December 30th is Joseph Beam’s Birthday…in honor of this brilliant Black Gay literary genius ancestor and and the fact that both In the Life and Brother to Brother are back in print thanks to RedBone Press this podcast includes readings and reflections from Lisa Moore of RedBone Press, La Marr Jurelle, Darnell Moore, Justin Smith and a round the kitchen table conversation with some of Durham’s most inspiring Black queer visionary men: Ashon Crawley, Sendolo Diaminah, Thaddeaus Edwards and Justin Robinson. Hosted by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
PPP, Melanie Fiona, Foreign Exchange and Maxwell top a list of 13 notable performances from 2009.
PPP (Platinum Pied Pipers)—“Abundance” from Abundance
“Abundance” begins with a Motown backbeat, draws in some boogie-woogie piano with big band flourishes and by the end it’s straight church. “Abundance” is the closing and title track of PPP’s sonic tour-de-force. The world that Waajeed and Saadiq (not to be confused with Raphael) conjure draws on the literal sonic history of Detroit, beginning with those rumpling automobiles. The cultural wealth of this so-called destitute city is way too often below the radar and when referenced it’s all too often about the “Sound of Young America” and the black mogul who changed the trajectory of American pop music. And Motown and Mr. Gordy are given their due on Abundance (see “Clouds”), as are Detroit based Hard Bop geniuses like Curtis Fuller, Donald Byrd and Paul Chambers, and the techno revolution that Detroit spurred in the 1980s via figures like Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. In many ways PPP are the progeny of that revolutionary moment (inclusive of the computer programmed Soul that Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam bequeathed as heard on a track like “Luv Affair”), a fact that they remind listeners of on the title track where they riff, courtesy of vocals by Coultrain “you’re a slave to tradition/if you don’t want have it all/If revolution ain’t your picture/ then you cease to exist at all”. What PPP has in “Abundance” is one of the richest musical legacies in the country and they are unafraid to exploit that legacy in support of making some of the most important R&B in more than a decade.
Melanie Fiona—“It Kills Me” from The Bridge
What first drew me to “It Kills Me” is the production—a lushness that simply fills a room, a car, a headset, reminiscent of some of classic R&B production of Luther Vandross, Hot Buttered Soul era Isaac Hayes and Gamble and Huff at their peak. This is production that is densely layered and filled with sonic subtleties that make every listen a journey into discovery. Kudos to Andrea Martin and Jay Fenix, for production that actually challenges a singer instead of enabling their mediocrity. Fiona is not a household name—yet—and at first listen your hear strains of Keyshia Coles (hoping this wasn’t a song she passed on). The Bridge is a solid debut from the Canadian born singer, whose parents are natives of Guyana, but “It Kills Me”—just listen to those Motown tinged “ooh, ooh, oohs” in the song’s chorus and that drama filled bridge, damn I love song craft—may be the best R&B ballad released in the last three years. And don’t sleep on the Ghostface remix, which is likely making Isaac Hayes smile from his grave
Foreign Exchange featuring Darien Brockington and Musinah—“Something to Behold” from Leave It All Behind
Most Negroes are oblivious to Foreign Exchange, largely because their brand of Cosmopolitan Soul—a touch of Holland in the American South—is well beyond the scope of anything that "Knee-gro" Radio (that’s for my man Bob Davis @ Soul-Patrol.com) can tolerate. Let’s hope the Grammy nod for “Daykeeper” featuring Musinah changes some of that though a nomination in a category called “Best Urban/Alternative” speaks volumes about where some of our ears are. Cards on the table, there’s a local connection; one-half of Foreign Exchange is Carolina’s Phonte, who is also part of the remaining half of Little Brother. And Phonte was real when he called Kanye out for trying to sing—Phonte is the real deal. Any number of the tracks on Leave It All Behind were Grammy worthy, including their brilliant take on Stevie Wonder’s “If She Break Your Heart” (from the Jungle Fever soundtrack), which features vocals from another Carolinian, Yazahrah and string arrangements courtesy of 4Hero. For my money though, it’s the playful “Something to Behold”—“I’mma need you to sing this one Anna-Mae”—with Musinah reminding us that she might be the most talented singer that nobody’s heard of. Thinking a Grammy might finally change that.
Maxwell featuring Nas—“Help Somebody (Remix)” from BLACKSummer’s Night
Even before the late December release of the remix of Maxwell’s “Help Somebody” the track would have landed on this year-end list, for simply being one of the many standouts on Maxwell’s return BLACKSummer's Night. Off the scene for 6 years, a couple a of lifetimes in R&B, few knew what to expect. To put this in some perspective, some of Maxwell’s peers, D’Angelo and Lauryn Hill, have not recorded full length studio recording in nearly a decade—there’s literally a generation of listeners unaware of them. Would this be the Maxwell of Now (2003) or the Maxwell of Embyra (1998), since no one could expect to hear the freshness that was Urban Hang Suite ever again. That Maxwell gave us all of the above and else more speaks well of his artistic future and the value of taking some time away from the game. The beautiful “Pretty Wings” and “Bad Habit” are reminders that artistic integrity and support from urban radio aren’t mutually exclusive, but “Help Somebody”—with or without Nasir Jones—is evidence that R&B need not stay at home, to find a home.
Leela James—“Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” from Let’s Do It Again
Leela James’ vocal instrument lies somewhere in between Betty Wright’s sass and Mavis Staples' gravitas and her musical sensibilities are not too far behind. Rather than court the radio support that she was denied for her fine debut A Change is Gonna Come (2005), James returned this year with a stellar set of covers—not that you could really call them covers. Even when the results missed the mark, as they did with James’ cover of Phyllis Hyman “You Know How to Love Me,” there was no denying that she had put her own stamp on the product. That James took on Bobby Womack, who in 2009 was finally inducted in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, speaks a great deal about both her brashness and her musical IQ. Though Calvin Richardson recorded a fine, fine full length tribute to Womack, nothing on that collection comes close to the funk that James conjures on her version of Womack’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.”
