Too Much Time on Their Hands: The Vick Generation

Too Much Time on Their Hands
by Mark Anthony Neal

Michael Vick stands in judgment, and it goes without saying that a generation of young black male athletes also stand in judgment. More than Allen Iverson, Kobe Bryant and Pacman “sometimes you need to just call a dangerous psychopath a ‘dangerous’ psychopath” Jones, Michael Vick has now become the stand-in for all that ails professional sports. And it’s not fair, but Michael Vick and his generational cohorts should know better.

The current crop of black male athletes are more visible and better compensated than every generation of black athletes that came before them. And for some of these young athletes, they believe they are beyond reproach because of it, particularly if said criticism comes from the generation of black athletes who toiled on fields, courts and tracks without the glamour and prestige that these young athletes now take for granted. I’m always reminded of Vince Coleman, a former major league baseball player who, months after signing a free-agent contract with the New York Mets in 1991, claimed that he didn’t know who Curt Flood was. It was Flood who, 20 years earlier, challenged the reserve clause in baseball, which essentially made baseball players little more than salaried chattel. Flood was the reason why Coleman and countless others can become free agents and sell their talents to the highest bidder.

As we witness the wealthiest generation of professional athletes ever, increasingly the professionalization process is beginning in childhood, as kids as young as seven and eight years of age are already being prepared for lives in professional sports. It is in this context that many of these athletes, particularly if they are black males, are denied the fullest range of social and cultural experience. The by-product is a generation of young rich athletes who, when they are not toiling for the NBA or NFL, are sitting at home playing video games 10 hours a day, before they hit the club. Lots of money and too much time on their hands and it explains, in part, why figures like Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan might gamble away millions of dollars, why former NBA star Jayson Williams (the black one) might be sitting in his bedroom playing with guns, or why an athlete might become interested in betting on dog fights. The irony is that given their largely unprecedented wealth, this is a generation of athletes who could truly afford to experience the world in ways that their predecessors could only imagine.

Read the full essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

Next Generation, Next Level

from Richard Prince's Journal-isms

From Washington Post to NAACP
Jabari Asim of "Book World" to Edit the Crisis

Jabari Asim, deputy editor of the Washington Post's Book World section, has been named editor of the NAACP's venerable magazine the Crisis, publisher Roger Wilkins told Journal-isms on Monday.

Asim is author of the recently published book "The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why" and has written children's books as well as a collection of essays, "Not Guilty: 12 Black Men Speak Out on Law Justice and Life."

His low-keyed style stands in marked contrast to that of George E. Curry, the high-profile editor of the late Emerge magazine and former editor of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service, which services the black press. Curry turned down an offer to edit the magazine in June after weeks of negotiations.

"The board is very happy," said Wilkins, who chairs the Crisis editorial board, calling Asim "an intelligent young man who has a passion for magazines and a passion for the concerns of black people and the work that the NAACP is doing and has done."

When Asim was promoted to deputy editor of the Post book section in 2005, Book World editor Marie Arana said, "Jabari has been an editor here for almost nine years now. He came to us from the arts pages of the St. Louis Post Dispatch and has built a reputation on this staff as an intrepid editor with a fearsome, green pen. He is more than passing wise about many subjects, ranging from poetry to literature to hard-nosed books on race and cultural issues. He is a thoughtful, always interesting writer, with a number of very good books to his credit."

Asim also wrote occasional columns for the Washington Post Web site.

In "The N Word," published in March, "Asim collects a wide array of facts and significant moments from American history, politics, science, entertainment and literature to marshal his impassioned argument that this word means black folks no good, and never has. Most Americans would agree with that, though few realize the extent to which whites went to keep the social order in place," Erin Aubry Kaplan wrote in the Los Angeles Times.

The Crisis was founded in 1910 by activist-scholar W.E.B. DuBois and is distributed free to NAACP members. Published every two months, it claims a circulation of 250,000.

