u.net -- Giuseppe Pipitone -- interviews Brother J X Clan @ UZN 37th Anniversary X Clan / Blackwatch Renunion, NYC Nov 2010
Friday, December 31, 2010
Scholar and Writer Jamal Ali Discusses New Book
Interview with author Jamal Ali discussing his newly released adventure trilogy, Heartfire Rendezvous, on Andrea Knight's Global People Link Show
Dr. Guy (Guthrie) Ramsey on Teena Marie
Teena Marie, Trailblazing Singer Known As The Ivory Queen Of Soul, Has Died
NPR All Things Considered
Lady T. Vanilla Child. The Ivory Queen of Soul. Mary Christine Brockert earned all kinds of nicknames over the course of her career. The one most people knew was Teena Marie.
Marie died yesterday at home in Pasadena, at the age of 54. A white woman whose exceptional voice made her a success in the traditionally black genres of soul, R&B and funk, her career began on Motown in the late 1970s. The cover of her 1979 debut album, Wild and Peaceful, didn't feature her photo; Marie later said that Motown chief Berry Gordy wanted people to listen to her voice without getting distracted by the color of her skin.
Talking to Audie Cornish on All Things Considered on Monday, University of Pennsylvania music professor Guthrie Ramsay explained Teena Marie's talent in technical terms:
"She sings with a very robust chest voice but she also has what we call a coloratura range. And that is, she can sing -- I tested it out -- she's singing high Cs, high C sharps. And she moves effortlessly through the range of her voice; she has a signature and very fluid melisma -- singing lots of notes on one syllable. And although her voice had a naturally wide vibrato, there was a sense that she was very much in control of it."
Rick James was one of many fans of Marie's voice. The two were romantically involved for years, and made songs like "Fire and Desire" and "I'm a Sucker for Your Love" together.
Marie had an acrimonious split with Motown; she filed a suit against the company that led to a law preventing record labels from keeping a musician on contract but refusing to release records. Ramsay says that Marie came into an industry that was in transition, and sometimes hesitant to embrace unconventional artists.
"You had some of the smaller labels being bought by larger corporations, and at that time they began to exercise a lot more artistic control over these artists in terms of what kind of music they wanted them to put out and what kind of image they wanted them to have. So she kind of stood out as an anomaly because first of all she was a white woman singing very soulful songs throughout all of the genres. She was participating in R&B ballads. She sang over funk songs. She did pop songs. Her "Ooh La La La" song is an early smooth jazz type of song. So she was really quite ambitious in her stylings, but at the same time she had to fight record labels in order to get the full range of her musicality out there."
Marie continued recording for labels like Epic and Cash Money; she recorded hits like "Ooh La La La," "Fix It" and "Lovergirl" in the '80s. Her final album, Congo Square, was released in 2009 on Stax.
Ramsay says Teena Marie's connection with soul was deep.
"She was a person who personified the idea that culture is learned. And for whatever reason, she was raised in a situation where she was exposed to soul music, R&B music, and she embraced it as her own. She believed that if it moved her, she could be part of it."
Listen Here
NPR All Things Considered
Lady T. Vanilla Child. The Ivory Queen of Soul. Mary Christine Brockert earned all kinds of nicknames over the course of her career. The one most people knew was Teena Marie.
Marie died yesterday at home in Pasadena, at the age of 54. A white woman whose exceptional voice made her a success in the traditionally black genres of soul, R&B and funk, her career began on Motown in the late 1970s. The cover of her 1979 debut album, Wild and Peaceful, didn't feature her photo; Marie later said that Motown chief Berry Gordy wanted people to listen to her voice without getting distracted by the color of her skin.
Talking to Audie Cornish on All Things Considered on Monday, University of Pennsylvania music professor Guthrie Ramsay explained Teena Marie's talent in technical terms:
"She sings with a very robust chest voice but she also has what we call a coloratura range. And that is, she can sing -- I tested it out -- she's singing high Cs, high C sharps. And she moves effortlessly through the range of her voice; she has a signature and very fluid melisma -- singing lots of notes on one syllable. And although her voice had a naturally wide vibrato, there was a sense that she was very much in control of it."
Rick James was one of many fans of Marie's voice. The two were romantically involved for years, and made songs like "Fire and Desire" and "I'm a Sucker for Your Love" together.
Marie had an acrimonious split with Motown; she filed a suit against the company that led to a law preventing record labels from keeping a musician on contract but refusing to release records. Ramsay says that Marie came into an industry that was in transition, and sometimes hesitant to embrace unconventional artists.
"You had some of the smaller labels being bought by larger corporations, and at that time they began to exercise a lot more artistic control over these artists in terms of what kind of music they wanted them to put out and what kind of image they wanted them to have. So she kind of stood out as an anomaly because first of all she was a white woman singing very soulful songs throughout all of the genres. She was participating in R&B ballads. She sang over funk songs. She did pop songs. Her "Ooh La La La" song is an early smooth jazz type of song. So she was really quite ambitious in her stylings, but at the same time she had to fight record labels in order to get the full range of her musicality out there."
Marie continued recording for labels like Epic and Cash Money; she recorded hits like "Ooh La La La," "Fix It" and "Lovergirl" in the '80s. Her final album, Congo Square, was released in 2009 on Stax.
Ramsay says Teena Marie's connection with soul was deep.
"She was a person who personified the idea that culture is learned. And for whatever reason, she was raised in a situation where she was exposed to soul music, R&B music, and she embraced it as her own. She believed that if it moved her, she could be part of it."
Listen Here
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Billy Taylor Meets Les McCann - I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free
http://www.billytaylorjazz.net presents Billy Taylor and Les McCann performing Billy's composition "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free"
Onaje Allan Gumbs Reflects on Dr. Billy Taylor
special to NewBlackMan
Dr. Billy Taylor: You Now Know How It Feels to be Free
by Onaje Allan Gumbs
Dr. Billy Taylor was a mentor and a friend. After listening to him on WLIB radio in New York for years, I met him in person just after I got out of high school in 1967. Although I was shy at the time, I mustered up enough courage to approach him...from then, he musically took me in.
While I was still going to college, on break, I would visit him often on the set of The David Frost Show for which he served as Musical Director. Almost jokingly I told him that I'd love to write something for the band. He told me to come back in a couple of months. I came back and to my surprise, he asked me how soon could I do the arrangement. I wrote an original song called "The Third Wave." Once I delivered the chart, I had to go back up to SUNY-Fredonia. I would watch The David Frost Show religiously but never heard my tune.
When I got back to NY and visited the set, Billy told me that there was a problem with the chart. Wel,l once the problem was fixed, Billy had the band play my song into every commercial break. It was an amazing experience to witness since I had no idea that the band was going to do that.
Billy Taylor was the one that encouraged me to join ASCAP which I still belong to today. I remember him telling me,"You can join BMI or ASCAP, but if you want a career as a composer, you'll join ASCAP."
Jaijai Jackson of The Jazz Network Worldwide, a few days ago, put together a profile feature on me at her site. To my surprise, she found, among other photographs, a photo of Billy and myself. I cried when I saw it, thinking back on all he had done for me. It wasn't 48 hours later when I found out Billy had made his transition.
Dr. Billy Taylor was a champion for the importance of the Legacy of Jazz, being the founder of Jazzmobile in New York in the 60's. He was a champion for young people (I remember at a conference years ago, Billy showed me a rap that he had written for a youth symposium he was going to conduct). Through his music, he was also a social activist. His enduring composition,"I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free," became one of the anthems of the Civil Rights Movement.
Billy Taylor was someone you could always walk up to and say hello or engage in a conversation. Always with that youthful voice and big smile, you knew when you were with Dr. Billy Taylor, everything was alright.
Abientot Billy. You now know how it feels to be free.
***
Pianist/keyboardist/producer/arranger/songwriter Onaje Allan Gumbs (pronounced Oh-Nah-Jay) is one of the music industry's most respected and talented music collaborators. Gumbs has worked almost three decades with top talent in the musical fields of jazz, R&B/soul, and pop to hone his considerable skills. A partial list includes Woody Shaw, Nat Adderly, Norman Connors, Angela Bofill, Jean Carn, Cassandra Wilson, Marlena Shaw, Sadao Watanabe, Phyllis Hyman ("The Answer Is You" from his 1979 Somewhere in My Lifetime album), Stanley Jordan, Denise Williams, Vanessa Rubin, Jeffrey Osborne, Eddie Murphy, Rebbie Jackson, and Gerald Albright (Live at Birdland West). His most recent project is Just Like Yesterday.
Dr. Billy Taylor: You Now Know How It Feels to be Free
by Onaje Allan Gumbs
Dr. Billy Taylor was a mentor and a friend. After listening to him on WLIB radio in New York for years, I met him in person just after I got out of high school in 1967. Although I was shy at the time, I mustered up enough courage to approach him...from then, he musically took me in.
While I was still going to college, on break, I would visit him often on the set of The David Frost Show for which he served as Musical Director. Almost jokingly I told him that I'd love to write something for the band. He told me to come back in a couple of months. I came back and to my surprise, he asked me how soon could I do the arrangement. I wrote an original song called "The Third Wave." Once I delivered the chart, I had to go back up to SUNY-Fredonia. I would watch The David Frost Show religiously but never heard my tune.
When I got back to NY and visited the set, Billy told me that there was a problem with the chart. Wel,l once the problem was fixed, Billy had the band play my song into every commercial break. It was an amazing experience to witness since I had no idea that the band was going to do that.
Billy Taylor was the one that encouraged me to join ASCAP which I still belong to today. I remember him telling me,"You can join BMI or ASCAP, but if you want a career as a composer, you'll join ASCAP."
Jaijai Jackson of The Jazz Network Worldwide, a few days ago, put together a profile feature on me at her site. To my surprise, she found, among other photographs, a photo of Billy and myself. I cried when I saw it, thinking back on all he had done for me. It wasn't 48 hours later when I found out Billy had made his transition.
Dr. Billy Taylor was a champion for the importance of the Legacy of Jazz, being the founder of Jazzmobile in New York in the 60's. He was a champion for young people (I remember at a conference years ago, Billy showed me a rap that he had written for a youth symposium he was going to conduct). Through his music, he was also a social activist. His enduring composition,"I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free," became one of the anthems of the Civil Rights Movement.
Billy Taylor was someone you could always walk up to and say hello or engage in a conversation. Always with that youthful voice and big smile, you knew when you were with Dr. Billy Taylor, everything was alright.
Abientot Billy. You now know how it feels to be free.
***
Pianist/keyboardist/producer/arranger/songwriter Onaje Allan Gumbs (pronounced Oh-Nah-Jay) is one of the music industry's most respected and talented music collaborators. Gumbs has worked almost three decades with top talent in the musical fields of jazz, R&B/soul, and pop to hone his considerable skills. A partial list includes Woody Shaw, Nat Adderly, Norman Connors, Angela Bofill, Jean Carn, Cassandra Wilson, Marlena Shaw, Sadao Watanabe, Phyllis Hyman ("The Answer Is You" from his 1979 Somewhere in My Lifetime album), Stanley Jordan, Denise Williams, Vanessa Rubin, Jeffrey Osborne, Eddie Murphy, Rebbie Jackson, and Gerald Albright (Live at Birdland West). His most recent project is Just Like Yesterday.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
The Late, Great Dr. Billy Taylor
Pianist Billy Taylor, Jazz Ambassador And NPR Host, Dies
by NPR Staff and Patrick Jarenwattananon
Billy Taylor, a pianist who became one of the country's foremost ambassadors for jazz music — including many years as an NPR host — died Tuesday night. The cause was a heart attack, according to his daughter, Kim Taylor Thompson. He was 89.
Born in 1921, Taylor had been a professional musician for more than six decades. After graduating from Virginia State College, he moved to New York in 1944; there, his first big gig was in the band of saxophonist Ben Webster. He would end up playing with essentially all the greats of that era, and many of them since. As a recording artist, he's best known as the leader of a trio, a format he maintained since the 1950s, and also as the composer of the song "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free."
After he had established himself as a premier musician, Taylor began broadcasting jazz. In 1958, he was musical director for The Subject Is Jazz, a National Educational Television program that was the first about jazz. He would later profile many musicians and advocates for CBS' Sunday Morning program; he also directed the band on The David Frost Show and produced projects for PBS.
