The Radical Soul of Curtis Mayfield

special to NewBlackMan

National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta Celebrates the 'Radical Soul' of Curtis Mayfield

Quiet Legend: The Radical Soul of Curtis Mayfield
by Stephane Dunn

This ain't no time for segregatin' (we people who are darker than blue)
I'm talking 'bout brown and yellow two
High yellow girl, can't you tell
You're just the surface of our dark deep well

Some musicians – not many – just have it - a timelessness that means whenever you hear their music you are moved to sing along or rock or in the case of Chicago native Curtis Mayfield, to go to church and say uh huh, alright now. He was a soft-spoken gentleman with an instantly recognizable vocal sound – at once soulful and mellow but tinged with that gut-wrenching emotion definitive of black gospel music. This wasn’t surprising since Mayfield was a church boy who taught himself the guitar and dropped out of school and turned professional musician at the very young age of fifteen.

Pianist Dr. Guthrie Ramsey, a professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania, says Mayfield’s “unforced, persuasive falsetto” offered a “dose of gospel-blues.” Mayfield proved to be an old soul and ahead of his generation. By the time his group The Impressions reached soul music fame with such albums as It’s All Right (1963) and the hit Keep On Pushin 1964, Mayfield had come to define the group’s sound, writing and producing many of their songs. While Mayfield is a name that any soul music lover or American music aficionado will know, he remains a sort of quiet legend and this despite the sampling of his music and tributes, both compilations of his music and concerts.

The most recent tribute by Atlanta’s National Black Arts Festival saluted Mayfield in song with legendary O’ Jay Eddie Levert, Joi, Dion Farris, Van Hunt and at night’s end, the Impressions leading the crowd in “Movin’ on Up.” It was particularly apropos that on the heels of Black Music Month, the 2010 festival chose to highlight Mayfield’s music both because of the sheer velocity of his work as well as his consistent musical investment in social introspection that unabashedly spoke to the black American experience in the 60’s and early-70’s. While Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album, What’s Goin’ On and the single by the same name are deservedly designated one of the top best of twentieth century pop music and revisited during times when the national consciousness is shaken (September 11th, the Hurricane Katrina aftermath), the socially radical musical genius of Curtis Mayfield is not referenced nearly enough . Perhaps this is in part because there is no singular song that sort of stands as his iconic socio-political critique – there was a whole catalog of such songs in the Mayfield repertoire. “People Get Ready”; “Keep On Pushin’’; We’re a Winner”, “This Is My Country” and “Choice of Colors” are just a few.

Several months before Gaye dropped his What’s Goin’ On (1971), Curtis Mayfield released his solo debut album, CURTIS in September of 1970 . Mayfield interrogated racial oppression, challenged the status quo, and inspired the young with a number of powerfully poetic songs - “Miss Black America,” “Moving on Up; “Don’t Worry if There’s a Hell Below We’re All Gonna Go” and “We People Who Are Darker Than Blue” – which Peter Burns describes as on “par” with Billie Holiday’s “strange Fruit.” Even before this solo point in his career, Mayfield had already built an extraordinary cache of politicized music with Impressions albums like People Get Ready (1965) and We’re A Winner (1967). Taken together, the Mayfield songbook is a powerful narrative record of the struggles for black liberation in the 60s to early 70s. CURTIS reached the top of the charts where it was unseated by Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On.

Mayfield’s movie soundtrack work further demonstrated his socially insightful voice and emphasized that part of his lyrical genius was his ability to capture the beauty, pleasures, and pain of black ghetto life. For Claudine (1974), starring James Earl Jones and Diahann Carroll as a struggling single mother raising six children in Harlem, he penned such critically sharp tracks as “Mr. Welfare Man.” Despite its controversial cultural legacy, the music for the drug themed Superfly, Mayfield’s most enduring soundtrack score, was more than a narrative accompaniment. It humanized and dramatized one of the most serious problems plaguing the black urban community with the memorable “Pusherman” and “Freddy’s Dead.” Like Superfly, The Bill Cosby and Sydney Poitier film, Let’s Do It Again (1974), continued to showcase Mayfield’s genius with creating sultry, magnetic songs like the hit title track. He offered up more of this in Sparkle, a 1977 movie starring Irene Cara, which included such sexy, alluring singles as the much performed “Giving Him Something He Can Feel.” He teamed up with the reigning Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin to do the re-cut version of the Sparkle soundtrack; it revitalized Franklin’s career and they went on to do her album Almighty Fire in 1978.

