The Cutting Edge of 'Kamaal the Abstract'

Q-Tip's Return to Grace
by John Murph

This decade, many a rap and R&B artist, from Missy Elliott to Mya, have seen their albums stalled or put on permanent hold. But Q-Tip’s Kamaal/The Abstract has the dubious distinction of being one of the most delayed hip-hop records in the history of rap, nearly done under by seven long years of corporate hemming and hawing.

The story of Kamaal/The Abstract is an epic battle of creative artistic control against an increasingly homogenized and claustrophobic mainstream market.

The album, which was released last month, was originally scheduled to hit the streets in early 2002 as the follow-up to Q-Tip’s first solo, and highly controversial, album, Amplified (Arista, 1999). With Kamaal/The Abstract, there was much at stake. Longtime fans felt that for his solo debut, Q-Tip had abandoned the thoughtful verses he waxed with A Tribe Called Quest, for a decidedly more glamorous, blinged-out approach. Kamaal/The Abstract was to be Q-Tip’s return to grace

Kamaal/The Abstract was a move to show both Q-Tip returning to the more experimental approach of Tribe as well as delving deeper into the group’s jazz aesthetic, an aesthetic that made ’90s discs such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders enduring classics for both hip-hop and jazz heads. On Kamaal/The Abstract, Q-Tip recruited the heavyweight talents of saxophonist/flutist Gary Thomas, alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, giving them plenty of room to shine. And instead of balancing the jazz equation with high-profile, hip-hop guest artists, he explored more conventional instrumentation and many times opted to sing rather than rap.

While pre-release media coverage was mixed, the underground buzz about the record generated a lot of excitement in the music world. Unfortunately, that exhilaration didn’t touch the powers that be at Arista Records, who initially kept postponing the release date. And then label execs put Kamaal on ice, arguing that it didn’t have a single hit on it.

After that, Q-Tip’s career floated, in limbo; another disc, Open (Hollywood) also stalled. It wasn’t until he pulled a Rocky Balboa last year with The Renaissance (Motown Records), that his recording career landed back on solid ground. So the thawing and release of Kamaal/The Abstract is a long time coming.

It must have been incredibly frustrating for Q-Tip to watch Kamaal/The Abstract held back while other risk-taking albums recorded later—Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (ironically also on Arista), Common’s Electric Circus, Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere and Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak—became critical and commercial successes. With Kamaal/The Abstract, Q-Tip proved himself to beprescient in challenging the status quo of what a hip-hop artist could do.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

New York State of Mind? Alicia Keys and Shawn Carter @ the World Series

Ne-Yo Sings the Theme to 'The Princess & the Frog'

"Never Knew I Needed" will be featured during the The Princess & the Frog's ending credits. The soundtrack album will be available November 23rd, and the movie, whose action takes place in New Orleans and the Louisiana bayou, will open in theatres on December 11th. In addition to Ne-Yo's contribution, The Princess and the Frog Soundtrack boosts a colorful collection of original songs and a lively orchestral score, both composed and conducted by Randy Newman.

Sapphire Chats Up 'Push' and 'Precious' with Katie Couric

Author Sapphire talks about the new movie "Precious" inspired by her novel "Push," the process of casting the lead actress Gabourey Sidibe, and the inspirational message of the story.

Why No One Talks Back to Cathy Hughes

The empress of black radio is using public airwaves to personally attack her enemies in Congress in the name of black progress. Who's going to put her in check?

Why No One Talks Back to Cathy Hughes
by Natalie Hopkinson

If you’ve tuned in to black radio in the past few months, chances are you’ve heard “Reality Radio,” a series of announcements in which radio pioneer Cathy Hughes asks the black community to fight a new law in Congress that she claims would “murder black-owned radio.”

Her definition of homicide? Performance Rights Act (HR 848), a bill that would require radio stations to pay royalties to artists for playing their music. The potential winners and losers in the bill being considered by Congress has been a source of heated debate. But it clearly would dim the already free-falling profits of Hughes’ company Radio One, the nation’s largest chain of black radio stations.

