'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.

'Left of Black': Episode #20 featuring Bakari Kitwana and Kyra Gaunt

Left of Black #20
w/Bakari Kitwana & Kyra Gaunt
February 7, 2011

In this 20th installment of Left of Black, host Mark Anthony Neal is joined by author, political analyst and activist Bakari Kitwana in a conversation about the current media landscape. Neal also talks with Baruch College Professor and 2009 TED Fellow Kyra D. Gaunt whose recent essay Black Twitter, Combating the New Jim Crow & the Power of Social Networking examines the social justice potential of Social Media.

→Bakari Kitwana is a journalist, activist and political analyst. He’s currently senior editor of newsone.com, the internet news presence of Radio One. He’s also the CEO of Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop, which conducts town hall meetings around the country on difficult dialogues facing the hip-hop generation. Kitwana is the author of The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture (2002) and Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wangstas, Wiggers, Wannabees and the New Reality of Race in America (2005).

→Kyra D. Gaunt is a trained ethnomusicologist and classical singer who teaches the study of African American music, cultural anthropology, hip-hop, race and gender studies. A 2009 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Fellow, Gaunt is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College. She is the author of The Games Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (NYU Press, 2007)

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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.

PBS' 'Need to Know': Dream Hampton and Jay Z

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

Interview with Dream Hampton, contributing writer of the new book, Decoded.

Eric Roberson May Not Be Jay-Z But...

Soul singer makes his mark in business world.

Eric Roberson May Not Be Jay-Z But...
by Roland Laird | TheLoop21

When most of us think of musical artists as successful businesspeople, we often think of Shawn Carter aka Jay-Z, and rightly so. After all, not too many people can claim to be in Forbes magazine while also being nominated for Grammy awards year after year. Yet as impressive a businessman as Carter may be, there’s another Grammy nominee this year, that’s equally as impressive a businessperson -- Eric Roberson.

While Carter is a conglomerate with holdings in multiple industries, Roberson is a vertically integrated artist whose approach to the business side of his career transcends his music to the point where it is worthy of study by anybody interested in doing their own thing irrespective of industry.

In stark contrast to Carter’s now mythic tale of drug dealer to rapper to mogul, Roberson’s story, though less street smart, is more book smart.

Roberson is a proud graduate of Howard University, where he majored in musical theatre. The importance of Roberson’s educational background cannot be understated for just like other industries where budgets for training and development have been all but completely cut, Roberson’s education helped him to develop when record labels phased out their Artist and Repertoire departments. He used the skills honed during his undergraduate years to start in the industry as a songwriter.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

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

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

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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.

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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.

Should Terry Gross Go The Way of Juan Williams?

from the Huffington Post

Should Terry Gross Go The Way of Juan Williams?
by Bakari Kitwana

Let's begin with the premise that no people, culture, religious, racial or ethnic group is by definition immoral. Not acknowledging this, at the core, is the problem with Juan Williams' gross generalization about Muslims that recently got him fired from National Public Radio (NPR). But if NPR's "Fresh Air" interview last week with the rapper Jay-Z about his new book Decoded is any indication, it's a message still lost on Terry Gross.

To be sure Juan Williams revealed his bias by openly, expressing his personal opinion. Terry Gross didn't do that. Instead the bias is more subtle and insidious and lurks in the line of questioning.

While not as shocking as the obvious blanket condemnation Juan Williams advanced, the Terry Gross/ Jay-Z interview is even more problematic because it illuminates a tendency pervasive in today's news media. This is a moment in which Blacks can be embraced and promoted at the same time that their humanity is dismantled--all in a 30-second sound bite.

Throughout her interview with Jay-Z, Gross kept returning the discussion to those places that reinforce the idea of Black culture as immoral and Black people as corrupt and/or corruptible. Such anti-Black arguments that once lived primarily in conservative public policy debates have now worked their way into national culture (especially in film, television, news media and politics) to the degree that these views are now widely accepted as the norm.