Victoria L. Valentine announced in December she was stepping down as Crisis editor after six years. Phil W. Petrie has been interim editor. There were as many as 30 candidates to succeed Valentine.

Working at the NAACP is not without its challenges. On June 7, the organization announced it was cutting about 40 percent of the staff positions at its Baltimore headquarters and planned to temporarily close its seven regional offices to cover three years of budget shortfalls, as Kelly Brewington reported in the Baltimore Sun.

NAACP Chairman Julian Bond told Journal-isms in June that the Crisis would continue the "noble tradition" started by DuBois. "We want the magazine to prosper and continue to be the kind of fighting magazine that it is. It's an advocacy magazine, and that's what we want it to be," he said.

The hiring of Asim away from the Post continues a recent trend of black-owned publications selecting editors who have worked in the mainstream press. Bryan Monroe, editorial director of Ebony and Jet magazines, who came from the defunct Knight Ridder Co., is another example. Asim starts Aug. 20.

More of the Summer of Soul '67

from NPR's Tell Me More w/Michel Martin

1967's 'Summer of Soul' - Part II

Tell Me More, July 27, 2007 · In the second installment of the series on 1967's "Summer of Soul," pop culture expert Mark Anthony Neal discusses four Soul and R&B hits from the historic summer. Among other things, the music helped mold a new identity for black men in America.

Listen Here

Maureen Mahon on Betty Davis

Betty’s Back
she brought serious funk the first time around. time to find out what you missed.
by Maureen Mahon

The funky, stylish, sexy, and provocative singer Betty Davis is back, having emerged from a reclusive retirement to promote the reissue of her first two albums, Betty Davis (1973) and They Say I’m Different, (1974) on Light in the Attic Records. I recently reached the funk cult heroine at her home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for a phone conversation about her career.

Discussions of Betty Davis typically refer to her connection to Miles Davis. Their 1968 marriage was short-lived, but was a formative period for the jazz great. Under his hip young wife’s tutelage, he began to explore rock, notably the music of Betty’s friend Jimi Hendrix. The new sounds helped shape Davis’s ground-shifting 1969 recording Bitches Brew, which Betty is said to have helped name. While the role of Betty Davis the muse is an undeniable part of her biography, equally important is the story of Betty Davis the musician, creative visionary, and artist in her own right.

Born in Durham, North Carolina, and raised in Pittsburgh, Davis attributes her first exposure to music to her maternal grandmother, a music lover who played her large collection of blues records for her grandchildren. Davis lists blues greats like Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton, and Koko Taylor as her earliest influences. While an old-style blues attitude informs her lyrics, she also drew on the music of her contemporaries. She admired Sly Stone’s arrangements (the Family Stone’s drummer Gregg Errico produced her first album) and Hendrix’s approach to his instrument, especially “the amount of bottom that he put on his guitar,” she said. “He used his guitar almost like a bass player would use his bass.”

A former model and one-time Jet Beauty, Davis wore an enormous Afro and an electric smile, but she was more than another pretty face. She was the rare female recording artist who wrote, performed, and produced her own music. Davis did the arrangements for Betty Davis and produced her subsequent releases, They Say I’m Different, Nasty Gal (1975), and Crashin’ From Passion (1979). “I was just interested in keeping the sound pure,” she explained. She is matter-of-fact about these accomplishments. “I’ve been writing music since I was 12 years old,” she said. “I always thought of myself as a songwriter more so than an artist.” In fact, some of her earliest material was performed by other acts. In 1967, the black rock ’n’ roll group The Chambers Brothers recorded her composition “Uptown” for their The Time Has Come album, and in the early 1970s, she wrote material for the Commodores, helping the fledgling band secure a deal at Motown. But it was when she began to write for herself that her artistic vision came into full flower.