Me’Shell Ndegeocello—“Love You Down” from Devil’s Halo
Given the high-brow pop that Me’Shell Ndegeocello has consistently delivered for more than 15 years, forgive us for forgetting that most of us got our first taste of the Chocolate-Gurl-Wonder somewhere in the basement with a blue light on dragging to “Outside Your Door” or “A Fool of Me.” Taking the obvious balladeers out of the mix, few besides Prince and Ndegeocello can claim such a body of exquisite slow jams. With “Love You Down” Ndegeocello reincarnates the long forgotten and stylistically disparaged (talking about the Jheri curls, not the music) Ready for the World, who pound for pound, ran with the best that R&B produced in the mid-1980s, when the likes of Dreamboy and The Deele were Quiet Storm staples. No doubt Ndegeocello heard them all during her hang days in Washington, DC, the city that birthed the Quiet Storm format, courtesy of the late Melvin Lindsey. As such “Love You Down” is fine tribute to that last era when Blackness was still under the cover.
Georgia Anne Muldrow—“Daisies” from Umsindo
That Georgia Anne Muldrow resists categorization is an understatement; indeed I’ve yet to find a coherent thought that captures what I feel when I hear her music. This is just some other-ish and understandably so, when your daddy was the noted Jazz guitarist Ronald Muldrow, your momma, Rickie Byers Beckwith, is a disarming singer in her own right and your most common collaborators are exquisite Detroit beat makers like PPP (formerly The Platinum Pied Piper), and oh yeah, you write produce and provide instrumentation on virtually all of you music. There’s not an urban radio station that’s got the “balls” or the sense to get Muldrow on their regular rotation, and let’s be clear it’s their loss. Umsindo is more arresting than Muldrow 2006 debut, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth, and “Daises” is the most arresting track on the new recording. A riff off the old colloquialism for death (pushing daisies), Muldrow’s “Daisies” is what second-line music is supposed to sound like when tainted by the muck and murk of Post-Katrina New Orleans. The perfect follow-up to the dirge “New Orleans” from Olesi, this is second-line music for the generation that’s yet to come.
The Jackson 5—“Buttercup” from I Want You Back: The Unreleased Masters
The Motown Records catalogue and the Jobete Publishing Company represent two of the most valuable cultural archives in the country, and this point was powerfully reinforced in the aftermath of Michael Jackson’s untimely death in June. At the time of Jackson's death, Universal (Motown’s parent company) was set to release Hello World: The Motown Solo Collection and the box-set, released under the direction of Harry Weinger, was a fitting tribute to Jackson. But Weinger wasn’t satisfied and went back to the archive where he discovered dozens of unreleased Jackson 5 master recordings, twelve of which appear on I Want You Back: The Unreleased Masters. Though the J5’s take on the Curtis Mayfield penned “Man’s Temptation” is a true revelation, it’s the collaboration with Stevie Wonder on “Buttercup” that is the true gem. Likely recorded in 1974, when the Jackson’s were working with Wonder on his Fullfillingness’ First Finale (they sing background on “You Haven’t Done Nothin’”), the song was intended to be part of a rumored full length album that Wonder was going to produce with the group. Given Motown’s difficulties in marketing the post-tween Jackson (one of the reasons, the family group shifted to Epic in late 1975), it’s not surprising that “Buttercup” and the project was canned. “Buttercup” gives an early inkling of the more mature Jackson that is heard on The Jackson’s Destiny (1978) and his Epic solo debut Off the Wall (1979); indeed the Stevie Wonder penned “I Can’t Help It” from Off the Wall sounds like it might have been intended for that initial session in 1974. “Buttercup” did find an afterlife before Weinger’s discovery—the late Carl Anderson recorded a nice version on his self-titled 1986 album.
Carlos Nino and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson—“Find a Way” from Suite for Ma Dukes—EP
Hip-hop is perhaps most compelling when it takes the time to mourn, and the death three years ago of James Yancy—J-Dilla/Jay Dee—has inspired the occasion of some breathtaking art. Yancy who died of at the age of 32 from complications from a rare blood disorder, inspired Erykah Badu’s poignant and beautiful “Telephone” (2007). Such is the case of Suite for Ma Dukes, where Nino and Atwood-Ferguson interpret four of Yancy’s compositions, including Slum Villages’ “Fall in Love” and Common’s “Nag Champa” as contemporary Chamber music. The project is yet another reminder of how expansive hip-hop continues to be, though it’s too bad that such recognition often occurs in moments of tragedy.
Israel Houghton—“Just Wanna Say” from The Power of One
Contemporary commercial Gospel music can often be as timid as the progressive politics of some of the black ministers who are the face of the Prosperity movement. As such Israel Houghton has always stood out—this cat’s simply one some other musical ish, breaking with musical conventions much the way Tonex issued a challenge to the Black Church’s regressive sexual politics. If the best of the Gospel tradition is about shaking your ass in the pews, Houghton’s got your ass on this track, replete with enough shifts, changes and transitions to remind you that this ish ain’t easy. This is not music for your cousin’s gospel choir, but the expressions of a musical genius who is never gonna get his due working within the insular world of Gospel music. And if Houghton, is solely concerned with saving souls, count me among the converted.
Mayer Hawthorne—“Maybe So, Maybe No” from the Maybe So, Maybe No—EP
Hat-tip to O-Dub (Oliver Wang) at Soul-Sides for putting Hawthorne on my radar. Hawthorne’s remake of New Holidays’ 1969 track served as the appetizer for Strange Arrangement, Hawthorne's full length recording that was released over the summer. Here Hawthorne taps into the retro movement that Wang has chronicled better than anybody and Hawthorne more than hangs with the big boys and girls like Amy Winehouse, Raphael Saadiq and Sharon Jones. Besides the Whurl-a-Gurls’ demands for repeats of “Maybe So, Maybe No” in the car, favorite moment with the song is hearing O-Dub’s own Whurl-a-Gurl put her own unique spin on it at Soul –Sides.
Tyler Woods—“Slow Jam—Relations” from The R&B Sensation
First caught the video for Woods’ “Prove Myself” on the burgeoning Centric channel and gave them glad hands for repping R&B that was way off the radio, I mean radar; nobody was gonna checking for Woods on their local Radio One station. I took a greater interest because of the local connection—Woods debut mixtape was produced by North Carolina’s own 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit). But “Slow Jam—Relations,” which literally drew me from a light sleep one night, mesmerized me, as much for its Stepper-set aesthetics as for the brilliant change in the song’s middle where it shifts from a mid-tempo groove into a real Stepper classic. Woods vocals are earnest and sweet, but leave it to 9th Wonder to remind us that our humanity still lives on the dance-floor. And check the cameo from current NC resident Christopher Martin, riffing on the classic House Party.
