Bakari Kitwana, Political Writing and the Harlem Book Fair

A portion of my recent conversation with Bakari Kitwana is now live over at AOL BlackVoices. I reviewed Bakari’s Hip-Hop Generation for Africana.com back in 2002, when I had less of a sense of his project. Over the last few years I’ve come to greatly appreciate his commitment to expanding the available language currently used to discuss hip-hop as well as his investment in coalition politics, as rooted in his notion of a multicultural, multi-racial hip-hop electorate. Our conversation is just a small glimpse of the ideas he expounds throughout his new book Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop.

I sat down with Bakari (via phone) only a week or so after his controversial essay The Cotton Club was published in the Village Voice. The premise of Bakari’s essay is that there is, in fact, a vibrant political scene in underground hip-hop, that is largely populated by black artists and white audiences. I had just read Bakari’s essay when I walked into the Barnes & Noble here in Durham, trying to track down a copy of the new Leela James cd. With Leela no where to be found, I did fid an interesting hip-hop display, which featured what I’ll diplomatically call “white boy hip-hop”: Aesop, Gift of Gab, MF Doom, etc. When I pressed the manager about the logic behind the display, he responded that if B&N was gonna have a hip-hop display, it was gonna be “good hip-hop.” Common, Missy, Jay Z aren’t “good hip-hop”?. Hell, here we are in Durham; had the cat ever heard of Little Brother?

There is lots of anxiety about Bakari’s new book and his Village Voice piece from folk who believe that he is advocating the jettisoning of a black specific political agenda, which thankfully, if you read the book closely, is not the case. On the other hand, I am having real reservations about the emergence of a generation of cultural gatekeepers—editors, program directors, concert promoters and even Barnes & Noble managers—who have little connection with hip hop’s history or aesthetic criteria. Too many cats in the game now don’t know nothing about Big Daddy Kane—I’m not just being nostalgic here. For example, I can’t claim to be a scholar of American literature if I can’t engage Walt Whitman with the same verve that I do James Baldwin—men who wrote in different centuries. In my specific case, I can’t call myself a scholar/critic of Black Popular Culture if I can’t engage Mary J. Blige with the same sophistication that I engage Aretha Franklin.

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Bakari Kitwana was among the panelist who were convened at this year’s Harlem Book Fair to discuss the “devolution” of hip-hop. While Gwendolyn Pough, Nelson George, Danyel Smith, Bakari and I talked, across the street at the Schomburg, C-Span was broadcasting another Harlem Book Fair panel about Black Political Writing in the 21st Century that featured Kevin Powell, Yvonne Bynoe and senior political scientist Ron Walters (University of Maryland). The irony of the two panels being scheduled at the same time is that the commentary on the hip-hop panel was as political as that which the “political writing” panel engaged in. Unfortunately for far too many, the general expectation is that if you put together a panel with hip-hop generation writers, then the sum total of our available knowledges is a conversation that covers ground about the beef between 50 Cent and The Game. And indeed for many of the Civil Rights Generation, that’s all there is to hip-hop. But as our colleagues Kevin Powell and Yvonne Bynoe evidenced throughout the “political writing” panel, any sophisticated engagement with hip-hop is an engagement with the social, political, cultural, and intellectual forces that created it. As Yvonne Bynoe stated so eloquently, when all is said and done, she’s a married parent, looking for the same quality of life issues that any married parent is looking for.

A month ago I lamented that hip-hop lacked it’s Audre Lorde. Hearing us do our thing at the Harlem Book Fair last Sunday I realized that we—Bakari Kitwana, Kevin Powell, Danyel Smith, Gwedonlyn Pough, Nelson George, Greg Tate, Yvonne Bynoe…Joan Morgan, William Jelani Cobb, Akiba Solomon, Lawrence Jackson, Farai Chideya, Miles Marshall Lewis, S. Craig Watkins, Imani Perry, Scott Poulsen-Bryant, Davey D and so many, many more—are already our generation’s Lorde…and Baldwin. Now it is just the matter of us having the faith to do the work that we have been primed to do.

