t Like the Face You Wear” and “The Phrenologist Coon”, which both appear on Bert Williams: The Early Years, 1901-1909, were written by Ernest Hogan. It was on the strength of his 1896 hit song (sold as sheet music) “All Coons Look Alike to Me” that Hogan became a popular writer of “coon songs”.
Whereas George Walker was just performing the coon, Bert Williams’s relationship to his characters was much more complicated. As a light-skinned black man, Williams resorted to blackening up to come off as a more convincing “coon.” As Camille F. Forbes, author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star writes, “The blackface covered and effectively hid the real Williams, protecting him from having to be the persona he portrayed on the stage.” The real Williams often lamented that he couldn’t give his largely white audiences a more complex image of his characters—“the pathos as well as the fun.” This lament along with the lack of offers to do serious dramatic roles, were the pressures that squeezed the ambition and ultimately the life out of Williams, who died in 1922 at age 47.
William McFerrin Stowe, Jr. makes the point that Williams humanized the minstrel stereotype, creating a “significant modification within the acceptable structure of Negro stage characterization.” And this is what perhaps distinguishes Williams and a host others who toiled in America’s burgeoning culture industry of the early 2oth century—a desire to give complexity to the “shiftless darky.”
*Originally Published in January 2005
Perhaps the truest genius of this tradition—call it blackface minstrelsy, the coon-show, samboisms—was Bert Williams. Almost a full century before hip-hop became sonic blackface, Williams donned the burnt cork and with partner George Walker became the most popular black performers in the United States. The recent release of a collection of recordings that Williams and Walker recorded from 1901-1909, allows us to again revisit the travails of the sad minstrel.
Williams was born in 1874 in the British West Indies of relative privilege. His family later moved to Florida, ultimately settling in Riverside, California, very far removed from the “plantation tales” that Walker and Williams would ultimately perform on Broadway. A natural mimic, Williams began to look for work in the traveling medicine shows (exhibitions where “quacks” sold ointments and the like) and it is there that he met Walker. As Walker wrote in 1906, “My experience with the quack doctors taught me…that white people are always interested in what they call ‘darky’ singing and dancing.”
What particularly caught the attention of Walker and Williams were the numbers of white minstrels, who “blackened up” often billing themselves as “coons”. Unable to compete with these white performers, Williams and Walker came up with a clever marketing scheme—they began to sell themselves as “Two Real Coons”. At their artistic peak in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Williams and Walker could claim to have mounted the first all-black musical on Broadway (1903’s In Dahomey) and an international following as the most popular purveyors of the dance the Cake Walk. After Walker’s death in 1909, Williams became the first black artist featured in the Ziegfeld Follies.
What Williams and Walkers understood then and what so many black performers have come to realize since is that white mainstream interest in blackness is often predicated on their belief that what they are consuming is “authentic”, whether they are capable of discerning black authenticity or not. In the spirit of Mark Twain’s desire for the “real nigger show,” black artists have often found it financially lucrative to give white audiences the “real” that they so desire. Williams and Walker were no different. For example songs like “I Don’t Like the Face You Wear” and “The Phrenologist Coon”, which both appear on Bert Williams: The Early Years, 1901-1909, were written by Ernest Hogan. It was on the strength of his 1896 hit song (sold as sheet music) “All Coons Look Alike to Me” that Hogan became a popular writer of “coon songs”.
Whereas George Walker was just performing the coon, Bert Williams’s relationship to his characters was much more complicated. As a light-skinned black man, Williams resorted to blackening up to come off as a more convincing “coon.” As Camille F. Forbes, author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star writes, “The blackface covered and effectively hid the real Williams, protecting him from having to be the persona he portrayed on the stage.” The real Williams often lamented that he couldn’t give his largely white audiences a more complex image of his characters—“the pathos as well as the fun.” This lament along with the lack of offers to do serious dramatic roles, were the pressures that squeezed the ambition and ultimately the life out of Williams, who died in 1922 at age 47.
