'Left of Black': Episode #26 featuring Professor Ebony Utley and Jasiri X

Left of Black #26
w/ Ebony Utley and Jasiri X
March 21, 2011

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by Professor Ebony Utley, who examines the proliferation of religious conspiracy theories about prominent hip-hop artists. Later Neal is joined by activist and hip-hop artist Jasiri X, in wide ranging conversation about socially conscious hip-hop in the age of Social Media.

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→Ebony Utley, an assistant professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Long Beach author of the forthcoming book Rap and Religion: Understanding The Gangsta’s God (Praeger 2012) as well as the co-editor of Hip Hop’s Languages of Love (2009). She has published in several journals including Black Women Gender & Families, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, The Western Journal of Black Studies, and Women and Language. Follow her on Twitter @U_Experience.

→ Jasiri X is a Pittsburgh based hip-hop artist, activist and entrepreneur, who burst on the national and international Hip-Hop scene with the controversial “Free the Jena 6″ which was named “Hip-hop Political Song of the Year,” and won “Single of the Year” at the Pittsburgh Hip-Hop Awards. His recent videos include “What if the Tea Party was Black?,” “American Workers Vs Multi-Billionaires,” and “Wandering Strangers.” Follow him on Twitter @Jasiri_X

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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.

Identifying With God: Jay-Z's Power to Profit

Identifying With God: Jay-Z's Power to Profit
by Ebony Utley

Rappers often credit God in their liner notes, acceptance speeches, and raps. They brag about being God’s sons and daughters. Some Five Percenter rappers have even claimed to be God, but few mainstream rappers have done so with the gusto of Jay-Z, also known by the nickname Jay-Hova, after the Judeo-Christian God. Versions of that include Hov the God, King Hov, Hov, or Hovito—and three of his albums (In My Lifetime, Hard Knock Life, and …Life and Times of S. Carter) are often referred to by the scriptural-sounding "Books of Hov."

Jay-Z is hip hop’s mogul. According to Zack O'Malley Greenburg’s newly released Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office, the $450 million dollar man’s 11 albums have sold over 50 million copies worldwide. Following the footsteps of Russell Simmons but doing it bigger and deffer, Jay-Z is the consummate businessman. In fact, he’s a business, man. Jay-Z credits his success to his hustler mentality, but he doesn't stop there...

His Blueprint albums reference his power of creation—the divine ability to manifest something out of nothing as God did when he spoke the world into existence. He describes himself as hip hop’s savior on his return-from-retirement album Kingdom Come, which samples the Lord’s Prayer “thy will be done, thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.”

Read the Full Essay @ Religion Dispatches

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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 Rap and Religion: Understanding the Gangsta's God (Praeger). She resides on the web at theutleyexperience.com.

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

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

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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