“Lesbianism is about to take over our community”: The Homophobic “wisdom” of Reverend Willie Wilson

I’m late on this one…

During his sermon on July 3, 2005 Reverend Willie Wilson of Washington D.C.’s Union Temple unleashed a homophobic and sexist rant, which included the claim that “lesbianism is about to take over” the black community. One of the most prominent ministers in D.C., Wilson is also the Executive Director of the Millions More Movement march, which will commemorate the 10 year anniversary of the Million Man March in October of this year.

Included among Rev. Wilson’s “insightful” observations is the notion that

Sisters are making more money than brothers and its creating problems…that’s one of the reasons many of our women are becoming lesbians.

Huh? Seems like a classic case of masculine anxiety, as if women choose same sex relationships solely out of a dissatisfaction with men.

While I agree with the tensions associated with "sisters making more money that brothers”, the reality is that the tensions are rooted in the inability of black men to see their self-worth as being more than making money and being the primary “provider”. Bruh if you ain’t got a job, pick up a broom and sweep the floor; hit the hamper and do some laundry; hell, pull out a pot or two and get to cookin’, and guess what, just because your labor is now relegated to the domestic sphere, that don’t make you any less of a man—just like working in the kitchen don’t make women any less of a women or a human being.

But then Rev. Wilson just gets vile. On lesbian relationships he states:

anytime somebody got to slap some grease on your behind and stick something in you, its something wrong with that. Your butt ain’t made for that…No wonder your behind is bleeding.

WHOA. What’s up with this cat? And this was in a church, right? And this cat considers himself a community leader? And we want to blame all the misogyny and homophobia in the black community on some rappers…?

Activists like Phil Pannell and Keith Boykin were of course ON this. Wilson’s diatribe comes months after Boykin’s celebrated hug of Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam and the spiritual figurehead for the Millions More Movement march. During their embrace, Farrakhan promised Boykin that black gays and lesbians would be welcomed at the march. That’s a hell of a welcoming speech by Wilson—It recalls some of the equally vile comments made by Bishop George Augustus Stallings of the Imani Temple who responded to charges of homophobia during the planning stages of the 1995 Million Man March with the quip:

What do you want, some milquetoast, sissy faggot to lead you to the promised land?

Farrakhan was silent then and thus far has been silent about Wilson.

Equally maddening is the coverage of Wilson’s comments in the mainstream press. BlackAmericaWeb.com is to be commended for covering the controversy, but their headline Black Homosexuals Enraged Over MMM Leader’s Anti-Gay Sermon reinforces the notion that homophobic rants like that of Wilson are solely the problem of black gays and lesbians and thus their “outrage” can be easily dismissed. No Wilson’s rant is our problem…it’s my problem. One of the reasons why homophobia and misogyny continues to fester in our communities is because we reduce the targets of such practices as less than black, less than human. Homophobia and Sexism is not only divisive, they also deny us the fullness of our humanity and anything that denies any of us our humanity, needs to be put in check.

I’m done.

Read New Black Man.

So Can You Pass a Brother some Hot Sauce…and perhaps a Revolution?

So…members of the legendary Black Panther Party are preparing to sell a new line of products called Burn Baby Burn: A Taste of the Sixties Revolutionary Hot Sauce—yes I said hot sauce. Proceeds from the sale of the hot sauce (still ruminating on this?) will go towards the Huey Newton Foundation and Oakland based community organization. Now I know that so many of us have become jaded and look at the hot sauce venture with a healthy sense cynicism, but this is not new territory for members of the Black Panther Party. During the late 1980s BPP founder Bobby Seale began to hawk his skills as a master Bar BQer. His cook book (“it’s a cook book, it’s a cook book!”) Barbeque'N With Bobby was published in 1988. I remember catching Seale give a talk up at New York University shortly after the book’s publication, where he defended his right to write such a book on the basis that (and I’m of cousre paraphrasing), even a revolutionary has a right to eat good Bar BQ (keep in mind as I write this, I am across the street from a place called the Q-Shack which specializes to East Carolina-styled Bar BQ). It seems to me that if Elijah Muhammad could sell the masses of the diverse uses of navy beans, then Bobby Seale and the Black Panther Party can celebrate the virtues of some good Bar-BQ and hot sauce.