In short, racial disparities in education, unemployment, criminal justice, wealth-building, and more are rooted in Black cultural failing alone. As this logic prevails, it's impossible to gain traction on any targeted policy solutions regarding the problems disproportionately facing Blacks.

President Obama realizes this. Hence his colorblind politics, a policy approach that anti-racist activist Tim Wise documents in detail in his new book, Colorblind. However, one wonders to what extent even liberal journalists like Terry Gross realize they are collaborators.

To grasp the full extent to which Gross emboldens conservative ideas about race, one should listen to the entire 45-minute interview. For now, let this brief exchange illustrate the point,

GROSS: Your father left when you were very young. And you say that most of your friends' fathers had left. You say, "Our fathers were gone, usually because they just bounced. But we took their old records and used them to build something fresh." That's really interesting that one of your things that your father leaves behind that you can use is his records.

JAY-Z: Yeah, I guess there's a bright side to everything right?

GROSS: Yeah, well, that's one way of looking at it.

Any great interviewer--and Gross is at the top of her game--knows the role he or she plays in the outcome. Part of the science is in framing the questions.

The advancing of conservative rhetoric about Blacks persists, whether Gross is bluntly asking Jay about crimes he committed 15 years ago (crack sales and assault), or inquiring about his mother's parental decisions: "You ended up selling crack and helping your mother, as a single mother, support the family. Did she know that's how you were making the money?"

What's the takeaway message? That Jay's mom was a single parent that made poor choices, let her teenage son sell drugs and is unprincipled because she knows the money he's using to support the family comes from drug sales. It's a narrative we've heard from the Republican Revolution of 1994 to the recent well-financed media blitz that resulted in the mid-term shellacking of the Democrats.

And Terry Gross never goes off message. In a nearly hour long interview with a self-made record executive mogul and entrepreneur worth at least half a billion, on the occasion of the publication of a book he deems a coming of age story for his generation, the most pressing questions on the table range from insight into drug dealing to why rappers grab their crotches?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that folks should boycott NPR or even "Fresh Air." And I'm not saying Gross should be fired. What I'm after is something much larger--a radical shift away from the growing tendency to allow conservative race analysis to dominate the ways Americans think and talk about race.

Ironically, Jay-Z points us to the territory in at least one of his responses to Gross: "I know all sorts of people saw their lives destroyed--but in America, we process that sort of thing as a tragedy," he tells Gross when she asks him about Hurricane Katrina, Kanye West and George Bush. "When it happens to black people, it feels like something else, like history rerunning its favorite loop."

Given how pervasive this narrative has become, it's going take much more than firing journalists like Gross and Williams to purge that "favorite loop" from our national culture.

Bakari Kitwana is senior media fellow at the Harvard Law-based think tank, The Jamestown Project and the author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era (Third World Press, 2011).

'Left of Black': Episode #12 featuring Marc Lamont Hill and Salamishah Tillet

Left of Black Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal discusses the crisis of Black Males and schooling, the de-skilling of the American Work-force and Social Media with Columbia University Professor Marc Lamont Hill. Neal is also joined by University of Pennsylvania Professor Salamishah Tillet as they discuss the career of Kanye West, the impact of Nicki Minaj and definitions of musical genius.

→Marc Lamont Hill is Associate Professor of Education at Columbia University. A regular contributor to Fox News and CNN, Hill is the author of Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity.

→Salamishah Tillet is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the forthcoming Peculiar Memories: Slavery and the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke University Press). Tillet is also Founder of A Long Walk Home, a non-profit organization and a regular contributor to The Root.com.

Inside Jay-Z's Launch of "Decoded" With Droga5, Bing

Inside Jay-Z's Launch of "Decoded" With Droga5, Bing
by Tyler Gray|Wed Nov 24, 2010

For the launch of his autobiography, hip-hop's premiere entrepreneur turned marketing into interactive art and a scavenger hunt that rewarded his die-hard fans. Here's an exclusive peek inside Jay's bag of tricks.

On Kanye West's new song, "So Appalled," Jay-Z raps, "I'm so appalled, I might buy the mall, just to show [...] how much more I have in store."