William McFerrin Stowe, Jr. makes the point that Williams humanized the minstrel stereotype, creating a “significant modification within the acceptable structure of Negro stage characterization.” And this is what perhaps distinguishes Williams and a host others who toiled in America’s burgeoning culture industry of the early 2oth century—a desire to give complexity to the “shiftless darky.”
*Originally Published in January 2005
Book Review: Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture, and Queer Identity
Special to NewBlackMan
Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture, and Queer Identity
by Bryant Keith Alexander
(AltaMira Press, 2006)
Review by Armond R. Towns
The construction for dominant society of what black masculinity looks like has been disseminated through the media. This construction of black men is one of hyper violence, hyper (hetero)sexuality, and hyper deviance. In Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture, and Queer Identity, Bryant Keith Alexander posits that black men construct their own masculinities which:
are unlike the stoic images of Black masculinity that we see on television, or the rough, mean, and aggressive images that we see in film. These images are not the violent, sexualized, and sometimes ineffectual images of Black men that we are expected to take as real. These are not the performances of ‘the angry Black man’ that has become the iconic representation of Black masculinity—and that we sometimes shamelessly use to a/effect service. (Alexander, 2006, pp. 151-152)This “displacement” of the black masculine performance, either physically (by visiting China or teaching in “the ivory tower”) or mentally (detailing alternative depictions of black masculinity to the dominant black masculinity), is Alexander’s project throughout this book. And speaking through a lens of autoethnography, performance studies, and cultural studies, Alexander toys with his acceptance as well as his denial of black male stereotypes.
Taking the reader through his activities—some “homespace,” daily activities, others “tourist,” international activities—Alexander illustrates the ways in which performing black maleness is viewed overseas, on a college campus, as well as within black communities. In one chapter, Alexander details a visit to China, in which he engaged gazing and being gazed at. A fairly large, African American male with dreadlocks, Alexander recalls being “an oddity, if not a commodity that [the Chinese people] visually consumed” (3). His dreadlocks especially drew stares. In fact, multiple residents would touch his hair throughout his visit.
This reverse gaze and tactile approach threw Alexander off, because he acknowledges his plan to initially make the Chinese people a spectacle, to simply be a “fly on the wall” and watch as the Chinese residents did their daily thing. “The gross assumption here that both undergirds and haunts tourism, as well as particular practices in ethnography and intercultural scholarship in general is that the researcher/tourist is a privileged viewer and is not held to the culture-specific codes of propriety that govern human sociality in the spaces of their observation” (Alexander, 2006, p. 13). Acknowledging his privilege and his planned viewing—while coming to grips with the eyes of the Chinese people that were fixated on him—Alexander begins to “question [his] own culpability in acts of domination as [he] characterize[d] the Chinese in [his] tourist experience and in this documentation of experience” (2006, p. 19). Ultimately, Alexander leaves China with more questions than answers in relation to his black body (and black hair) and how it impacted the way in which he was viewed and the way in which he performed.
Tying into black hair, Alexander also recalls some of his earliest years in the black barbershop. Like many black men, “the test of establishing community for [him] has often been grounded in locating a barbershop” (137), a black cultural cornerstone. This cornerstone is not without outside influences that are tied to both race and gender. Within the barbershop, “the old men’s talk…served both as functional component of social exchange, and as a way of perpetuating culture and community” (143). There is also talk that is largely heterosexual in nature “that both reveals and promotes desire for women” (152). There seems little to no room for discussion of homosexuality in these spaces.
In more recent years, Alexander has also traveled “betwixt and between” two communities: the barbershop (for his shavings) and the beauty salon (for maintenance of his dreadlocks). The beauty salon, like the barbershop, is marked by gender, and Alexander acknowledges some discomfort in his travels into the beauty salon, despite becoming a regular customer. From his memory, the beauty salon, like his mother’s kitchen, was reserved for “women’s talk.” Still, “In some ways [he is] gradually accepted into this community, but not as a member. The maleness of [his] body tells a different story” (156).