Additionally, Taylor was program director of the Harlem-based radio station WLIB, and was a host on the New York pop station WNEW. Those positions led to a long relationship with NPR, where he interviewed and featured top performers on numerous programs, including a 13-week series called Taylor Made Piano and the long-running series Jazz Alive! and Billy Taylor's Jazz at the Kennedy Center. NPR Music's JazzSet regularly features performances from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where Taylor was long the artistic director for jazz.
Dr. Billy Taylor — his common appellation, as he held a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and many honorary degrees — is also remembered as an educator who traveled widely for clinics and lectures. Since 1964, his JazzMobile organization has presented free concerts and workshops in New York City (and primarily its heavily African-American neighborhoods). Those who knew him universally speak of his personal warmth, and of his missionary-like zeal for introducing jazz music to people.
Listen @ All Things Considered
also
Honoring Billy Taylor (2008)
WUNC-FM
The State of Things w/ Frank Stasio
When Tar Heel native Billy Taylor arrived in New York City, it took him just one week to land a gig playing piano alongside a jazz master, saxophonist Ben Webster. Taylor's auspicious beginnings in the early 1940s turned into a six-decade long career accompanying great musicians like Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. But beyond the masterful performances and hundreds of original jazz compositions, Taylor also made a name for himself by teaching jazz to the masses. Tonight, Billy Taylor will be honored at North Carolina Central University. Taylor and Dr. Larry Ridley, Executive Director of African American Jazz Caucus, join host Frank Stasio to talk about Taylor's life in music and North Carolina's place in jazz history.
Listen HERE
by NPR Staff and Patrick Jarenwattananon
Billy Taylor, a pianist who became one of the country's foremost ambassadors for jazz music — including many years as an NPR host — died Tuesday night. The cause was a heart attack, according to his daughter, Kim Taylor Thompson. He was 89.
Born in 1921, Taylor had been a professional musician for more than six decades. After graduating from Virginia State College, he moved to New York in 1944; there, his first big gig was in the band of saxophonist Ben Webster. He would end up playing with essentially all the greats of that era, and many of them since. As a recording artist, he's best known as the leader of a trio, a format he maintained since the 1950s, and also as the composer of the song "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free."
After he had established himself as a premier musician, Taylor began broadcasting jazz. In 1958, he was musical director for The Subject Is Jazz, a National Educational Television program that was the first about jazz. He would later profile many musicians and advocates for CBS' Sunday Morning program; he also directed the band on The David Frost Show and produced projects for PBS.
Additionally, Taylor was program director of the Harlem-based radio station WLIB, and was a host on the New York pop station WNEW. Those positions led to a long relationship with NPR, where he interviewed and featured top performers on numerous programs, including a 13-week series called Taylor Made Piano and the long-running series Jazz Alive! and Billy Taylor's Jazz at the Kennedy Center. NPR Music's JazzSet regularly features performances from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where Taylor was long the artistic director for jazz.
Dr. Billy Taylor — his common appellation, as he held a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and many honorary degrees — is also remembered as an educator who traveled widely for clinics and lectures. Since 1964, his JazzMobile organization has presented free concerts and workshops in New York City (and primarily its heavily African-American neighborhoods). Those who knew him universally speak of his personal warmth, and of his missionary-like zeal for introducing jazz music to people.
Listen @ All Things Considered
also
Honoring Billy Taylor (2008)
WUNC-FM
The State of Things w/ Frank Stasio
When Tar Heel native Billy Taylor arrived in New York City, it took him just one week to land a gig playing piano alongside a jazz master, saxophonist Ben Webster. Taylor's auspicious beginnings in the early 1940s turned into a six-decade long career accompanying great musicians like Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. But beyond the masterful performances and hundreds of original jazz compositions, Taylor also made a name for himself by teaching jazz to the masses. Tonight, Billy Taylor will be honored at North Carolina Central University. Taylor and Dr. Larry Ridley, Executive Director of African American Jazz Caucus, join host Frank Stasio to talk about Taylor's life in music and North Carolina's place in jazz history.
Listen HERE
Teena Marie and #BlackTwitter
Twitter conversations around singer's death speak to the lack of trust African-Americans have in mainstream media.
***
Teena Marie and #BlackTwitter
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21
I was doing my usual Sunday night multi-tasking of trying to meet a writing deadline, following the late NFL scores and eavesdropping on Twitter when I first heard the news about the death of legendary R&B singer Teena Marie. That Twitter has become a source of breaking news is not surprising — many producers and bookers from mainstream news sources from CNN to NPR have perches on Twitter. But Twitter also has the propensity to get the story wrong and to spread mis-information (as opposed to government sponsored dis-information), including ill-conceived rumors about the deaths of celebrities.
This later dynamic takes on an added emphasis within the phenomenon of #BlackTwitter — cited many times this past year for its ability to dictate what are the most popular trends on Twitter to the obliviousness of most non-Black Twitter users. Only months ago Twitter announced that Bill Cosby had died, which Cosby rebutted via his own Twitter account @BillCosby. And accordingly many within #BlackTwitter were skeptical and suspicious even after Ronald Isley announced Marie’s death on Twitter (and yes, even the recently incarcerated Mr. Biggs is on Twitter) and it was announced on Philadelphia’s WDAS.
Amidst what is certainly a tragedy for Ms. Marie’s family and for pop music in general, the #BlackTwitter response to Ms. Marie was a marvel to witness. Many resisted outright that Ms. Marie had died — citing Ms. Marie’s own Twitter account which was last used on Christmas Day — awaiting official word from a reputable news source, even as many also disregarded traditional sources like CNN as being viable to deliver news that was meaningful to Black audiences.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21
***
Teena Marie and #BlackTwitter
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21
I was doing my usual Sunday night multi-tasking of trying to meet a writing deadline, following the late NFL scores and eavesdropping on Twitter when I first heard the news about the death of legendary R&B singer Teena Marie. That Twitter has become a source of breaking news is not surprising — many producers and bookers from mainstream news sources from CNN to NPR have perches on Twitter. But Twitter also has the propensity to get the story wrong and to spread mis-information (as opposed to government sponsored dis-information), including ill-conceived rumors about the deaths of celebrities.
This later dynamic takes on an added emphasis within the phenomenon of #BlackTwitter — cited many times this past year for its ability to dictate what are the most popular trends on Twitter to the obliviousness of most non-Black Twitter users. Only months ago Twitter announced that Bill Cosby had died, which Cosby rebutted via his own Twitter account @BillCosby. And accordingly many within #BlackTwitter were skeptical and suspicious even after Ronald Isley announced Marie’s death on Twitter (and yes, even the recently incarcerated Mr. Biggs is on Twitter) and it was announced on Philadelphia’s WDAS.
Amidst what is certainly a tragedy for Ms. Marie’s family and for pop music in general, the #BlackTwitter response to Ms. Marie was a marvel to witness. Many resisted outright that Ms. Marie had died — citing Ms. Marie’s own Twitter account which was last used on Christmas Day — awaiting official word from a reputable news source, even as many also disregarded traditional sources like CNN as being viable to deliver news that was meaningful to Black audiences.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?
A nighttime raid. A reality TV crew. A sleeping seven-year-old. What one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America's middle class.
What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?
by Charlie LeDuff
IT WAS JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on the morning of May 16 and the neighbors say the streetlights were out on Lillibridge Street. It is like that all over Detroit, where whole blocks regularly go dark with no warning or any apparent pattern. Inside the lower unit of a duplex halfway down the gloomy street, Charles Jones, 25, was pacing, unable to sleep.
His seven-year-old daughter, Aiyana Mo'nay Stanley-Jones, slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. Outside, Television was watching them. A half-dozen masked officers of the Special Response Team—Detroit's version of SWAT—were at the door, guns drawn. In tow was an A&E [4] crew filming an episode of The First 48 [5], its true-crime program. The conceit of the show is that homicide detectives have 48 hours to crack a murder case before the trail goes cold. Thirty-four hours earlier, Je'Rean Blake Nobles [6], 17, had been shot outside a liquor store on nearby Mack Avenue; an informant had ID'd a man named Chauncey Owens as the shooter and provided this address.
The SWAT team tried the steel door to the building. It was unlocked [7]. They threw a flash-bang grenade through the window of the lower unit and kicked open its wooden door, which was also unlocked. The grenade landed so close to Aiyana that it burned her blanket. Officer Joseph Weekley, the lead commando—who'd been featured before on another A&E show, Detroit SWAT [8]—burst into the house. His weapon fired a single shot, the bullet striking Aiyana in the head and exiting her neck. It all happened in a matter of seconds.
"They had time," a Detroit police detective told me. "You don't go into a home around midnight. People are drinking. People are awake. Me? I would have waited until the morning when the guy went to the liquor store to buy a quart of milk. That's how it's supposed to be done."
But the SWAT team didn't wait. Maybe because the cameras were rolling, maybe because a Detroit police officer had been murdered two weeks earlier while trying to apprehend a suspect. This was the first raid on a house since his death.
Police first floated [9] the story that Aiyana's grandmother had grabbed Weekley's gun. Then, realizing that sounded implausible, they said she'd brushed the gun as she ran past the door. But the grandmother says she was lying on the far side of the couch, away from the door.
Compounding the tragedy is the fact that the police threw the grenade into the wrong apartment. The suspect fingered for Blake's murder, Chauncey Owens, lived in the upstairs flat, with Charles Jones' sister.
Plus, grenades are rarely used when rounding up suspects, even murder suspects. But it was dark. And TV may have needed some pyrotechnics.
"I'm worried they went Hollywood," said a high-ranking Detroit police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the investigation and simmering resentment in the streets. "It is not protocol. And I've got to say in all my years in the department, I've never used a flash-bang in a case like this."
The official went on to say that the SWAT team was not briefed about the presence of children in the house, although the neighborhood informant who led homicide detectives to the Lillibridge address told them that children lived there. There were even toys [10] on the lawn.
Read the Full Essay @ Mother Jones
What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?
by Charlie LeDuff
IT WAS JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on the morning of May 16 and the neighbors say the streetlights were out on Lillibridge Street. It is like that all over Detroit, where whole blocks regularly go dark with no warning or any apparent pattern. Inside the lower unit of a duplex halfway down the gloomy street, Charles Jones, 25, was pacing, unable to sleep.
His seven-year-old daughter, Aiyana Mo'nay Stanley-Jones, slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. Outside, Television was watching them. A half-dozen masked officers of the Special Response Team—Detroit's version of SWAT—were at the door, guns drawn. In tow was an A&E [4] crew filming an episode of The First 48 [5], its true-crime program. The conceit of the show is that homicide detectives have 48 hours to crack a murder case before the trail goes cold. Thirty-four hours earlier, Je'Rean Blake Nobles [6], 17, had been shot outside a liquor store on nearby Mack Avenue; an informant had ID'd a man named Chauncey Owens as the shooter and provided this address.
The SWAT team tried the steel door to the building. It was unlocked [7]. They threw a flash-bang grenade through the window of the lower unit and kicked open its wooden door, which was also unlocked. The grenade landed so close to Aiyana that it burned her blanket. Officer Joseph Weekley, the lead commando—who'd been featured before on another A&E show, Detroit SWAT [8]—burst into the house. His weapon fired a single shot, the bullet striking Aiyana in the head and exiting her neck. It all happened in a matter of seconds.
"They had time," a Detroit police detective told me. "You don't go into a home around midnight. People are drinking. People are awake. Me? I would have waited until the morning when the guy went to the liquor store to buy a quart of milk. That's how it's supposed to be done."
But the SWAT team didn't wait. Maybe because the cameras were rolling, maybe because a Detroit police officer had been murdered two weeks earlier while trying to apprehend a suspect. This was the first raid on a house since his death.
Police first floated [9] the story that Aiyana's grandmother had grabbed Weekley's gun. Then, realizing that sounded implausible, they said she'd brushed the gun as she ran past the door. But the grandmother says she was lying on the far side of the couch, away from the door.
Compounding the tragedy is the fact that the police threw the grenade into the wrong apartment. The suspect fingered for Blake's murder, Chauncey Owens, lived in the upstairs flat, with Charles Jones' sister.
Plus, grenades are rarely used when rounding up suspects, even murder suspects. But it was dark. And TV may have needed some pyrotechnics.
"I'm worried they went Hollywood," said a high-ranking Detroit police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the investigation and simmering resentment in the streets. "It is not protocol. And I've got to say in all my years in the department, I've never used a flash-bang in a case like this."