Of the cousre the timing of “Burn Baby Burn” hot sauce is not accidental. Next year marks the “formal’ birth of the Black Power Movement and the reality is that unless you are a hard-core fan/scholar/veteran of the era, names like David Hilliard, Mark Clark, Elaine Brown, Fred Hampton, Kathleen Clever and Bobby Hutton are not familiar names. At the very least, “Burn Baby Burn” gives us an opportunity to revisit that amazing moment in American history and at best, let’s hope the Huey Newton Foundation raises enough money to do the kind of work that lives up to the radical democratic ideals that the Black Panther Party tried to uphold.

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Just to Get a Rep?

I repped today on behalf of Hip-Hop parents on NPR’s News and Notes with Ed Gordon. Danyel Smith also got down on a little Bliss

William Rehnquist Meet Nick Cannon

It goes without saying that the majority of Americans who know who Chief Justice William Rehnquist is, probably don’t know who Nick Cannon is. But as Rehnquist considers retiring from the Supreme Court, it’s a good bet that many more folk will suddenly be introduced to Cannon

For the uninitiated Nick Cannon is a twenty-something rapper-actor, who first came to fame as a bit player on the Nickelodeon “tween” series All That. Most recently Cannon has had starring roles in John Hughes like “black face” fare such as Love Don’t Cost a Thing (2003) and Charles Stone III’s directorial debut Drumline (2002). Cannon has attracted attention lately for his new song and video “Can I Live?” in which he thanks his mother for not aborting him. Not surprisingly the song has been celebrated by pro-life/anti-abortion groups. For his part Cannon is non-committal about the song’s political sentiments—he ain’t trying to judge nobody—and I take him at his word on that.

But in an era when popular culture is increasingly little more than unadulterated ideology and network news can be better described as “ideo-tainment” one has to wonder what kind of impact “Can I Live?” is gonna have as the pressure increases to repeal Roe vs. Wade—particularly as Rehnquist’s retirement could push the court further to the Right. For folk who usually don’t watch Fox News and wouldn’t know William F. Buckley if he knocked on their door, Cannon’s video can become an incredible influence—much like the façades of down-low brothers and gay marriage became the wedge issues that Carl Rove exploited in the 2004 Presidential election.

For the record, my own politics are pro-choice—a product of my pro-feminist sensibilities, though I am deeply affected by arguments from my feminist sister home girl Joan Morgan and others about the parental rights of fathers, in the pro-choice debate. As the parent of two adoptive daughters, I am also touched by Cannon’s video—what if the birth mothers of my daughters had choose the path of abortion?

These are not easy issues, hence that passion that erupts on all sides, but my hope is that Cannon’s lovesong to his mom, doesn’t become an unwitting accomplice to those who don’t really have the best interests of women and black folk in mind.

Don’t Call It a Comeback

Great, great piece on Michael Jackson by Greg Tate in Sunday’s Newsweek. Tate has always been outside the box in his criticism—it’s the reason he’s never had the visibility of Nelson George. These days though, it’s like he’s goin’ through a renaissance, harking back to the pieces he did for the Voice in the late 1980s and 1990s, most of which was collected in Flyboy in the Buttermilk. A lot of the younger cats didn’t have the chance to read Tate during those days, so it’s great that he’s still putting it down in major way. Check the flow:

what if Jackson's alleged pursuit of forbidden man-boy love, and even his artificially induced albinism, were not simply pedophilia and African-American self-loathing? What if all of this has really been Jackson's form of black rage turned inside out for the world to see - his way of showing white America the monster he thought a black man had to become to share in their American dream? After all, how was Jackson supposed to predict gangsta rap and the revelation of its rewarding racial paradox: that there was as much love and money in the heartland for a prancing, predatory-acting black man who pretended to be armed to the teeth as there was for one who pretended to be defanged?

Damn.