The acceptance and denial of the black male body—and the various levels of acceptance and denial—is the theme that carries throughout Alexander’s book. From the “migration of Black faculty, staff, and students across the borders between the university campus and ‘the Black cultural community’” (34), to the performance of the “Good Man/Bad Man” dialectic, to the performance of a black, gay professor teaching drag in the classroom, to engaging “readers in topics that are sedimented in all of our lived experiences” (163), like the death of a loved one, Alexander’s book displays a black masculinity that is both accepted and despised, both dominant and subordinate. And by examining multiple intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, as well as showing the ways in which black men differ from and can be complicit to various black masculine performances, Alexander’s book provides a level of understanding that depicts the complexity of black masculine performance rather than the simplicity of the dominant depiction of black masculinity.
***
Armond R. Towns is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the communication and cultural studies department.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Michael Jackson--The Motown Years
Michael Jackson
Hello World- The Complete Motown Solo Collection
SITE SHIP DATE: 7/03/09
LIMITED EDITION QUANITITY: 7,000
“Michael Jackson could make you forget he was so young.”
So writes Suzee Ikeda, a Motown A&R assistant who was a creative confidante of a teenage Michael, in her introductory essay to Hello World: The Motown Solo Collection, a new 3-CD set that features every MJ recording released from 1971 to 1975, plus the Motown-era songs that were released after he left the company.
At the height of Jacksonmania in 1970-71, when everyone in the world, it seemed, was focusing on the hot kids’ group from Gary, Indiana, a solo career for Michael was not necessarily a given. But when 13-year-old Donny Osmond went solo while staying in the Osmonds family group, so did Michael, then turning 14, who was given material that made him sound even wiser and more mature as an artist. “Got To Be There” was his first solo hit, which featured a stunning, declamatory phrase that provided the name of this collection.
The LP Got To Be There, released in January 1972, also included the hits “Rockin’ Robin” and “I Wanna Be Where You Are.” It was followed by Ben, after the hit title song from a film about a pet rat—a song that became an unlikely No. 1 smash for Michael. The album was first issued with a cover featuring lurid artwork from the film, which was quickly replaced by a simpler image of MJ; our package reproduces both covers in the 48 page booklet.
Music And Me was next, an experiment in softening Michael’s sound—the album featured a few Adult Contemporary covers—followed by Forever, Michael. That LP had a harder dance age, and included the now-classic, sample-favorites “We’re Almost There” and “Just A Little Bit Of You.”
Those four albums might have been the end of the story for Michael and Motown, as the J5 left in 1975 to go to Epic Records. In the aftermath of the huge success of MJ’s solo Off The Wall, however, came the compilation One Day In Your Life, whose title song—lifted from Forever, Michael—turned into a No. 1 hit in the U.K. and top 40 AC in the U.S. Following the crazy ride of Thriller, Motown released Farewell My Summer Love, a batch of songs from the vault with contemporary overdubs; the title song went top 10 R&B.
There’s more: in 1986 Motown issued Looking Back To Yesterday, a collection of more vault masters—some with the J5—that contained further unexpected gems.
Hello World has all of that and these extra gems: all nine songs from Farewell My Summer Love are included in their original, undubbed mixes. Plus, we unearthed the original mix of “Twenty-Five Miles”—Michael’s cover of the Edwin Starr hit that has previously been available only in a 1987 vault collection. It’s all in a splendid 8” x 5.5” package with Ms. Ikeda’s intro, a main essay by Mark Anthony Neal, pages of annotations, rare photos and repros of the LP jackets. It’s deserving of the one of the greatest performers the world has ever known, at any age.
Read More at Hip-O-Select.com
Hello World- The Complete Motown Solo Collection
SITE SHIP DATE: 7/03/09
LIMITED EDITION QUANITITY: 7,000
“Michael Jackson could make you forget he was so young.”
So writes Suzee Ikeda, a Motown A&R assistant who was a creative confidante of a teenage Michael, in her introductory essay to Hello World: The Motown Solo Collection, a new 3-CD set that features every MJ recording released from 1971 to 1975, plus the Motown-era songs that were released after he left the company.