Now, your average multimillionaire business mogul might respond to a congressional threat by heading directly to K Street to hire the most powerful lobbyist money can buy. But we are talking about Cathy Hughes, BLACK multimillionaire business mogul, someone who has a long track record of using the airwaves to throw her weight around on behalf of the Darker Nation.

Thus Hughes’ calculus for the “Reality Radio” spots goes something like this: I am a black person + my business is under threat = black people are under threat.

“This bill is not in the interest of black people!” Hughes tells the 12 million listeners who tune in to Radio One stations each week, in spots that air as many as a dozen times a day. In one episode, Hughes publicly scolds bill co-sponsor Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston for assuring radio execs that HR 848 would not put them out of business. “She has never worked at, managed nor owned a radio station in her life,” Hughes says. “So how could she possibly know anything about what it takes or doesn’t take to operate a broadcasting facility?”

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Crisis in the Village? The Morehouse Dress Code

Crisis in the Village? The Morehouse College Dress Code

Mark Anthony Neal of NewBlackMan is joined by David Ikard (Florida State University), Simone Drake (Ohio State University) and Jeffrey McCune (University of Maryland) in a discussion of the Morehouse College Dress Code.

Listen HERE

The Unmasking of Mike Tyson

The Unmasking of Iron Mike

By Stephane Dunn



Oprah’s show has rarely attempted to provide a platform where intimate portraits of black men and radical dialogue about black masculinity with black men take place nor of course, do we see this often enough in popular culture and mass media. But two recent shows-dialogues with former infamous heavyweight Mike Tyson do a lot towards making up this deficit.



On the first show, Mike and Oprah sat and talked-Oprah in typical form anticipating some answers, but the allure of the show weren’t in the answers to burning questions like why Mike bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear or quintessential philosophical Oprah guru questions: ‘what have you learned’ from this or that. No, it was simply the unadorned humanity of Mike Tyson. Like the recent documentary Tyson (2008), in essence a long commentary on his life by Mike, it was almost too uncomfortable to watch, a former symbol of tough American and especially black American masculinity naked to the world in a way that supposedly true men are not supposed to be. With his powerful punch and that seemingly unwavering scary demeanor, Mike was the last true American heavyweight celebrity when he became the youngest heavyweight ever at age twenty.



After his fall from being a three hundred million dollar media darling, including that marriage debacle with actress Robin Givens, a rape conviction and three year prison sentence, divorces, and that ear biting episode, Mike seemed bound to be written off as yet another former great performer turned into a tragic black male, social monster-public joke. But Mike is having his most raw public showing yet. Without his gloves and that menacing mask, “iron” Mike’s words and tears, his obvious confusion and that painful desire to be free of suffering and his accompanying demons (drugs, womanizing, anger . . .) has the potential to earn him a new audience and a new public role. Ironically, as Mike made clear on the second show with Evander Holyfield, fame is the least thing he seeks.



Most striking was Mike’s inability to fully articulate his pain and the demons he does battle with daily including at that very moment. His ‘I don’t knows’ in response to such topics as the recent death of his young daughter highlighted his struggle not only with words but within himself. That continuous break in his voice suggested the telling tears that seemed to threaten to overtake Mike at any second. He was so extraordinarily stripped of any subterfuge, of the willingness to lie or seemingly of knowing that most men, indeed many women and men would have clung to the mask rather than sit their fully clothed but soul naked on a show that has become sort of an ultimate way that men jokingly [and seriously] distinguish men and masculinity from the so-called soap opera-like feminine emotionality that they equate with Oprah’s female dominated viewership and show style.



Mike humanized not only himself but the emotional vulnerability that we are not often privy to viewing through the prism of America’s heterosexual tough guy masculine ethos. In admitting that he is a hurting, struggling, but feeling human being and man, Mike provides a more powerful entryway into deconstructing narrow images and narratives of masculinity than any academic theory ever could. Furthermore, Mike, ironically, is actually a useful model for the black masculine street codes that require young black men to adapt a cool, dangerous posturing that’s wreaking havoc on themselves and their community.



