David "Fathead" Newman Makes His Transition

from The Los Angeles Times

David 'Fathead' Newman dies at 75; jazz saxophonist
By Jon Thurber
January 23, 2009

David "Fathead" Newman, a jazz saxophonist who was a key member of Ray Charles' band for a dozen years and later became a high-profile session player, has died. He was 75.

Newman died Tuesday of pancreatic cancer at a hospital in Kingston, N.Y., according to his wife and manager, Karen Newman.

Newman's saxophone can be heard on many of Charles' landmark hits, including "I Got a Woman," "What'd I Say" and "Lonely Avenue." And it was Charles who helped Newman get his first album as a leader with the 1958 Atlantic Records release "Fathead: Ray Charles Presents David Newman."

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Solid as Barack

from McClatchy

Solid as Barack: How 1980s hit song became Obama tribute

by William Douglas | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Some may call it a case of life imitating art, or a dose of excessive political enthusiasm, but singer-songwriters Ashford & Simpson call it a labor of love.

After hearing audiences change the lyrics to their 1984 hit song "Solid (as a Rock)" to "Solid (as Barack)" — and watching "Saturday Night Live" perform a skit in with cast members did the same thing — the performing duo went back into the studio, retooled the lyrics to honor Obama, and intend to release it via digital download on Inauguration Day.

"We were amazed that it went from a concert in California to New York to 'Saturday Night Live,'" Valerie Simpson told McClatchy in an interview. "It really started out as a people thing and snowballed from there."

Ashford & Simpson said they never thought about recording a song for Obama, though they're staunch supporters of the president-elect. They were running through a medley of their hits during a show in Los Angeles in August when they turned the microphone towards the audience to have it join them in singing "Solid."

Instead of singing "solid as a rock," many in the crowd of 3,000 belted out "solid as Barack." An audience in New York did the same thing several nights later, and it caught the attention of a newspaper concert reviewer.

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Listen to "Solid As Barack" Here

Daughters, Your President is Black!

from Vibe.com

CRITICAL NOIR
Letter to My Daughters: Your President is Black
by Mark Anthony Neal

Dear Daughters,

Your president is Black.

I never thought that I'd ever say those words to you; in fact I can't say that I even imagined what it would be like to say those words to you. For so many of us, a Black president was just some far off wish, but no more far off than those once and always proud New World Africans who dreamed of freedom by "climbing into their heads" as the late Sekou Sundiata once described it. Perhaps that is why so many little black boys and girls have been told over the years, that they too might grow up to become President. And guess what babies--one of us did.

When I was your age, the world was in transition, but filled with the promise of a "new day" ("can you feel it, it's a brand new day" as they sang in the Emerald Cities of Chocolate Lands all across the nation). Two of our great soothsayers (so many of whom we so wish were earthbound to experience this day) captured the expectations of that era with a song called "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black" (and I know, you've heard it many times. When I was your age though, the song was one of the great gifts given to those of us who were expected to most benefit from the struggles of that moment. Years before on-line social networks existed, it was the music that was our social network, and Ms. Simone and Mr. Irvine's "Young Gifted and Black" went viral, finding resonance throughout the culture. As a testament to the song's power, so many of our worldly geniuses paid tribute to it, including the late Donny Hathaway, Les McCann (who years before asked the question "Compared to What?"), and Ms. Aretha Franklin, who was simply regal singing "My Country Tis of Thee" on this great day. It was like there was collective desire for my generation to always be reminded of our birthright: "You are Young, Gifted, and Black."

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The Best African-American Essays, 2009

from Random House

Best African American Essays 2009
Edited by Debra J. Dickerson and Gerald Early

This exciting collection introduces the first-ever annual anthology of writing solely by African Americans. Here are remarkable essays on a variety of subjects informed by—but not necessarily about—the experience of blackness as seen through the eyes of some of our finest writers.

