Dear Michael: Love Letters from Cyberspece

Michael Jackson: Morning's End
by Jeff Chang

Many of his most affecting performances were about distance and displacement, the desire to be somewhere else, the inability to return to a lost past. Think of the songs that the hip-hop generation adored so much: “I’ll Be There”, “I Wanna Be Where You Are”, “Who’s Loving You”, “Maybe Tomorrow”, “All I Do Is Think Of You”, “Ready Or Not”. On these songs, Michael’s “knowingness” sounds more like fragility.

Read the Full Article @ Zentronix

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Chasing Michael Jackson
by Teresa Wiltz

I remember covering Michael in 2004 as an arts writer for the Washington Post. He was making a tour through Capitol Hill, making nice with the Congressional Black Caucus and talking about AIDS in Africa and philanthropy, etc., etc. Not that the public was privy to any of this. “Covering” Michael Jackson on the Hill amounted to standing around and waiting for hours, and hours, and hours on end, interviewing fans who used to love him but were no longer sure he was a good role model. Keeping an eye trained on the door, lest the Altered One jet before you could get next to him. Feeling just a little foolish.

Read the Full Article @ The Root

Chatting Up Michael Joseph Jackson

CBCRadio
Q with John Ghomeshi

June 26: Michael Jackson Remembered. We'll talk to several cultural thinkers and musical figures about the life and legacy of the King of Pop. Plus, Friday LIVE guest, Homecookin', featuring four of Canada's top jazz and blues musicians.

Listen to Q

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NPR's Tell Me More with Michel Martin

The King of Pop is Gone

Tell Me More, June 26, 2009 - The world is mourning the loss of a music icon. Michael Jackson died yesterday at the age of 50. Duke Professor Mark Anthony Neal and Journalist Bryan Monroe, former Editorial Director of Ebony Magazine, share their thoughts about Michael Jackson, his influence and his legacy.

Listen to Tell Me More


Jackson's Musical Peers Remember His Genius

Tell Me More, June 26, 2009 - Behind the scenes in the music industry, Michael Jackson was more than a star. He was a genius.

Record producer Kenny Gamble and Howard Hewett, lead singer of the 70s R&B group Shalamar, both worked closely with Jackson. They remember what it was like to share a studio with the 'King of Pop.'

Listen to Tell Me More

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The Michael Eric Dyson Show
WEAA-FM Baltimore

The Life and Legacy of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson with Reverend Jesse Jackson, Professor James Braxton Peterson, Music Critic Ann Powers, BET Founder Robert Johnson, and Professor Mark Anthony Neal

Listen to the Michael Eric Dyson Show

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Soundcheck with John Schaefer
WNYC-FM New York

Death of Thriller

Michael Jackson was one of the most successful and influential entertainers of the 20th Century. He won 13 Grammys and sold 50 million copies of his 1982 masterpiece, Thriller. But his fame and reputation declined starting in the 1990s. When he died yesterday at age 50, Jackson was attempting a comeback with 50 sold-out concert dates in London. Today, we look back at Jackson's career. Guests include: music critic Jody Rosen of Slate.com; Los Angeles Times chief pop music critic Ann Powers; Mark Anthony Neal, professor of black popular culture at Duke University and contributor to TheRoot.com; Susan Blond, founder and president of Susan Blond Inc. and a former Jackson publicist; Details magazine editor at large Jeff Gordinier; and Bruce Swedien, the recording engineer behind Thriller among other Jackson albums.

Conjuring Michael (the “uncut-before-u-git-the-academic-ish” mix)

Conjuring Michael (the “uncut-before-u-git-the-academic-ish” mix)
by Mark Anthony Neal

“Schumaw”—like some ancient African dialect that only he, James Brown, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Macy Gray, and quiet as it’s kept, Lil’ Wayne quite understand. Random utterings like “Mama-ko, mama-sa, ma-ka-ma-ko-ssa” and even Cameroonian musician Manu Dibango can’t quite claim it. The point is that this was some deep knowledge and there was never any explanation for it—like that riff in the middle of “Remember the Time” that can’t even be transcribed. Much the same with the infamous audition tape—the grainy black & white one, where the lil’ boy is singing JB and moving through an archive of masculine movements known only to Mr. Brown, Mr. Wilson—and quiet as it’s kept, Mr. Presley. Mr. Gordy was hooked, not quite knowing what he had and misreading the lil boy as some kind of novelty, like that lil blind boy, who asked for his freedom only to return with Music On My Mind under one arm and genius under the other. But that boy had almost a decade of seasoning before the breakthrough; this other cat was 10-years old, singing about stuff he ain’t supposed to know about.

Aks him who he dug and the boy say “William Hart.” What? Yeah, William Hart. Like what this 10-year-old know about The Delphonics, and then you listen to “Can You Remember?” from that first Jackson 5 joint and it’s like damn—this boy ain’t real. Smokey must have thought the same thing listening to the playback of “Who’s Lovin’ You?”—the b-side of the original hot ish, “I Want You Back.” Naw, Smokey, flip that ish over. I mean damn, you did write this joint right—and you did record this joint right? But damn if that ain’t yo’ song no mo’. And the rest was history.

My story with the boy started just a bit after that. Call it a serious boy crush and who could blame me, he was like the prettiest M’fer we’d ever seen, especially with the Apple Jack on his head. I talking from the beginning, like I listened to that ABC album on 8-Track—years before I figured out what the actual album sequencing was like. Years later I danced with my mother to that album’s “I Found that Girl” at my wedding. The boy was my first muse—literally. Used to copy lyrics from those early albums—“Darling Dear,” “Wings of Love,” “In Our Small Way”—and sent them in secret notes to the first shortie who really caught my eyes. Got the idea peeping an old episode of the ABC Afterschool Special where the boy’s “We’ve Got a Good Thing Going” played in the background and I got that queasy first love thing in my stomach. The song that’s on the album with the rat. Boy was on some queer ish even them. Shame the boy wasn’t free to be on some Ziggy Stardust ish, but what’s a little black boy to do in the mid-1970s.

Boy tried to get his own freedom in the late 1970s frequenting dance clubs like 54, checking the scene, watching cats like Gamble and Huff work the boards and when he and them other boys took control over their own music and that young boy hooked up with Q, all was magic. Young boy found his own muse in the scarecrow, easing on down the road to the Emerald City—“can you, feel it, brand day?”—and damn if those early videos for “Rock With You”, “Don’t Stop ‘Till You Get Enough” and “Can You Feel It” don’t feel inspired by The Wiz. Truth be told, Off the Wall was the crown jewel—ish was still innocent, earnest, organic. Thriller seemed contrived—like that young boy was trying to sell 20 million records. Find the boy’s true fans by asking “Thiller” or “Off the Wall”? If they say the former, than you know that were on some Johnny/Janie come-lately ish when that young boy took claim to the world.