Jay Z featuring Alicia Keys—“Empire State of Mind” from The Blueprint 3
It begins with a grand Soul gesture, the dramatic opening sequence from The Moments’ “Love on a Two Way Street.” It the kind of gesture that lets you know that this is Alicia’s song even before she sings a note of the chorus. That the song gave Jay Z the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 seems beside the point. This update of Billy Joel’s own love song for the Big Apple and Nas’s love song to Hip-Hop, seemed perfectly pitched for our still-in-progress responses to the 9/11 tragedy. Jay Z’s choice was to celebrate his city, with a perfect little piece of pop befitting the 40-year-old man he is and Keys was the perfect collaborator. Give them credit for that promotional coup that was the performance prior to game 2 of the 2009 World Series. Like Melle Mel said more than a generation ago, “New York, New York, big city of dreams…”
Coming of age in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, men like David Dinkins, Basil Patterson, Percy Sutton and Charles Rangel seemed the very definition of Black Power. One of Sutton's true gifts to the city of New York and young minds like myself was the founding of Inner City Broadcasting--can't imagine what my childhood would have been like without it.
Percy Sutton, Eminent Politician, Dies at 89 By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: December 27, 2009
Percy E. Sutton, a pioneering figure who represented Malcolm X as a young lawyer and became one of the nation’s most prominent black political and business leaders , died in a Manhattan nursing home on Saturday, his family said. He was 89.
Marissa Shorenstein, a spokeswoman for Gov. David A. Paterson, confirmed Mr. Sutton’s death but said she did not know the cause, according to The A.P.
Mr. Sutton stood proudly at the center of the struggle for equal rights. He was arrested as a freedom rider; represented Malcolm X as young lawyer; rescued the fabled Apollo Theater in Harlem; and became a millionaire tycoon in the communications business to give public voice to African Americans.
He was also an eminent politician in New York City, rising from the Democratic clubhouses of Harlem to become the longest serving Manhattan borough president and, for more than a decade, the highest black official in the city. In 1977, he was the first seriously regarded black candidate for mayor.
His supporters saw his loss in that mayoral race as a stinging rebuff to his campaign’s strenuous efforts to build support among whites. But David N. Dinkins, who was elected the first black mayor in 1989, called Mr. Sutton’s failed bid indispensable to his own success.
“I stand on the shoulders of Percy Ellis Sutton,” Mr. Dinkins said in an interview. President Obama also issued a tribite.
“Percy Sutton was a true hero to African Americans in New York City and around the country," Mr. Obama said in a statement. "We will remember him for his service to the country as a Tuskegee Airman, to New York State as a state assemblyman, to New York City as Manhattan Borough President, and to the community of Harlem in leading the effort to revitalize the world renowned Apollo Theater. His life-long dedication to the fight for civil rights and his career as an entrepreneur and public servant made the rise of countless young African Americans possible. Michelle and I extend our deepest condolences to his family on this sad day.”
Edward I. Koch, who won the 1977 mayoral vote, said only complicated political maneuvering stifled Mr. Sutton’s bid. He explained that incumbent Mayor Abraham Beame did not step aside as Mr. Sutton had expected, but ran himself, costing Mr. Sutton votes.
“I’m glad God intervened and I became mayor,” Mr. Koch said in an interview. He called Mr. Sutton “one of the smartest people I have met in politics or outside of politics.”
Mr. Sutton’s business empire included, over the years, radio stations, cable television systems and national television programs. Another business invested in Africa. Still another sold interactive technology to radio stations.
Mr. Sutton had an immaculately groomed beard and mustache; tailored clothing; and a sonorous, slightly Southern voice that prompted the nickname “wizard of ooze.” Associates called him “the chairman,” and he liked it.
The obvious critiques of crass materialism aside, Santa Claus is but a user friendly symbol of the State’s capacity to engage in blatant forms of surveillance and to police behavior in the absence of actual surveillance.
“Santa Claus is Coming to Town”: Some Notes on Christmas and State Surveillance by Mark Anthony Neal
It was one of those Hallmark Mahogany moments; we were all in the living room in front of the fireplace, the Christmas tree was lit, Christmas carols on the stereo as my youngest daughter played Mancala and my oldest finished up her homework. As The Temptations’ stellar version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” played in the background my oldest gave a curious look and blurted out, “Santa sounds like a stalker.” She was referring specifically to the lyric “he knows when you are sleeping/ he knows when you’re awake,/he knows when you’ve been bad or good/So be good for goodness sake. ” My daughter was on to something. Every holiday season millions of American embrace a seemingly innocuous symbol, that is in truth a powerful reminder of the reality of State surveillance in everyday life.
As citizens, we are practically trained to never fully interrogate the dominant symbols that circulate within American culture, including Santa Claus. I remember, as a child, wondering how Santa traveled down a chimney that my family—or anybody else in the South Bronx for that matter—did not possess. In my youthful nationalist days, it was easy to reject the idea that some “fat white man” would be honored for providing gifts that hardworking black women and men, like my parents sacrificed to provide for their families. These critiques largely spoke to the obvious cultural ramifications of Black Americans embracing symbols that did not reflect our heritage. The relative explosion of Ebony Santas and heritage consumables like Hallmark’s Mahogany greeting card line (even Kwanzaa essentials can be purchased at Pier 1) were blatant attempts to respond our need to see our heritage celebrated during the holiday season. But even this heightened sense of multicultural reflection get us further away from the more troubling aspects of Santa Claus.
The obvious critiques of capitalism and crass materialism aside, Santa Claus is but a user friendly symbol of the State’s capacity not only to engage in blatant forms of surveillance, but to essentially police behavior in the absence of actual surveillance. Indeed how many parents have exploited their children’s knowledge that Santa “knows when you are bad or good” as a means of reigning in bad behavior. When you consider the proliferation of Santa Claus imagery in popular media in the post World War II period, much of which targeted children, one gets an inkling of the ways that American’s are socialized at very ages to accept and expect certain forms of State surveillance.