With Mike so obviously involved in the greatest fight for his life, one can’t help but to hope that this broken brother can be rebuilt into the new man, the new being that he so desperately wants to become. For Mike’s sake, here’s hoping he gets enough rounds to truly, in his words, “win.”



***



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).

Black Women's Health and Domestic Violence

Black men need to wake up to the facts on our women's health
by Mark Anthony Neal

October is both Breast Cancer Awareness Month as well as Domestic Abuse Awareness Month and, on the surface, the two seem to have little in common except concern for the quality of women's lives. Most men understand that breast cancer and domestic violence represent forms of crisis in the lives of black women, but I'd like to suggest that our dismissive attitude towards women's health care issues represent a form of abuse itself.

According to the Chicago Foundation for Women "violence against women and girls is a cradle-to-grave epidemic." The Institute on Domestic Violence in the African-American Community at the University of Minnesota found that black women were 30 percent more likely to be subject to domestic violence than white women and 250 percent more likely to be the subject of such violence than men. Additionally, black women account for more than 20 percent of the homicides associated with domestic violence despite only representing 8 percent of the national population.

Thankfully, there is now a generation of men, including activists and educators like Jackson Katz, Quentin Walcott, director of the CONNECT's Community Empowerment Program in New York, Ulester Douglass of Men Stopping Violence in Georgia and filmmaker Byron Hurt who are providing leadership in getting men of all races to understand their complicity in violence against women. It is still a struggle to get men to speak out against violence against women, but the aforementioned men represent tremendous growth in that regard.

Thanks to organizations like Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the foundation behind the pink ribbons and wrist bands so prominently featured during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, society is beginning to grapple with the disproportionate effect of the disease on black women, who, while less likely to get the disease than their white peers, are far more likely to die from it.

There are lots of reasons for the discrepancies between black and white women, but I'd like to highlight the roles that black women play as caretakers and nurturers in our communities. Also, black women are seemingly more willing to address the high incidence of hypertension and prostate disease among black men, often at the expense of addressing their own health issues.

Ironically, few black men seem to take the same interest in black women's health concerns or their own health issues for that matter. Men have been socialized to think of diseases like breast cancer, fibroids and osteoporosis, as simply examples of "women's diseases." Some men are likely to dismiss diseases that disproportionately affect women, because they were told as boys that it was "mommy's time of the month," distancing them from women's health issues. Nevertheless, black men must take greater responsibility in increasing their awareness of diseases that afflict their mothers, sisters, daughters, wives and friends.

For example, some studies have shown that 80 percent of all black women suffer from some form of fibroid disease, yet most black men are oblivious to the effects of the disease. Could you imagine a disease that afflicted 80 percent of black men that black women would be largely ignorant of?

In many ways our willing ignorance about black women's health issues represents a form of abuse. As healthcare issues remain critical to black America, it is incumbent on black men to get serious about finding out about the diseases that affect the women in our communities with the same passion that some of us have begun to address domestic violence.

Originally Published @ theGrio.com

Issues Beyond the Morehouse College Dress Code

Morehouse’s Crossroads Has Nothing To Do With ‘Ghetto Gear’ or Cross-Dressing
by Frank Leon Roberts

The conversation regarding the new dress-code policy at Morehouse College has been hijacked by a vociferous gang of socially conservative black pundits: some of them simply politically misguided, others merely proud homophobes; a few of them the ideological love-children of Ward Connerly and Bill Cosby. In the short week and a half since I became the first writer to report the news of Morehouse’s new policy, the college has become the subject of an intensifying national debate regarding the role that style plays in producing (or constraining) black male substance.

By now, there is no need to explain what went “down” at Morehouse. You already know. But while you may have already heard the details of Morehouse’s new “no grills or purses” policy, it’s quite possible that you have yet to hear an impassioned defense of grillz and purses in the spirit of Morehouse’s most illustrious progenitors.

There are those who have argued that it is inappropriate to incite a national public dialogue about what’s happening at a private, independently funded college. In the blogosphere, there have been comments in recent days such as “What goes on at Morehouse is a private affair between its students, alumni and administrators. There is nothing illegal about a private school enforcing a dress code. Any student who is unhappy with the dress code has the liberty to leave.”