The rest was a blur, like if you drop like 26 millions sales, what exactly do you do next? The young boy never figured that out and the less it was about the music, the more surreal the ish got. Then it became about young boys, ‘cept he was now a grown ass-man, though true be told, if I’m to believe that this grown ass man was fondling young boys, I also got to believe the ass whumpings that occurred at the hands of that once young boy’s daddy. That boy spent a lifetime seeking a meaningful freedom, perhaps from the tyranny of family, but later from the tyranny of celebrity. And yeah perhaps Mr. Presley, Ms. Monroe and those four British mop-tops could relate, but when that young boy was hitting his half half of them were dead—and they never had to deal with MTV and 24-hour cable networks in their prime.

I will shed a tear sometime soon, not for the man who breathed his last breath today, but for that young boy that helped to define the me that I be. That young boy was special and it’s that young boy that I choose to remember today.

Loving Michael

special to NewBlackMan

Loving Michael
by Stephane Dunn

The calls came fast – Michael Jackson was dead. The words flashed across the screen in typical pop news form – sensational and impersonal. I muted the television and stopped taking calls. It was not hot, shocking news to me. It was heartbreaking.

I want you back

Michael was my first crush. There were the posters on my wall and the journal entries about meeting and marrying him and protecting him all that might wound him.

Abc, 123

As a little girl, my cousins and I lip synced, kicked, and spun, trying to follow the studded bell bottoms of Michael and his brothers. In secret I wrote him letters by the dozens and sat in my room, daydreaming of our fairytale love story.

Just call my name and I’ll be there

Later, I ‘shook my body to the ground’ and grew into adolescence as Michael, the wide eyed cutie with the magical voice, eased out of the Afro on his way to the jheri curl and a solo career.

Keep on, don’t Stop ‘till you get enough

I moved beyond posters on the walls and accepted that he was a star flung too far for me to marry – though I hung on to the prayer that at least we’d meet. He was still my Michael and I stood applauding telling him to go on with his bad self as he moon-walked onto MTV and further into pop performance history.

Reaching out to touch a stranger

The lighter his skin got, the more that nose changed, the more I worried about him. But still the voice, the feet, and something of that little boy of long ago remained in the eyes. The awards, the glove, the sparkling sock, and the imitators came and went and the stories grew.

Just call my name and I’ll be there

Weird, bizarre, - the king of pop branded child molester, masked freak, wanna-be-white recluse, bad father. And he retreated even, from that beloved stage that had so long been home and went further in search, I believe, of a wonder-world fit for the child the spotlight and fame had stolen him from too early. And there he was – the barred topic, the disgraced has-been pop star, fallen prey to the world’s amnesia.

You’ve got a friend in me

They will say, are saying, he was a musical genius, a pop icon. They will catalog his ‘bizarre behavior’, trot long anonymous fans across the television screen, show images of flower tributes against the back drop of his pale face and ‘Michael Jackson 1958-2009.’ They will debate the sequence of his death, calculate his emotional state, review his achievements and cultural importance, and surmise on the future of his children.

I’ve been a victim of a selfish kind of love

None of it will mean much to me – not the images, the talk, and debates. I’ll be mourning my Michael, my first crush, the boy with James Brown and Jackie Wilson in his feet, the man with the sweetness and the haunted soul in his voice . . .

Oh I never can say good-bye . . .

***

Stephane Dunn, Ph.D, MFA, is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Morehouse College. She has also taught at Ohio State University. A scholarly and creative writer, she specializes in film, popular culture, literature and African American studies. She is the author of articles and commentaries and the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008).

The Persecution of Progressive Black Scholars

St. Clair Drake/Special to NewBlackMan


The Persecution of Progressive Black Scholars
by Christopher J. Metzler
Georgetown University

Institutions of higher education are supposed to be the place where the free market place of ideas takes hold. In fact, the basis for tenure has always been that academics should not be punished for speaking out. The theory is that such speaking out is protected even when university administration does not agree with the content of that speech. However, these same institutions are also political fiefdoms where tenure has been used and will continue to be used to punish those with whom the members of the promotion and tenure committee do not agree. In other words, academic freedom is only free when one agrees with those in power. All junior faculty understand very quickly that the definition of “scholarship” is a moving target and that if they wish tenure, they better move with the target. The hypocrisy of the promotion and tenure process (and I use the word process lightly) is that too many faculty are more about politics and less about scholarship. So, they play the game to get tenure and then when some of them get it, they punish the ideas of others they find unpopular by denying them tenure.

Progressive Black scholars find ourselves in a particular pickle. On the one hand, we want to advance ideas that look critically at the academy and simply not accept the status quo. On the other, if we are too progressive, then we will be Boyced. That is, we will be fired from predominately white institutions that will reduce our entire scholarly career to a warm bucket of spit. Of course I am not suggesting that all predominately white institutions will Boyce progressive Black scholars. I am suggesting that too many can and do.

First, regardless of whether one agrees with Dr. Watkins’ views or not, one cannot in good faith question his credential or his scholarship. One can disagree with it, one can dislike it, one can criticize but one cannot question its rigor, funny, I thought that this is what academic freedom is about. In fact, Syracuse University believed him to be of sufficient scholastic heft to hire him on tenure track in the first place. So, did he suddenly become a less than mediocre scholar after he joined the faculty? Of course not, in fact, an objective reading of his work suggests that he is a scholar who pushes his knowledge to a public that is very much outside “the ivory tower.” Perhaps the problem is that those judging scholarship should realize that scholarship as well as its consumption is evolving and that progressive black scholars such as Dr. Watkins must, if we are to be true to our mission, bring the scholarship to many who may never step foot on our campuses.

Second, it is not an understatement to say that Black male scholars do not dominate the ranks of predominately white institutions. It is also not an understatement to say that progressive Black scholars are in the numerical and scholastic minority at these same institutions. Thus, perhaps promotion and tenure committees should stop trying to pretend that they value our contributions and admit that far too many of them are more interested in visual representation (diversity for diversity sake) than diversity of thought, diversity of scholarship, diversity of methodology and diversity of thought. A reading of that which is considered “scholarly” by many of these committees reveals a common theme: protection of the status quo of ideas by a limited number of elite intellectuals. To be sure, one can argue that there is nothing wrong with this approach. I would argue that in the interest of transparency that promotion and tenure committees should not shrink from stating this since many of them believe it to be true. This way, progressive Black scholars will simply need not apply.