From art, entertainment, and science to technology, sexuality, and current events—including the battle for the Democratic nomination for the presidency—the essays in this inaugural anthology offer the compelling perspectives of a number of well-known, distinguished writers, including Malcolm Gladwell, Jamaica Kincaid, James McBride, and Walter Mosley, and a number of other writers who are just beginning to be heard.

Selected from an array of respected publications such as the New Yorker, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and National Geographic, the essays gathered here are about making history, living everyday life—and everything in between. In “Fired,” author and professor Emily Bernard wrestles with the pain of a friendship inexplicably ended. Kenneth McClane writes hauntingly of the last days of his parents’ lives in “Driving.” Journalist Brian Palmers shares “The Last Thoughts of an Iraq War Embed.” In “Jamaica Girl,” author Lori Cullen illustrates the struggle of immigrant blacks to become American without losing hold of their cultural roots, and writer Hawa Allan depicts the forces of race and rivalry as two catwalk icons face off in “When Tyra Met Naomi.” A venue in which African American writers can branch out from traditionally “black” subjects, The Best African American Essays features a range of gifted voices exploring the many issues and experiences, joys and trials, that, as human beings, we all share.

Table of Contents

Introduction/By Gerald Early, Series Editor
Introduction/By Debra J. Dickerson, Guest Editor

Friends, Family
Fired: Can a Friendship Really End for no Good Reason?/By Emily Bernard
Gray Shawl/By Walter Mosley
Real Food/By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Entertainment, Sports, the Arts
Hip Hop Planet/By James McBride
Writers Like Me/By Martha Southgate
Dances with Daffodils/By Jamaica Kincaid
The Coincidental Cousins: A Night Out with Artist Kara Walker/By James Hannaham
Music: Bodies in Pain/By Mark Anthony Neal
When Tyra Met Naomi: Race, Fashion, and Rivalry/By Hawa Allen
Dancing in the Dark: Race, Sex, the South, and Exploitative Cinema/By Gerald Early
Modern-Day Mammy?/By Jill Nelson
Broken Dreams/By Michael A. Gonzales

Sciences, Technology, Education
None of the Above: What I.Q. Doesn’t Tell You About Race/By Malcolm Gladwell
Driving/By Kenneth A. McClane
Part I: I Had a Dream/By Bill Maxwell
Part II: A Dream Lay Dying/By Bill Maxwell
Part III: The Once and Future Promise/By Bill Maxwell

Gay
Get Out of My Closet: Can You Be White and “On the Down Low”?/By Benoit Denizet-Lewis
Girls to Men: Young Lesbians in Brooklyn Find That a Thug’s Life Gets Them More Women/By Chloé A. Hilliard

Internationally Black
A Slow Emancipation/By Kwame Anthony Appiah
Searching for Zion/By Emily Raboteau
Last Thoughts of an Iraq “Embed”/By Brian Palmer
Stop Trying to “Save” Africa/By Uzodinma Iweala
We Are Americans/By Jerald Walker

Activism/ Political Thought
Jena, O.J. and the Jailing of Black America/By Orlando Patterson
One Nation…Under God?/By Sen. Barack Obama
Americans Without Americanness: Is Our Nation Nothing More Than an Address?/By John McWhorter
Barack Obama/By Michael Eric Dyson
Standing Up for “Bad” Words/By Stephane Dunn
Debunking “Driving While Black” Myth/By Thomas Sowell
Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters/By Andrew Sullivan
The High Ground/By Stanley Crouch

***

Motown @ 50!

from The Root

Half a century later, the Motown sound is still the soundtrack of American life.

Happy Birthday! Motown Turns 50
by Mark Anthony Neal

In the months leading up to the presidential election, much was made about the size of the crowds and the energy level at Obama rallies. For clues, some looked to the Obama playlist—the songs that served as the soundtrack for those frenzied events. True to his overall political strategy, Obama’s playlist cut across various popular genres—country music stalwarts Brooks and Dunn were as likely to be heard as much as the McFadden and Whitehead disco-era classic “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.”