These voices are misguided and unsophisticated. Morehouse College is much more than simply a “private institution;” it is a black cultural pillar. In other words, the institution we call “Morehouse” is quite similar to the institution we call “the black church.” One does not have to be a member of these institutions in order to be affected by what goes on within their walls. Given Morehouse’s stature as a historical pillar, all African-American men (not just those who are students or alumni of the institution) have an ethical obligation to contribute to this national dialogue about the politics of the college’s policies—especially in instances where it promotes a climate of rampant anti-ghetto-culture classism and femiphobia.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root.com

'Hearing' Meshell Ndgeocello Again

‘Hearing’ Meshell Again
by Mark Anthony Neal

Part of the initial appeal of Meshell Ndegeocello, one off the first artists signed to Madonna’s Maverick label, was her effortless exoticism. Arriving on the scene in 1993 with Plantation Lullabies and seemingly from a nether post somewhere between Trey Ellis’s “new black aesthetic” and Biggie’s “Big Poppa,” it wasn’t difficult for Ndegeocello, like Dionne Farris or PM Dawn’s Prince Be, to be easily cited as that other-type Negro—whatever that happened to be on any given day. But baby-gurl could pluck it with the best of them—Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, Nathan East, Larry Graham, and of course Bootsy—so the regular, round-the-way Negros took notice. Wasn’t a black radio station in the country that wasn’t featuring “Outside Your Door” on their Quiet Storm program in those days. For the white folk not likely to venture down the radio dial, there was that duet with John Cougar Mellencamp, flipping the old Van Morrison classic “Wild Night” into an MTV staple. It was the only whiff a pop chart that Ndegeocello would ever get.

When Ndegeocello returned in 1996 with Peace Beyond Passion, courting controversy with a decidedly innocuous indictment of homophobia—by contemporary standards at least—on “Leviticus: Faggot,” her sound was lean, fierce and muscular, driving originals like “The Way” and her gender-bending cover of Bill Withers’ “Who is He and What is He to You?.” Folk might not have known what to do with the message and even less with the messenger, but it was clear that if you gave the woman more than a few moments, you too would be moving your ass.

With a winning formula in the mix—an old adage really, “free your mind and your ass will follow”—Ndegeocello played against expectation, making the first of several artistic statements. Bitter, her 1999 follow-up to Peace Beyond Passion, wasn’t so much a recording as it was musical brooding session and with it she had my ears and my heart. I have not listened to anything quite the same since, finding disparate passions in the music of Terry Callier, Laura Nyro, Alana Davis, Chocolate Genius, Lizz Wright, Bill Withers (quiet as it’s kept) and a host of others whose most common resonances were in registers far beneath the surface. What has been clear over the last decade is that Ndgeocello herself, has been most comfortable when she trust her ears instead of her body, so that even when she made that last stab at other-chartly and political relevance with Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, it was the darker hues of “Jabril” and “Earth” that told on her—and on us for that matter.

Seems as if 2003’s Comfort Woman—an overlooked gem in any era, like Robert Marley’s Kaya—marks the beginning of Ndegeocello’s loss of faith in her ears, though as the primary composer and conductor of Dance of the Infidels (2005) she conjured, with Lalah Hathaway, beauty unrequited on the slow as death cover of “When Did You Leave Heaven.” With Devil’s Halo, her new recording on the Downtown/Mercer Street label, Ndegeocello’s faith in her ears and our ability to 'hear' her is renewed.

While there are still hints of the Emo rock that marked 2007’s The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams, Devil’s Halo settles on a mood somewhere in between The World… and Bitter. The bassist remains lyrically provocative throughout—Ernest Hardy notes this ditty from “Lola:” “a wife’s just a whore with a diamond ring”—but here is wordless quality about Ndegeocello’s vocal performance. Tracks like “Tie One On” and the twangy (in the tradition of Craig Street’s work with Lizz Wright and Cassandra Wilson) “Crying in My Beer,” are simply beautiful in their starkness; the lyrics largely served as adornments. Tellingly, the title track is an instrumental that Ndegeocello wrote when she was a teen growing up in Washington, DC.