The official went on to say that the SWAT team was not briefed about the presence of children in the house, although the neighborhood informant who led homicide detectives to the Lillibridge address told them that children lived there. There were even toys [10] on the lawn.
Read the Full Essay @ Mother Jones
Is Kwanzaa Still Important?
These days the holiday Ron Karenga founded 44 years ago may have more commercial than cultural significance.
Is Kwanzaa Still Important?
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21
If you wanted to celebrate Kwanzaa this year, you could purchase one of dozens of books explaining it’s seven principles, purchase a Kinara and Kwanzaa cards from Macy’s, mail those cards with official Kwanzaa postal stamps, watch M. K. Assante Jr.’s film "The Black Candle," and attend any number of Kwanzaa celebrations in your local neighborhood. Even George W. Bush offered an official Kwanzaa message during his presidency. I note these points to highlight how accessible and mainstream Kwanzaa has become, despite the fact that it was founded more than 40 years ago in midst of the Black Power Movement.
Kwanza was founded in 1966 by Ron Karenga (born Ron Everettt) who also founded the Black Cultural Nationalist organization United Slaves or US. In the late 1960s, US was one of the many organizations targeted by the FBI counter-intelligence program COINTELPRO. The violent exchanges by US and the Black Panther Party (also targeted by the FBI) in Los Angeles in the late 1960s was instigated by the FBI to destabilize both organizations. That Karenga is one of the few figures from that era that has survived relatively intact—he is arguably more influential now as an Afrocentric scholar—has often raised questions about the true nature of his role in the ultimate demise of the Black Panther Party.
Kwanzaa was one of the many ritual celebrations that Karenga founded in an effort to counter the influences of White Supremacy and Christianity on African-Americans. Among those rituals were Kwanzisha, which recognized the founding of US, Kuzaliwa, a celebration of Malcolm X’s birthday and Uhuru Day which marked the beginnings of the Watts riots during the summer of 1965.
As USC Historian Scot Brown writes in his book Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization and Black Cultural Nationalism (2005), Kwanzaa “was part of a matrix of rituals, holidays and social praxis that effectively comprised a nationalist counter-culture capable of attracting a diverse body of Black Americans to the organization.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21.com
Is Kwanzaa Still Important?
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21
If you wanted to celebrate Kwanzaa this year, you could purchase one of dozens of books explaining it’s seven principles, purchase a Kinara and Kwanzaa cards from Macy’s, mail those cards with official Kwanzaa postal stamps, watch M. K. Assante Jr.’s film "The Black Candle," and attend any number of Kwanzaa celebrations in your local neighborhood. Even George W. Bush offered an official Kwanzaa message during his presidency. I note these points to highlight how accessible and mainstream Kwanzaa has become, despite the fact that it was founded more than 40 years ago in midst of the Black Power Movement.
Kwanza was founded in 1966 by Ron Karenga (born Ron Everettt) who also founded the Black Cultural Nationalist organization United Slaves or US. In the late 1960s, US was one of the many organizations targeted by the FBI counter-intelligence program COINTELPRO. The violent exchanges by US and the Black Panther Party (also targeted by the FBI) in Los Angeles in the late 1960s was instigated by the FBI to destabilize both organizations. That Karenga is one of the few figures from that era that has survived relatively intact—he is arguably more influential now as an Afrocentric scholar—has often raised questions about the true nature of his role in the ultimate demise of the Black Panther Party.
Kwanzaa was one of the many ritual celebrations that Karenga founded in an effort to counter the influences of White Supremacy and Christianity on African-Americans. Among those rituals were Kwanzisha, which recognized the founding of US, Kuzaliwa, a celebration of Malcolm X’s birthday and Uhuru Day which marked the beginnings of the Watts riots during the summer of 1965.
As USC Historian Scot Brown writes in his book Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization and Black Cultural Nationalism (2005), Kwanzaa “was part of a matrix of rituals, holidays and social praxis that effectively comprised a nationalist counter-culture capable of attracting a diverse body of Black Americans to the organization.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21.com
Monday, December 27, 2010
Teena Marie Backstage @ The Rhythm & Blues Foundation Award Ceremony
ReelBlack TV was privileged to encounter TEENA MARIE backstage at the 2008 R&B Foundation Awards. Here is the raw uncut footage from her press conference after receiving the award. She will be sadly missed. Camera Bill Tucker and Mike D.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Kamala Harris: Democrats' Anti-Palin
Kamala Harris: Democrats' Anti-Palin
by Ben Smith
It’s easy to understand why Kamala Harris, California’s next attorney general, is being called the future of the Democratic Party, a rising political star in the mold of one of her big supporters — President Barack Obama.
At first glance, the president and Harris have much in common: Both are mixed-race children of immigrants raised by a single mother; both are eloquent, telegenic big-city lawyers with strong liberal credentials who catapulted from relative obscurity to the national stage. And like the first African-American president, Harris has broken a long-standing barrier — she’s California’s first African-American attorney general and the first woman to hold the office.
But Harris, whose position, potential and glamour will most likely give her as high a national profile as she wants, resists the comparisons.
“It’s flattering,” she told POLITICO, just weeks after claiming victory in a photo-finish race against Steve Cooley, her Republican opponent. Nevertheless, “these comparisons make me uncomfortable because I know what I want to do. I am really excited about being attorney general.”
(Word that some eager Democrats have dubbed her the “anti-Palin” draws a one-word reply: “oy.”)
Instead, what Harris mostly wants to talk about is an issue that’s almost entirely off the national radar.
“What I would like to contribute to the conversation,” she added, “is an in-depth discussion about what we can do to create smarter criminal justice policy.”
But Harris will have to do it over the Democrats’ growing buzz about her.
When she broke out of a six-candidate primary field in the race for attorney general, the San Francisco prosecutor won big endorsements from party heavyweights, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, as well as endorsements from labor unions like the Service Employees International Union and all of California’s top newspapers. She also was the only down ballot Democrat for whom President Obama fundraised this year.
Read the Full Essay @ Politico
by Ben Smith
It’s easy to understand why Kamala Harris, California’s next attorney general, is being called the future of the Democratic Party, a rising political star in the mold of one of her big supporters — President Barack Obama.
At first glance, the president and Harris have much in common: Both are mixed-race children of immigrants raised by a single mother; both are eloquent, telegenic big-city lawyers with strong liberal credentials who catapulted from relative obscurity to the national stage. And like the first African-American president, Harris has broken a long-standing barrier — she’s California’s first African-American attorney general and the first woman to hold the office.
But Harris, whose position, potential and glamour will most likely give her as high a national profile as she wants, resists the comparisons.
“It’s flattering,” she told POLITICO, just weeks after claiming victory in a photo-finish race against Steve Cooley, her Republican opponent. Nevertheless, “these comparisons make me uncomfortable because I know what I want to do. I am really excited about being attorney general.”
(Word that some eager Democrats have dubbed her the “anti-Palin” draws a one-word reply: “oy.”)
Instead, what Harris mostly wants to talk about is an issue that’s almost entirely off the national radar.
“What I would like to contribute to the conversation,” she added, “is an in-depth discussion about what we can do to create smarter criminal justice policy.”
But Harris will have to do it over the Democrats’ growing buzz about her.
When she broke out of a six-candidate primary field in the race for attorney general, the San Francisco prosecutor won big endorsements from party heavyweights, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, as well as endorsements from labor unions like the Service Employees International Union and all of California’s top newspapers. She also was the only down ballot Democrat for whom President Obama fundraised this year.
Read the Full Essay @ Politico
Onaje Allan Gumbs--"Inner City Blues" (Just Like Yesterday)
New Music from Pianist Onaje Allan Gumbs from Just Like Yesterday featuring Omar Hakim, Victor Bailey, Bill 'Spaceman' Patterson, Chuggy Carter and Marcus McLaurine.
Onaje Allan Gumbs / Just Like Yesterday
1. What You Won't Do For Love What You Won't Do For Love
2．Betcha By Golly Wow Betcha By Golly Wow
3．Hot Dawgit Hot Dawgit
4．Ribbon in the Sky Ribbon in the Sky
5．Inner City Blues Inner City Blues
6．I'll Be Around I'll Be Around
7．That's the Way of the World That's the Way of the World
8．Quiet Passion Quiet Passion
9． A Child is Born A Child is Born
10. The Tokyo Blues The Tokyo Blues
11．Dolphin Dance Dolphin Dance
12．Yearning For Your Love Yearning For Your Love
Onaje Allan Gumbs / Just Like Yesterday
1. What You Won't Do For Love What You Won't Do For Love
2．Betcha By Golly Wow Betcha By Golly Wow
3．Hot Dawgit Hot Dawgit
4．Ribbon in the Sky Ribbon in the Sky
5．Inner City Blues Inner City Blues
6．I'll Be Around I'll Be Around
7．That's the Way of the World That's the Way of the World
8．Quiet Passion Quiet Passion
9． A Child is Born A Child is Born
10. The Tokyo Blues The Tokyo Blues
11．Dolphin Dance Dolphin Dance
12．Yearning For Your Love Yearning For Your Love
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Do we need a body count to count?: Notes on the serial murders of Black women
Do we need a body count to count?:
Notes on the serial murders of Black women
by The Crunk Feminist Collective
Debra Jackson. Click. Henrietta Wright. Click. Barbara Ware. Click. These are some names of Black women who were sexually assaulted, drugged, murdered, and dumped in LA alleys and the backstreets by a former city trash collector. As news broke about a serial killer dubbed the Grim Sleeper, I found myself at the computer clicking on the still images of 180 nameless, numbered Black women and girls published by the LA Times. I sat with each photo picturing each life—and remembering the life of my aunt who was murdered years ago.
For women who are poor, who are Black, who are substance abusers, who are single/mothers, who are sex workers, and for women who possess no Olan Mills yearbook portrait like that of Natalee Holloway, how do we make sense of their lives? Do we see them?
Read the Full Essay @ The Crunk Feminist Collective
Notes on the serial murders of Black women
by The Crunk Feminist Collective
Debra Jackson. Click. Henrietta Wright. Click. Barbara Ware. Click. These are some names of Black women who were sexually assaulted, drugged, murdered, and dumped in LA alleys and the backstreets by a former city trash collector. As news broke about a serial killer dubbed the Grim Sleeper, I found myself at the computer clicking on the still images of 180 nameless, numbered Black women and girls published by the LA Times. I sat with each photo picturing each life—and remembering the life of my aunt who was murdered years ago.
For women who are poor, who are Black, who are substance abusers, who are single/mothers, who are sex workers, and for women who possess no Olan Mills yearbook portrait like that of Natalee Holloway, how do we make sense of their lives? Do we see them?
Read the Full Essay @ The Crunk Feminist Collective
Whither the Female Sports Fan?
Whither the Female Sports Fan?
by Paul Farhi | Washington Post Staff Writer
It was a major milestone for college sports, and a special triumph for women's basketball. With its victory over Florida State on Tuesday, the University of Connecticut women's basketball team won its 89th straight game, breaking one of the most hallowed records in intercollegiate sports, the UCLA men's streak of 88 straight victories from 1971 to 1974 under legendary coach John Wooden.
The nation's sports media all but yawned at the news.
The record-breaking game was relegated to ESPN2, clearing the flagship ESPN channel to carry something called the Beef 'O' Brady's Bowl. The UConn news rated a wire-service story in The Washington Post's Sports section and inside-the-section play in the New York Times. Sports talk radio stations barely touched it.
Women and girls are playing sports in vast numbers, propelled onto the court and into the field by Title IX, the 1972 law that effectively outlawed discrimination in funding for public-school sports programs. Between the law's enactment and 2008, the number of girls playing high school sports grew tenfold, according to the Women's Sports Foundation.
Fans are a different story. One reason is that men - generally the most passionate and loyal sports fans - aren't keen on watching women's sports. But if anything, women show even less interest in the games women play. Women haven't grown into the sorts of sports fans that can sustain professional leagues or boost a women's game into the national spotlight.
Women's games don't draw the crowds, the money or the media attention that even "minor" sports played by men attract. Only a few women's sports - golf and tennis, primarily - have strong enough followings for lengthy regular seasons. Others, such as gymnastics and figure skating, surge in popularity in Olympic years largely on the strength of female viewers but slide back into relative obscurity in off years.