Read the Full Essay @ EbonyJet.com

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Maureen Mahon is an associate professor of anthropology at UCLA. She is the author of Right To Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race (Duke University Press)

Donnie Unplugged

"I am in a tradition of making message music, which is Soul music, which is basically the bridge between the secular and sacred world"--Donnie

Listen to his interview with NPR's Farai Chideya

Soul & Prose: Chrisette Michele & Michael Eric Dyson in NYC

Soul & Prose
by Mark Anthony Neal

...The event promised to bring together a unique cadre of folk—teen shorties looking to get a glimpse of Chrisette, hip-hop heads, knowledge hungry grad students, members of the socialist workers party (lol), folk who just love some good music and some good talk and a bunch of other folk, who just happened to be passing through. But the already hyped energy went to another level when five minutes before Chrisette Michele began her four-song set, in walked Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, CNN’s Roland S. Martin—and a few minutes later, Essence Magazine’s Susan L. Taylor and her husband Khephra Burns.

Read and See more at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

1967: The Summer of Soul

from NPR's Tell Me More w/Michel Martin

'Summer of Soul' Melded Music, Cultural Change

Tell Me More, July 20, 2007 · They called it the Summer of Love. Nostalgia for the summer of 1967 and its impact on American pop culture is spawning a string of ceremonial retrospectives, from New York's Whitney Museum of Art to an entire issue of Rolling Stone magazine. The season of "free love" rocked traditional norms of morality, strengthened the mainstream women's movement and fueled a newfound sense of independence among youngsters.

But many of the 40-year retrospectives have taken only a quick glance at one element of pop culture that forever changed communities of color: soul and R&B music.

The Summer of Soul was about music that was more hot-buttered than groovy. The songs were a soundtrack for a period of racial tension and political change that still resonates in many black communities.

In 1967, while her own community was going up in flames during the Detroit riots, a woman who wanted only one thing — respect — was introduced to the world.

"Literally, she just explodes. It's difficult to think of 1967 as not just simply the year of Aretha," says Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal, author of Songs In the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation.

Later dubbed the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, a preacher's daughter, made an impressive mark on both music and the civil rights movement as she fused her gospel roots with the sounds of rhythm and blues.

Listen to the Full Segment...

Sekou Sundiata Goes Home

from the New York Times

Sekou Sundiata Dies at 58; Performer of Text and Sound
By MARGALIT FOX

Sekou Sundiata, a poet and performance artist whose work explored slavery, subjugation and the tension between personal and national identity, especially as they inform the black experience in America, died on Wednesday in Valhalla, N.Y. He was 58 and lived in Brooklyn.

The cause was heart failure, said his producer, Ann Rosenthal. At his death, Mr. Sundiata was a professor in the writing program of Eugene Lang College of New School University.

Mr. Sundiata’s art, which defied easy classification, ranged from poems performed in the style of an oral epic to musical, dance and dramatic works infused with jazz, blues, funk and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. In general, as he once said in a television interview, it entailed “the whole idea of text and noise, cadences and pauses.”

His work was performed widely throughout the United States and abroad, staged by distinguished organizations like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. Among Mr. Sundiata’s most recent works was “the 51st (dream) state,” an interlaced tapestry of poetry, music, dance and videotaped interviews that explores what it means to be an American in the wake of 9/11.

His other works include “Udu,” a staged oratorio about slavery in present-day Mauritania, with music by Craig Harris; “blessing the boats,” a one-man show, autobiographically inspired, about Mr. Sundiata’s experiences of heroin addiction, a debilitating car crash and a kidney transplant; and “The Circle Unbroken Is a Hard Bop,” a collaboration with Mr. Harris about black Americans coming of age in the 1960s.

Writing in The New York Times in 1993, D .J. R. Bruckner reviewed a production of “The Circle Unbroken” at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe:

“This is a remarkably smooth work, its complex stories and ideas bound together by the vivid, memorable poetry of Mr. Sundiata. And in one tornadic scene, the poet lets the audience hear all at once the range of his vocabulary and voice: Mr. Sundiata becomes a young, crazed homeless man on the street, and in eight minutes pours out a torrent of grief, humor and shrewd insight that leaves one simply astonished.”