Third, for Black scholars, the reality of being Boyced stifles academic freedom and suffocates scholarship. Many of us will be loathe to publish anti-establishment scholarship for fear that ultra-right wing bloggers and T.V. entertainers can influence whether we are promoted or fired. We will also question whether the entertainers of whom I write are adjunct members of the committee with whom we should vet our scholarship before we publish it. Of course, some of them do not have the educational or scholarship credentials to judge our work in the first instance.

But, I digress.

The losers here will be students who will not be exposed to a panoply of ideas and approach to teaching and learning but to educational malnutrition in the form of anti-intellectual mediocrity. It will also be academic freedom which in too many of these institutions is simply not free.

How can institutions of higher learning justify living in a state of educational humdrum? Just ask the institutions that Boyce black progressive Black scholars.

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Christopher J. Metzler, PhD is Associate Dean of Human Resources for the Masters of Professional Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining Georgetown University, he was on the faculty at Cornell University's ILR School where he directed the EEO and Diversity Studies program.

Mark Anthony Neal on the Michael Eric Dyson Show

from The Michael Eric Dyson Show (WEAA-FM--Baltimore)


The New Black Man:
Mark Anthony Neal’s “Overlooked Genius”

Throughout this month – - Black Music Month - – we’ve been hearing from some of the most influential artists in popular music, jazz, and Gospel.

We’ve heard Lalah Hathaway, Melba Moore, Nancy Wilson, Chuck D., Leela James, Sonny Rollins, CeCe Winans, and Jody Watley….

We’ve also dissected the use of AutoTune technology and talked with the Rev. Jesse Jackson about the reach of Tupac Shakur.

But we’re not done yet.

We haven’t hit on Black Radio for example.

On today’s show, Dyson talks to the New Black Man, which is the online blogging moniker of Mark Anthony Neal.

Professor Neal is also a student, and teacher, of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University.

He wants to talk about one old-school artist in particular this month…. whom he calls “an overlooked genius.” And it’s not me.

Listen @ The Michael Eric Dyson Show

A "Fatherless" Debate?

(Traditional) Fathers Don’t Always Know Best
by Kai Wright

The notion that kids can’t develop properly without a biological father was a lie when Dan Quayle asserted it in 1992, and it’s a lie when Barack Obama says it now.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

New Muslim Cool

An Intimate Look at Hip-Hop’s Jihad
by Suad Abdul Khabeer

Real hip-hop heads know that Islam and hip-hop have been longtime friends, feeding off each other’s energy. Muslim ideals of self-respect and social change have inspired some of the greatest emcees, and hip-hop is giving voice to the dreams and daily struggles of a generation of Muslims. This cross-pollination between Islam and hip-hop is vividly illustrated in a new documentary, New Muslim Cool, which premieres tonight on PBS.

Directed by veteran filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, New Muslim Cool chronicles three years in the life of Hamza "Jason" Perez, a Puerto Rican Muslim, family man, emcee, interfaith prison chaplain and social activist.

So why is Hamza’s story called the New Muslim Cool? Because he is part of a generation of young Muslims who are coming of age in a post-9/11 America. They are tackling questions of race, faith, freedom and even, as Hamza does, questionable intrusions by the FBI. They unapologetically choose God and country; they are doing American Islam with style.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Chatting Up Black Radio, the Music Industry and Facebook with Michael Fordham on Blog Talk Radio

Blog Talk Radio
Michael Fordham's A Measure of Truth

A Daughter's Reflection...

special to NewBlackMan


Oatmeal
by Stephane Dunn

My father (daddy) dies. He is in bed with his girlfriend and he wakes, says her name, gasps, and that’s it. He is gone. Heart attack. It’s March and three weeks after we’ve buried gramps, my mother’s daddy. And that’s the last time I spoke to my father. The day of that funeral. We chatted a few minutes about how it was time for a little reunion, maybe a barbeque in Fort Wayne where he lived and maybe May 22, his birthday and the birthday of his granddaughter, my sister’s then two year old. I tell him that anytime I listen to James Cleveland, I think of him and Sundays, getting ready for church and leaving, all except he, who always remained at home with Albertina Walker, James, and the Mighty Clouds of Joy, cooking up some good smelling roast or stew. He laughed a little, kind of sad, and that was it. He was dead three weeks later.

Don’t remember who called. Mama, I think, with that voice that said somebody died before the “I got some bad news” comes out. Still, I am surprised, too surprised to say much or think much. My older sister has to be told; my younger sister, daddy’s best thing, knows. She is crushed - two little kids of her own but now a little girl missing what she’d already lost and the chance that somehow that perfect arc of daddy and little girl love will return whole. My older sister is dry but full of stuff, a good deal held back and in; it comes out in funeral planning drama days later in Indiana when she ticks the girlfriend off and we have to pay for the burial instead of using money he’d supposedly put aside for that.

At the funeral, I sit in the front row - my brother, younger sister, then me and the older sister. The younger sister is beside herself, the coffin, the church, us in the front row, hits hard. Her father is really gone. She wails one line, ‘I’m not ready.” I take my place in front of the pulpit, off to one side of the coffin and stand beside the brother and older sister and pay homage. I come last or maybe next to last and talk about oatmeal. I think it is a poem, kind of, but really some words trying to say something about someone I’ve missed for years, someone I’ll keep missing. I could only eat daddy’s oatmeal. Only he made it perfectly, not too thick or thin and so pretty with just the right mix of cinnamon and butter and just a bit of sugar, so good I did not need toast or milk. I say that I haven’t eaten it, oatmeal, for years, not anybody’s even my own.

I cannot remember them all, but I know my words were all about oatmeal - the best oatmeal ever. I returned to my seat and held my wailing sister. Maybe I did not, could not wail or cry because I was there and I wasn’t. I’m in the black dress, the coffin, silver, a few feet away and my sister cries on my shoulder but I’m looking down high above the choir stand and the preachers, including my step dad pastor and I’m looking down, noting the too empty pews and the few familiar faces dotting benches. I see we four sitting on that front pew and my mother and some aunts a ways behind us and the little singing and organ playing going on. When it’s over and a cousin has preached his subject, about what I cannot recall, we walk down the aisle to the preacher’s ‘ashes to ashes’ and I greet a boyfriend from back in the day and an old high school friend and then there is the cemetery. The coffin goes down, down, down and too soon we’re back at the church where people eat chicken and exchange numbers. And that’s it.

A few months later on a Sunday summer morning, my off and on again poet boyfriend rises early and says come on. For some reason I don’t ask where or why just throw on sweats, a t-shirt, and some tennis shoes and mask my fast beating heart when he pulls the four-wheel out of the drive. We don’t go far from the beige subdivision but it seems miles away, the hidden little woods behind a school where we stop. There are trees undisturbed reaching up past the clouds and a little brook in the center of the tree clump. We sit on a fallen trunk, under another tree where the bright morning sun warms up and filters down through the leaves. We don’t speak. I feel something that’s been too far from me, quiet, calm. I raise my t-shirt, baring a breast and raise my chest and ask the sun to warm me all the way through. The poet leans over softly and kisses the breast then rises and walks off. I cover my breast and rise too but do not follow him. I head towards a tree frozen in convulsions and lean against the bewitched body and look up.