Children’s programming ranging from the classic Rankin-Bass productions of the 1960s and 1970s such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1965), Santa Claus is Coming to Town (1970) and The Year Without a Santa Claus, to current theatrical fare such as the Tom Hanks produced The Polar Express (2004), which was adapted from the 1985 book, all portray Santa Claus as a benevolent patriarch. Benevolent, that is, as long as children (and presumably adults) adhere to some State sanctioned notion of normal and legal behavior.
This particularly brand of Santa Claus is also positioned in opposition to disruptive outlaw figures—think about the ways that BurgermeisterMeisterburger in Santa Claus is Coming to Town reproduced anxieties about Soviet-styled Communism or how the Miser Brothers of The Year Without a Santa Claus fame are used to gently chide the kinds of male flamboyance often associated with homosexuality.
Yet there are moments, when the sheen of Santa Claus is eroded. In The Terrible Twos(1982) and The Terrible Threes (1989), Ishmael Reed’s brilliant satirical novels, he highlight corporate complicity in the maintenance of the Santa Claus myth, as well as offers a revisionist take on the original Dutch version of St. Nicholas and his “helper” Black Peter. Even Tim Allen’s Santa Clause 2, features a draconian militaristic version of Santa Claus, that suggest an Old St. Nick perfectly pitched for the era of the Patriot Act.
I for one keep thinking of the old recording, “Back Door Santa” a soulful banger recorded in the 1960s by the lyrically profane Clarence Carter. Originally collected on A Soul Christmas (1967), the song details the sexual exploits of a Santa Claus who samples more than warm milk and cookies when he visits. As Carter sings, “they call me backdoor Santa/ I make my runs about the break of day/ I make all the little girls happy/while the boys are out to play.”
Though "Back Door Santa" is playful in its sexual innuendo, the song also indexes some of the anxieties associated with black life in the 1960s as things like COINTEPRO (under the behest of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover) literally threatened black lives on a daily basis. When one takes into account the December 4, 1969 State sanctioned assassinations of Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (in what poet HakiMadhubuti describes as a “One-Sided Shootout”) or even the recent revelation that the late historian John Hope Franklin was subject to FBI surveillance during the 1960s, so-called Christmas songs like “Back Door Santa” simply take on a different meaning.
Like many of us who grew up in the 1970s, Living Colour vocalist Corey Glover, who performed a riveting version of Withers’ jealous guy anthem “Who is He (And What is He to You?)” at a tribute concert in Brooklyn last year, was raised under the spell of Bill.
“When I was a kid, we played that tape in my fathers Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme,” remembers Glover, whose performance was captured in the documentary. “Those are some of my earliest memories of Bill Withers. Driving with my family to cookouts and picnics while everyone sang along to ‘Lean on Me’. His music is literally therapeutic for him and us. To me, he is what Bob Dylan wants to be.”
After writing and recording a classic catalog that includes “Harlem,” “Use Me,” “Lovely Day,” “Just the Two of Us” and many others, Bill Withers left the industry in 1985 and never looked back. Yet, while his music continues to be sampled by producers like Teddy Riley (“No Diggity”) and used in film soundtracks (Jackie Brown), many seem to have forgotten the man behind songs.
“This is my first tribute concert,” Withers says matter-of-factly in Still Bill as he enters Prospect Park. Produced by Hal Willner in conjunction with Celebrate Brooklyn, the concert featured performances by Angelique Kidjo, Corey Glover, Nona Hendryx, The Swell Season, James “Blood” Ulmer, Sandra St. Victor, The Persuasions, Eric Mingus, Jim James, Howard Tate and Henry Grimes backed by a great band featuring Lenny Pickett, Steven Bernstein and Cornell Dupree.
However, the biggest thrill for the thousands gathered that balmy August night in 2008, was when the man himself stepped to the stage and sang the achingly autobiographical “Grandma’s Hands.”
Lounging in their Chelsea office space laughing at the memory, the Still Bill directors remember well the first time that the singer decided to take to the stage twenty-three years after walking away from the business. “We thought he was going to the bathroom or to get a drink or something,” says Vlack. He and co-director Baker have known each other since they were teenagers growing-up in the Bay Area twenty years ago. “We had no idea that he was headed to the stage.”
The celebrated historian John Hope Franklin was scrutinized by the FBI in the 1960s for supposed links to communists, particularly his opposition to the House Committee on Un-American Activities and his vocal support for W.E.B. Du Bois.
"Dr. Franklin is an apologist for the late Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent crusader for civil rights and a sponsor of communist fronts who joined the Communist Party at the age of 93," wrote an unidentified FBI official in a letter to the White House in July 1965.
Franklin's file, obtained by TPMmuckraker through the Freedom of Information Act, is mainly a collection of background checks conducted when he was up for presidential appointments (though the FBI withheld 18 pages of the 515-page file). The author of the classic From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans, Franklin died in May at 94.
He was appointed by President Kennedy to the Board of Foreign Scholarships in 1962 and his background checks show universally glowing praise from friends, neighbors, and colleagues.
But that wasn't enough for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Almost dripping off the pages are overheated Cold War suspicions about Franklin's links, even two or three degrees removed, to communists.
Chicago native Donny Hathaway co-wrote and recorded "This Christmas," the greatest holiday song composed by an African American. The traditional Christmas songbook is known for the likes of Irving Berlin, Gene Autry, Burl Ives and Mel Torme. Catch my snowdrift?
Released in 1970, "This Christmas" was a significant departure. The song endures through Hathaway's sweeping tempo changes, sweet vocal range ... and warm promise
The lyrics declare:
Presents and cards are here / My world is filled with cheer and you, ohh yeah / This Christmas / And as I look around / Your eyes outshine the town, they do ...
The song is a made-in-Chicago classic. It was written at Jerry Butler's songwriters workshop, 1402 S. Michigan. Nadine McKinnor put the lyrics to Hathaway's melody.
Butler's initial response? "Nobody wants a new Christmas song and nobody wants a new 'Happy Birthday' song," he said with a hearty laugh. "Well, 'This Christmas' has become one of the biggest songs ever."
Last year, the musicians' rights group ASCAP revealed its 25 most-performed holiday songs of the five years prior, based on radio airplay data tracked by Mediaguide. "This Christmas" re-entered the list at No. 25. ("Winter Wonderland" was No. 1.)