Read More Here...

Head Nodding Prose for the Summer, Vol. 1

Head Nodding Prose for the Summer, Volume One
by Mark Anthony Neal

Soul Covers: Rhythm and Blues Remakes and the Struggle for Artistic Identity
Michael Awkward

Michael Awkward, the Gayl Jones Collegiate Professor of Afro-American Literature and Culture at the University of Michigan, has built a career on the notion of “close” readings. In other words, he takes quite seriously that every word and gesture matters, when one examines the culture of African-Americans. Though he has been primarily concerned with black women’s literature throughout his career—in many ways initiating the field of black male feminist criticism—in his new book he turns his attention to the music of Al Green, Aretha Franklin, and Phoebe Snow, highlighting songs that the artists chose to cover during the period of 1964-1976. In the case of Franklin it was an album length tribute to the music of Dinah Washington, while Green, during the height of his popularity, chose to cover Country music standards like Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” and Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times.” —songs which Green used a template to write songs that expressed his own “country boy” sensibilities. In the case of Snow, easily the lesser known of the trio, Awkward examines the “something in between”—Snow is a Jewish singer-songwriter with “kinky” hair who rarely tried to disturb perceptions that she was an “authentic” Soul singer, particularly on her album Second Childhood. Soul Covers is not for casual fans of Soul music, but for those who interests might best be described as devout.

Read Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

The Boys of Summer (of Sam)

The Boys of Summer (of Sam)
by Mark Anthony Neal

The game of baseball was never really made for television. For every great moment in the history of baseball that was televised—Henry Aaron’s 715th homerun, Carton Fisk’s walk-off homerun in game 6 of he 1975 World Series, and Bill Buckner flubbing a ground-ball in game 6 of the 1986 World Series, to name a few—there are literally millions of 3-2 counts, foul pop-ups and pitchers throwing over to first base that have driven folks away from the game. While watching baseball on television is perhaps only a thing for purists, in contrast, baseball nostalgia makes for great television. Such is the case with the HBO documentary Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghost of Flatbush and ESPN’s mini-series The Bronx is Burning.

Read Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

Chrisette Michele, I AM

Chrisette Michele, I Am
By Mark Anthony Neal
SeeingBlack.com Contributing Editor

When most audiences were introduced to Chrisette Michele, she was wrapping Jay Z’s lament about lost friends, lost families and lost loves with warm sisterly kisses. Weeks later she was a throwback chanteuse from the jazz age of the 1920s, endowing Nas’s plea for immortality, with the verve and brashness of Harlem Renaissance-era writers who gave the jazz age its meaning. With both songs, Jay Z’s “Lost Ones” an Nas's “Can’t Forget About You”, my inclination was to check the liner notes (“What are those?” says the boy to the Ipod) to find out which coquetish, dead jazz diva had been exhumed from her digital grave to provide the emotional depth that contemporary artists sometimes seem incapable of channeling. (Thinking favorably here, about Will.i.am’s brilliant pairing of Nina Simone and Mary J. Blige on the latter’s “About You”). At the very least, I wanted to confirm that Erykah Badu was back in the world. Chrisette Michele? Doesn’t ring a bell.

Chrisette Michele, I Am, says the 24-year-old woman from Long Island and, when pressed, she admits, “I been studying, Ms. Billie, Ms. Ella, Ms. Sarah Vaughn, and Ms. Natalie Cole.” (from “Let’s Rock”). Michele’s debut recording, I Am, is a curious collection, as much for the choice of songs as it is for the fact that the singer has been allowed to build from the ground a small, but growing audience. R&B singers barely a decade older than Michele—Deborah Cox and Amel Larrieux are the singers I’m thinking of specifically—have been banished from urban radio and find themselves either recording jazz standards or claiming stakes in the gospel music industry to find an audience. The clear message is that not only do these women have to compete with the Rhiannas and Ameries of the world, but also the Fergies and Nelly Fertados of the world. Quite frankly, save Mary J. Blige and perhaps Beyonce (though she too must be beginning to feel old), there is little room—or seemingly need—for grown Black women in contemporary R&B. But Chrisette Michele is too grown—her voice is too grown—to play to the expectations of an industry that still struggles to accept women and Black women in particular, on terms that these women define themselves.