As Jay's protégé's album dropped this week (and leaked much earlier on the web), Jay himself was revealing what he'd long had in store for the publishing world: a game-changing marketing plan for his autobiography, Decoded, itself a groundbreaking book.

Beyond a mere collection of stories--which many readers would find plenty tantalizing--Decoded is also a rap Rosetta Stone. Listeners can literally decode Jay's lyrics on 11 studio albums to unlock new details about the 40-year-old's personal history. The marketing for the book took the idea further, mashing up old-school billboard advertising, new-school social media, mobile apps, and more for an interactive game that let players unlock pages of the book and enter to win concert tickets and memorabilia. Jay's corporate partners, meanwhile, scored a fortune in buzz.

Read the Full Essay @ Fast Company

Jay Z & Michael Eric Dyson Rock the Bourgeois and the Boulevard

Jay Z Goes 'Fresh Air'

from NPR

The Fresh Air Interview: Jay-Z 'Decoded'

Decoded: Jay-Z in Conversation with Cornel West

Pretty Amazing Conversation--Jay Z and Cornel West at the New York Public Library

Jay Z Meets Warren Buffet

Where's Young Jeezy's Anthem for the Mid-Term Elections?

Young Voters Must Transition into an Engaged Electorate

Where’s Young Jeezy’s Anthem for the Midterm Elections?
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

Back in the fall of 2008, to be young and voting age in America, meant that you were on the verge of something extraordinary. To vote for Barack Obama was the epitome of cutting edge cool. No one wanted to be on the wrong-side of history. Obama wasn’t simply going to be the first Black president, he was the first President branded for a generation for which branding (and perhaps hip-hop) was their lingua franca—their shared language across race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality.

And everybody got in the act from Will.I.Am to crack rapper Young Jeezy, whose “My President is Black” had everyone—from Big Mama to Pookie and ‘dem—singing and rapping for change. Two years later there are no more anthem, Barack Obama is fighting for his political life and there’s little guarantee that those same young voters that energized the electorate will find their way to the voting booth next month.

It is perhaps easy to suggest that young voters—and quite few others—were caught up in the allure of a candidate, who in comparison to the forty-three men who held the office before him really did look like change. No doubt Barack Obama the campaigner was an open signifier able to look like everything that the electorate desired whether they were independents, the fringe Left or first time voters.

Obama’s chameleon ways have been so successful that even his political enemies believe that he’s Leftist radical; Forbes Magazine publisher and failed Presidential candidate Steve Forbes manages to describe Obama’s economic policies as “soft Socialism” in every other paragraph of the magazine.

Many times throughout the last 18 months there were more than enough opportunities for young voters to provide political pressure on President Obama—the proverbial phone calls, emails, letters to House Representatives, Senators, committee heads, and even the White House—to weigh in on every thing from the environmental crisis in the Gulf region, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his choice for Secretary of Treasury, his tepid Healthcare legislation, to the (un)forced resignation of Green Jobs Guru Van Jones and the sad and embarrassing dismissal of Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod. Yet young voters seemed content to stay on the sidelines and let Obama, stand in as proxy for their concerns relieving them of rightful responsibility to hold elected officials accountable for their decisions.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

Kanye West featuring Jay Z and Swizz Beatz--"Power Remix"

Kanye West feat. Jay-Z & Swizz Beatz - Power (Remix) by uristocrat

Empire State of Minds

from The PS22 Chorus:

The PS22 Chorus delivers big time on this New York anthem by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys! Props to Dominique & Messale for amazing jobs on the lead vocals & rap (respectively). And of course to Ethan for a well-deserved happy dance at the song's conclusion.

We based our version more on the Alicia Keys "Empire State of Mind Part II," but as a tribute to Jay-Z version, the kids and I created our own little rap that obviously was a bit more age appropriate.

2010 is proving to be an extremely prolific year for the PS22 Chorus! Look for them in February on the Tyra Banks Show!

New York, New York, Big City of Dreams...

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

The Hova Oeurve in 60 Seconds