"This Christmas" was recorded in the autumn of 1970 at Audio Finishers Studio, a brownstone on Ontario Street that was an offshoot of Universal Recording Studios, 46 E. Walton. The song was released later that year as a single for ATCO Records, a subsidiary of Atlantic.
Hathaway had signed with Atlantic in 1969 and broke through in 1970 with the epic hit single "The Ghetto, Part 1" on ATCO. In 1972, Hathaway recorded an album of duets with Roberta Flack, whom he met while studying music at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Their million-selling pop crossover hit was "Where Is the Love," co-written by Ralph MacDonald, currently a percussionist with Jimmy Buffett.
By January 1979, Hathaway was dead. He was 33 years old. His body was found outside the Essex House hotel in New York City. His death was ruled a suicide. Oft-covered tune
Hathaway's solo work was intense, experimental and sophisticated. His final release in 1973, "Extension of a Man," included "Someday We'll All Be Free," which Spike Lee used as the closing theme of his film "Malcolm X."
But Hathaway's "This Christmas" has grown in epic proportions.
It has been covered by Christina Aguilera, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, the Temptations, Harry Connick Jr. and Michael McDonald, who titled his new Razor & Tie holiday album after the song. "That's one of my favorite contemporary Christmas songs," the former Doobie Brother said from his home in Nashville, Tenn. "It has such a contemporary R&B jazz groove. We typically associate Christmas songs with church music or very languid melodies."
Practicing What We Teach: 'Precious' Notes About Un/predictability by Aisha S. Durham
Tuesday, I offered my black popular culture students a course summary. In the midst of reviewing the varied approaches employed to describe black popular culture from Hall, hooks and Darnell Hunt to Rose, Neal and Gwendolyn Pough, I stopped myself to ask the class what they thought of Precious.
Their comments echoed much of the preferred cultural criticism from institutional voices surrounding the film. They readily spotted controlling images, they critiqued ghettocentricity and ghetto realism in black cinema, they described the popular production of black women’s stories as told by men (making connections to Spike Lee, Tyler Perry, Steven Spielberg ), and they identified the ideological work used to construct the preferred reading of individual triumph sans structural/institutional support; and for the students who proclaimed (with added grunts, rolling eyes, and lip smacks) they would not watch a film that could make us look bad (i.e., black folks who look bad to white people), they had handy, ready-made speeches replete with age-old racial uplift rhetoric about positive/negative images. Both groups sat resolute in their “reading” of the film—demonstrating to me that they could apply the course material to engage critically with a media product. They anticipated my you-done-good smile. But, I took a breath and leaned over the laptop to announce:
I liked Precious.
With three words, I risked unraveling my tightly woven media/cultural studies course. On the final day of class, I had run the risk of losing credibility from my black feminist media studies teachers in training. Yet, in that moment, I had to run off course from my scripted notes to address the un/predictability of Precious and the implications of my empathetic re-reading of the film for media studies.
The Un/Predicability of Precious
First, I liked Precious for reasons other than its emotive, evocative rhetoric of struggle that recalls what some have dubbed poverty porn. Precious offers racial sincerity and a class sensibility without announcing itself as real or some authentic re-presentation of black urban life. There are varied depictions of blackness in conversation with one another, which disrupts the singularly focused and celebrated come-up, overcome narrative that makes it commercially viable. Visually, Daniels undercuts minor narrative arcs by splicing “real” violence with fantasy (i.e., real-fantasy as an escape from violence and real-fantasy to re-imagine another way of being in the world), and by using the voice of Precious as the narrator and the voice-over that interrupts and disrupts institutional voices (e.g., the teacher, the case worker) speaking for her and about her.
The institutional voices are the voices of authority—the ones who are heard. What we hear from some institutional voices in the popular is that moviegoers should read the book to appreciate or denounce the film (i.e., read the book to read the film accurately). What we hear from some institutional voices in the academy is that we should know the social facts or the statistical realities to talk about the un/realness of this story. Both of these responses assume stories—as social fact or fiction—get us closer to some knowable truth when each of them (with their own codes and conventions), use numbers, words and images to tell a story. And it is because of these voices that I imagine that a “Precious” could never be heard. She can only stand-in for or represent positions that already call her body into being.
As a media studies scholar, I am interested in what story is being told and whose story is being heard. From weeklong conversations about the film, it would seem the story depends on who you ask. Some identified with the teacher, the caseworker, the daughter. Few could digest the mother as both victim and victimizer. As a baby who was nicknamed Precious because of my mother’s perceived overprotection and as a the professor with educational capital who still carries a form of ghetto girl class consciousness from my public housing community in Norfolk (VA) to the university halls of College Station (TX), I found myself shifting viewing positions and aligning myself with different characters, which speaks to the multiplicity of blackness present and the competing stories that drew me to Precious in the first place. There can be multiple stories. There can be multiple stories. There can be multiple stories. What Precious reveals is the cultural politics surrounding class for black folks—especially those consumed with the omnipresence of whiteness. (Here, I am reminded of other discussions about hip hop and even some of my own commentary about Tyler Perry for that matter.) Here, class as a differential consciousness remains a thorny subject in media studies because there is an assumption that we agree on what constitutes the black popular proper. After hearing my own voices and those of homegirls and students, I am left to wonder when do the working class have “permission” to speak about lived realities and how do we really account for multiple representations of blackness in the black public sphere?
Second, I liked Precious because it does illuminate the impact of the patriarchal state vis-Ã -vis violence. Violence is structural and systemic through poverty, institutional and disciplinary through the welfare, juvenile justice and educational system, and interpersonal through emotional, physical and sexual, and verbal abuse and aggression. (And, yes those are interrelated.) The life chances of the poor black women in the film are deeply impacted by their navigation through and their cooperation with the state. Food, shelter and family cohesion are tied to (or severed by) the state. Precious must perform a re-victimization for the caseworker to “get her check” while performing acceptable black motherhood for another caseworker to keep her kid(s). The state commands the performance while simultaneously using these “acts” as evidence of black pathology. While national discussions about the state has routinely addressed the lived realities of black men, Precious forcefully depicts the significant role of the state in the policing and surveillance of poor black females. These are vulnerable bodies whose privates (body, home and otherwise) can be invaded, used and abandoned. As domineering as the Mary mother figure appears, she too is a victim of these varied modes of violence. I watched the film thinking about our inability to see anything redeeming in Mary speaks to our inability to see poor black women in general as vulnerable, as victim. Precious calls attention to the state of some poor black women by highlighting heteropatriarchal state/violence.
