Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.
August 3rd, 2009 — Black Music, Design, Hip-Hop
Did your heart leap with anticipation at today’s release of cover art for Jay-Z’s upcoming The Blueprint III, above? (Or, instead, did you, like one blogger, feel compelled to rant that “that optimising album covers for viewing on iPhones leads to f#&*ing sh!@@y album covers”?) Or maybe your beef is that it “looks EXACTLY like the Secret Machines’ 2004 album cover, Now Here Is Nowhere,” above.
Love it? Hate it? Lemme know!
[via jay-z.com]
July 31st, 2009 — Art, Black Music, Books, Education, NONFICTION, Race
Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni is not just one of the world’s greatest poets, with a legacy of profound and funky work, but a scholar with deep community interests and focuses. As a Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg VA since 1987, she trains future leaders in the literature of the mother tongue. As the author of over 30 books, she shares the beauty of poetic language with readers far and wide, having done so for over four decades. The above photo is drawn from the session for her first volume of work, Black Feeling, Black Talk, published in 1968, the year she turned twenty-five.
Unlike many poets, however, Giovanni, right, has long had an interest in reaching children. Her first book of verse for them, Spin a Soft Black Song, was published a mere three years after her first volume, in 1971, two short years after giving birth to her only child, Thomas Watson Giovanni.
Her latest work, which she edited, continues her aim of making poetry come alive for young listeners and readers, albeit in a contemporary way. Hip-Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat presents compositions by rap artists like A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, the Sugarhill Gang, and Stetsasonic along with classics by Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, Maya Angelou, and, of course, Nikki Giovanni. Children can read along in the profusely illustrated text while an accompanying CD presents most of the pieces in audio form, some of them read by the original poet. For me, the highlight had to be hearing Langston Hughes, performing his own poems, like “Dream Boogie” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
Nikki Giovanni has had a long and varied career, appropriately honored with accolades from admirers as diverse as TV host Oprah Winfrey, whose hailed her as one of twenty-five “Living Legends”; to singer Teena Marie, who name-checked Giovanni on her 1981 hit, “Square Biz”; to biologist Robert Baker who, in 2004—no joke—named a West Ecuadoran bat he discovered, three years earlier, after her. Micronycteris giovanniae, which means meaning “Giovanni’s small night flyer,”looks much like the cuddly fellow above. “I enjoy reading her poetry and I come from the Deep South, so I really can appreciate what she has done for race relations and equality,” the professor explains.
Nikki Giovanni is the guest today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, July 31st, at 2 pm ET.
You can hear her ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.
July 7th, 2009 — Black Music, Obituary, Pop Culture, Race, TV
Al Sharpton, dropping the bomb, and the morning’s most compelling statement, at Michael Jackson’s memorial service, the Staples Center, Los Angeles CA, July 7, 2009.
July 1st, 2009 — Black Music, Magazines, Media, Money
Stick a knife in it, they’re done:
Jay-Z unknowingly celebrates VIBE’s last Juice issue, September 2008
When I went upstairs yesterday, to the 21st fl. of 120 Wall St., and the offices of VIBE Media Group, I first noticed the seated retirees at the door. I suspected, and it was later confirmed, that they were security, sent by the company’s owners to maintain the premises as the magazine’s personnel began packing up their professional lives.
June 30th, 2009 — Black Music, Obituary, TV
From MEDIA ASSASSIN, December 23, 2008.—HA
I may like nothing less than any film or video where Black people teach white people how to dance, or to otherwise be cool.
That said, I can kind of bear the otherwise talented Vicki Lawrence (Mama’s Family) in this clip from The Carol Burnett Show, above, because there’s just not a lot of high-quality footage around of the Jackson 5 performing their hot, often-less-heralded semi-single, “Body Language (Do the Love Dance).”
June 29th, 2009 — Black Music, Humor, Obituary
While we’re waiting for Eddie Murphy’s insights on Michael Jackson’s passing, this will have to do: The comedian riffing on the King, from 1983’s Delirious. High point: His spot-on impersonation of Jackson singing “She’s Out of My Life,” added calls for sympathy from the vocalist’s brothers. A quarter-century later…still amazing.
June 26th, 2009 — Black Music, NONFICTION, Obituary
Today, on NONFICTION, I’ll be talking about the life and music of the late, great Michael Jackson, who died yesterday, with ethnomusicologist Dr. Kyra Gaunt and music writer Michael Gonzales, author of “Remembering The Times: Memories of Mike.”
You can hear their ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.
June 25th, 2009 — Black Music, Obituary, Toys
“And when the groove is dead and gone
You know that love survives
So we can rock forever on….”
June 4th, 2009 — Black Music, Race, Religion
Living in Harlem, I’ve been seeing Asian tourists coming uptown for years, and that would little suprise most people. What might get their attention, though, is that many of these sojourners don’t come here just to eat at Sylvia’s, or merely to sit in the back of Abyssinian Baptist Church and hear its choir’s masterful singing.
Instead, they want to be part of the show. That’s why, for some time, a number of Japanese tourists have been rolling up above 110th St to learn how to sing gospel. As The New York Times reported in 2000,
Over the last two years, hundreds of Japanese, primarily women, have trekked to Memorial Baptist for the Saturday workshop where veteran black gospel music instructors like Mr. [Terrance] Kennedy lead them in a crash course of clapping, stomping, singing and swaying. Tommy Tomita, who is Japanese and a longtime Harlem resident, started the workshop in 1998 to give friends a look at one of the oldest forms of black music. When the friends demanded more, he persuaded the church to teach them how to sing. Now the workshop is advertised in Japanese stores and community centers in New York, as well as throughout Japan.
Well, it looks like Japanese nationals weren’t the only ones taking the classes. Check out the Kirk Franklin-esque strains Korea’s Heritage Mass Choir bring, singing “My Desire,” above. Wow: Folk weren’t lying when they said that 125th St. is the crossroads of the world. I believe it! Now, stop gentrifying our neighborhood, white people.
May 29th, 2009 — Advertising, Black Music, Food, TV
 |  |
 |  |