But the common denominator at so many of those rallies was the sound of Motown, the once fledgling and once black-owned record label founded in Detroit 50 years ago today. The campaign’s embrace of the Motown Sound was likely not happenstance nor simply inspired by the president-elect’s fondness for soul music from the 1960s. More probably, it is the result of the campaign’s legendary attention to minute details and the understanding that the Motown catalogue was uniquely suited to bring together a nation of disparate opinions, concerns and beliefs. As Suzanne Smith writes in Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, “Motown’s music symbolized the possibility of amicable racial integration through popular culture. But as a company Motown represented the possibilities of black economic independence.”

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InnerVision

from Vibe.com

CRITICAL NOIR:
Elizabeth Alexander's INNERVISION
by Mark Anthony Neal

In a cultural and commercial world largely defined by the myopic pretensions of a largely invisible white male elite (the more visible they are, the less powerful they be), the contours of blackness--that amorphous, stasis-bending "giant" that is always in the room--can rarely be deciphered. In her book, The Black Interior (2004) Elizabeth Alexander--the recently tapped Inaugural Poet--observes that blacks are "too often prisoners of the real trapped in fantasies of 'Negro authenticity' that dictate the only way we truly exist for a mainstream audience is in their fantasies of our authentic-ness." (7) Alexander's observations seem perfectly pitched for a historical moment, that she will be largely remembered, for helping to frame for the American body politic. Throughout The Black Interior, Elizabeth Alexander posits a "dream space"--"the black interior"--where African Americans and others of African descent counter the debilitating and truncating affects of "mainstream constructions of our 'real'." (5) Alexander describes "the black interior" as "black life and creativity behind the public face of stereotype and limited imagination." (x)

Within black everyday life Alexander finds the black interior most powerfully expressed in the living room--the "literal 'black interiors,' inside the homes of that black people live in." [9] She extends this metaphor in examining the careers of poets Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Michael S. Harper and the 19th-century intellectual Anna Julia Cooper, as well as in considering black masculinity and Jet magazine (still ghetto-fabulous after all these years). She cites the latter, the largest circulating weekly aimed at black readers and the sister journal of the popular monthly Ebony Magazine, for its role in constructing and circulating "race pride"--a "handbook for a logic that understands the primacy of race, the primacy of blackness," observing the ways that the weekly pamphlet was "important for me to understand as I grew up in an era in which the happy rhetoric of integration was gospel." (95)

"Race Pride" is a term that Alexander also applies to Hughes, noting that his work presents a " 'race-pride' moment par excellence. He is 'our' poet laureate, our 'Shakespeare in Harlem'." (21) The essay on Hughes examines the poet's role in creating a canon of African-American poetry, notably through his editing of the anthology New Negro Poets: USA ( 1964). As published, the anthology was very different from the one that Hughes had originally envisioned. Whereas Hughes envisioned a collection that captured the embryonic energies of the still unnamed Black Arts Movement of the early 1960, his publishers were more interested in a collection that catered more to the taste sensibilities of mainstream readers. In Alexander's view the book was an example of how the "best of intentions can also be thwarted by the very real exigencies of the publishing companies--almost always white--that enable words to make their way to us." (40) Ironically Hughes is also a figure that also exemplifies Alexander's observation that the "black interior" is also a space "that black people ourselves have policed at various historical moments"--the space where race pride collides with Hughes's sexuality and the "troublesome" identities of so many other black bodies. (x) One of the best examples of this dynamics are the difficulties filmmaker Isaac Julien experienced during the making of Looking for Langston, where Hughes's estate denied the filmmaker use of Hughes poetry, because the film explicitly addressed the poet's sexuality.

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True Hip-Hop Stories: Kwame

Reminder of Hip-Hop DIY Ethic