Though Ndegeocello has long distanced herself from mainstream contemporary R&B, her most striking artistic statement on Devil Halo comes from the R&B world of the 1980s. Ready for the World’s classic slow drag, “Love You Down” was ripe for a post-auto-tune update, but Ndegeocello gives the song a breathtaking new edge—dreamy and urgent. Ndegeocello tells music journalist John Murph, “Love You Down” is a song that “brings up fond memories. It has a great melody. Also I had a great time trying to put the song through my [artistic] filter. I hope people hear the love in my version.”

Robin DG Kelley on Thelonious Monk

from Simon & Schuster

"The piano ain't got no wrong notes!" So ranted Thelonious Sphere Monk, who proved his point every time he sat down at the keyboard. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers. Yet throughout much of his life, his musical contribution took a backseat to tales of his reputed behavior. Writers tended to obsess over Monk's hats or his proclivity to dance on stage. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. But these labels tell us little about the man or his music.

In the first book on Thelonious Monk based on exclusive access to the Monk family papers and private recordings, as well as on a decade of prodigious research, prize-winning historian Robin D. G. Kelley brings to light a startlingly different Thelonious Monk -- witty, intelligent, generous, politically engaged, brutally honest, and a devoted father and husband. Indeed, Thelonious Monk is essentially a love story. It is a story of familial love, beginning with Monk's enslaved ancestors from whom Thelonious inherited an appreciation for community, freedom, and black traditions of sacred and secular song. It is about a doting mother who scrubbed floors to pay for piano lessons and encouraged her son to follow his dream. It is the story of romance, from Monk's initial heartbreaks to his lifelong commitment to his muse, the extraordinary Nellie Monk. And it is about his unique friendship with the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, a scion of the famous Rothschild family whose relationship with Monk and other jazz musicians has long been the subject of speculation and rumor. Nellie, Nica, and various friends and family sustained Monk during the long periods of joblessness, bipolar episodes, incarceration, health crises, and other tragic and difficult moments.

Above all, Thelonious Monk is the gripping saga of an artist's struggle to "make it" without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century. Elegantly written and rich with humor and pathos, Thelonious Monk is the definitive work on modern jazz's most original composer.

A Queer Black MobileHomeComing

MobileHomeComing: Here We Go! from Alexis Gumbs on Vimeo.

A Queer Black MobileHomeComing is an innovative and loving response to a deep craving for intergenerational connection. A craving that lives in the hearts of queer black same gender loving elders and visionaries. A craving that has taken over the minds of two young queer black women. Julia Wallace of Queer Renaissance and Alexis Pauline Gumbs of BrokenBeautiful Press have decided to dedicate the next phase of their lives to collecting and amplifying the social organizing herstories of black women who have been refusing the limits of heteronormativity and opening the world up by being themselves from the 1980’s and before.

Panel Discussion: Do the Right Thing: 20 Years Later

Do the Right Thing: 20 Years Later
Panel Discussion

Thursday, October 15, 2009
7:30 PM

The Mary Lou Williams Center
Duke University

Join Dr. Maurice Wallace and Dr. Mark Anthony Neal for a panel discussion on Spike Lee's film, Do The Right Thing on the 20th Anniversary of the film's release.

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A 1995 Duke PhD, Maurice Wallace has also taught at in the departments of English and African and Afro-American Studies at Yale University. Author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995, his recent teachings and writings have turned to literature and visual culture, with particular emphases on autobiography, realism, and the visual technologies of race and gender.

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. He holds a Doctorate in American Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Neal has appeared in several documentaries including Byron Hurt’s acclaimed Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes (2006), John Akomfrah’s Urban Soul (2004) and the BBC’s Soul Deep: the Story of Black Popular Music (2005). A frequent commentator for National Public Radio Neal also contributes to several on-line media outlets, including The Root.com (Washington Post Interactive)

Frank Leon Roberts: On Morehouse College's New Dress Code Policy

Beyond the Trope of Black Masculine Respectability:
Notes on Morehouse College's New Dress Code Policy
by Frank Leon Roberts

Like many graduate students, I suffer from a serious “cant-get-any-work-done-in-my-apartment” syndrome. Try as I may, each time I sit down to write an article or dissertation chapter, I find myself having to venture out of my apartment and into a more open, public setting (libraries or cafes work well for me).