Read the Full Article @ The Washington Post
by Paul Farhi | Washington Post Staff Writer
It was a major milestone for college sports, and a special triumph for women's basketball. With its victory over Florida State on Tuesday, the University of Connecticut women's basketball team won its 89th straight game, breaking one of the most hallowed records in intercollegiate sports, the UCLA men's streak of 88 straight victories from 1971 to 1974 under legendary coach John Wooden.
The nation's sports media all but yawned at the news.
The record-breaking game was relegated to ESPN2, clearing the flagship ESPN channel to carry something called the Beef 'O' Brady's Bowl. The UConn news rated a wire-service story in The Washington Post's Sports section and inside-the-section play in the New York Times. Sports talk radio stations barely touched it.
Women and girls are playing sports in vast numbers, propelled onto the court and into the field by Title IX, the 1972 law that effectively outlawed discrimination in funding for public-school sports programs. Between the law's enactment and 2008, the number of girls playing high school sports grew tenfold, according to the Women's Sports Foundation.
Fans are a different story. One reason is that men - generally the most passionate and loyal sports fans - aren't keen on watching women's sports. But if anything, women show even less interest in the games women play. Women haven't grown into the sorts of sports fans that can sustain professional leagues or boost a women's game into the national spotlight.
Women's games don't draw the crowds, the money or the media attention that even "minor" sports played by men attract. Only a few women's sports - golf and tennis, primarily - have strong enough followings for lengthy regular seasons. Others, such as gymnastics and figure skating, surge in popularity in Olympic years largely on the strength of female viewers but slide back into relative obscurity in off years.
Read the Full Article @ The Washington Post
Closing Cabrini-Green
photo courtesy of Ronitfilms.com
When the last tenant moved out of Chicago's notorious housing project, it signaled the end of an era and raised questions about the future of displaced tenants -- and public housing itself.
Closing Cabrini-Green
by Sylvester Monroe | The Root.com
When the last tenant moved out of Chicago's notorious housing project, it signaled the end of an era and raised questions about the future of displaced tenants -- and public housing itself.
Sometimes, moving is a happy event. Sometimes it's not. Last week, when Annie Ricks and five of her children left the 11th-floor apartment in the dilapidated, 15-story high-rise complex where she has lived for the past 22 years, it was a media event. And Ricks, the last tenant in Chicago's notorious Cabrini-Green public housing project, was not happy.
"I didn't want to leave, but I didn't have a choice," she said in an interview with The Root, while sitting among a sea of boxes in the kitchen of her newly renovated Chicago Housing Authority apartment on the other side of the city. Indeed, the 54-year-old mother of eight from Alabama didn't have a choice about leaving Cabrini. The building where she lived is scheduled to be demolished early next year. She moved there about a year ago, after another Cabrini building, where she had lived for 21 years, was also torn down.
Ricks successfully challenged the housing authority's order to evacuate the building by the end of November. She wanted to move to a rehabbed apartment in a low-rise building, but it was not ready. When Ricks was finally forced to vacate last week after CHA officials decreed that the high-rise building was no longer inhabitable, she was first offered a home in a Cabrini rowhouse apartment. But Ricks was concerned about gun battles between "the reds," residents of the red brick apartments, and "the whites," who live in Cabrini's high-rise towers, an ongoing rivalry fueled by gang and drug violence. "That would have put my kids in jeopardy," she said.
Instead, she was forced to choose between two low-rise CHA properties on the South Side. She also has the option of returning to Cabrini next year when more units are rehabbed. "It was the Dearborn Homes or Wentworth Gardens," she said. "I settled for this one [in Wentworth] because it was not a high-rise." But she said the new apartment is too small.
Though it is completely renovated, with new kitchen appliances and bath fixtures, it has only three bedrooms, compared with the five she had in Cabrini. As a result, Ricks' oldest daughter and her baby son, who lived with Ricks in Cabrini, had to move to their own apartment in a different complex. Ricks also said that the low-rise building hallways are too narrow to get her queen-size bed into the apartment. "I just feel like they didn't try hard enough to accommodate me," she said.
Annie Ricks' frustration and unhappiness are not unusual as the CHA and others struggle to improve the physical living conditions of hundreds of thousands of poor and low-income families stuck in substandard public housing across the country. At one point, 15,000 people lived in Cabrini-Green before deteriorating conditions, gang and drug violence, and other crime earned the 58-year-old complex a reputation as the most notorious of Chicago's dangerous housing projects and transformed it into a national symbol of inner-city warehousing of America's largely black and brown urban underclass.
Read the Full Essay @ The Root.com
***
Sylvester Monroe is a native of Chicago and frequent contributor to The Root.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Empowered and Sexy: The Ms Magazine Interview with Shayne Lee
Empowered and Sexy
by Ebony Utley
Erotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality and Popular Culture by Tulane University professor Shayne Lee (Hamilton Books, 2010) revolutionizes the politics of black female respectability. Instead of writing about how hypersexualized representations hurt black women, Lee celebrates black female pop culture icons who purposefully hype uninhibited sexual agency. He defends Karinne Steffans, Tyra Banks, Alexyss Tylor and other women who have been publicly accused of promiscuity. He argues that their attention to masturbation, vagina power, multiple sex partners and reverse objectification will help black women reclaim their sexuality. In a candid conversation with the Ms. Blog, Lee asserts that pro-sex black women are the new sexy.
How did you became interested in erotic revolutionaries?
Shayne Lee: I became intrigued by the ways in which third-wave feminists fought for their right to be both empowered and sexy. I thought that message was missing within black academic feminist thought. Then I realized that pop culture was full of these individuals who weren’t really career feminists but who embodied the kind energy that I thought was powerful from third wave feminism. So that’s when I came up with the idea for Erotic Revolutionaries.
How does your male privilege help or hinder your erotic revolutionary endeavors?
I’ve been told by people that I shouldn’t have written Erotic Revolutionaries because I’m a man. But I don’t think any one [person] can represent the female voice. Gender is fractured by class, by beauty standards, by social positioning in ways that I don’t think one voice can represent other women. So in that way, I feel safe as a man to objectively, or at least the best I can, look at black women in pop culture for the ways in which these women transcend the politics of respectability.
In your Tyra Banks chapter, you argue that she flips the gaze and is able to objectify men. How would you characterize that gaze reversal?
You have these binaries: male/female; male on top/female on bottom; male has agency, power; female is passive and victim. As long as these binaries exist in society, to make them even you have to reverse them for a while. Since men have enjoyed so much agency in objectifying women, there’s gotta be some point where women really go overboard and enjoy those spaces, first of all to show men how it feels to be constantly objectified and second of all to feel the power of subjecting men to the female gaze. Once that’s done enough, maybe we could get to a more equitable form of society where men and women are objectifying each other equally.
Read the Full Interview @ Ms. Magazine
by Ebony Utley
Erotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality and Popular Culture by Tulane University professor Shayne Lee (Hamilton Books, 2010) revolutionizes the politics of black female respectability. Instead of writing about how hypersexualized representations hurt black women, Lee celebrates black female pop culture icons who purposefully hype uninhibited sexual agency. He defends Karinne Steffans, Tyra Banks, Alexyss Tylor and other women who have been publicly accused of promiscuity. He argues that their attention to masturbation, vagina power, multiple sex partners and reverse objectification will help black women reclaim their sexuality. In a candid conversation with the Ms. Blog, Lee asserts that pro-sex black women are the new sexy.
How did you became interested in erotic revolutionaries?
Shayne Lee: I became intrigued by the ways in which third-wave feminists fought for their right to be both empowered and sexy. I thought that message was missing within black academic feminist thought. Then I realized that pop culture was full of these individuals who weren’t really career feminists but who embodied the kind energy that I thought was powerful from third wave feminism. So that’s when I came up with the idea for Erotic Revolutionaries.
How does your male privilege help or hinder your erotic revolutionary endeavors?
I’ve been told by people that I shouldn’t have written Erotic Revolutionaries because I’m a man. But I don’t think any one [person] can represent the female voice. Gender is fractured by class, by beauty standards, by social positioning in ways that I don’t think one voice can represent other women. So in that way, I feel safe as a man to objectively, or at least the best I can, look at black women in pop culture for the ways in which these women transcend the politics of respectability.
In your Tyra Banks chapter, you argue that she flips the gaze and is able to objectify men. How would you characterize that gaze reversal?
You have these binaries: male/female; male on top/female on bottom; male has agency, power; female is passive and victim. As long as these binaries exist in society, to make them even you have to reverse them for a while. Since men have enjoyed so much agency in objectifying women, there’s gotta be some point where women really go overboard and enjoy those spaces, first of all to show men how it feels to be constantly objectified and second of all to feel the power of subjecting men to the female gaze. Once that’s done enough, maybe we could get to a more equitable form of society where men and women are objectifying each other equally.
Read the Full Interview @ Ms. Magazine
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Trailer: Shaft or Sidney Poitier: Black Masculinity in Comic Books
Through interviews with prominent artists, scholars and cultural critics along with images from the comic books themselves, Jonathan Gayles' Shaft or Sidney Poitier: Black Masculinity in Comic Books examines the degree to which early Black superheroes generally adhered to common stereotypes about Black men. From the humorous, to the offensive, early Black superheroes are critically considered.
The "Masculine Journey" of Bishop Eddie Long
The "Masculine Journey" of Bishop Eddie Long
By Guy Mount
In an effort to establish his “potency” via the Word of God, Bishop Eddie Long once told his congregation that it was “the job of the preacher to bring fresh sperm.” For many observers this came as no surprise, as the bishop is widely known for asserting his masculinity through these kinds of sexually-charged analogies. In the same sermon the bishop denigrated lesser preachers calling them impotent “dead sperm” disseminators and glorified a God that begets “widespread [spiritual] pregnancies.” He has subsequently made blanket statements referring to homosexuality as a form of “spiritual abortion.”
While the merging of the sacred and the profane is a centuries-old practice among African Americans, these statements have taken on an entirely new meaning in light of the current allegations made by four male church members against the bishop. The four men, in their civil lawsuits, claim that the Bishop Eddie Long induced them with lavish gifts and romantic trips in return for sexual favors and manly fellowship. The complaints essentially describe an all-male harem operating within the Bishop’s New Birth Missionary Baptist Church. Promising a “Longfellows Masculine Journey,” this now suspiciously titled “Longfellows Academy” was a youth ministry program that found the bishop allegedly ‘initiating’ young boys like a Greek aristocrat while performing elaborate cult-like marriage ceremonies between himself and his “Spiritual Sons.”
Inadvertently, the bishop may have in fact introduced some “fresh sperm” into a decades-old process that has been quietly reshaping black religious life in America. Although this particular germination was clearly not what the bishop had in mind, his case has dramatically brought issues of gender and sexuality to the center of the discussion taking place around black religious reform and spiritual leadership. While the final impact of the bishop’s plight is still unknown, it seems clear that his case will mark a significant turning point in African American religious history, especially as it relates to black sexuality and masculinity. It may also open up a much wider discussion about black religious belief in general and its intersection with contemporary cultural politics. As Syracuse University Professor Boyce Watkins wrote in a recent article for Black Voices, these allegations have the potential to “change the black church forever.”
The Performance of Religious Manhood
In the bishop’s defense, he really did do everything in his power to keep the lie alive. The extreme effort that the bishop exerted in order to demonstrate that he might single-handedly hold the cipher of black manhood was remarkable to the point of comical. His dogmatic performances continue to this day, as unlike other preachers whose private sex lives have been exposed, the bishop has decided to take the most unheard of (and masculine) of all positions; he’s fighting the charges. The elaborate pageantry was on full display in the bishop’s first public address regarding the allegations and was held on Sunday morning after the allegations broke in front of his New Birth “family.”
Beaming with charm and confidence the bishop started off by bending the truth. He told his congregation that he had waited to address the world until this moment because “[m]y first responsibility was to my family. Then my next responsibility is not to address the world before I address my family at New Birth.” This met with great applause from his congregation despite the fact that earlier in the week the bishop’s attorney appeared on the Tom Joyner show in the bishop’s steed, saying that that the bishop’s true desire was to address the world and the media first but that he, as his attorney, had to talk the bishop out of it. Where the bishop’s true desire really lies we may never know. What we do know is that the bishop vowed to fight the charges while pitting himself as David against Goliath. Continuing the analogy the bishop threatened all those who might doubt him, saying “I’ve got five rocks and I haven’t thrown one yet.” The bishop did however throw down his mic, snatched his wife, and left the stage leaving us all to wonder what he has in store for the world. Throughout the sermon Long admitted that he was not “a perfect man” and refused to deny that he had sex with other imperfect men. Although he said: “this thing, I’m gonna fight” we don’t yet know if “this thing” is a sexual orientation that he will later admit to and attempt to exorcise.