I imagine the trees really do go on and on as far away as daddy and gramps and grandmamma and further, maybe to where there actually is a heaven. I stretch against the bewitched one and stretch my neck trying to see that far. Without warning, there’s a wetness on my cheeks and a low sound. My Poet stays away and I cry and look up until it comes again - calm and quiet. Minutes later, we get back on the four-wheel but this time, I hop on the front and take that wheel. I forget to worry about going too fast or getting hit in the face with a branch or flying off the thing if we hit a curve too fast. I don’t know it then, but I will learn to make oatmeal that I like.

***

Stephane Dunn, Ph.D, MFA, is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Morehouse College. She has also taught at Ohio State University. A scholarly and creative writer, she specializes in film, popular culture, literature and African American studies. She is the author of articles and commentaries and the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008).

Rethinking Juneteenth

The Truth About Juneteenth
by Thavolia Glymph

Juneteenth, widely celebrated throughout the United States, is now a commemorative holiday in 31 states. On Thursday the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and the long century of segregation and discrimination that followed its end. This, for some, long-awaited, and for others, disappointing, resolution appears to have been deliberately timed to pass on the eve of Juneteenth. It is unsurprising given the popular history of Juneteenth. And it is also troubling.

Juneteenth has in popular renderings come to be understood as the date Union Gen. Gordon Granger, arriving in Galveston on June 19, 1865, brought the news of emancipation and set Texas slaves free. From a strictly historical point of view one might think January 1, 1863, the date the Emancipation Proclamation was announced, or December 6, 1865, the date the 13th Amendment was ratified, would be more appropriate dates to commemorate.

Today, Juneteenth is celebrated as something even grander, a "holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States" or as the state of Virginia's 'Juneteenth State Holiday Observance Resolution of 2007,' put it, Juneteenth represents the day Gordon notified "the last enslaved Americans of their new status almost two and one-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation." Other state, senate and congressional resolutions and media accounts all offer up similar narratives. Strictly speaking, Juneteenth does not represent any of these things.

Read the Full Essay @ THE GRIO

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Thavolia Glymph is a professor of history and African and African American Studies at Duke University, specializing in Southern History. Her most recently published work is Out Of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), co-winner of the 2009 Philip Taft Book Prize.

Fathers and Sons; Black Men and Baseball (for Byron Hurt)

Fathers and Sons; Black Men and Baseball (for Byron Hurt)
by Mark Anthony Neal

My father had gone home to glory, months before the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president. In the difficult days before his death, there was little opportunity even to talk about such a possibility, but I have vivid memories of my father’s reaction to another "Black first." It was the fall of 1974 when the Cleveland Indians, broke one of the last racial barriers in professional sports, by naming Frank Robinson their manager. My father’s joy was palpable—one of the lasting memories that I have of him.

It was only two years before Frank Robinson was named the Cleveland manager, that another Robinson, the legendary Jackie Robinson threw out the first pitch before a world series game between the Cincinnati Reds and Oakland Athletics. Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s infamous color barrier in 1947, becoming the first black to play in the league since Moses Fleetwood Walker was effectively banned from the American Association and National Leagues (precursors the current league) in 1889. Robinson took the opportunity that day in October of 1972 to announce his hope that one day he could attend such a game and see a black manager in one of the dugouts. It would be Jackie Robinson’s last public appearance; He died on October 24, 1972 at the young age of 53. I can remember my father, trying to get his 6-year-old son—oblivious to the Jim Crow segregation that defined his father’s existence—to understand the significance of Jackie Robinson’s life and death.

My father was never much of a race man, but his sense of racial accomplishment was intimately tied to the black men he watched play professional baseball. Born in 1935, my father was of a generation of black men who clearly smelled of freedom in ways that their fathers could never imagine, but were still reigned in by very real social constraints. In men like Frank Robinson, Jackie Robinson, Juan Marachial, Henry Aaron, Elston Howard, Bob Gibson, Roberto Clemente and especially Willie Mays—the first generation of Black superstars in baseball—my father saw the possibilities of that freedom, even if it could only then be realized on the playing field. Indeed Mays’s boyish swagger—the way he loped to the batter’s box, the casual style in which he employed his signature basket catch, the way his cap always came off as he ran the bases—was an inspiration for many a boy, regardless of race.

It was my father’s love of Mays that essentially made me a baseball fan. My father could barely contain himself when Mays was traded from the San Francisco Giants to the New York Mets in May of 1972. If I was gonna be a baseball fan, I had little choice but to be a New York Met fan, despite the fact that Yankee Stadium was less than 10 minutes away from our Bronx tenement building. In the early 1970s, the New York Mets had few black ball players and none that could be called major stars, but the names of Cleon Jones, John Milner and Tommy Agee, became part of my everyday vocabulary. Though Mays was well past his prime when he was traded to the Mets, he was still a marquee name for a team that would never quite escape the shadow of their cross-town rivals, The Yankees. Until George Steinbrenner took over the Yankees in 1973, the team seemed to relish in the whiteness of their legacy.

It was during this time that my father and I began our Sunday ritual; a morning spent listening to the music of Gospel groups like the Mighty Clouds of Joy and the Pilgrim Jubilee Singers and an afternoon of watching Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner announce Met games. The most memorable times though were the Sundays when we could head out to Flushing, NY and to see the team play in person. At the time I couldn’t fully appreciate what it meant to see Willie Mays in the flesh, despite his diminished talents. It was much the same way at a 1973 game between the Mets and the Atlanta Braves, where Hank Aaron hit two-home runs during his last push towards Babe Ruth’s career total of 714 homeruns. It was with my father that I watched Mays’s last hurrah, during the 1973 World Series, when the great player’s age finally betrayed him in ways that could no longer be ignored.

Though I have remained a baseball fan for much of my life, girls and hip-hop would capture my attention in the decade after Mays’s retirement. There were few games that my father and I watched together as time progressed, though we excitedly discussed the emergence of Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Godden as the New York Mets first homegrown black superstars in the mid-1980s. There was a silence between my father and I, when both of those men succumbed to the pitfalls of being young, black and famous in New York City; my father all too aware of the brutal ways that dreams were deferred for black men of his generation and I all too aware of the young black men of my generation, who lived tragic lives, far from the back pages of the New York Daily News.