Mayfield’s collaborations with the likes of Franklin, Donnie Hathaway, and the Staple singers provide an impressive body of work on it’s on and is further distinguishable because much of it occurred on Mayfield’s successful Chicago based label, Curtom. The ownership Mayfield took over his work when the Impressions finished their ABC contract in 1968 further signals his radicalism. On the surface, it is perhaps easy to reach for familiar terms like “message music” to characterize Mayfield’s 1960s-70s body of work. Such a tag might obscure the profound thematic depth, lyrical genius, and musical artistry of Curtis Mayfield who could captivate us with achingly, beautiful songs [“The Makings of You”] or get us moving and flirting [Let’s Do It Again”] or call us to action [“People Get Ready.”] Dr. Ramsey notes that Mayfield’s “understated personality” countered “the massive influence his musicianship held over the music industry for years.”

In August 1990, a freak accident at an outdoor concert paralyzed Mayfield from the neck down. He recorded a little again from his bed as renewed interest and tributes to his work appeared in the ‘90s. In December 1999, the quiet legend passed away. Tributes have a greater use than just providing feel-good sing along evenings and technology assists mightily. Pop culture memory is notoriously short-lived; recovering the great ones who offer a compelling window into a historical period and high artistry is ongoing work. Curtis Mayfield offers one of the loudest, most deft nods to the marriage of musical profundity and thematic consciousness; in that his radical soul is timeless.

***

Stephane Dunn, Ph.D, MFA, is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Morehouse College. She has also taught at Ohio State University. A scholarly and creative writer, she specializes in film, popular culture, literature and African American studies. She is the author of articles and commentaries and the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008). She can be reached at musesd@netzero.com.

'Bulletproof' and Raheem DeVaughn's Urgent Nostalgia

Raheem DeVaughn’s performance of the Black Power era throwback “Bulletproof” begs the question; What is happening exactly in black culture and politics that necessitates this regeneration? What is going on that has forced DeVaughn to put “sexy” back in the closest in exchange for Black radical chic?

The Urgent Nostalgia of Raheem DeVaughn’s “Bulletproof”
By Mark Anthony Neal

For nearly a generation, R&B has been in a hopeless competition with its past. There hasn’t been a male R&B singer who has emerged in the past generation that hasn’t been burdened with the pressure of being this generation’s Marvin Gaye, Al Green or Curtis Mayfield. More often than not, when contemporary male R&B singers have laid claim to the legacies of the great Soul Men of yesterday, they have done so with requisite bedroom attire.

As political scientist Richard Iton astutely observes in his recent book In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics & Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press), “As a result of the gendered transition and classed transition from soul to disco to hip-hop, R&B has come to be seen increasingly as the music of women and hip-hop as a male-only domain, given their respective concerns: “love songs” in the case of the former and “everything else” in the case of rap” (276)

What this dynamic has meant for male R&B singers is that they have largely ceded political terrain to the rappers, who have mined the archives of the Soul generation better than anyone to find inspiration for contemporary moments of crisis; even Lil’ Wayne has been in conversation with Nina Simone. Consistent efforts on the part of male R&B singers over the last twenty years to explicitly address the social and political climate that they exist in are scarce. One literally has to go back to the late 1980s--the last moment R&B’s dominanance on Black (urban) radio—to find examples of socially conscious R&B—such as Paul Laurence’s “Strung Out,” Oran Juice Jones’s “Pipe Dreams,” and Tashan’s “Black Man.”