Not surprisingly, the performance met with overwhelming approval from the majority of Long’s supporters. Gabrielle A. Richards, a New Birth church member, told CNN that she “was so proud of him the way that he came out with his head high up and with his fabulous wife and he showed the strength that I’m accustomed to. And this is the Bishop Long that I know.” The bishop’s confidence and “fabulous” yet silent wife meant for Ms. Richards that their might still be hope that the nuclear black family rooted in heterosexual patriarchy might weather the storm. Ultimately it was the notion that nothing had changed which proved so comforting to her as “Bishop Long did a great job assuring us that he’s still Bishop Long.” Of course the implication was that Bishop Long could not be Bishop Long if he turns out to be the gay Bishop Long.
Others had a different assessment. The Reverend Carlton Pearson, Senior Pastor of Christ Universal Temple which openly welcomes and accepts LGBT members, commented on CNN regarding the same sermon saying that “the people rejoiced Sunday because he didn’t admit to anything. They didn’t want him to.” Apparently Bishop Long is a man who knows what his flock can handle and what they want to hear. Rev. Person, who is one of the leading advocates of the Gospel of Inclusion, told the nation prophetically that “Bishop Eddie Long is just the tip of the iceberg.” Gospel music and the black church are overflowing with LGBT members, according to Rev. Person, and without them “we wouldn’t have a church.”
Read the Full Essay @ History News Network
***
Gary Mount is a teaching assistant at San Diego State University and a HNN intern.
By Guy Mount
In an effort to establish his “potency” via the Word of God, Bishop Eddie Long once told his congregation that it was “the job of the preacher to bring fresh sperm.” For many observers this came as no surprise, as the bishop is widely known for asserting his masculinity through these kinds of sexually-charged analogies. In the same sermon the bishop denigrated lesser preachers calling them impotent “dead sperm” disseminators and glorified a God that begets “widespread [spiritual] pregnancies.” He has subsequently made blanket statements referring to homosexuality as a form of “spiritual abortion.”
While the merging of the sacred and the profane is a centuries-old practice among African Americans, these statements have taken on an entirely new meaning in light of the current allegations made by four male church members against the bishop. The four men, in their civil lawsuits, claim that the Bishop Eddie Long induced them with lavish gifts and romantic trips in return for sexual favors and manly fellowship. The complaints essentially describe an all-male harem operating within the Bishop’s New Birth Missionary Baptist Church. Promising a “Longfellows Masculine Journey,” this now suspiciously titled “Longfellows Academy” was a youth ministry program that found the bishop allegedly ‘initiating’ young boys like a Greek aristocrat while performing elaborate cult-like marriage ceremonies between himself and his “Spiritual Sons.”
Inadvertently, the bishop may have in fact introduced some “fresh sperm” into a decades-old process that has been quietly reshaping black religious life in America. Although this particular germination was clearly not what the bishop had in mind, his case has dramatically brought issues of gender and sexuality to the center of the discussion taking place around black religious reform and spiritual leadership. While the final impact of the bishop’s plight is still unknown, it seems clear that his case will mark a significant turning point in African American religious history, especially as it relates to black sexuality and masculinity. It may also open up a much wider discussion about black religious belief in general and its intersection with contemporary cultural politics. As Syracuse University Professor Boyce Watkins wrote in a recent article for Black Voices, these allegations have the potential to “change the black church forever.”
The Performance of Religious Manhood
In the bishop’s defense, he really did do everything in his power to keep the lie alive. The extreme effort that the bishop exerted in order to demonstrate that he might single-handedly hold the cipher of black manhood was remarkable to the point of comical. His dogmatic performances continue to this day, as unlike other preachers whose private sex lives have been exposed, the bishop has decided to take the most unheard of (and masculine) of all positions; he’s fighting the charges. The elaborate pageantry was on full display in the bishop’s first public address regarding the allegations and was held on Sunday morning after the allegations broke in front of his New Birth “family.”
Beaming with charm and confidence the bishop started off by bending the truth. He told his congregation that he had waited to address the world until this moment because “[m]y first responsibility was to my family. Then my next responsibility is not to address the world before I address my family at New Birth.” This met with great applause from his congregation despite the fact that earlier in the week the bishop’s attorney appeared on the Tom Joyner show in the bishop’s steed, saying that that the bishop’s true desire was to address the world and the media first but that he, as his attorney, had to talk the bishop out of it. Where the bishop’s true desire really lies we may never know. What we do know is that the bishop vowed to fight the charges while pitting himself as David against Goliath. Continuing the analogy the bishop threatened all those who might doubt him, saying “I’ve got five rocks and I haven’t thrown one yet.” The bishop did however throw down his mic, snatched his wife, and left the stage leaving us all to wonder what he has in store for the world. Throughout the sermon Long admitted that he was not “a perfect man” and refused to deny that he had sex with other imperfect men. Although he said: “this thing, I’m gonna fight” we don’t yet know if “this thing” is a sexual orientation that he will later admit to and attempt to exorcise.
Not surprisingly, the performance met with overwhelming approval from the majority of Long’s supporters. Gabrielle A. Richards, a New Birth church member, told CNN that she “was so proud of him the way that he came out with his head high up and with his fabulous wife and he showed the strength that I’m accustomed to. And this is the Bishop Long that I know.” The bishop’s confidence and “fabulous” yet silent wife meant for Ms. Richards that their might still be hope that the nuclear black family rooted in heterosexual patriarchy might weather the storm. Ultimately it was the notion that nothing had changed which proved so comforting to her as “Bishop Long did a great job assuring us that he’s still Bishop Long.” Of course the implication was that Bishop Long could not be Bishop Long if he turns out to be the gay Bishop Long.
Others had a different assessment. The Reverend Carlton Pearson, Senior Pastor of Christ Universal Temple which openly welcomes and accepts LGBT members, commented on CNN regarding the same sermon saying that “the people rejoiced Sunday because he didn’t admit to anything. They didn’t want him to.” Apparently Bishop Long is a man who knows what his flock can handle and what they want to hear. Rev. Person, who is one of the leading advocates of the Gospel of Inclusion, told the nation prophetically that “Bishop Eddie Long is just the tip of the iceberg.” Gospel music and the black church are overflowing with LGBT members, according to Rev. Person, and without them “we wouldn’t have a church.”
Read the Full Essay @ History News Network
***
Gary Mount is a teaching assistant at San Diego State University and a HNN intern.
Barbershop Health Outreach on 'Our World' with Marc Lamont Hill
Marc Lamont Hill - Our World with Black Enterprise - Black Barbershop Health Outreach Foundation
Monday, December 20, 2010
Net Neutrality: The Most Important Free Speech Issue of Our Time
from The Huffington Post
The Most Important Free Speech Issue of Our Time
by Al Franken
This Tuesday is an important day in the fight to save the Internet.
As a source of innovation, an engine of our economy, and a forum for our political discourse, the Internet can only work if it's a truly level playing field. Small businesses should have the same ability to reach customers as powerful corporations. A blogger should have the same ability to find an audience as a media conglomerate.
This principle is called "net neutrality" -- and it's under attack. Internet service giants like Comcast and Verizon want to offer premium and privileged access to the Internet for corporations who can afford to pay for it.
The good news is that the Federal Communications Commission has the power to issue regulations that protect net neutrality. The bad news is that draft regulations written by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski don't do that at all. They're worse than nothing.
That's why Tuesday is such an important day. The FCC will be meeting to discuss those regulations, and we must make sure that its members understand that allowing corporations to control the Internet is simply unacceptable.
Although Chairman Genachowski's draft Order has not been made public, early reports make clear that it falls far short of protecting net neutrality.
For many Americans -- particularly those who live in rural areas -- the future of the Internet lies in mobile services. But the draft Order would effectively permit Internet providers to block lawful content, applications, and devices on mobile Internet connections.
Mobile networks like AT&T and Verizon Wireless would be able to shut off your access to content or applications for any reason. For instance, Verizon could prevent you from accessing Google Maps on your phone, forcing you to use their own mapping program, Verizon Navigator, even if it costs money to use and isn't nearly as good. Or a mobile provider with a political agenda could prevent you from downloading an app that connects you with the Obama campaign (or, for that matter, a Tea Party group in your area).
It gets worse. The FCC has never before explicitly allowed discrimination on the Internet -- but the draft Order takes a step backwards, merely stating that so-called "paid prioritization" (the creation of a "fast lane" for big corporations who can afford to pay for it) is cause for concern.
It sure is -- but that's exactly why the FCC should ban it. Instead, the draft Order would have the effect of actually relaxing restrictions on this kind of discrimination.
What's more, even the protections that are established in the draft Order would be weak because it defines "broadband Internet access service" too narrowly, making it easy for powerful corporations to get around the rules.
Here's what's most troubling of all. Chairman Genachowski and President Obama -- who nominated him -- have argued convincingly that they support net neutrality.
But grassroots supporters of net neutrality are beginning to wonder if we've been had. Instead of proposing regulations that would truly protect net neutrality, reports indicate that Chairman Genachowski has been calling the CEOs of major Internet corporations seeking their public endorsement of this draft proposal, which would destroy it.
No chairman should be soliciting sign-off from the corporations that his agency is supposed to regulate -- and no true advocate of a free and open Internet should be seeking the permission of large media conglomerates before issuing new rules.
After all, just look at Comcast -- this Internet monolith has reportedly imposed a new, recurring fee on Level 3 Communications, the company slated to be the primary online delivery provider for Netflix. That's the same Netflix that represents Comcast's biggest competition in video services.
Imagine if Comcast customers couldn't watch Netflix, but were limited only to Comcast's Video On Demand service. Imagine if a cable news network could get its website to load faster on your computer than your favorite local political blog. Imagine if big corporations with their own agenda could decide who wins or loses online. The Internet as we know it would cease to exist.
That's why net neutrality is the most important free speech issue of our time. And that's why, this Tuesday, when the FCC meets to discuss this badly flawed proposal, I'll be watching. If they approve it as is, I'll be outraged. And you should be, too.
***
Al Franken is an Emmy Award-winning comedian, the author of five New York Times best-sellers, and was the host of Air America Radio’s “The Al Franken Show.” He’s the United States Senate from Minnesota.
by Al Franken
This Tuesday is an important day in the fight to save the Internet.
As a source of innovation, an engine of our economy, and a forum for our political discourse, the Internet can only work if it's a truly level playing field. Small businesses should have the same ability to reach customers as powerful corporations. A blogger should have the same ability to find an audience as a media conglomerate.
This principle is called "net neutrality" -- and it's under attack. Internet service giants like Comcast and Verizon want to offer premium and privileged access to the Internet for corporations who can afford to pay for it.
The good news is that the Federal Communications Commission has the power to issue regulations that protect net neutrality. The bad news is that draft regulations written by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski don't do that at all. They're worse than nothing.
That's why Tuesday is such an important day. The FCC will be meeting to discuss those regulations, and we must make sure that its members understand that allowing corporations to control the Internet is simply unacceptable.
Although Chairman Genachowski's draft Order has not been made public, early reports make clear that it falls far short of protecting net neutrality.
For many Americans -- particularly those who live in rural areas -- the future of the Internet lies in mobile services. But the draft Order would effectively permit Internet providers to block lawful content, applications, and devices on mobile Internet connections.
Mobile networks like AT&T and Verizon Wireless would be able to shut off your access to content or applications for any reason. For instance, Verizon could prevent you from accessing Google Maps on your phone, forcing you to use their own mapping program, Verizon Navigator, even if it costs money to use and isn't nearly as good. Or a mobile provider with a political agenda could prevent you from downloading an app that connects you with the Obama campaign (or, for that matter, a Tea Party group in your area).
It gets worse. The FCC has never before explicitly allowed discrimination on the Internet -- but the draft Order takes a step backwards, merely stating that so-called "paid prioritization" (the creation of a "fast lane" for big corporations who can afford to pay for it) is cause for concern.
It sure is -- but that's exactly why the FCC should ban it. Instead, the draft Order would have the effect of actually relaxing restrictions on this kind of discrimination.
What's more, even the protections that are established in the draft Order would be weak because it defines "broadband Internet access service" too narrowly, making it easy for powerful corporations to get around the rules.