I lament that my father and I never attended a baseball game together as adults—as men who could reflect on the beauty of the game along with the challenges that we faced as black men, fathers and loving husbands. My father’s absence hit home months ago, as I watched the opening of the New York Mets' new stadium Citi Field. On hand for the opening festivities was Rachel Robinson, the 87-year-old widow of Jackie Robinson. In tribute to Robinson, Citi Field features the Jackie Robinson Rotunda where visitors can view memorabilia and video presentations of Robinson during his playing days. Sometime this summer I hope to visit Citi Field with my own children and though my father will not be there, I know that he will be there in spirit, as I tell my daughters about this game of baseball and its importance to their grand-father.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books and currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for New York University Press. He is Professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University in Durham, NC.

Chatting Up (Black) Fatherhood

"Fatherhood" (2000) by Ruth Bloch/Weinstein Gallery


REINVENTING DAD

Pacifica Radio 99.5 FM WBAI
Women, Body & Soul
Hosted by Nathalie Thandiwe

Interview with guests Professor Mark Anthony Neal, father and author of New Black Man, along with hip hop musician, educator and father, Bomani Armah (Peek-a-Boo, Read a Book, Grown Ass Man), as the discuss how men and families can benefit from the reinvention of fatherhood.

Listen to the Interview @
WOMAN, BODY & SOUL

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HOW DID YOU LEARN TO BE A FATHER?

NPR's Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan

Talk of the Nation, June 18, 2009 · Men who become fathers learn quite suddenly that the learning curve is steep and kids don't come with a user's manual. The curve can be more dramatic for men who grew up without dads.

Author Abdul Ali and Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal talk about how they learned fatherhood.

Listen to the Interview @

TALK OF THE NATION

ON-THE-AIR: Re-inventing Fatherhood

Woman, Body and Soul

Hosted by Nathalie Thandiwe.
WBAI-FM--NYC--Pacifica Radio (99.5)
Thursday June 18, 2009
12:00 noon - 1:00pm
Live Stream @ WBAI.ORG

***

THE FATHERLESS DAUGHTER

with guest Jonetta Rose Barras, author of Whatever Happened to Daddy's Little Girl?
author, columnist and DC Politics radio host (WPFW, Tuesdays @ 11 am)

Jonetta Rose Barras speaks about the Impact of Fatherlessness.

• What happens to girls who grow up without their father?
• How does it shape their growth, life choices and relationships?
• For those who mourn or rage at this loss, where is the healing?

REINVENTING DAD

with guests Professor Mark Anthony Neal, father and author of New Black Man, along with hip hop musician, educator and father, Bomani Armah (Peek-a-Boo, Read a Book, Grown Ass Man).

Mark Anthony Neal and Bomani Armah discuss how men and families can benefit from the reinvention of fatherhood.

• How does our concept of masculinity inform fatherhood and how does it confine fathers?
• What role is there for fathers who cannot provide materially for their children/ families?
• How does feminism fit into fatherhood?

Live Stream @ WBAI.ORG

Book Review: Ain't I a Feminist?: African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom

special to NewBlackMan

Ain’t I a Feminist?:
African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom
by Aaronette White
(State University of New York Press, 2008)
Reviewed by Chantel K. Liggett

***

In Ain’t I a Feminist, Aaronette White proves that progressive feminist thought and action is not foreign to present-day African American men. Even more important, however, is the way in which she helps to “demystify the process” leading these men to, and sustaining their investments in, various forms of lived feminism (199). While brilliantly organizing the narratives of the twenty self-identified feminist, profeminist, or anti-sexist men she studied into seven thematic chapters, providing helpful contextualizations and frameworks within which to understand their experiences, the evaluation she does is so fluid and congruent with the men’s experiences, it undeniably gives their words and thought processes precedence over any theory or analysis thereof. As she puts it, “how men learn to confront patriarchy and become feminists can be understood through the narratives of those who are living the experience”(193). In permitting her subjects to lead by example, White provides what can be thought of as a blueprint for the cultivation of black male feminism.

The key ingredients of lived black male feminism are “humility, emotional openness, empathy, nurturing, dialog, accountability, mutuality, power sharing, and nonviolence,” offers White, focusing on the way feminist values are internalized and continually practiced on a day-to-day basis by the men in her study (199). Beyond questioning societal structures and practices like marriage, monogamy, religion, Black Power nationalist movements, violence, workplace gender dynamics, female domesticity, homophobia/heterosexism, and authoritative or removed fatherhood, these men reflect critically on their humanity, personal development, and relationships; White centers these processes as providing a wealth of knowledge about the implementation of feminist thought. Quoting James Baldwin as saying, “Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master,” she points to the importance of feminist men striving to occupy social positions more meaningful than those of dominators (59).

More than once White uses the phrase “vigilant practices” to describe the behavioral work of feminist men. Giving credit where credit is due, she does not overlook negative bouts in the men’s feminist development, which she calls “contamination” experiences, and outlines the difficultly with which men maintain feminist lifestyles. As one of her participants says, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing one has “already made it” as a feminist, when feminism is really a continual process of revaluation and renewal (122). Another participant offers that Black male feminists also sometimes (accidentally or purposely) revert to the “male thing” (104). Elaborating on this, White states, “Feminist Black men’s use of male dominant behaviors can be subtle, unconscious, and used as a coping device when they feel threatened” (101). Given that feminism requires a radical resocialization of males, she stresses that male feminists need not be flawless, and that it would be unrealistic to expect them to. “Egalitarianism requires not perfection but effort mixed with humility,” she says, demonstrating the importance of willingness in feminist development (96). A large portion of such willingness takes the form of speaking about, listening to, and being perceptive of both ‘larger’ issues and everyday occurrences regarding gender; what White chronicles the power of in Ain’t I a Feminist is the recurrence of such seemingly simply acts. Furthermore, in “directing attention to these practices,” White “counters the popular tendency to view a person’s gender identity as fixed or as developed primarily through childhood socialization,” instead naming it an ongoing, conscious process that individuals have a large degree of control over(84).

Aaronette White further commits to detailing and addressing the patterns of specific environments and resources that have had the biggest influence on her subjects’ feminist development. Demonstrating that becoming a feminist is not something one does alone, White seeks to pinpoint what has led these men in that direction, coming to the solid conclusion that intimate friendships or romances with feminist women and institutional settings that support feminist thinking are the key portals through which they gain access and further their development. Speaking of the importance of his romantic and sexual attraction to a feminist woman in aiding his feminist development, one subject says, “I don’t believe many men will put much effort into trying to correct themselves if the person who is trying to correct them is not someone who they are committed to and who is important to them” (89). As White highlights, many of the men in her study posited feminist-thinking women as strong, firm, and challenging, prompting, if not forcing, them to reevaluate patriarchal beliefs and practices. In this way, White emphasizes the importance of female feminist thinkers opening up to and working with men, and vice versa, as opposed to having separatist movements. Friendships with feminist women offer men “insider perspectives” (112), she says, and such relationships frequently provide “constructive criticism,” “practicing ground,” “safe spaces” for feminist growth (116). Furthermore, simply being around other feminists helped her subjects legitimate or free their potential male feminist identities, in providing a “mutually understood and shared relational reality that affirms another’s identity” (121).