So there was nothing unusual about my decision today to pack up my laptop and head over to Morehouse College’s Jazzmen Café to work on my dissertation amidst a comfortable climate of Pumpkin Lattes and innocently-arrogant Kappa Alpha Psi undergraduates. At 6’clk, after I had managed to spend three hours working, I decided to grab a bite to eat at Morehouse’s Cafeteria.

As I paid my $6 Non-Morehouse student fee to enter the cafeteria, I was told that in order to enter I would need to remove my red, fitted-baseball cap. “Uhm…ok” I thought to myself. It seemed a bit strange to me that baseball hats would be prohibited in a stinky, old cafeteria lounge, but hey, then again this was Morehouse College, an institution hell-bent on promoting images of black middle class respectability and propriety.

I didn’t think anything of the no-red-fitted-caps-in-the-cafeteria policy until I glanced over at a headline from the October 6th Issue of The Maroon Tiger (Morehouse’s 84 year old student newspaper). “Administration Announces New Attire Policy.”

Immediately, I dropped my spoon in the stale cafeteria macaroni.

Read the Full Essay @ BrooklynBoyBlues

The Access & Digital Literacy Research Project

Dr. Allison Clark, Research Scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was interviewed while she was at Duke University's John Hope Franklin Center as the Distinguished HASTAC Scholar in Residence. She presented her new work-in-progress, called The Access + Digital Literacy Research Project. Here is a videoprofile of Dr. Clark and her residency.

Make In Plain: Reading Nas’s Letter to ‘Young Warriors’

special to NewBlackMan

Make In Plain: Reading Nas’s Letter to ‘Young Warriors’
by David Ikard

So rapper Nas wrote an open letter to black male teens that condemned the senseless killing of honors student Derrion Albert and issued a plea to young black men to stop taking their social frustrations out on each other. He writes passionately:

“Killing each other is definitely played out. Being hurt from the lost of a love one was never cool. Dear Young Warriors fighting the wrong war! I know that feeling, that frustration with life and needing to take it out on someone, any one. But we chose the dumbest things to go the hardest for. I remember seeing deaths over 8 ball jackets, Filas, and name plate chains. Deaths over ‘he say she say’!!!!! ‘I’m from this block or I’m from that block”, or ‘my moms n pops is f***ed up now the whole world gotta pay!!!”

Even though Nas’s words hit home for a great many black and brown folks that are forced to contend with such violence on the daily—either from each other or the criminal justice system—there were several feminist groups that were quick to indict his gesture. Referring to Nas as a “washed up” and “sorry azz” rapper, blogger Sandra Rose refused to post his open letter on her blog, writing

“Here’s a man (and I use the term loosely) whose violent lyrics helped contribute to the environment that bred the wild children who opened up another child’s head with sticks and laughed while doing it.”

On the politically progressive website whataboutourdaughters.com—whose expressed raison d'etre is “to use economic power to impose economic sanctions on those who are producing destructive images of black women and girls”—the acid attacks on Nas continue. Zeroing in the Nas’s reference to young black men as “warriors,” one blogger writes, “Let’s call these people what they are URBAN TERRORISTS! Their war is against US—innocent black civilians trying to make our way in the world the best way we know how.” The terms “savage” and “savagery” emerged time and again as references to these young urban black men on other blog entries. This is not to say that there weren’t other blogs that avoided such jabs because there were. The most insightful engaged our nation’s preoccupation with thug images of black masculinity, a preoccupation that works directly to undermine the presence and productivity of honor students such as Albert.

I focus here more on the acidic ones because as a black man invested in progressive antisexist, antiracist, anti-capitalistic models of empower, I don’t see how these gendered attacks against Nas and young urban black men help us initiate the kinds of substantive dialogue about hyper-black masculinity and culturally sanctioned violence against black women that we advocate.