The absence of social and political commentary—what Iton identifies as part of a “private realm (female) versus public realm (male)” dynamic—has led male R&B singers to look inward; one can only gaze at the spiritual crisis and domestic drama that has marked the music, in recent years, of R. Kelly and Usher Raymond, two of R&B’s best known figures. While this more introspective view, often masked by a strident hyper-sexuality and hyper-masculinity (Jaheim immediately comes to mind), offers a fuller exploration of black masculinity than even the Soul generation was willing to engage, the fact that R&B has been mute when it comes to Black politics remains troubling. In steps Raheem DeVaughn, whose new single “Bulletproof,” featuring Ludacris, seems to be a concerted effort to fill a seeming void.

“Bulletproof,” which has been in heavy circulation on urban radio, finds DeVaughn musing about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, police brutality (personal aside: "really Barack? 30,000 more troops?"), poverty, homicide and sexual violence alongside the refrain “Living like we bulletproof/We bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang /I say we load it, cock it, aim and shoot.” Musically “Bulletproof” is the logical progeny of the soundtrack era of Soul music, clearly nodding to Marvin Gaye’s soundtrack for Trouble Man and Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly soundtrack. For the song DeVaughn even trades in his own yearning tenor for Mayfield’s signature falsetto.

This is not new terrain for DeVaughn, who prior to signing with Jive records a few years ago had established himself as a mixtape artist often melding traditional R&B balladry with a distinct street sensibility. Tracks like “Catch 22” and “Until” from DeVaughn’s Jive debut The Love Experience (2006) attempted to speak to more pressing social realities. Audiences instead gravitated to his “Guess Who Loves You More”—a bit of user-friendly R&B which heavily borrows from Earth Wind and Fire’s “Can’t Hide Love.” DeVaughn’s follow-up, Love Behind the Melody (2008), seemed calibrated to the club and the after-party, an attempt to take advantage of DeVaughn’s sexy (though unconventional) Soul Man looks (see the doe-eyes and full lips).

During a recent performance of "Bulletproof" on the Soul Train Awards, DeVaughn riffs on the sartorial politics of the Black Power era , dressed in all-black—turtle neck, leather jacket, sun glasses, black gloves and untied combat boots—recalling the stylistic choices of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and other black militants from the late 1960s and 1970s. Adding to the sense of urgent nostalgia, DeVaughn was joined on stage by Professor Griff and the S1Ws—Public Enemy’s famed faux paramilitary unit (modeled after the Nation of Islam’s Fruit of Islam). The presence of Black Power iconography—DeVaughn and the S1Ws raise a Black Power fist at the close of the performance—alongside the symbolic presence of hip-hop’s most political moment, suggest that DeVaughn embodies the regeneration of socially conscious black music.

Yet the DeVaughn’s performance begs the question; What is happening exactly in black culture and politics that necessitates this regeneration? What is going on that has forced DeVaughn to put “sexy” back in the closest in exchange for Black radical chic?

The murders of Shaniya Davis and Derrion Albert notwithstanding, I’d like to suggest that there is a general sense of crisis simmering in Black communities, that has little to do with the actual challenges facing black communities. What I am suggesting is that the crises experienced by black communities are no more daunting than they were prior to January of 2009, but with the first family Obama serving as the ultimate agents of Black respectability—there is suddenly added pressure within the black body politic to resist social deviance and to conform to notions of respectability. Such tensions are indexed in the erection of dress codes at historically black institutions and anxieties over innocuous black stereotypes (most pronounced in the hackneyed debates about the Lee Daniel’s film Precious).

In this context, “Bulletproof” is the kind of song that Raheem DeVaughn is supposed to make, because that is what respectable Soul Men are supposed to do; R. Kelly’s sexual ruminations on “Pregnant” and “Bangin’ the Headboard” or even Usher's midst-of-divorce broadside “Papers” are read as little more than deviant excesses. But the motivations for the social commentary of the Soul Men who clearly inspire DeVaughn—Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye —are instructive.