The men’s reliance on institutional encouragement and support of feminist thought is most evident in Chapter Four, titled “Turning Points,” in which White charts the men’s substantial shifts in their thoughts about or relationship to feminism. “Their exposure to open-minded and radical, social justice-oriented institutions,” most often universities, “and their active participation to support racial and economic injustice often provided the foundation for subsequent feminist views and practices,” she observes (87). White utilizes these findings by challenging black feminists and their communities to recreate such environments where they are lacking, to facilitate the development of feminist consciousnesses in willing boys and men who would not otherwise have access. She boldly recommends the development women’s studies curricula in elementary and high schools and calls for a multiplicity of community campaigns that would allow black men to develop feminist consciousness in settings closer to home, providing her readers a lasting challenge.

Notably, aside from chronicling the paths of twenty black men to feminism, White’s groundbreaking work demonstrates effortlessly that “when one is pressured to view one’s humanity in terms of ‘being a man’ or ‘being a woman,’ what it means to be human is lost, truncated, stereotyped, and taken less seriously” (120). What these men gain from their commitment to feminism is indefinable but shines through their stories, impossible to ignore. In giving public voice to these men in the way she has, White sets forth a compelling model for other present-day as well as future men to grab on to.

***

Chantel K. Liggett is an undergraduate at Duke University pursuing a Women's Studies Major and Study of Sexualities Certificate. She is currently conducting research on 'queer' resistance to concrete categories of identity by Dutch nationals and Surinamese migrants in Amsterdam

Black Music Month 2009--The Genius of Rev. James Cleveland

Cleveland never achieved the crossover success of some contemporary Gospel artists, but in his day he was a leading light.

Black Music Month Classics: Songs of the Sad Minstrel

BLACK MUSIC MONTH CLASSICS

Songs of the Sad Minstrel
by Mark Anthony Neal

There’s rarely a moment when John Smith aka Lil’ Jon flashes across the television screen that the “coon” meter lodged deep within my consciousness begins to vibrate. It’s not that Smith’s antics offend me—I’ve long argued that there’s often an untapped complexity attached to even the most lurid of stereotypical racial images, particularly those created by blacks themselves. Indeed Smith is part of a tradition that has produced Stepin’ Fetchit (Lincoln Perry), Butterfly McQueen, Mantan Moreland, or any shuckin’ and jivin’ plantation “darky” that understood that their ability to sing and dance (or break tackles or finish line tapes) went a long way towards self-preservation. If such antics spared you the rod two centuries ago, it can surely earn you seven-figure salaries in this era of global digitized blackness.

Perhaps the truest genius of this tradition—call it blackface minstrelsy, the coon-show, samboisms—was Bert Williams. Almost a full century before hip-hop became sonic blackface, Williams donned the burnt cork and with partner George Walker became the most popular black performers in the United States. The recent release of a collection of recordings that Williams and Walker recorded from 1901-1909, allows us to again revisit the travails of the sad minstrel.

Williams was born in 1874 in the British West Indies of relative privilege. His family later moved to Florida, ultimately settling in Riverside, California, very far removed from the “plantation tales” that Walker and Williams would ultimately perform on Broadway. A natural mimic, Williams began to look for work in the traveling medicine shows (exhibitions where “quacks” sold ointments and the like) and it is there that he met Walker. As Walker wrote in 1906, “My experience with the quack doctors taught me…that white people are always interested in what they call ‘darky’ singing and dancing.”

What particularly caught the attention of Walker and Williams were the numbers of white minstrels, who “blackened up” often billing themselves as “coons”. Unable to compete with these white performers, Williams and Walker came up with a clever marketing scheme—they began to sell themselves as “Two Real Coons”. At their artistic peak in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Williams and Walker could claim to have mounted the first all-black musical on Broadway (1903’s In Dahomey) and an international following as the most popular purveyors of the dance the Cake Walk. After Walker’s death in 1909, Williams became the first black artist featured in the Ziegfeld Follies.

What Williams and Walkers understood then and what so many black performers have come to realize since is that white mainstream interest in blackness is often predicated on their belief that what they are consuming is “authentic”, whether they are capable of discerning black authenticity or not. In the spirit of Mark Twain’s desire for the “real nigger show,” black artists have often found it financially lucrative to give white audiences the “real” that they so desire. Williams and Walker were no different. For example songs like “I Don’t Like the Face You Wear” and “The Phrenologist Coon”, which both appear on Bert Williams: The Early Years, 1901-1909, were written by Ernest Hogan. It was on the strength of his 1896 hit song (sold as sheet music) “All Coons Look Alike to Me” that Hogan became a popular writer of “coon songs”.



Whereas George Walker was just performing the coon, Bert Williams’s relationship to his characters was much more complicated. As a light-skinned black man, Williams resorted to blackening up to come off as a more convincing “coon.” As Camille F. Forbes, author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star writes, “The blackface covered and effectively hid the real Williams, protecting him from having to be the persona he portrayed on the stage.” The real Williams often lamented that he couldn’t give his largely white audiences a more complex image of his characters—“the pathos as well as the fun.” This lament along with the lack of offers to do serious dramatic roles, were the pressures that squeezed the ambition and ultimately the life out of Williams, who died in 1922 at age 47.

William McFerrin Stowe, Jr. makes the point that Williams humanized the minstrel stereotype, creating a “significant modification within the acceptable structure of Negro stage characterization.” And this is what perhaps distinguishes Williams and a host others who toiled in America’s burgeoning culture industry of the early 2oth century—a desire to give complexity to the “shiftless darky.”

*Originally Published in January 2005

Book Review: Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture, and Queer Identity

Special to NewBlackMan

Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture, and Queer Identity
by Bryant Keith Alexander
(AltaMira Press, 2006)
Review by Armond R. Towns

The construction for dominant society of what black masculinity looks like has been disseminated through the media. This construction of black men is one of hyper violence, hyper (hetero)sexuality, and hyper deviance. In Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture, and Queer Identity, Bryant Keith Alexander posits that black men construct their own masculinities which:

are unlike the stoic images of Black masculinity that we see on television, or the rough, mean, and aggressive images that we see in film. These images are not the violent, sexualized, and sometimes ineffectual images of Black men that we are expected to take as real. These are not the performances of ‘the angry Black man’ that has become the iconic representation of Black masculinity—and that we sometimes shamelessly use to a/effect service. (Alexander, 2006, pp. 151-152)

This “displacement” of the black masculine performance, either physically (by visiting China or teaching in “the ivory tower”) or mentally (detailing alternative depictions of black masculinity to the dominant black masculinity), is Alexander’s project throughout this book. And speaking through a lens of autoethnography, performance studies, and cultural studies, Alexander toys with his acceptance as well as his denial of black male stereotypes.