There is no debating that Nas’ patriarchal rhetoric reinforces the hyper-black masculinity discourse that is partly to blame for why these young men acted out in the vicious ways that they did. But, he clearly does not see that. Even though he does not possess the critical and historical frameworks to fully understand his complicity in the status quo, he clearly knows that something about the ways that black men are thinking about their manhood and expressing their anger is wrongheaded. He also knows—and is indeed trying to fend off with his references to this young men as “warriors”—that the tendency in the public domain is for our nation to write these boys off as “savages,” “thugs,” “urban terrorists,” and the like.

However impolitic is his expression of concern, Nas is rightly trying to refocus the debate on the patterns of structural inequality that encourage such black-on-black violence. Rather than attack the brotha’s language and shortsighted patriarchal politics, we should reach out to him. Send him what Mark Anthony Neal’s calls a “black feminist care package,” including books by scholar-activists like Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill-Collins, Michael Awkward, Nellie McKay, Mark Anthony Neal, and Joan Morgan. We should think of this intervention as—dare I say—a “teaching moment” for Nas and the male-centric black communities.

And, since good teaching is always a two-way street, we should also remain open to what we can learn from Nas and those brothas and sistas that come out of these environments. Indeed, street literacy in the form of understanding how black masculinity is performed and read in certain ‘hoods can be a matter of life and death. However productive and smart we might think our theories for resolving these problems are, if they are divorced materially from the realities on the ground, then they are essentially bankrupt. If someone is hungry, she is more likely to hear and appreciate your theories about resolving her hunger after you address the most pressing concern and give her something to eat. No matter how smart or useful is your theory for resolving hunger, if you skip this vital step, you lose the interest—and perhaps even the respect—of your audience.

Suffice it to say, that if our goal is to reach out and help transform our communities on issues of gender and violence, then its high time that we start “keeping it real” about the limitations of our vantage points and theories. To riff on Mohandas Gandhi’s poignant words, “we have to become the change we want to see” in black communities.

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DAVID IKARD, Assistant Professor, Ph.D, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2002), specializes in twentieth century literature (with a specialty in African American), black feminist criticism, hip hop culture, and black masculinity studies. In 2007, he published his first book, Breaking The Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism and was also awarded a Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship. His current book length project reconsiders rigid identity-focused approaches to African American Literature with an eye towards developing expansive critical models of black humanity.

Bombing Capitalism

Bombing Capitalism
by Esther Iverem, editor SeeingBlack.com

On a throwback vibe, you could say that “Capitalism: A Love Story” is the bomb.

By exploring the economic system of capitalism as an evil, Moore fires a salvo into the heart of America’s social machine. Along the way, he explodes some serious myths: Myth #1: that the economic system of capitalism is the same as or tied to the political system of democracy. Myth #2: That to be an American is to be a capitalist and that to be anti-capitalist is to be anti-American. Myth #3: That people of color with bad credit, who bought houses that they couldn’t afford, caused the financial meltdown in the United States. Myth #4: That mainly Blacks and Hispanics are losing their homes to foreclosure.

He also drops other bombshells, such as the internal Citigroup memo declaring that the United States is no longer a democracy but is, rather, a plutocracy, where the richest 1 percent of the country is in charge of the rest of us peasants, and where government has been warped in the past 30 years to serve the rich. Then there is the relatively unknown Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur from Ohio—not one of the usual suspects on talking head news shows—calling the bailout of Wall Street a financial coup d’etat and telling Americans who have lost their homes to become squatters in their homes and not leave. There is the laundry list of Washington insiders who received sweet V.I.P. mortgages from Countrywide, which was a leader in dispensing high-interest “sub prime” loans to homeowners. The explosions go on and on.

Read the Full Essay @ SeeingBlack.com

from the ASALH

Had the pleasure of presenting on a plenary panel at the annual Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) in Cincinnati. The session was dedicated to the legacy of Michael Jackson and I was joined by Dawn Ellisa-Fischer and the legendary Sonia Sanchez. First heard Ms. Sanchez speak/read 25 years ago and still cherish my signed copy of HomeGirls and Hand Grenades. Thought I'd use this occasion to reprint my review Sanchez's 2004 recording, Full Moon of Sonia.