At the height of Jacksonmania in 1970-71, when everyone in the world, it seemed, was focusing on the hot kids’ group from Gary, Indiana, a solo career for Michael was not necessarily a given. But when 13-year-old Donny Osmond went solo while staying in the Osmonds family group, so did Michael, then turning 14, who was given material that made him sound even wiser and more mature as an artist. “Got To Be There” was his first solo hit, which featured a stunning, declamatory phrase that provided the name of this collection.
The LP Got To Be There, released in January 1972, also included the hits “Rockin’ Robin” and “I Wanna Be Where You Are.” It was followed by Ben, after the hit title song from a film about a pet rat—a song that became an unlikely No. 1 smash for Michael. The album was first issued with a cover featuring lurid artwork from the film, which was quickly replaced by a simpler image of MJ; our package reproduces both covers in the 48 page booklet.
Music And Me was next, an experiment in softening Michael’s sound—the album featured a few Adult Contemporary covers—followed by Forever, Michael. That LP had a harder dance age, and included the now-classic, sample-favorites “We’re Almost There” and “Just A Little Bit Of You.”
Those four albums might have been the end of the story for Michael and Motown, as the J5 left in 1975 to go to Epic Records. In the aftermath of the huge success of MJ’s solo Off The Wall, however, came the compilation One Day In Your Life, whose title song—lifted from Forever, Michael—turned into a No. 1 hit in the U.K. and top 40 AC in the U.S. Following the crazy ride of Thriller, Motown released Farewell My Summer Love, a batch of songs from the vault with contemporary overdubs; the title song went top 10 R&B.
There’s more: in 1986 Motown issued Looking Back To Yesterday, a collection of more vault masters—some with the J5—that contained further unexpected gems.
Hello World has all of that and these extra gems: all nine songs from Farewell My Summer Love are included in their original, undubbed mixes. Plus, we unearthed the original mix of “Twenty-Five Miles”—Michael’s cover of the Edwin Starr hit that has previously been available only in a 1987 vault collection. It’s all in a splendid 8” x 5.5” package with Ms. Ikeda’s intro, a main essay by Mark Anthony Neal, pages of annotations, rare photos and repros of the LP jackets. It’s deserving of the one of the greatest performers the world has ever known, at any age.
Read More at Hip-O-Select.com
Friday, June 12, 2009
Black Music Month Classics: Fertile Ground
BLACK MUSIC MONTH CLASSICS
Fertile Rewards: The Return of Fertile Ground
By Mark Anthony Neal
According to their publicity, the group Fertile Ground has sold more than 125,000 discs. In an era when bad rappers and American Idol rejects often sell twice as much, Fertile Ground’s records sales might not seem significant. But the group has sold all of those records without distribution from a major label or any support from radio or traditional video outlets. Of course stories of third-tier gangsta rappers who moved 100,000 units out of the back of their jeeps are hip-hop lore, but that’s what makes Fertile Ground’s achievement all that more astounding: against the grain of the hip-hop and R&B that masquerades as great black music, Fertile Ground has created a rich mix of Jazz, R&B, Soul that has resonated with those thirsting for Black music (with a capital "B") and artists that are more conscious of tradition than how many rotations can be garnered on a Clear Channel station. Fertile Ground’s latest recording Black Is…, the group’s fourth recording, is the fertile reward of seven years of struggle and passion to make great black music.
The Fertile Ground story begins with keyboardist James Collins. A graduate of the University of Maryland, where he majored in Biochemistry, Collins grew up a fan of jazz music and played trumpet while a student in the Baltimore Public School system. Collins was playing gigs with his jazz band and enrolled in medical school at Johns Hopkins University, when he was given a tip about a local vocalist who was a student at Baltimore’s HBCU Morgan State University. That vocalist was Navasha Daya. According to Collins, after Daya sat in with the band one night he dropped out of medical school and “started to embark upon our beautiful musical career.” With fellow band members including percussionist Ekendra Das, saxophonist Craig Alston, and trumpeter Freddie Dunn, Collins and Daya forged forward with Fertile Ground; Their first full-length recording Field Songs was released in 1998.