Read the Full Review @ SeeingBlack.com

Carrying the Water: On Michael Eric Dyson

Is Michael Eric Dyson the intellectual equivalent of a poverty pimp? Or is he in the best tradition Black public intellectualism?







Carrying the Water
by Mark Anthony Neal

Recently, one of my colleagues jokingly referred to Michael Eric Dyson’s Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip-Hop, as the latest offering in the Michael Eric Dyson “book-of-the-month-club”. It was a grudging, though derisive, admission of Dyson’s level of productivity as an author.

Know What I Mean?, which is largely a collection of conversations that Dyson has had over the past few years, represents his fourteenth publication in just as many years. His first collection of essays, Reflecting Black (University of Minnesota Press) was published in 1993. Since January of 2005, Dyson has published texts on Hurricane Katrina, one of the seven deadly sins (Pride), the specter of race in contemporary American political discourse and, of course, on Bill Cosby’s rhetorical “drive-by” on the Black poor.

Given Dyson’s prolific output and heightened visibility, it should not be surprising that some of his peers within the academy accuse him of pandering to the marketplace, while many outside of the academy view him as little more than a race hustler. The same goes for Dyson’s proclivity for movement from one elite institution to another. The publication of Know What I Mean? coincided with the announcement that Dyson had accepted a new position as university professor at Georgetown University. In contrast to this so-called conventional wisdom, I’d like to suggest that for nearly two decades, Dyson has carried the water, not only for the principles of being a civically engaged scholar and intellectual, but for the field of African-American Studies and its many mutations, including the burgeoning field of hip-hop studies.

As such, this is as much meant to defend Michael Eric Dyson, as it is meant to defend the vocation that he, as well as many others, have brilliantly upheld with guile, intelligence, passion and an unwavering commitment to issues of social justice. So for a moment let’s assume that Michael Eric Dyson is the intellectual equivalent of an ambulance chaser. But we’re not talking about nefarious accident lawyers and tow-truck drivers, who lay in wait to profit from the misfortunes of others, but an Ivy-League trained scholar, author and public thinker of some distinction.

The recurring presumption here is that Dyson’s public profile and celebrity are some how premised on his exploitation of the misery of the Black folk he ostensibly represents. This widely circulated and decidedly worn “poverty pimp” thesis has been applied to figures as diverse as Reverend Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, and the current cadre of hip-hop generation intellectuals, who supposedly, as the critique goes, wallow in victimization and refuse to hold the Black rank-and-file, particularly Black youth, accountable for bad behavior. This chorus from the choir of “common sense” populism holds merit merely for those who refuse to value the labor of those whose mode of activism is best realized via corporate media (including the publishing houses) and elite universities, and who leverage the resources of those institution to do the work of social justice. The populism of common sense suggest that the attainment of wealth and celebrity could be the only motivations for trafficking in the marketplace of ideas.

Read the Full Essay @ SeeingBlack.com

An Unreconstructed Negro; Cynthia Fuchs on Petey Green

Watch Your Language
by Cynthia Fuchs

Following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the streets of Washington DC erupted. The scene, fiery and chaotic, similar to other cities across the US at the time, appears in Talk to Me through the eyes of Petey Greene (Don Cheadle). Shocked by the news, he stands outside the WOL-AM office where he’s a DJ and surveys the turmoil. Figures barely discernable run past, papers fly through smoke, windows break across the street, a car blows up. Petey pauses, then heads back inside, where he takes the mic and starts doing what he does best: he starts talking.