I came to Precious thinking that I knew the story, that I knew her story. I was prepared—like my students—to be a mad black woman because the stereotypes do exist in the film, and do perform the ideological work of the state. The cultural criticism highlighting the two is warranted. My reading shouldn’t contest it. Instead, my reading asked me to consider how these cinematic representations gain meaning. I left Precious thinking how and why is Precious so meaningful to me? The film invited me to access modes of differential consciousness in the same way that I was drawn to forms of hip hop to announce that I was a hip hop feminist years ago. Ultimately, Precious pushed me to hear another story—an unlikely and disliked one. And it is because of this push, I interrupted myself (and the student echo) in the classroom. Tuesday, I thought—for one moment—that there could be another Precious story to tell.
Aisha S. Durham is the co-editor of the books Home Girls, Make Some Noise!: A Hip-Hop Feminism Anthology and Globalizing Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method & Policy. Durham is Assistant Professor of Communications and Africana Studies at Texas A&M University.
"She's Not Just a Fat Aunt Jemima on a Pancake Box":
A Response to Ishmael Reed by Khadijah Costley White
Precious is one of the few movies I have truly appreciated in a while--and I've seen a good number of the "notable," patriarchal and sexist Black films that show how much Black men love white/light-skinned women that Reed uncritically admires in his review (ahem, The Great Debaters?!). Moreover, it sounds like Reed's central complaint is more about the lack of other similar portrayals of non-Blacks than an ACTUAL critique of this specific movie. In fact, based on his summary of the movie in his review, I'm not even sure he's seen the film.
Precious provides a new twist to an old stereotype--the "mammy" figure in this film speaks, she suffers, she schemes, she aspires, she fights back... she's not just a fat Aunt Jemima on a pancake box. I don't see typical, humanistic portrayals of overweight Black women that aren't comedy. I definitely see problems with Precious--one of them being that in order to create a sympathetic Black female welfare recipient, she has to be so ridiculously beat down. I wouldn't argue that it's a scot-free portrayal-- I'm just saying that its complexity deserves much more of a thorough critique than the "oh it's stereotypical" arguments that I've seen thus far. Finally, we get a film in which an overweight Black woman isn't just happy and funny.
Additionally, the fact that the character Precious narrates this film is extremely significant--the idea that she understands her own subjectivity and the conditions of a system in which she is undernourished and undereducated is absolutely integral to the power of this piece. Precious takes the stereotypes of Black people and transforms them into a real person with thoughts and ambition and complexity. THAT alone makes it a worthwhile film. Much better than The Green Mile or any of those other magic negro movies. No one said that Precious is supposed to represent the experience of all of Black humanity--no more than the Cosby show did.
Let's talk about what it means for her to be welcomed into the home of a loving lesbian couple. Let's talk about why it's important that she is so aware of her own surveillance that she steals her social worker's file and discusses the realities of a morally bankrupt system like "workfare" with her peers. Please, someone, analyze why its so poignant that one of her classmates can't help but laugh at the absurdity of a baby wrapped in a blood covered blanket. How about the damaging impact of colorism, represented by a dark-skinned girl's fantasy about being a white woman with blonde hair or being loved by a light-skinned man with "good hair"? And, ideally, we can ponder why Precious' mother tells the social worker "bring my baby back,"stating truthfully "that's what you do!" -- in this she reminds us of all the family reunification projects that have resulted in any number of murdered or horribly abused children, often after ignoring other types of kinship ties within the Black community.
In any case, who gets to decide what serves as Black "reality"? Ishmael Reed? Is there a review board? There are any number of human experiences--I don't like the DuBoisian tendency to pick and choose which ones count as worthwhile and which ones don't (thus, the complete disregard for a luminary like Zora Neale Hurston 100 years ago). Would a film about the savagery that some of us have seen our own female relatives suffer at the hands of male relatives make the "representational black film" cut?
And, even more importantly, can anything about Black women ever be about BLACK WOMEN, or will a male-centric gaze always shove us aside --even in our own narratives?
Khadijah White is a PhD student and Fontaine Scholar in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, she worked as an Associate Producer at NOW on PBS.
An intimate view of 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit), my co-conspirator in "Sampling Soul," the course we will be offering @ Duke University in the Spring of 2010. Check the flip of the MJ sample midway.
Guests are: Quintin Walcott, Director of the CONNECT Training Institute and CONNECT’s Male Anti-Violence Initiatives; Mark Anthony Neal, author and Professor of African and African American Studies @ Duke University; Sharif Simmons, Creative Writing Teacher at the Alice Steven Center from 5th Grade to High School in Birmingham Alabama, Poet, Musician and Single Father.
Discussion of Black Male media reactions to the film Precious
“I’m going to die for the people because I’m going to live for the people.” They said, “Right on.” He said, “I’m going to live for the people because I love the people.” And they’d say, “Right on.” And he’d say, “I love the people, why?” And they’d say, “Because we’re high on the people, because we’re high on the people.” And that was Fred Hampton. When you saw this 21 year old, it was unbelievable. You had no choice, but to be moved by Fred Hampton.” (Eyes on the prize documentary)
“The police pulled me from the room as Fred lay unconscious on the bed. I heard one officer say, He’s still alive. Then I heard two shots and another officer said, He’s good and dead now.”
The picture I was given of Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers in grade school was an unfair and incomplete image of what actually happened. I was lied to. I’m not sure who to blame. It could be the Civil Rights sections of the History books that only wanted to praise Martin Luther King Jr., Demonize Malcolm X, and pretend all other possible negative details were non-existent. Or it could be a few of my teachers who chose to believe and regurgitate a type of history that is at least, insufficient and at most, well crafted fallacies written by people in power who benefited from the oppression and marginalization of others. It was not until I began to read for myself and go into more depth in my college classes that I realized the misguided stories I was being fed in my juvenile years.