From the beginning Collins and the band had a deep sense that they would have to pursue a different course than what was happening in the mainstream recording industry. As Collins admitted in a recent interview, “over the last 15 or 20 years, the way records have been marketed has been by exclusively national, commercial entities” adding that “We don’t really go the commercial route of putting out a record and you work with the top producers, who do the same thing that’s already out there…we try to focus, more or less, on the legacy of art.” And that focus on the “legacy of art” is perhaps what most distinguishes Fertile Ground from so many of their contemporary peers. Listening to their new recording Black Is…, as well as their previous outings, you can hear strong strains of Nina Simone, Pharaoh Sanders, Gil Scott-Heron, Fela Kuti, Duke Ellington and even a lesser know genius like Doug Carn, who in the 1970s made classic recordings like Infant Eyes and Adam’s Apple for the independent Black Jazz Label. Like Carn, Fertile Ground mixes good music with uplifting lyrics and an independent spirit about the music industry. But Collins is quick to add that Fertile Ground’s musical influences go beyond the obvious choices noting that “you’ll also hear Talib Kweli and Esthero and even a little hint of Bjork.”
There are many highlights on Black Is…, including “Live in the Light”, “Changing Woman”, “A Blues for Me”, and “Yellow Daisies” (Collins’s favorite), but it is the title track “Black Is…” that is likely to most stir emotions. Collins recounted the band’s performance of “Black Is…” at recent show at Blues Alley in Washington, DC., where a white family walked out because they were “uncomfortable” with the song. According to Collins, “I think that pretty much sums up the reason we put the record out” adding “The chorus to the track is ‘Black is Beautiful’, that was my conclusion, but I feel that regardless of what the conclusion is, the question is still the same—“What is Black?” And I think its something that is very relevant right now.”
Collins sees the need to record a track like “Black Is…” as important, particularly at a historical moment when marketing firms and publicists hold so much sway in determining what “blackness” is. In Collins’s view, “we need to establish what makes us, a people, and hold on to those things, because if we don’t, then the dominating cultural forces, right now the marketing forces, will define us. That’s why we start to become defensive—‘we’re more than hip-hop, slang and baggy jeans’—the only reason that becomes a conversation is because other images of blackness are not being equally marketed, equally professed.
The passion and love of black music and culture that Collins and band members profess comes through powerfully in all of the group’s music. But of course there might be detractors who question why Collins, for example, would choose to give up on a career in the medical profession, in order to become a struggling musician. Collins’s choice ultimately was predicated on the fact that he believes that Fertile Ground is part of something larger—a belief that it is vitally important at this moment to replenish the well of black expressive culture. That so many black folk see such efforts as a waste of time and energy has deep implications for black youth who might not see the importance of maintaining black creative traditions, be it in music, visual arts, literature or dance. Collins notes that it’s “unfortunate that in industries that we dominate, we don’t raise our kids to be musicians, not even to learn music business or the business of music, so that we can stop complaining about the fact the we got to deal with these culturally insensitive people to put our records and our art out.” “Ultimately” Collins observes, “this is the same fight that Spike Lee has to have, that Haile Gerima has to have, that Quincy Jones had to have.”
*Originally Published in 2004
By Mark Anthony Neal
According to their publicity, the group Fertile Ground has sold more than 125,000 discs. In an era when bad rappers and American Idol rejects often sell twice as much, Fertile Ground’s records sales might not seem significant. But the group has sold all of those records without distribution from a major label or any support from radio or traditional video outlets. Of course stories of third-tier gangsta rappers who moved 100,000 units out of the back of their jeeps are hip-hop lore, but that’s what makes Fertile Ground’s achievement all that more astounding: against the grain of the hip-hop and R&B that masquerades as great black music, Fertile Ground has created a rich mix of Jazz, R&B, Soul that has resonated with those thirsting for Black music (with a capital "B") and artists that are more conscious of tradition than how many rotations can be garnered on a Clear Channel station. Fertile Ground’s latest recording Black Is…, the group’s fourth recording, is the fertile reward of seven years of struggle and passion to make great black music.