It’s a turning point in Kasi Lemmons’ smart, enthralling film. Part biopic, part portrait of an era, it presents an ongoing dilemma—what does it mean to be “black enough” and how does “talk” shape the question and answers?

Read the Full Review @ Popmatters.com

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Also Read Esther Iverem's Straight Talk, No Chaser @ SeeingBlack.com

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Also footage of Petey Green's classic "How to Eat a Watermelon"

"Blackness" & the Populism of Common Sense

The Amen Corner:

"Blackness" and the Populism of Common Sense
By Mark Anthony Neal

"The use of the N-word is unacceptable," Stephanie Brown, director of the NAACP’s Youth and College Division announced, adding that "Every time we use the N-word, we disgrace the ancestors who came before us." The setting for Brown’s pronouncement was a mock funeral, for the word “nigger” that was part of the programming for the NAACP’s National Convention in Detroit, MI. According to Michael H. Cottman of BlackAmericaWeb.com, Brown’s words, “brought the crowd," numbered in the thousands “to their feet.” I’ve been here before. Conventional wisdom suggest that when faced with crises and uncertainties, one should rely on their common sense, but when applied to conditions that confront large communities, such wisdom profoundly undermines the possibilities of bringing new ideas and ways of thinking to bear on the situation. David Lionel Smith observed more than a decade ago, “Common sense is not critically self-conscious, and its function is to facilitate conformity and adaptation to familiar circumstances. It thrives on familiarity and fears change, and therefore common sense is profoundly conservative.” While all points-of-view need to be acknowledged and valued in the “marketplace of ideas,” the thunderous applause and standing ovations that often accompany common sense responses, at times shut down and silence alternative points of view, particularly if it goes against conventional wisdom. Indeed common sense borders on a form of populism, that denies black communities access to the fullest range of strategies to address our conditions.

Read the Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

Nah-Mean?

Michael Eric Dyson discusses why he believes that hip-hop music is one of the most authentic expressions of the black experience. Rap and hip-hop artist Jay-Z wrote the introduction to Dyson's new book, Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip Hop.

Listen @ NPR's Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan

Chasing Down A Memory: Motherlode's "When I Die"

Listen to Motherlode's "When I Die" and then go to Critical Noir @ Vibe.com to read the story.

What's in Your Hip-Hop Canon?

Last week WNYC’s Soundcheck had a conversation about the validity of a hip-hop canon, no doubt inspired by Brian Coleman’s fine new addition to the field of hip-hop studies. Personally I’m not a big fan of canons, since the very premise of one elicits a form of elitism. That said, as folk ranging from Paula Zahn to your local high school social studies teacher feel compelled to bring themselves up to speed on things, it may be tactically useful to present folk with a list that some of us think of as most reflective of what this thing is. I regularly stand in front of classrooms filled with 18-21 year olds (as many of them Black as they are White, Latino/a and Asian) who stare blankly into space when I mention folk like Whodini, A Tribe Called Quest and Gangstarr. Jazz scholars and critics often talk about this concept known as the “common practice” period—that period in jazz history, where most of the elements that make Jazz, Jazz, are present. If I had to identify a “common practice” period for hip-hop, it would be from 1987- 1992. With that in mind, I’d like to offer my own hip-hop canon.

Just a few things about my choices. I was a fully grown man when It Takes A Nation of Millions was released, so my taste in hip-hop reflects that of a fully grown man, who's been married for 16 years, has two daughters under the age of 10 and who drives a minivan. Also, because of my vocation, I heard hip-hop, particularly in the 1990s with cats like Habermas, Baudrillard, Michael Eric Dyson, Skip Gates, Patricia Hill-Collins and Greg Tate whispering in my other ear. Finally, this is not meant to be some comprehensive list—there are folk like Em, Mr. Fiddy and T.I., for example—who I simply don’t be checking for. That said this list is biased—premised on an east coast, quite frankly, New York bias, that I’m proud of.

Read the Full Essay at Critical Noir @ Vibe.com