The Black Youth Project was a national research project launched in 2003 that examined the attitudes, resources, and culture of African American youth ages 15 to 25, exploring how these factors and others influence their decision-making, norms, and behavior in critical domains such as sex, health, and politics. Understanding the need to make this data available to a wider constituency beyond the academy Professor Cathy Cohen, the Black Youth Project’s principle investigator, decided to create an online hub for Black youth where scholars, educators, community activist, youth allies, and youth could access the study’s research summaries as well as have access to a plethora of resources concerning the empowerment and development of black youth.
The Black Youth Project’s website is a cyber-resource center for black youth and all those who are committed to enriching the lives of black youth.
I’m not sure if there’s been a film in my generation that has been the object of so much mixed emotion, and perhaps vitriol, drawing a line in the sand along gender lines. Almost all of the guys that I know have talked about Precious at arm’s length. Some of us have even said “I’m not ready to see that film.” Yet my female friends have almost unanimously said “I got to go see it”, etc.
The movie’s been out for a few weeks now. Granted, I’ve been busy but I know I could have seen it sooner. There was almost an instant retreat when I saw the extra large darkskinned black women featured prominently on film—a rarity for contemporary film. And this is unfortunate as the darkskinned black woman is a part of all of us, so why the hesitation? I suppose it’s because the big-boned black women aren’t framed in a flattering way and this is a part of a larger narrative. Remember growing up we’d call the fat black girl in class “fat and ugly?” Seeing this film made me confront the inherent self-loathing that so many of us have inherited.
For starters, I’ve always felt that American film, Black American cinema in particular, was lacking in so many ways. It didn’t have the pacing of indie films that I so love. I didn’t treat its viewers as intelligent. There wasn’t much poetry or going on with the cinematography—as these are all things I look for in films, as well as literature. And of course, most black characters are written as flat, stereotypes, never truly inhabiting that space that we all know is human and difficult to categorize.
Add to that, in my entire twenty years of movie going there may have been only ten films worthy of discussion on an intelligent level. The rest of them seem to embarrass the race rather than illuminate audiences about black life.
Considering all of that, I said “what the hell” and went to see a 9:30 showing yesterday evening and I was instantly surprised. Surprised because I knew angry black women back home in New York who were that cruel to their children, who were that mentally ill, and who were that invisible to society at large. Then all of a sudden, I didn’t think much about all of the “stereotyping rhetoric” that has been programmed from reading Donald Bogle and taking literary criticism in college.
Instead, what I saw was a young woman-child who was curious, fierce, and longing to be more fully human.
Raheem DeVaughn’s performance of the Black Power era throwback “Bulletproof” begs the question; What is happening exactly in black culture and politics that necessitates this regeneration? What is going on that has forced DeVaughn to put “sexy” back in the closest in exchange for Black radical chic?
The Urgent Nostalgia of Raheem DeVaughn’s “Bulletproof” By Mark Anthony Neal
For nearly a generation, R&B has been in a hopeless competition with its past. There hasn’t been a male R&B singer who has emerged in the past generation that hasn’t been burdened with the pressure of being this generation’s Marvin Gaye, Al Green or Curtis Mayfield. More often than not, when contemporary male R&B singers have laid claim to the legacies of the great Soul Men of yesterday, they have done so with requisite bedroom attire.
As political scientist Richard Iton astutely observes in his recent book In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics & Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press), “As a result of the gendered transition and classed transition from soul to disco to hip-hop, R&B has come to be seen increasingly as the music of women and hip-hop as a male-only domain, given their respective concerns: “love songs” in the case of the former and “everything else” in the case of rap” (276)
What this dynamic has meant for male R&B singers is that they have largely ceded political terrain to the rappers, who have mined the archives of the Soul generation better than anyone to find inspiration for contemporary moments of crisis; even Lil’ Wayne has been in conversation with Nina Simone. Consistent efforts on the part of male R&B singers over the last twenty years to explicitly address the social and political climate that they exist in are scarce. One literally has to go back to the late 1980s--the last moment R&B’s dominanance on Black (urban) radio—to find examples of socially conscious R&B—such as Paul Laurence’s “Strung Out,” Oran Juice Jones’s “Pipe Dreams,” and Tashan’s “Black Man.”
The absence of social and political commentary—what Iton identifies as part of a “private realm (female) versus public realm (male)” dynamic—has led male R&B singers to look inward; one can only gaze at the spiritual crisis and domestic drama that has marked the music, in recent years, of R. Kelly and Usher Raymond, two of R&B’s best known figures. While this more introspective view, often masked by a strident hyper-sexuality and hyper-masculinity (Jaheim immediately comes to mind), offers a fuller exploration of black masculinity than even the Soul generation was willing to engage, the fact that R&B has been mute when it comes to Black politics remains troubling. In steps Raheem DeVaughn, whose new single “Bulletproof,” featuring Ludacris, seems to be a concerted effort to fill a seeming void.
“Bulletproof,” which has been in heavy circulation on urban radio, finds DeVaughn musing about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, police brutality (personal aside: "really Barack? 30,000 more troops?"), poverty, homicide and sexual violence alongside the refrain “Living like we bulletproof/We bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang /I say we load it, cock it, aim and shoot.” Musically “Bulletproof” is the logical progeny of the soundtrack era of Soul music, clearly nodding to Marvin Gaye’s soundtrack for Trouble Man and Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly soundtrack. For the song DeVaughn even trades in his own yearning tenor for Mayfield’s signature falsetto.
This is not new terrain for DeVaughn, who prior to signing with Jive records a few years ago had established himself as a mixtape artist often melding traditional R&B balladry with a distinct street sensibility. Tracks like “Catch 22” and “Until” from DeVaughn’s Jive debut The Love Experience (2006) attempted to speak to more pressing social realities. Audiences instead gravitated to his “Guess Who Loves You More”—a bit of user-friendly R&B which heavily borrows from Earth Wind and Fire’s “Can’t Hide Love.” DeVaughn’s follow-up, Love Behind the Melody (2008), seemed calibrated to the club and the after-party, an attempt to take advantage of DeVaughn’s sexy (though unconventional) Soul Man looks (see the doe-eyes and full lips).