Here's what's most troubling of all. Chairman Genachowski and President Obama -- who nominated him -- have argued convincingly that they support net neutrality.
But grassroots supporters of net neutrality are beginning to wonder if we've been had. Instead of proposing regulations that would truly protect net neutrality, reports indicate that Chairman Genachowski has been calling the CEOs of major Internet corporations seeking their public endorsement of this draft proposal, which would destroy it.
No chairman should be soliciting sign-off from the corporations that his agency is supposed to regulate -- and no true advocate of a free and open Internet should be seeking the permission of large media conglomerates before issuing new rules.
After all, just look at Comcast -- this Internet monolith has reportedly imposed a new, recurring fee on Level 3 Communications, the company slated to be the primary online delivery provider for Netflix. That's the same Netflix that represents Comcast's biggest competition in video services.
Imagine if Comcast customers couldn't watch Netflix, but were limited only to Comcast's Video On Demand service. Imagine if a cable news network could get its website to load faster on your computer than your favorite local political blog. Imagine if big corporations with their own agenda could decide who wins or loses online. The Internet as we know it would cease to exist.
That's why net neutrality is the most important free speech issue of our time. And that's why, this Tuesday, when the FCC meets to discuss this badly flawed proposal, I'll be watching. If they approve it as is, I'll be outraged. And you should be, too.
***
Al Franken is an Emmy Award-winning comedian, the author of five New York Times best-sellers, and was the host of Air America Radio’s “The Al Franken Show.” He’s the United States Senate from Minnesota.
'Left of Black': Episode #14 featuring TJ Anderson and Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Left of Black #14—December 20, 2010
w/Mark Anthony Neal
Left of Black Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by composer T.J. Anderson and Queer media activist and writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs on location at the Beyu Caffe in Durham, NC
→T.J. Anderson is one of the leading composers of his generation. Born in 1928 Anderson received a Ph.D in Composition from the University of Iowa. After serving as Chairman of the Department of Music at Tufts University for eight years, Thomas Jefferson Anderson became Austin Fletcher Professor of Music and in 1990 became Austin Fletcher Professor of Music Emeritus. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he devotes full time to writing music.
→A Self-Described "Queer Black Trouble Maker" Alexis Pauline Gumbs holds a Ph.D. from Duke University and is the founder of Broken Beautiful Press. Gumbs is also editor of the blog Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.
***
Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.
w/Mark Anthony Neal
Left of Black Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by composer T.J. Anderson and Queer media activist and writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs on location at the Beyu Caffe in Durham, NC
→T.J. Anderson is one of the leading composers of his generation. Born in 1928 Anderson received a Ph.D in Composition from the University of Iowa. After serving as Chairman of the Department of Music at Tufts University for eight years, Thomas Jefferson Anderson became Austin Fletcher Professor of Music and in 1990 became Austin Fletcher Professor of Music Emeritus. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he devotes full time to writing music.
→A Self-Described "Queer Black Trouble Maker" Alexis Pauline Gumbs holds a Ph.D. from Duke University and is the founder of Broken Beautiful Press. Gumbs is also editor of the blog Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.
***
Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.
The Color Purple: On Location in North Carolina
On Location: The Color Purple
The State of Things
w/ Frank Stasio
WUNC-FM
Director Steven Spielberg took one look at Anson County, North Carolina and decided it was the perfect setting for the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Color Purple.” That was in 1985. Twenty-five years later, the little purple flowers that were planted by Spielberg’s production team still bloom in Anson County and the film that catapulted the careers of lead actresses Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey remains significant for its beautiful cinematography, powerful performances and controversial depictions of African-American life.
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the film, “The Color Purple,” host Frank Stasio talks to a panel of guests about the movie’s production, its connection to Walker’s written narrative, and how it challenges audiences with complex themes of race, family, gender and sexuality. Joining the conversation is Lu Ellen Huntley, an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and a member of the family that owned the Anson County farm where the movie was filmed; Michael Connor, theater coordinator at Livingstone College who appears in the film; Charlene Regester, associate professor of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of “African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900-1960”; L. Lamar Wilson, an English PhD student and Composition Teaching Fellow at UNC-Chapel Hill; and Karla FC Holloway, James B. Duke Professor of English and a professor of law at Duke University.
Listen HERE
The State of Things
w/ Frank Stasio
WUNC-FM
Director Steven Spielberg took one look at Anson County, North Carolina and decided it was the perfect setting for the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Color Purple.” That was in 1985. Twenty-five years later, the little purple flowers that were planted by Spielberg’s production team still bloom in Anson County and the film that catapulted the careers of lead actresses Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey remains significant for its beautiful cinematography, powerful performances and controversial depictions of African-American life.
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the film, “The Color Purple,” host Frank Stasio talks to a panel of guests about the movie’s production, its connection to Walker’s written narrative, and how it challenges audiences with complex themes of race, family, gender and sexuality. Joining the conversation is Lu Ellen Huntley, an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and a member of the family that owned the Anson County farm where the movie was filmed; Michael Connor, theater coordinator at Livingstone College who appears in the film; Charlene Regester, associate professor of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of “African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900-1960”; L. Lamar Wilson, an English PhD student and Composition Teaching Fellow at UNC-Chapel Hill; and Karla FC Holloway, James B. Duke Professor of English and a professor of law at Duke University.
Listen HERE
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Why All the Silly Devil Talk Should be Taken Seriously
The selective nature of these vitriolic assertions reflects social anxieties. The perceived precarious position of Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy requires its adherents to protect their identity by being intolerant of others.
Why All the Silly Devil Talk Should be Taken Seriously
by Ebony Utley
MC Hammer recently released a video “Better Run Run” [see below] where he insinuates that Jay-Z worships the devil.
But this is more than just regular rap beef, one artist’s put-down of another. If you know where to look, the internet is awash in conspiracy theories about pop culture icons (Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Britney Spears, etc.) and their affiliations with evil. The usual suspects, a crowd of virtual vigilantes, include The Vigilant Citizen, Marco Ponce, G. Craig Lewis, and Professor Griff.
If we look at this through the lenses of race, gender, and class identity in the U.S., we begin to see that it is no accident that talented, powerful, popular, and rich African American male rappers, along with female artists, are being targeted by these claims. There is no better way to temper black men’s influence on tween and teen audiences, for example, than by claiming they are evil. (MC Hammer is himself black, but he seems happy to undermine a fellow artist by perpetuating the stereotype that successful black men are associated with the devil.)
Claims about female popular culture superstars and the occult are equally disturbing. Historically, autonomous women who threatened patriarchal power were labeled witches—women who had sex with the devil in exchange for power and therefore had to be executed. Today’s claims about female popular culture icons eerily resurrect similar arguments.
Read the Full Essay @ Religion Dispatches
***
Ebony A. Utley, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of communication studies at California State University Long Beach and the author of the forthcoming book The Gangsta’s God (Praeger). She resides on the web at theutleyexperience.com
Why All the Silly Devil Talk Should be Taken Seriously
by Ebony Utley
MC Hammer recently released a video “Better Run Run” [see below] where he insinuates that Jay-Z worships the devil.
But this is more than just regular rap beef, one artist’s put-down of another. If you know where to look, the internet is awash in conspiracy theories about pop culture icons (Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Britney Spears, etc.) and their affiliations with evil. The usual suspects, a crowd of virtual vigilantes, include The Vigilant Citizen, Marco Ponce, G. Craig Lewis, and Professor Griff.
If we look at this through the lenses of race, gender, and class identity in the U.S., we begin to see that it is no accident that talented, powerful, popular, and rich African American male rappers, along with female artists, are being targeted by these claims. There is no better way to temper black men’s influence on tween and teen audiences, for example, than by claiming they are evil. (MC Hammer is himself black, but he seems happy to undermine a fellow artist by perpetuating the stereotype that successful black men are associated with the devil.)
Claims about female popular culture superstars and the occult are equally disturbing. Historically, autonomous women who threatened patriarchal power were labeled witches—women who had sex with the devil in exchange for power and therefore had to be executed. Today’s claims about female popular culture icons eerily resurrect similar arguments.
Read the Full Essay @ Religion Dispatches
***
Ebony A. Utley, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of communication studies at California State University Long Beach and the author of the forthcoming book The Gangsta’s God (Praeger). She resides on the web at theutleyexperience.com
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
Like This! The Photography of Sedrick Miles
The State of Things
w/ Frank Stasio
WUNC-FM
Photographer Sed Miles has spent the last three years documenting people and events in North Carolina. Miles, who has been living in Durham, is preparing to travel the world armed with a camera and not much else. But before he leaves, he will pay homage to the faces and places of the Bull City with an exhibit called “Like This.” Many of the images on display have been viewed before on Facebook, but Miles’ goal is for the members of his adopted community to log off of the Internet and experience his work in the presence of friends and neighbors. Miles joins host Frank Stasio to talk about what happens when fine art meets Facebook.
Listen Here
w/ Frank Stasio
WUNC-FM
Photographer Sed Miles has spent the last three years documenting people and events in North Carolina. Miles, who has been living in Durham, is preparing to travel the world armed with a camera and not much else. But before he leaves, he will pay homage to the faces and places of the Bull City with an exhibit called “Like This.” Many of the images on display have been viewed before on Facebook, but Miles’ goal is for the members of his adopted community to log off of the Internet and experience his work in the presence of friends and neighbors. Miles joins host Frank Stasio to talk about what happens when fine art meets Facebook.
Listen Here
A Living Tribute to Aretha Franklin on the Michael Eric Dyson Show
Living Tribute to Aretha Franklin
The Michael Eric Dyson Show
December 17, 2010
Today we pay tribute to none other than the Queen of Soul. While Aretha Franklin is at home, recovering from surgery and enjoying the holidays, we take the opportunity to share how much her music has been enjoyed throughout the years. Gospel singer, Detroit native, and friend to Aretha Franklin, Bebe Winans shares his opinion on what makes this renowned singer so appealing to people worldwide. At the Grammy Awards in 2008, Winans was invited to sing with Franklin, who he considers one of his own musical inspirations.
We continue our living tribute to Aretha Franklin with a comprehensive look into her role as an influential social figure. Mark Anthony Neal , professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University, and Daphne Brooks, director of Undergraduate Studies in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, discuss Franklin as a pivotal figure who bridged issues of politics, gender, race, and spiritual expression within African-American culture.
Finally, Rev. Jesse Jackson joins us to talk about Aretha Franklin’s support of the Civil Rights Movement, her ability to master different genres of music, and their own personal relationship. The civil rights activist, ordained Baptist minister, and former Democratic presidential candidate discusses how Aretha Franklin’s music has translated the soul of Black America to a larger audience.
Listen HERE
The Michael Eric Dyson Show
December 17, 2010
Today we pay tribute to none other than the Queen of Soul. While Aretha Franklin is at home, recovering from surgery and enjoying the holidays, we take the opportunity to share how much her music has been enjoyed throughout the years. Gospel singer, Detroit native, and friend to Aretha Franklin, Bebe Winans shares his opinion on what makes this renowned singer so appealing to people worldwide. At the Grammy Awards in 2008, Winans was invited to sing with Franklin, who he considers one of his own musical inspirations.
We continue our living tribute to Aretha Franklin with a comprehensive look into her role as an influential social figure. Mark Anthony Neal , professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University, and Daphne Brooks, director of Undergraduate Studies in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, discuss Franklin as a pivotal figure who bridged issues of politics, gender, race, and spiritual expression within African-American culture.
Finally, Rev. Jesse Jackson joins us to talk about Aretha Franklin’s support of the Civil Rights Movement, her ability to master different genres of music, and their own personal relationship. The civil rights activist, ordained Baptist minister, and former Democratic presidential candidate discusses how Aretha Franklin’s music has translated the soul of Black America to a larger audience.
Listen HERE
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Murder Music: On Jamaican Dancehall and Homophbia
Jamaica’s dancehall music is being blamed for the country’s violent attacks on gays. But there are many who don’t see the music as homophobic, only the battle cry of a changing nation.
Murder Music
by Ilan Greenberg
On a breezy evening in mid-April a committee boasting some of Jamaica’s most venerable citizens convened an open-air meeting under the auspices of the department of government at the University of the West Indies. After almost a year and a half of sifting through charts and listening to old vinyl recordings, the committee co-chairmen, which included the president of Jamaica’s National Gallery and a former finance minister, presented to several hundred members of the public their list of the top one hundred Jamaican songs. Pandemonium ensued.