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Critical Noir: The Full Moon of Sonia

by Mark Anthony Neal

“Black people’s reality is controlled by alien forces. This is why Sonia Sanchez is so beautiful & needed; this is also why she is so dangerous.”

—Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee)

For those who’ve heard ever Sonia Sanchez perform, you know that she possesses a spirit that seemingly gains energy with each word that she offers to the world. Indeed, I can still her poly-syllabic chants in my head as if I was 19 year-old again watching her weave her poetic magic the first time I saw her perform in 1985. For those who’ve never heard Sonia Sanchez perform, she has just released her first solo recording, Full Moon of Sonia.

Sonia Sanchez was born more than seventy-years ago in Birmingham (Bombingham), Alabama. Ms. Sanchez is more likely though, to claim herself as a native of New York, the city that she moved to as a nine-year old and the place where she began to cultivate her poetic skills after graduating from Hunter College in 1955. Sanchez’s poetry workshops in the 1960s at places like the Downtown Community School proved politically challenging to her employers. According to Sanchez, she was “white-balled” in New York and eventually left New York taking teaching positions as various schools until she landed at Temple University in 1977. She retired from Temple in 1999.

Ms. Sanchez’s first collection of poetry, Homecoming, was published by Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press in 1969, followed by We a BaddDDD People in 1970. Both collections featured poetry that literally screamed off the page as if Sanchez was struggling to find language to fully convey the emotions that informed her poetry, whether it was the plight of African-Americans in the United States or her failing marriage with the late “prison” poet Etheridge Knight. As Ms. Sanchez told MELUS, “you must remember, when we were reading poetry at that time, there was not an interest in poetry. People had their ears tuned to radios…something with a beat.” Sanchez and many of her peers such as Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) and Nikki Giovanni found success in the late 1960s and early 1970s by gearing their poetry to the dance-floor and the street.

Not surprisingly, Ms. Sanchez’s legacy is being recovered by the hip-hop generation, particularly among spoken word poets. Danny Simmons, executive producer of Def Poetry, refers to Ms. Sanchez as the “spiritual mother” of spoken word. And indeed Ms. Sanchez gives love back citing the late Tupac Shakur (who she pays tribute to on Full Moon of Sonia), Rakim, and Ursula Rucker (who bears a striking resemblance to Ms. Sanchez) as exemplars of hip-hop generation wordsmiths. More than anything Full Moon of Sonia is an attempt to speak more directly to the hip-hop generation.

Recorded during the National Black Arts Festival in 2003, where Ms. Sanchez was celebrated as a “living legend”, Full Moon of Sonia is Ms. Sanchez’s first solo recording after more than thirty-five years as a published poet. Backed by a stream of R&B, Funk, Jazz, Soul, Blues and Gospel, Ms. Sanchez brings to musical life a range of poetry that captures the demons and passions of African-American life. Poems such as “Bubba” (which first appeared in Home Girls and Hand Grenades), “Tupac” and “For Langston/I’ve Known Rivers” (for the legendary poet) recalls figures from Ms. Sanchez’s past, allowing her memories of them to speak to the humanity of black men in the midst of on-going demonization.

Earlier in her career, Ms. Sanchez was often lock-step with the most fiery expressions of 1960s styled black nationalism. Though Ms. Sanchez remains fiery, Ms. Sanchez black nationalist politics are muted these days, in part because of her embrace of feminist politics. So a piece like “Poem for Some Women” performed to the gospel track “There’s a Leak in this Old Building” gives light to a women who leaves her baby in a crack-house, indicting the men who take advantage of both the woman and her child, as well as a society that offers little support for poor single mothers. Even more powerful is a track like “He/She” which examines the utter tragedy of domestic abuse. And still Ms. Sanchez takes time to have fun as she does with “Good Morning Sex.”

Full Moon of Sonia, represents Sonia Sanchez as a poet women at her peak. At once she embodies the power and promise of African-American expression and a clarion example of longevity and vitality for a hip-hop generation in dire need for artistic role models.