During a recent performance of "Bulletproof" on the Soul Train Awards, DeVaughn riffs on the sartorial politics of the Black Power era , dressed in all-black—turtle neck, leather jacket, sun glasses, black gloves and untied combat boots—recalling the stylistic choices of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and other black militants from the late 1960s and 1970s. Adding to the sense of urgent nostalgia, DeVaughn was joined on stage by Professor Griff and the S1Ws—Public Enemy’s famed faux paramilitary unit (modeled after the Nation of Islam’s Fruit of Islam). The presence of Black Power iconography—DeVaughn and the S1Ws raise a Black Power fist at the close of the performance—alongside the symbolic presence of hip-hop’s most political moment, suggest that DeVaughn embodies the regeneration of socially conscious black music.
Yet the DeVaughn’s performance begs the question; What is happening exactly in black culture and politics that necessitates this regeneration? What is going on that has forced DeVaughn to put “sexy” back in the closest in exchange for Black radical chic?
The murders of Shaniya Davis and Derrion Albert notwithstanding, I’d like to suggest that there is a general sense of crisis simmering in Black communities, that has little to do with the actual challenges facing black communities. What I am suggesting is that the crises experienced by black communities are no more daunting than they were prior to January of 2009, but with the first family Obama serving as the ultimate agents of Black respectability—there is suddenly added pressure within the black body politic to resist social deviance and to conform to notions of respectability. Such tensions are indexed in the erection of dress codes at historically black institutions and anxieties over innocuous black stereotypes (most pronounced in the hackneyed debates about the Lee Daniel’s film Precious).
In this context, “Bulletproof” is the kind of song that Raheem DeVaughn is supposed to make, because that is what respectable Soul Men are supposed to do; R. Kelly’s sexual ruminations on “Pregnant” and “Bangin’ the Headboard” or even Usher's midst-of-divorce broadside “Papers” are read as little more than deviant excesses. But the motivations for the social commentary of the Soul Men who clearly inspire DeVaughn—Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye —are instructive.
Mayfield, who penned many a Civil Rights anthem while fronting the Impressions in the 1960’s, is most remembered for his soundtrack recording for Superfly—a recording that was both a commercial and artistic success. Less remembered is the fact that Mayfield only agreed to record the album after reading a copy of the script of the film. It was in fact the film—as opposed to the reality of drug addiction in black communities--that Mayfield sought to counter with his soundtrack. According to Mayfield, “[W]hen I saw it visually I thought ‘this is a cocaine infomercial’…I did the music and the lyrics to be a commentary as though someone was speaking as the movie was going” (quoted in In Search of The Black Fantastic, 114). My intent is not to quibble with Mayfield’s choices—the recording was a clear boost to his post-Impressions career—but to highlight that he was responding less to Black crises and more to a Hollywood financed Blaxploitation film’s mediation of those crises—crises that were largely manufactured for a popular audience.
Similarly, Marvin Gaye’s soundtrack for Trouble Man was released as Gaye was trying to craft a following up to his groundbreaking What’s Going On?—a recording generally regarded as one of the quintessential protest albums of the era. In the spring of 1972 Gaye recorded the track “You’re the Man,” the intended lead single for a follow-up protest album with the same title. The song was directed at the presidential candidates during the 1972 primary season (rapper Brother Ali recorded a version of the song on the eve of Barack Obama’s election in November of 2008).
The album never materialized. As Iton writes in In Search of the Black Fantastic, “The failure of the single to cross over to the pop charts led Gaye to return to the mold—that of the singer of songs about male/female relationships…The subsequent success of his next [single] ‘Let’s Get It on’—originally conceived as ‘(Come On People) Let’s Get It On’—reinforced his anxieties about recording political material.” (99) Gaye’s decision to transition from the music of social protest to that of sexual climax would reverberate for nearly two generations of male R&B singers, ushering in an era of hypersexualized Soul—thinking specifically of Major Harris’s “Love Won’t Let Me Wait” which is accompanied by post-coital moans—that framed the careers of figures like Teddy Pendergrass, Rick James, R. Kelly and many others.
Marvin Gaye Let’s Get it On (1973) effectively put Black politics back in the closet, just as social policy began to reflect a retreat from the social gains of the late 1960s. Now more than thirty years, Raheem DeVaughn has pulled respectable black politics from the closet—at the expense of gender, sexuality and class—performing a urgent nostalgia that may ultimately ring hollow in this new age of Black Respectability.
In January of 1972, two months short of her 30th birthday, Aretha Franklin walked into the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles to record a live gospel album. Backed by the Southern California Community Choir, under the direction of her longtime friend and mentor the Reverend James Cleveland, Franklin’s recording eventually sold over 2 million copies and remained the best-selling Gospel album of all time for more than twenty years. Firmly established as the “Queen of Soul”—and still more than a decade away from the caricature that she has become, Aretha Franklin was at the peak of her artistic powers when she recorded Amazing Grace. More than 35 years after its release, the album stands as the best testament of Franklin’s singular genius.
Having earned six Grammy Awards, nearly a dozen gold singles and several gold albums, Franklin was easily the most commercially successful black woman vocalist ever. Culled from sessions recorded in late 1970 and throughout 1971, her album Young, Gifted and Black marks the beginning of what might be called her most sustained period of artistic genius.
Franklin’s decision to record tracks like Elton John’s “Border Song,” Jerry Butler’s “Brand New Me,” Lennon and McCartney’s “The Long and Winding Road” and Nina Simone’s “Young, Gifted and Black,” alongside originals like “Day Dreamin’,” “All the King’s Horses” and the infectious “Rock Steady” was as much about an artist who had warranted the right to record anything she wanted, as it was about a woman who felt she finally had control over her life and career.
Franklin is adamant in her memoirs that Amazing Grace didn’t mark a return to church, in a spiritual sense: “When I say ‘took me back to church,’ I mean recording in church. I never left church. And I never will.” (p.150) Franklin’s very first recording, “Never Grow Old,” was done in her father’s church in 1956. Her first album, Songs of Faith, contained recordings of live performances while she was on tour with her father. In the years between that release and Amazing Grace, Franklin had, with others, been largely responsible for mainstreaming the black Gospel aesthetic in popular music and culture.
hese are vulnerable bodies whose privates (body, home and otherwise) can be invaded, used and abandoned. As domineering as the Mary mother figure appears, she too is a victim of these varied modes of violence. I watched the film thinking about our inability to see anything redeeming in Mary speaks to our inability to see poor black women in general as vulnerable, as victim. Precious calls attention to the state of some poor black women by highlighting heteropatriarchal state/violence.