The Fertile Ground story begins with keyboardist James Collins. A graduate of the University of Maryland, where he majored in Biochemistry, Collins grew up a fan of jazz music and played trumpet while a student in the Baltimore Public School system. Collins was playing gigs with his jazz band and enrolled in medical school at Johns Hopkins University, when he was given a tip about a local vocalist who was a student at Baltimore’s HBCU Morgan State University. That vocalist was Navasha Daya. According to Collins, after Daya sat in with the band one night he dropped out of medical school and “started to embark upon our beautiful musical career.” With fellow band members including percussionist Ekendra Das, saxophonist Craig Alston, and trumpeter Freddie Dunn, Collins and Daya forged forward with Fertile Ground; Their first full-length recording Field Songs was released in 1998.
From the beginning Collins and the band had a deep sense that they would have to pursue a different course than what was happening in the mainstream recording industry. As Collins admitted in a recent interview, “over the last 15 or 20 years, the way records have been marketed has been by exclusively national, commercial entities” adding that “We don’t really go the commercial route of putting out a record and you work with the top producers, who do the same thing that’s already out there…we try to focus, more or less, on the legacy of art.” And that focus on the “legacy of art” is perhaps what most distinguishes Fertile Ground from so many of their contemporary peers. Listening to their new recording Black Is…, as well as their previous outings, you can hear strong strains of Nina Simone, Pharaoh Sanders, Gil Scott-Heron, Fela Kuti, Duke Ellington and even a lesser know genius like Doug Carn, who in the 1970s made classic recordings like Infant Eyes and Adam’s Apple for the independent Black Jazz Label. Like Carn, Fertile Ground mixes good music with uplifting lyrics and an independent spirit about the music industry. But Collins is quick to add that Fertile Ground’s musical influences go beyond the obvious choices noting that “you’ll also hear Talib Kweli and Esthero and even a little hint of Bjork.”
There are many highlights on Black Is…, including “Live in the Light”, “Changing Woman”, “A Blues for Me”, and “Yellow Daisies” (Collins’s favorite), but it is the title track “Black Is…” that is likely to most stir emotions. Collins recounted the band’s performance of “Black Is…” at recent show at Blues Alley in Washington, DC., where a white family walked out because they were “uncomfortable” with the song. According to Collins, “I think that pretty much sums up the reason we put the record out” adding “The chorus to the track is ‘Black is Beautiful’, that was my conclusion, but I feel that regardless of what the conclusion is, the question is still the same—“What is Black?” And I think its something that is very relevant right now.”
Collins sees the need to record a track like “Black Is…” as important, particularly at a historical moment when marketing firms and publicists hold so much sway in determining what “blackness” is. In Collins’s view, “we need to establish what makes us, a people, and hold on to those things, because if we don’t, then the dominating cultural forces, right now the marketing forces, will define us. That’s why we start to become defensive—‘we’re more than hip-hop, slang and baggy jeans’—the only reason that becomes a conversation is because other images of blackness are not being equally marketed, equally professed.
The passion and love of black music and culture that Collins and band members profess comes through powerfully in all of the group’s music. But of course there might be detractors who question why Collins, for example, would choose to give up on a career in the medical profession, in order to become a struggling musician. Collins’s choice ultimately was predicated on the fact that he believes that Fertile Ground is part of something larger—a belief that it is vitally important at this moment to replenish the well of black expressive culture. That so many black folk see such efforts as a waste of time and energy has deep implications for black youth who might not see the importance of maintaining black creative traditions, be it in music, visual arts, literature or dance. Collins notes that it’s “unfortunate that in industries that we dominate, we don’t raise our kids to be musicians, not even to learn music business or the business of music, so that we can stop complaining about the fact the we got to deal with these culturally insensitive people to put our records and our art out.” “Ultimately” Collins observes, “this is the same fight that Spike Lee has to have, that Haile Gerima has to have, that Quincy Jones had to have.”
*Originally Published in 2004
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