Taking the reader through his activities—some “homespace,” daily activities, others “tourist,” international activities—Alexander illustrates the ways in which performing black maleness is viewed overseas, on a college campus, as well as within black communities. In one chapter, Alexander details a visit to China, in which he engaged gazing and being gazed at. A fairly large, African American male with dreadlocks, Alexander recalls being “an oddity, if not a commodity that [the Chinese people] visually consumed” (3). His dreadlocks especially drew stares. In fact, multiple residents would touch his hair throughout his visit.

This reverse gaze and tactile approach threw Alexander off, because he acknowledges his plan to initially make the Chinese people a spectacle, to simply be a “fly on the wall” and watch as the Chinese residents did their daily thing. “The gross assumption here that both undergirds and haunts tourism, as well as particular practices in ethnography and intercultural scholarship in general is that the researcher/tourist is a privileged viewer and is not held to the culture-specific codes of propriety that govern human sociality in the spaces of their observation” (Alexander, 2006, p. 13). Acknowledging his privilege and his planned viewing—while coming to grips with the eyes of the Chinese people that were fixated on him—Alexander begins to “question [his] own culpability in acts of domination as [he] characterize[d] the Chinese in [his] tourist experience and in this documentation of experience” (2006, p. 19). Ultimately, Alexander leaves China with more questions than answers in relation to his black body (and black hair) and how it impacted the way in which he was viewed and the way in which he performed.

Tying into black hair, Alexander also recalls some of his earliest years in the black barbershop. Like many black men, “the test of establishing community for [him] has often been grounded in locating a barbershop” (137), a black cultural cornerstone. This cornerstone is not without outside influences that are tied to both race and gender. Within the barbershop, “the old men’s talk…served both as functional component of social exchange, and as a way of perpetuating culture and community” (143). There is also talk that is largely heterosexual in nature “that both reveals and promotes desire for women” (152). There seems little to no room for discussion of homosexuality in these spaces.

In more recent years, Alexander has also traveled “betwixt and between” two communities: the barbershop (for his shavings) and the beauty salon (for maintenance of his dreadlocks). The beauty salon, like the barbershop, is marked by gender, and Alexander acknowledges some discomfort in his travels into the beauty salon, despite becoming a regular customer. From his memory, the beauty salon, like his mother’s kitchen, was reserved for “women’s talk.” Still, “In some ways [he is] gradually accepted into this community, but not as a member. The maleness of [his] body tells a different story” (156).

The acceptance and denial of the black male body—and the various levels of acceptance and denial—is the theme that carries throughout Alexander’s book. From the “migration of Black faculty, staff, and students across the borders between the university campus and ‘the Black cultural community’” (34), to the performance of the “Good Man/Bad Man” dialectic, to the performance of a black, gay professor teaching drag in the classroom, to engaging “readers in topics that are sedimented in all of our lived experiences” (163), like the death of a loved one, Alexander’s book displays a black masculinity that is both accepted and despised, both dominant and subordinate. And by examining multiple intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, as well as showing the ways in which black men differ from and can be complicit to various black masculine performances, Alexander’s book provides a level of understanding that depicts the complexity of black masculine performance rather than the simplicity of the dominant depiction of black masculinity.

***

Armond R. Towns is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the communication and cultural studies department.

Michael Jackson--The Motown Years

Michael Jackson
Hello World- The Complete Motown Solo Collection
SITE SHIP DATE: 7/03/09
LIMITED EDITION QUANITITY: 7,000

“Michael Jackson could make you forget he was so young.”

So writes Suzee Ikeda, a Motown A&R assistant who was a creative confidante of a teenage Michael, in her introductory essay to Hello World: The Motown Solo Collection, a new 3-CD set that features every MJ recording released from 1971 to 1975, plus the Motown-era songs that were released after he left the company.

At the height of Jacksonmania in 1970-71, when everyone in the world, it seemed, was focusing on the hot kids’ group from Gary, Indiana, a solo career for Michael was not necessarily a given. But when 13-year-old Donny Osmond went solo while staying in the Osmonds family group, so did Michael, then turning 14, who was given material that made him sound even wiser and more mature as an artist. “Got To Be There” was his first solo hit, which featured a stunning, declamatory phrase that provided the name of this collection.

The LP Got To Be There, released in January 1972, also included the hits “Rockin’ Robin” and “I Wanna Be Where You Are.” It was followed by Ben, after the hit title song from a film about a pet rat—a song that became an unlikely No. 1 smash for Michael. The album was first issued with a cover featuring lurid artwork from the film, which was quickly replaced by a simpler image of MJ; our package reproduces both covers in the 48 page booklet.

Music And Me was next, an experiment in softening Michael’s sound—the album featured a few Adult Contemporary covers—followed by Forever, Michael. That LP had a harder dance age, and included the now-classic, sample-favorites “We’re Almost There” and “Just A Little Bit Of You.”

Those four albums might have been the end of the story for Michael and Motown, as the J5 left in 1975 to go to Epic Records. In the aftermath of the huge success of MJ’s solo Off The Wall, however, came the compilation One Day In Your Life, whose title song—lifted from Forever, Michael—turned into a No. 1 hit in the U.K. and top 40 AC in the U.S. Following the crazy ride of Thriller, Motown released Farewell My Summer Love, a batch of songs from the vault with contemporary overdubs; the title song went top 10 R&B.

There’s more: in 1986 Motown issued Looking Back To Yesterday, a collection of more vault masters—some with the J5—that contained further unexpected gems.

Hello World has all of that and these extra gems: all nine songs from Farewell My Summer Love are included in their original, undubbed mixes. Plus, we unearthed the original mix of “Twenty-Five Miles”—Michael’s cover of the Edwin Starr hit that has previously been available only in a 1987 vault collection. It’s all in a splendid 8” x 5.5” package with Ms. Ikeda’s intro, a main essay by Mark Anthony Neal, pages of annotations, rare photos and repros of the LP jackets. It’s deserving of the one of the greatest performers the world has ever known, at any age.