Mayfield, who penned many a Civil Rights anthem while fronting the Impressions in the 1960’s, is most remembered for his soundtrack recording for Superfly—a recording that was both a commercial and artistic success. Less remembered is the fact that Mayfield only agreed to record the album after reading a copy of the script of the film. It was in fact the film—as opposed to the reality of drug addiction in black communities--that Mayfield sought to counter with his soundtrack. According to Mayfield, “[W]hen I saw it visually I thought ‘this is a cocaine infomercial’…I did the music and the lyrics to be a commentary as though someone was speaking as the movie was going” (quoted in In Search of The Black Fantastic, 114). My intent is not to quibble with Mayfield’s choices—the recording was a clear boost to his post-Impressions career—but to highlight that he was responding less to Black crises and more to a Hollywood financed Blaxploitation film’s mediation of those crises—crises that were largely manufactured for a popular audience.

Similarly, Marvin Gaye’s soundtrack for Trouble Man was released as Gaye was trying to craft a following up to his groundbreaking What’s Going On?—a recording generally regarded as one of the quintessential protest albums of the era. In the spring of 1972 Gaye recorded the track “You’re the Man,” the intended lead single for a follow-up protest album with the same title. The song was directed at the presidential candidates during the 1972 primary season (rapper Brother Ali recorded a version of the song on the eve of Barack Obama’s election in November of 2008).

The album never materialized. As Iton writes in In Search of the Black Fantastic, “The failure of the single to cross over to the pop charts led Gaye to return to the mold—that of the singer of songs about male/female relationships…The subsequent success of his next [single] ‘Let’s Get It on’—originally conceived as ‘(Come On People) Let’s Get It On’—reinforced his anxieties about recording political material.” (99) Gaye’s decision to transition from the music of social protest to that of sexual climax would reverberate for nearly two generations of male R&B singers, ushering in an era of hypersexualized Soul—thinking specifically of Major Harris’s “Love Won’t Let Me Wait” which is accompanied by post-coital moans—that framed the careers of figures like Teddy Pendergrass, Rick James, R. Kelly and many others.

Marvin Gaye Let’s Get it On (1973) effectively put Black politics back in the closet, just as social policy began to reflect a retreat from the social gains of the late 1960s. Now more than thirty years, Raheem DeVaughn has pulled respectable black politics from the closet—at the expense of gender, sexuality and class—performing a urgent nostalgia that may ultimately ring hollow in this new age of Black Respectability.

Black Music Month '09: The Legacy of Jerry Butler’s Songwriter’s Workshop

BLACK MUSIC MONTH 2009

Chicago Soul Connection:
The Legacy of Jerry Butler’s Songwriters Workshop
by Mark Anthony Neal

Pop music history is filled with examples of singers who first honed their songwriting skills and offered those skills to more established acts, before making a name for themselves singing their own material. Most famously, Carole King was a staple at the famed Brill Building in New York City churning out pop confections with partner Gerry Goffin for the likes of The Shirelles, Little Eva, and Aretha Franklin, whose version of King and Goffin’s “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman” remains a Soul standard. After a decade behind the scenes, King stepped forward in the early 1970s with Writer (1970) and then Tapestry (1971), the latter which established King as one of the definitive singer-songwriters of the era. No less a famous example can be found in the case of Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, who toiled at Motown for nearly a decade creating classics like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “You’re All I Need to Get By” before becoming major stars in their own right in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Contemporarily, there’s the case of Shaffer Chimere Smith, who offered his compositions to Marques Houston, Mario (“Let Me Love You”) and Christina Milian, before stepping out front as Ne-Yo. Singers need songs, and no one understood that better than the legendary song stylist Jerry Butler, when he created the Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop in Chicago in the early 1970s. Though few remember it Butler’s workshop would have an impact on Soul music throughout the 1970s eventually figuring in the rise of Natalie Cole as the first real challenge to Aretha Franklin’s status as the “Queen of Soul”

Jerry Butler began his professional singing career in the late 1950s as the initial lead singer for The Impressions. Butler was 18-years-old when the Chicago based group topped the pop charts with “For Your Precious Love” in 1958. Among those in the group was a 16-year-old songwriter and guitarist by the name of Curtis Mayfield, later to become one of the most recognizable singer-songwriters of his generation. Though Butler was with the group for only a short time, he and Mayfield forged a productive professional relationship that led to Butler’s success recording as a solo artist in the early 1960s. Recording with with the black-owned Vee-Jay Records with the Butler/Mayfield collaboration produced hits like “Need to Belong” and “He Will Break Your Heart.”