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Charlie Braxton, who is one of my favorite journalists, has a funny, but ultimately very sad piece on Flava Flav and VH-1’s Strange Love. For those of you who don’t know Charlie’s work (shame on you, btw), check out the liner notes to The Best of Pete Rock and CL Smooth—worthy of a Grammy nomination in my mind.

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I’ve been loving NPR’s Fresh Air, simply because the host Terry Gross
has opened the door wide open for the kinds of folk who come through: Ice Cube, RZA, Don Byron, to name a few. Yesterday Gross spent some time with Hank Jones—pianist and brother of Thad and Elvin. He’s 86 and like my hero John Hope Franklin, I hope I have that kind of energy and fire when I’m that age.

Summer Book Roundup, Volume One

One of the things I hope to do with NewBlackMan: The Blog, is to give some shine to the scholars, critics, and artists who putting in down in major way. This week I want to shout some folk doing their thang, thang in the literary world

Daphne Brooks is one of my favorite people and also one of the most brilliant people I know. Her long awaited book about Jeff Buckley’s Grace has just been published by Continuum as part of their 33 1/3 Series (book length studies of important pop albums). Anybody who has heard Daphne talk passionately about Buckley and the need for a black feminist perspective in Rock criticism (which this book is), knows that she can bring her own style of crunchy granola funk. Now hopefully we’ll see her “big” book--Bodies in Dissent: Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary-- in the world soon, also.

When Judith Halberstam dropped her brilliant Female Masculinity
back in 1998, it opened up a whole new spaces to theorize about gender and sexuality. I was indeed enraptured listening to Judith talk about Big Mama Thornton within the context of female masculinity during last year’s Experience Music Project (EMP) Pop Conference. Judith has just published a new book, In A Queer Time And Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NYU Press). According to Popmatters reviewer N.A. Hayes, “This small seductive book pours warmth as Halberstam confesses and connects movements of pop culture and high art to a deeper understanding of the potentials of the body.”

Speaking of a fabulously brilliant women, Maureen Mahon will be at Harlem’s Hue-Man Book Store and Café on Thursday June 23, 2005. I’ve already given Maureen major propers for her book Right to Rock: The Black Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race and was fortunate to have her spend some time with my graduate students in our seminar on Post-Black Culture.

Venus In The Dark: Blackness And Beauty In Popular Culture, Janell Hobson’s new book on black female bodies in popular culture will be published late next month. A brilliant book throughout, the chapter “The "Batty" Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body” is worth the price of admission alone. Janell’s voice is a great addition to the on-going debates about the policing of black female sexuality.

For one year S. Craig Watkins and I, were to the University of Texas at Austin, what Chauncey Billups and Rip Hamilton are to the Detroit Pistons. Watkins been putting it down in the lone star state for a bit and now he’s back with a follow-up to his vital Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (still one of the top five scholarly studies of hip-hop). According to Robin D.G. Kelley, Watkins’ Hip-Hop Matters: Politics, Popular Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement is “A fantastic voyage into a culture that has defined a generation.”

A Father's Day Love Song

Dance For My Father

Two years ago my mother asked for one of those favors, that you really don't want to do, but you know you ought to, particularly when you're an only child. For the last seven years, my father has suffered from a degenerative disease that has left him paralyzed from his waist down and with limited movement of his arms. Though my father has nursing assistants with him for up to ten hours a day, his health has also paralyzed my mother by limiting the amount of time she's able to spend outside of their home to trips to the store or visits to the doctor. Thus I really couldn't deny her request that I make the drive from upstate New York to spend the day with my father in their Bronx apartment — the same apartment I grew up in — while she took a trip to Baltimore Harbor to spend the day with some family and friends.