Audience members objected to the choice for number one song, “One Love,” Bob Marley’s sweet paean to togetherness, as being too saccharine. People jammed the open microphone to point out the under-representation of female artists. Others testily questioned why so few of the chosen top songs reflected reggae’s subversive, anti-establishment politics. Several people demanded a more transparent process. But the most passionate complaint from the crowd—which included members of the media, faculty in the university’s department of reggae studies, music industry figures, and ordinary music fans—was voiced over and over again from younger members of the audience: Where on this top one hundred list were the dancehall songs?
Dancehall is a beat-heavy, lyrically-dense, energetic, and synthesizer-driven music that has much in common with American hip-hop. It evolved in the early nineteen nineties out of the classic reggae of Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff—the often feel-good, reefer-party music championing the Rastafarian visions of social justice and pan-African celebration, which had powered Jamaica to worldwide recognition in the nineteen seventies and had catapulted Jamaican musicians into the far reaches of global iconography.
Surging in popularity worldwide, dancehall acts routinely fill venues like Madison Square Garden. The biggest dancehall performers sell out their U.S. concert dates within minutes. In Japan some forty thousand fans roar to the beat of dancehall acts in a sold-out stadium concert staged every September. Dance moves pioneered by dancehall fans frequently turn up in the videos of American hip hop stars.
But dancehall is hugely controversial—inside and outside Jamaica. Detractors echo many of the same complaints voiced against American hip-hop, including that the music promotes misogyny and violence. But the brief against dancehall far exceeds criticism inveighed against any other genre of popular music. Dancehall is a crucible for Jamaica’s irreconcilable notions of class and masculinity and identity. Most of all, dancehall is accused of fomenting vicious anti-gay violence.
Read the Full Essay @ Guernica
Murder Music
by Ilan Greenberg
On a breezy evening in mid-April a committee boasting some of Jamaica’s most venerable citizens convened an open-air meeting under the auspices of the department of government at the University of the West Indies. After almost a year and a half of sifting through charts and listening to old vinyl recordings, the committee co-chairmen, which included the president of Jamaica’s National Gallery and a former finance minister, presented to several hundred members of the public their list of the top one hundred Jamaican songs. Pandemonium ensued.
Audience members objected to the choice for number one song, “One Love,” Bob Marley’s sweet paean to togetherness, as being too saccharine. People jammed the open microphone to point out the under-representation of female artists. Others testily questioned why so few of the chosen top songs reflected reggae’s subversive, anti-establishment politics. Several people demanded a more transparent process. But the most passionate complaint from the crowd—which included members of the media, faculty in the university’s department of reggae studies, music industry figures, and ordinary music fans—was voiced over and over again from younger members of the audience: Where on this top one hundred list were the dancehall songs?
Dancehall is a beat-heavy, lyrically-dense, energetic, and synthesizer-driven music that has much in common with American hip-hop. It evolved in the early nineteen nineties out of the classic reggae of Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff—the often feel-good, reefer-party music championing the Rastafarian visions of social justice and pan-African celebration, which had powered Jamaica to worldwide recognition in the nineteen seventies and had catapulted Jamaican musicians into the far reaches of global iconography.
Surging in popularity worldwide, dancehall acts routinely fill venues like Madison Square Garden. The biggest dancehall performers sell out their U.S. concert dates within minutes. In Japan some forty thousand fans roar to the beat of dancehall acts in a sold-out stadium concert staged every September. Dance moves pioneered by dancehall fans frequently turn up in the videos of American hip hop stars.
But dancehall is hugely controversial—inside and outside Jamaica. Detractors echo many of the same complaints voiced against American hip-hop, including that the music promotes misogyny and violence. But the brief against dancehall far exceeds criticism inveighed against any other genre of popular music. Dancehall is a crucible for Jamaica’s irreconcilable notions of class and masculinity and identity. Most of all, dancehall is accused of fomenting vicious anti-gay violence.
Read the Full Essay @ Guernica
GA Prison Inmate Strike Enters New Phase, Prisoners Demand Human Rights, Education, Wages For Work
GA Prison Inmate Strike Enters New Phase, Prisoners Demand Human Rights, Education, Wages For Work
by Bruce A. Dixon, audio interview by Glen Ford
The historic strike of Georgia prisoners, demanding wages for their labor, educational opportunities, adequate health care and nutrition, and better conditions is entering a new phase. Strikers remain firm in their demands for full human rights, though after several days many have emerged from their cells, if only to take hot showers and hot food. Many of these, however, are still refusing their involuntary and unpaid work assignments.
A group that includes relatives, friends and a broad range of supporters of the prisoners on the outside has emerged. They are seeking to sit down with Georgia correctional officials this week to discuss how some of the just demands of inmates can begin to be implemented. Initially, Georgia-based representatives of this coalition supporting the prisoner demands included the Georgia NAACP, the Nation of Islam, the National Association for Radical Prison Reform, the Green Party of Georgia, and the Ordinary Peoples Society among others. Civil rights attorneys, ministers, community organizations and other prisoner advocates are also joining the group which calls itself the Concerned Coalition to Protect Prisoner Rights.
Read More @ Black Agenda Report
by Bruce A. Dixon, audio interview by Glen Ford
The historic strike of Georgia prisoners, demanding wages for their labor, educational opportunities, adequate health care and nutrition, and better conditions is entering a new phase. Strikers remain firm in their demands for full human rights, though after several days many have emerged from their cells, if only to take hot showers and hot food. Many of these, however, are still refusing their involuntary and unpaid work assignments.
A group that includes relatives, friends and a broad range of supporters of the prisoners on the outside has emerged. They are seeking to sit down with Georgia correctional officials this week to discuss how some of the just demands of inmates can begin to be implemented. Initially, Georgia-based representatives of this coalition supporting the prisoner demands included the Georgia NAACP, the Nation of Islam, the National Association for Radical Prison Reform, the Green Party of Georgia, and the Ordinary Peoples Society among others. Civil rights attorneys, ministers, community organizations and other prisoner advocates are also joining the group which calls itself the Concerned Coalition to Protect Prisoner Rights.
Read More @ Black Agenda Report
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Robert Townsend: The Future of Television, Importance of Social Justice, and Working With Committed Collaborators
Robert Townsend: The Future of Television, Importance of Social Justice, and Working With Committed Collaborators
by Aymar Jean Christian
AJC: What led you to the web?
Robert Townsend: A gentleman out of DC named Rey Ramsey. He approached me about creating content for the web. I was shooting a movie in Toronto and he said, ‘hey Robert, you’ve run a television network before, and online/broadband/web series are going to be the future, so would you be interested in creating web shows?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know much about it.’ He started to tell me more. And as he started to educate me more about what was really going on the future, I was like, ‘yea, let me try it.’ And the first web series he wanted to do was about single mothers, because they go through a lot and their stories are never really truly being told. And that became our first web series, Diary of a Single Mom. Then I called on friends in Hollywood, everybody that I thought would be right for the part, and everybody that I asked came aboard, like the legend Billy Dee Williams, Richard Roundtree, Leon, Monica, Diahann Carroll.
What is One Economy?
One Economy is a non-profit out of Washington, DC., and one of their missions is to get minorities online. Historically it’s been documented that minorities are the last to, you know, jump on board with technology. So Ray’s vision was to create a show that had a multi-ethnic cast, and give them quality programming – ‘spinach,’ stuff that would make their lives better.
Was it hard to shoot the series?
When you shoot something, it’s the same muscles and energy it would take to do a feature or a TV series. For the web, the only difference is we’re doing 12 to 14 minute episodes, but when you average it all together, we’re really shooting a small feature. It’s the same discipline, we’re using the same cameras that you’d use on any other production. We just had to figure out how you tell a really tight story in 12 minutes or 13 minutes.
What do you think works best about the show?
I think the production really just comes together on all levels. I think the acting is really fine. Cheryl [West] is an incredible writer. As a director, I just stay out of the way, because when you’ve got a good machine and a good team, we all work all together. We didn’t do it to win awards, we didn’t even know there were awards out there for web shows. We were just trying to create the best series we could and all of a sudden we’re nominated! So I think for us the spirit in which Ray envisioned the series is what it is. And I think people respond because it’s authentic. There’s a place where Cheryl writes from because she’s a single mother as well.
A lot of that authenticity seems to stem from Monica Calhoun. You want to root for her character, Ocean.
Oh my God, do you want to root for her! I’ve re-watched a lot of the episodes, and I just finished mixing season three. We’re supposed to be in there listening for sound problems, and we’re in there crying! Monica’s going through so much. You really feel like a voyeur going into this world because it feels very real. She’s at the heart of it. Ocean and Monica are at the heart of the show.
Read the Full Interview @ Televisual
by Aymar Jean Christian
AJC: What led you to the web?
Robert Townsend: A gentleman out of DC named Rey Ramsey. He approached me about creating content for the web. I was shooting a movie in Toronto and he said, ‘hey Robert, you’ve run a television network before, and online/broadband/web series are going to be the future, so would you be interested in creating web shows?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know much about it.’ He started to tell me more. And as he started to educate me more about what was really going on the future, I was like, ‘yea, let me try it.’ And the first web series he wanted to do was about single mothers, because they go through a lot and their stories are never really truly being told. And that became our first web series, Diary of a Single Mom. Then I called on friends in Hollywood, everybody that I thought would be right for the part, and everybody that I asked came aboard, like the legend Billy Dee Williams, Richard Roundtree, Leon, Monica, Diahann Carroll.
What is One Economy?
One Economy is a non-profit out of Washington, DC., and one of their missions is to get minorities online. Historically it’s been documented that minorities are the last to, you know, jump on board with technology. So Ray’s vision was to create a show that had a multi-ethnic cast, and give them quality programming – ‘spinach,’ stuff that would make their lives better.
Was it hard to shoot the series?
When you shoot something, it’s the same muscles and energy it would take to do a feature or a TV series. For the web, the only difference is we’re doing 12 to 14 minute episodes, but when you average it all together, we’re really shooting a small feature. It’s the same discipline, we’re using the same cameras that you’d use on any other production. We just had to figure out how you tell a really tight story in 12 minutes or 13 minutes.
What do you think works best about the show?
I think the production really just comes together on all levels. I think the acting is really fine. Cheryl [West] is an incredible writer. As a director, I just stay out of the way, because when you’ve got a good machine and a good team, we all work all together. We didn’t do it to win awards, we didn’t even know there were awards out there for web shows. We were just trying to create the best series we could and all of a sudden we’re nominated! So I think for us the spirit in which Ray envisioned the series is what it is. And I think people respond because it’s authentic. There’s a place where Cheryl writes from because she’s a single mother as well.
A lot of that authenticity seems to stem from Monica Calhoun. You want to root for her character, Ocean.
Oh my God, do you want to root for her! I’ve re-watched a lot of the episodes, and I just finished mixing season three. We’re supposed to be in there listening for sound problems, and we’re in there crying! Monica’s going through so much. You really feel like a voyeur going into this world because it feels very real. She’s at the heart of it. Ocean and Monica are at the heart of the show.
Read the Full Interview @ Televisual
Prisoner Advocate Elaine Brown on Georgia Prison Strike: “Repression Breeds Resistance”
from Democracy Now
w/Amy Goodman
Prisoner Advocate Elaine Brown on Georgia Prison Strike:
“Repression Breeds Resistance”
At least four prisons in Georgia remain in lockdown five days after prisoners went on strike in protest of poor living and working conditions. Using cell phones purchased from guards, the prisoners coordinated the nonviolent protests to stage the largest prison strike in U.S. history. There are reports of widespread violence and brutality by the guards against the prisoners on strike. We speak to longtime prison activist Elaine Brown of the newly formed group Concerned Coalition to Respect Prisoners’ Rights. [includes rush transcript]
Elaine Brown, Longtime prison activist and former chair of the Black Panther Party. Her books include The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America and A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story.
w/Amy Goodman
Prisoner Advocate Elaine Brown on Georgia Prison Strike:
“Repression Breeds Resistance”
At least four prisons in Georgia remain in lockdown five days after prisoners went on strike in protest of poor living and working conditions. Using cell phones purchased from guards, the prisoners coordinated the nonviolent protests to stage the largest prison strike in U.S. history. There are reports of widespread violence and brutality by the guards against the prisoners on strike. We speak to longtime prison activist Elaine Brown of the newly formed group Concerned Coalition to Respect Prisoners’ Rights. [includes rush transcript]
Elaine Brown, Longtime prison activist and former chair of the Black Panther Party. Her books include The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America and A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
All the Rock Gods are White, All the Soul Men are…well Black Men, but Some of Us Are Aretha Franklin
All the Rock Gods are White, All the Soul Men are…well Black Men,but Some of Us Are Aretha Franklin
Roses for Aretha
by Mark Anthony Neal
“A Rose is Still a Rose,” released in 1998, was Aretha Franklin’s last major hit single. Produced by Lauryn Hill, who was poised to release the generation defining The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill later that year, the song represented a metaphoric passing of the torch—a torch that was also passed to Mary J. Blige, when Franklin appeared on the latter’s “Don’t Waste Your Time” from Blige’s Mary. Unspoken in both of these performances is that Franklin remains the most important Black Woman artist that the Unites States has ever produced and few among current fans of American popular music really have an appreciation of what that means.