Butler also had access to the remnants of Tin Pan Alley—the cadre of New York based songwriters and producers that were at the heart of American popular music in the early 20th century—in this case, the aforementioned Brill Building where Butler scored hits recording tracks by Brill Building residents like Hal David and Burt Bacharach (“Make It Easy On Yourself”).



When Butler signed with Mercury Records in 1966 and was again in need of strong material, he turned to two young and unproven songwriters and producers named Leon Huff and Kenny Gamble. Butler’s work with Gamble and Huff coincides with the most productive and popular period of the Soul singer’s career with a string of hits including the ballad “Never Gonna Give You Up” (later covered by Isaac Hayes on Black Moses), “Hey Western Union Man” and “Only the Strong Survive,” which became Butler’s first Gold single and gave an early inkling of the uplift music that Gamble and Huff would become known for in the 1970s. Recalling his work with Gamble and Huff, which produced the legendary The Ice Man Cometh recording, Butler writes in his autobiography Only the Strong Survive: Memoirs of a Soul Survivor,

Huff would be on the piano , while Kenny and I would come up with lyrics. Huff and Kenny would come up with concepts and play some chords, and I started singing. That’s how we came up with ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.

When Mercury Records balked at Gamble and Huff’s efforts to get a greater percentage of the profits from their production efforts with Butler, the relationship was dissolved in late 1969, though Butler would record two albums with the duo for Philadelphia International Records a decade later. Having worked with songwriters and producers like Gamble and Huff and Curtis Mayfield before them—folk who literally defined the sound of Soul music for more than a decade—Butler’s career was at a crossroads. Butler writes in Only the Strong Survive, “

I was in a terrible dilemma. Should I risk my professional reputation recording substandard material? Or should I use what I had learned over the years to lay the groundwork for developing songwriters who would supply me—and others—with quality songs for a life time. I chose the latter.

Thus the Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop was founded in Chicago in January of 1970. A year later, the workshop became a joint venture with the Chappell music publishing company which made an initial investment of $55,000 for the project.

The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop did little to revive Butler’s career—though his second Gold single “Ain’t Understanding Mellow” with Brenda Lee Eager was a product of the workshop. By 1972 though, the workshop had generated $4 million in records sales and produced about 30 chart singles recorded by the likes of The Dells, Isaac Hayes, Aretha Franklin, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Betty Everette. Despite its modest success, the real story of the Jerry Butler Songwriter’s Workshop wasn’t what it produced, but the talent that came through its doors and went on to greater success. Workshop veterans include Terry Callier, who with fellow workshop participant Larry Wade, worked on The Dells' Freedom Means (1972) recording which produced their classic “The Love We Had (Stays on My Mind)” as well as Callier’s own brilliant Cadet recordings Occasional Rain (1972) and What Color is Love? (1973)—both produced by Charles Stepney, architect of the early Earth, Wind and Fire sound. Other veterans of the workshop were Len Ron Hanks and Zane Grey who wrote L.T.D.’s breakthrough hit “(Every Time I Turn Around) Back in Love Again”(1977) and later scored their own Disco hit “Dancin’” (1978) recording as Grey and Hanks.

The most successful veterans of The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop were the duo of Chuck Jackson and Marvin Yancy. Jackson, the brother of the Reverend Jessie Jackson, was an art director at Playboy Magazine when he joined Butler’s workshop. Yancy, was the musical director and pianist at his father’s Chicago Church when he met Jackson at Reverend Jackson’s Black Expo in 1971. The two made a musical connection and the initial fruits of their collaboration was the formation of the group The Independents which featured Jackson, Yancy (who preferred staying in the background) Helen Curry, Maurice Jackson (no relation), and later Eric Thomas, who was a member of Reverend Jackson’s Operation PUSH Choir. Recording with dual leads Curry and Chick Jackson, in the spirit of the deep Soul recordings of the Soul Children, The Independents produced a series of soulful, moody and gospel inflected mid-tempo and ballad numbers including “Leaving Me,” which sold over a million copies in 1973, “Baby I Been Missing You,” “The First Time We Met,” “In the Valley of My World” (later sampled on Jay Z’s remix of “Allure”) and the stirring “Let This Be a Lesson to You.”