As a kid my father and I were reasonably close. Willie Mays was his favorite ball player, so when Mays was traded to the New York Mets in 1972, Mays became my favorite ballplayer and I've been a Mets fan ever since. But as I ventured into adulthood I can't say that our conversations ever broached subjects beyond sports, music and the more than occasional query about how much money I make. Understanding that I'd be spending some ten hours with homie, I copped some music for the day — The Best of The Dixie Hummingbirds, The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi
and The Mighty Clouds of Joy— and though we talked very little that afternoon, my father shared with me a lifetime of joys, pains, and hopes simply in the way he listened to the music. At one point as we sat there, he stopped me mid-sentence, so that he could hear Archie Brownlee, the original lead-singer of the Blind Boys of Mississippi, sing a riff. It was a reminder that with my father, it has always been about the music.

Indeed my earliest memory of hearing music came with my father sitting shotgun in my uncle's car while Junior Walker's "What Does it Take (To Win Your Love)" blared on the radio. That would have been the summer of 1969 and I would have been three. Most of the time that I spent with my father as a child was on Sunday mornings, his day of "rest" — he worked 60-hours a week, Monday through Saturday in Brooklyn — and I had to share him on those mornings with his music. Thus by the age of eight-years-old, I had already acquired a taste for black gospel quartets like the Highway QCs, The Swanee Quartet, The Pilgrim Jubilee Singers, The Soul Stirrers and of course Joe Ligon and The Mighty Clouds of Joy.

While my father clearly dug all of the quartet groups, including the Sam Cooke version of the Soul Stirrers, by far his favorite was The Mighty Clouds of Joy. It resulted in much of the Sunday music being devoted to them, most notably their recording In Concert: Live at the Music Hall (1966) which was recorded in Houston, TX. Founded in 1960 in Los Angeles, The Mighty Clouds of Joy quickly became the standard bearers of the quartet tradition, in large part because of their ability to bridge the gap between the black secular world and the black sacred one. That was undoubtedly part of the appeal they held for my father, who was never a religious man and who, as I recall, has been in a church less than ten times in my lifetime. Within the tradition of black vocal groups the legend of the Mighty Clouds of Joy rivals that of The Temptations and The Dells, and during their peak in the late '60s and '70s, The Mighty Clouds even shared a tailor with The Temptations. Their lead singer Joe Ligon, still with the group after 44 years, belongs to a small group of black male singers whose voices should be regarded as national treasurers — Marvin Gaye, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Donny Hathaway, Sam Cooke, Al Green, Marvin Junior, Teddy Pendergrass, Walter Jackson, Jerry Butler, Luther Vandross, Russell Thompkins, Jr., David Ruffin and Jeffrey Osbourne.

I've listened to Live at the Concert Hall hundreds of times, many of those times while sitting on the living room floor, not far from my entranced father. And of course this was back in the day when folks didn't have turntables, but record players, so my father often let that first side of Live at the Concert Hall play over and again. He listened to the first side so much so that when I hear that album today, it recalls a singular memory in my mind — that of my father getting up to do his version of the "holy dance." Never the most agile of men (something he definitely passed on to his son) my father's version of the "holy-dance" — a one-footed stomping affair, with almost Frankenstein-like finger-snapping gestures — was barely different than the dance he did while listening to Jimmie Smith, B. B. King and Jimmy McGriff (his listening pleasures, once he put the quartets to rest). Though most of the time he listened to his music in a sorta gangsta-lean, with a cigarette dangling from the ashtray, whenever The Mighty Clouds sang "I Came to Jesus" he was up on his feet. Years later, I can still hear the searing falsetto of one of the Mighty Cloud members —"I came…I came…I came" — while Little Joe begins to hoot and holler — "when I get happy, I do the Holy Thing! Hey!"

With my father in his current state, I think often about The Mighty Clouds of Joy and Joe Ligon singing "I Came to Jesus." The memories are bittersweet. Those days watching my father, my hero, were some of the best times of my childhood — what son didn't love the times he could share the world with his father? But I also realize that my father will never again dance to the Mighty Clouds of Joy, and that my daughters will never fully understand where their father gets his sense of rhythm from. Every once in awhile when I'm by myself, I'll put on Live at the Concert Hall and when "I Came to Jesus" comes on, I get up and dance — for my father.

* Orignally Published at Africana.com (June 2004)

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Also check out my NPR Commentary, about my dad and his Record Collection.