In the annals of American Pop music, to paraphrase Barbara Smith, Gloria Hull and Patricia Bell Scott, “All the Rock Gods are White, All the Soul Men are…well Black Men, but Some of Us Are Aretha Franklin.” It is simply too easy to forget that Aretha Franklin was the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. That Ms. Franklin wasn’t included among the 16 men who were inducted in the first class (The Everly Brothers, really?) in 1986 only illustrates the point that Ms. Franklin’s achievements are often taken for granted, even among so-called fans of Black music.
Though the term “Diva” existed well before Aretha Franklin walked across a stage, in many ways she is the ultimate embodiment of the term. More than simply a celebrated vocalist, at her commercial peak in the late 1960s, Ms. Franklin could have legitimately been called the most popular Black woman of the 20th Century. The 18 Grammy Awards, including eight straight years in the Best Female R&B/Soul category (1968-1975) tell only a part of the story.
Ms. Franklin’s stature existed well beyond the Pop charts that she dominated in the 1960s and 1970s as she is part of a handful of African-American artists responsible for mainstreaming Black spirituality at a time when the ethos of that spirituality was at the cutting edge of progressive politics in the United States.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21
Roses for Aretha
by Mark Anthony Neal
“A Rose is Still a Rose,” released in 1998, was Aretha Franklin’s last major hit single. Produced by Lauryn Hill, who was poised to release the generation defining The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill later that year, the song represented a metaphoric passing of the torch—a torch that was also passed to Mary J. Blige, when Franklin appeared on the latter’s “Don’t Waste Your Time” from Blige’s Mary. Unspoken in both of these performances is that Franklin remains the most important Black Woman artist that the Unites States has ever produced and few among current fans of American popular music really have an appreciation of what that means.
In the annals of American Pop music, to paraphrase Barbara Smith, Gloria Hull and Patricia Bell Scott, “All the Rock Gods are White, All the Soul Men are…well Black Men, but Some of Us Are Aretha Franklin.” It is simply too easy to forget that Aretha Franklin was the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. That Ms. Franklin wasn’t included among the 16 men who were inducted in the first class (The Everly Brothers, really?) in 1986 only illustrates the point that Ms. Franklin’s achievements are often taken for granted, even among so-called fans of Black music.
Though the term “Diva” existed well before Aretha Franklin walked across a stage, in many ways she is the ultimate embodiment of the term. More than simply a celebrated vocalist, at her commercial peak in the late 1960s, Ms. Franklin could have legitimately been called the most popular Black woman of the 20th Century. The 18 Grammy Awards, including eight straight years in the Best Female R&B/Soul category (1968-1975) tell only a part of the story.
Ms. Franklin’s stature existed well beyond the Pop charts that she dominated in the 1960s and 1970s as she is part of a handful of African-American artists responsible for mainstreaming Black spirituality at a time when the ethos of that spirituality was at the cutting edge of progressive politics in the United States.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21
Adam Mansbach Responds to Boston Globe Screed on Hip-Hop Studies
from the Boston Globe
Meet the Rap-ademics
The Ivy League offers its esteemed interpretation on the ‘virtue and complexity’ of hip-hop lyrics
by Alex Beam
***
special to NewBlackMan
Adam Mansbach Responds
Dear Alex,
I wonder what you hope to accomplish with a piece like "Meet the Rap-ademics." Why bother to write about the music or the culture at all, if you're going to approach it with petulance, mockery, and ignorance? None of these is anything new, when it comes to coverage of hip-hop – not the shots you take, not the over-generalizations, not the factual errors (two glaring ones: Gates was in no way the first "rap-ademic" by virtue of his 1990 testimony; Craig Werner was teaching a course on hip-hop at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as early as 1985. And you misquote the Jay-Z lyric; it's "rub," not "run." Even the Anthology gets this line right – this error is all yours.)
Sure, you can isolate two Jay-Z lines lacking in complexity and ambivalence, quote them, and make the entire conversation about his work look silly. But if you're serious about making a critique, why take a cheap shot? Why not do it honestly, by discussing a lyric that possesses these qualities? You've got the Anthology in front of you, presumably. Why not flip the page to,"All the teachers couldn't reach me and my mama couldn't beat me/hard enough to match the pain of my pops not seeing me/so with that disdain in my membrane/got on my pimp game/f*** the world my defense came."
You mock Grandmaster Caz's clarification of his lyrics, but the truth is that it's precisely this kind of locale-specific reference that made the music vital at the moment of its inception – made it relevant, the voice of New York City kids who had been marginalized because of where they lived. Your tone here is insulting, deliberately so, but it's more than that, and probably more than you realize. Caz's stories do matter – more so because they were created in the face of just the kind of condescension and dismissal you replicate here. I wonder: why, in 2010, are you so invested in belittling them?
"Finally the academy has caught up with and embraced hip-hop," you write, as if it just happened. In reality, hundreds of courses on hip-hop are taught at universities all over the country. Neither I nor anyone else is "fretting" about a "lacunae in the hip-hop canon;" quite the contrary, we're arguing that this field of study – established and recognized – has specific standards that we intend to see met. I can't help but wonder whether you'd recognize any of the titles that make up that canon, but I'd be happy to send you a copy of the syllabus for the hip-hop course I'll be teaching this spring at Rutgers University.
All that said, I doubt I'd be bothering to write this email if not for the statement with which you end your piece. How it's connected to the rest of the essay, I can't tell. But the argument that hip-hop is "keeping African-Americans down" through its "celebration of ignorance, gangsterism... and violence against women" is just the kind of sweeping generalization that has always plagued the worst hip-hop scholarship. First of all, how can one generalize about a sprawling, multi-billion dollar industry like hip-hop? For every artist who trades in such ideas (and certainly, there are many), there is another whose lyrical content is deeply well-informed, explicitly anti-gangster, and explicitly anti-violence.
It's easy, of course, to stereotype an entire kind of music (though no one seems interested in doing do with rock, which last time I checked also had its share of sexist and violent content). More productive would be to examine the market forces that push the kind of songs you're talking about into positions of mainstream prominence – and to acknowledge that those forces do not act solely on hip hop, but on mass culture at large. But it’s easier to pretend that violence and misogyny were somehow smuggled into the country through hip hop, as opposed to forces that act profoundly on us all.
Ultimately, blaming hip-hop for "keeping African-Americans down" is a tried and true method of obscuring structural racism: if it's hip-hop's fault, then nobody has to care, do they? Nobody has to question inherent biases in education, law enforcement, the judicial system – all areas that hip-hop artists, ironically enough, have been addressing for thirty years. You’ve gotta listen to hear that part, though.
Meet the Rap-ademics
The Ivy League offers its esteemed interpretation on the ‘virtue and complexity’ of hip-hop lyrics
by Alex Beam
***
special to NewBlackMan
Adam Mansbach Responds
Dear Alex,
I wonder what you hope to accomplish with a piece like "Meet the Rap-ademics." Why bother to write about the music or the culture at all, if you're going to approach it with petulance, mockery, and ignorance? None of these is anything new, when it comes to coverage of hip-hop – not the shots you take, not the over-generalizations, not the factual errors (two glaring ones: Gates was in no way the first "rap-ademic" by virtue of his 1990 testimony; Craig Werner was teaching a course on hip-hop at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as early as 1985. And you misquote the Jay-Z lyric; it's "rub," not "run." Even the Anthology gets this line right – this error is all yours.)
Sure, you can isolate two Jay-Z lines lacking in complexity and ambivalence, quote them, and make the entire conversation about his work look silly. But if you're serious about making a critique, why take a cheap shot? Why not do it honestly, by discussing a lyric that possesses these qualities? You've got the Anthology in front of you, presumably. Why not flip the page to,"All the teachers couldn't reach me and my mama couldn't beat me/hard enough to match the pain of my pops not seeing me/so with that disdain in my membrane/got on my pimp game/f*** the world my defense came."
You mock Grandmaster Caz's clarification of his lyrics, but the truth is that it's precisely this kind of locale-specific reference that made the music vital at the moment of its inception – made it relevant, the voice of New York City kids who had been marginalized because of where they lived. Your tone here is insulting, deliberately so, but it's more than that, and probably more than you realize. Caz's stories do matter – more so because they were created in the face of just the kind of condescension and dismissal you replicate here. I wonder: why, in 2010, are you so invested in belittling them?
"Finally the academy has caught up with and embraced hip-hop," you write, as if it just happened. In reality, hundreds of courses on hip-hop are taught at universities all over the country. Neither I nor anyone else is "fretting" about a "lacunae in the hip-hop canon;" quite the contrary, we're arguing that this field of study – established and recognized – has specific standards that we intend to see met. I can't help but wonder whether you'd recognize any of the titles that make up that canon, but I'd be happy to send you a copy of the syllabus for the hip-hop course I'll be teaching this spring at Rutgers University.
All that said, I doubt I'd be bothering to write this email if not for the statement with which you end your piece. How it's connected to the rest of the essay, I can't tell. But the argument that hip-hop is "keeping African-Americans down" through its "celebration of ignorance, gangsterism... and violence against women" is just the kind of sweeping generalization that has always plagued the worst hip-hop scholarship. First of all, how can one generalize about a sprawling, multi-billion dollar industry like hip-hop? For every artist who trades in such ideas (and certainly, there are many), there is another whose lyrical content is deeply well-informed, explicitly anti-gangster, and explicitly anti-violence.
It's easy, of course, to stereotype an entire kind of music (though no one seems interested in doing do with rock, which last time I checked also had its share of sexist and violent content). More productive would be to examine the market forces that push the kind of songs you're talking about into positions of mainstream prominence – and to acknowledge that those forces do not act solely on hip hop, but on mass culture at large. But it’s easier to pretend that violence and misogyny were somehow smuggled into the country through hip hop, as opposed to forces that act profoundly on us all.
Ultimately, blaming hip-hop for "keeping African-Americans down" is a tried and true method of obscuring structural racism: if it's hip-hop's fault, then nobody has to care, do they? Nobody has to question inherent biases in education, law enforcement, the judicial system – all areas that hip-hop artists, ironically enough, have been addressing for thirty years. You’ve gotta listen to hear that part, though.
***
Adam Mansbach's latest novel, The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau) won the California Book Award. Named a Best Book of 2008 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Mansbach’s previous novel, the bestselling Angry Black White Boy (Crown), is taught at more than sixty colleges, universities and high schools. A satire about race, whiteness and hip-hop, it was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005, and the recipient of an Honorable Citation from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards and a PEN/Faulkner Writers in the Schools grant.
Monday, December 13, 2010
'Left of Black': Episode #13 featuring Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Ben Carrington
Left of Black #13—December 13, 2010
w/Mark Anthony Neal
Left of Black Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the next director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and Sociologist Ben Carrington, author of the just published Race, Sports and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora.
→Khalil Gibran Muhammad is Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University. He is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard University Press) and will become the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in July of 2011.
→Ben Carrington is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches courses on the Sociology of Race, Sport and Popular Culture. He is the author of Race, Sports and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora (Sage Publishers).
***
Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.
w/Mark Anthony Neal
Left of Black Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the next director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and Sociologist Ben Carrington, author of the just published Race, Sports and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora.
→Khalil Gibran Muhammad is Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University. He is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard University Press) and will become the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in July of 2011.
→Ben Carrington is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches courses on the Sociology of Race, Sport and Popular Culture. He is the author of Race, Sports and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora (Sage Publishers).
***
Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.
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