Despite the group’s moderate success, Jackson and Yancy disbanded The Independents to seek other opportunities. Jackson and Yancy’s fortunes changed when they had a chance encounter with the daughter of Nat King Cole, who was performing at a local club in Chicago. Natalie Cole had been performing a collection of pop standards and soft rock songs, contemplating signing with a major label, but wary of being "exploited" as the daughter of a pop icon. That all changed when Jackson and Yancy took Cole into Curtis Mayfield’s Chicago studio and recorded the demo for what became “Inseparable.” As Cole told The New York Times Stephen Holden in 1976, “I went back to R&B with my producers who gave it a little extra sophistication.” That sophistication translated into Cole’s first album Inseparable (1975), recorded for her father’s longtime label Capitol. The album eventually spawned two chart-topping singles—the title track and “This Will Be”—and earned Cole two Grammy Awards in 1975 including the award for “Best R&B Performance, Female”—the first person not named Aretha Franklin to win that category in 8 years.

A year after the release of Inseparable, mainstream newspapers like The New York Times were publishing articles openly asking if Natalie Cole was the “new queen of Soul?” (November 21, 1976). If Cole seemed to have an affinity for Franklin’s style, it wasn’t an accident. Jackson and Yancy’s “You” was recorded by both Franklin and Cole in 1975 (it was the title track of Franklin’s 1975 album) and “This Will Be” was initially offered to Franklin. With musical taste changing, Jackson and Yancy (who was briefly married to Cole in the late 1970s) were able to package Cole with a pop-jazz sound, not unlike that of Cole’s father and Jerry Butler in the early 1960s, but with the Gospel sensibility that Jackson and Yancy were most familiar with. Cole alludes to this dynamic telling Leonard Feather in a 1976 Los Angeles Times piece, about her practices of overdubbing her own background vocals instead of using backup singers:

I imagine two group; I call the N sisters and the Colettes…the Colettes—they’re a commercial kind of group—and I’ve given them names like Jody, Betty and Suzie. But the Ns are gospel singers.

The Cole, Yancy, Jackson collaboration would produce five albums and several million-selling singles including 1977’s “I’ve Got Love on My Mind” (from Thankful) and “Our Love” which was released later in the year on Unpredictable. At her peak in the 1970s, Cole music was the very definition of crossover pop music, though it was always steeped in the Gospel aesthetic that Aretha Franklin helped mainstream a decade earlier. As Cole told Feather,

I really didn’t think I could sing all that good until I began working with [Chuck and Marvin], but they can communicate to me exactly what feeling they think is right for a particular song.

No doubt Jackson and Yancy’s time at The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop, contributed to them becoming better songwriters, but also helped them become much more adept at managing talent in the studio—something that is increasingly a lost art.

After the dissipation of her professional relationship with Jackson and Yancy and eventual divorce from Yancy (who was an emerging Gospel star when he died in 1985 at age of 35), Cole went through her well documented struggles with addiction, only to reemerge in 1991 as a major pop star by literally embracing her father’s musical legacy winning three Grammy Awards for Unforgettable…with Love (1991).

For Butler’s part, he was always clear about his investment in the songwriters workshop. As he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1973,

The idea for the workshop came out of self-interest. I had obligations to do thirty sides for Mercury…Tin Pan Alley, where you used to be able to go get a couple of songs, has died for all intents and purposes.” Butler added, “I knew Chicago was not the music center that it once was. But at the time, I knew there were a number of young cats in Chicago with a lot of songwriting talent, who just didn’t have any place to take it to. And even more important, nobody to encourage them. (quoted in Robert Pruter’s Chicago Soul).

Butler’s comments are just a reminder that great artists need great material and as the popular recording industry has become more producer driven and given to star-gazing, the industry is far more interested in discovering the next Aretha Franklin or Beyonce, than the next Carole King or Chuck Jackson and Marvin Yancy.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999) and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003). A frequent contributor to The Root.com (Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive), Neal maintains a blog at http://newblackman.blogspot.com. He is currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for NYU Press.