Read More at Hip-O-Select.com

Black Music Month Classics: Fertile Ground

BLACK MUSIC MONTH CLASSICS

Fertile Rewards: The Return of Fertile Ground
By Mark Anthony Neal

According to their publicity, the group Fertile Ground has sold more than 125,000 discs. In an era when bad rappers and American Idol rejects often sell twice as much, Fertile Ground’s records sales might not seem significant. But the group has sold all of those records without distribution from a major label or any support from radio or traditional video outlets. Of course stories of third-tier gangsta rappers who moved 100,000 units out of the back of their jeeps are hip-hop lore, but that’s what makes Fertile Ground’s achievement all that more astounding: against the grain of the hip-hop and R&B that masquerades as great black music, Fertile Ground has created a rich mix of Jazz, R&B, Soul that has resonated with those thirsting for Black music (with a capital "B") and artists that are more conscious of tradition than how many rotations can be garnered on a Clear Channel station. Fertile Ground’s latest recording Black Is…, the group’s fourth recording, is the fertile reward of seven years of struggle and passion to make great black music.

The Fertile Ground story begins with keyboardist James Collins. A graduate of the University of Maryland, where he majored in Biochemistry, Collins grew up a fan of jazz music and played trumpet while a student in the Baltimore Public School system. Collins was playing gigs with his jazz band and enrolled in medical school at Johns Hopkins University, when he was given a tip about a local vocalist who was a student at Baltimore’s HBCU Morgan State University. That vocalist was Navasha Daya. According to Collins, after Daya sat in with the band one night he dropped out of medical school and “started to embark upon our beautiful musical career.” With fellow band members including percussionist Ekendra Das, saxophonist Craig Alston, and trumpeter Freddie Dunn, Collins and Daya forged forward with Fertile Ground; Their first full-length recording Field Songs was released in 1998.

From the beginning Collins and the band had a deep sense that they would have to pursue a different course than what was happening in the mainstream recording industry. As Collins admitted in a recent interview, “over the last 15 or 20 years, the way records have been marketed has been by exclusively national, commercial entities” adding that “We don’t really go the commercial route of putting out a record and you work with the top producers, who do the same thing that’s already out there…we try to focus, more or less, on the legacy of art.” And that focus on the “legacy of art” is perhaps what most distinguishes Fertile Ground from so many of their contemporary peers. Listening to their new recording Black Is…, as well as their previous outings, you can hear strong strains of Nina Simone, Pharaoh Sanders, Gil Scott-Heron, Fela Kuti, Duke Ellington and even a lesser know genius like Doug Carn, who in the 1970s made classic recordings like Infant Eyes and Adam’s Apple for the independent Black Jazz Label. Like Carn, Fertile Ground mixes good music with uplifting lyrics and an independent spirit about the music industry. But Collins is quick to add that Fertile Ground’s musical influences go beyond the obvious choices noting that “you’ll also hear Talib Kweli and Esthero and even a little hint of Bjork.”

There are many highlights on Black Is…, including “Live in the Light”, “Changing Woman”, “A Blues for Me”, and “Yellow Daisies” (Collins’s favorite), but it is the title track “Black Is…” that is likely to most stir emotions. Collins recounted the band’s performance of “Black Is…” at recent show at Blues Alley in Washington, DC., where a white family walked out because they were “uncomfortable” with the song. According to Collins, “I think that pretty much sums up the reason we put the record out” adding “The chorus to the track is ‘Black is Beautiful’, that was my conclusion, but I feel that regardless of what the conclusion is, the question is still the same—“What is Black?” And I think its something that is very relevant right now.”

Collins sees the need to record a track like “Black Is…” as important, particularly at a historical moment when marketing firms and publicists hold so much sway in determining what “blackness” is. In Collins’s view, “we need to establish what makes us, a people, and hold on to those things, because if we don’t, then the dominating cultural forces, right now the marketing forces, will define us. That’s why we start to become defensive—‘we’re more than hip-hop, slang and baggy jeans’—the only reason that becomes a conversation is because other images of blackness are not being equally marketed, equally professed.

The passion and love of black music and culture that Collins and band members profess comes through powerfully in all of the group’s music. But of course there might be detractors who question why Collins, for example, would choose to give up on a career in the medical profession, in order to become a struggling musician. Collins’s choice ultimately was predicated on the fact that he believes that Fertile Ground is part of something larger—a belief that it is vitally important at this moment to replenish the well of black expressive culture. That so many black folk see such efforts as a waste of time and energy has deep implications for black youth who might not see the importance of maintaining black creative traditions, be it in music, visual arts, literature or dance. Collins notes that it’s “unfortunate that in industries that we dominate, we don’t raise our kids to be musicians, not even to learn music business or the business of music, so that we can stop complaining about the fact the we got to deal with these culturally insensitive people to put our records and our art out.” “Ultimately” Collins observes, “this is the same fight that Spike Lee has to have, that Haile Gerima has to have, that Quincy Jones had to have.”

*Originally Published in 2004

Bill Clinton on John Hope Franklin

Hubert Harrison, Black Public Intellectual

A New Biography about Hubert Harrison Offers Insight Into Black Public Intellectualism in America
by Felicia Pride

Debates have been circling lately regarding black leadership and public intellectualism. Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell recently wrote a piece for CNN that slams Tavis Smiley's inadequate critiques of Obama's treatment of race. She also gets at Smiley's "soul patrol"-which includes Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Dick Gregory-for their roles in his documentary "Stand." She feels Smiley and friends appropriate Martin Luther King's legacy and "implicitly claim that they, not Obama, are the authentic representatives of the political interests of African-Americans."

Spelman professor William Jelani Cobb, chimed in on what he called the "Obama Wars" among intellectuals. He wrote on his blog, "Conflict produces progress. Or, more specifically, the competitive market of ideas forces everyone to step up their thought game."

All this talk aligns with a growing interest in Hubert Harrison, a figure not typically studied in school or talked about in contemporary discourse. A new biography, "Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918" (the first of two volumes) by Jeffrey B. Perry, a self-described "working class scholar," intends to rekindle the work, life, and politics of a forgotten thinker.

Read the Full Review @ The Root

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William Jelani Cobb on Obama and Same-Sex Marriage

Commentary: Obama Absent on Gay Rights
by William Jelani Cobb

(CNN) -- Last week Gov. John Lynch signed a bill making New Hampshire the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage.

It was a paradoxical moment. The new law is a reminder that same-sex marriage is the civil rights issue of our era and just how far the movement for marriage equality has come. It also highlighted the unexpected and remarkable silence from the White House on this issue.

During the campaign, Barack Obama assured gays and lesbians that he supported repealing "don't ask, don't tell" as well as adoption and anti-discrimination rights for the gay community. Those kinds of promises carry a particular weight when made by a man whose very capacity to run for elected office is the yield of another civil rights struggle.

That lineage and the high expectations that come with it gave Obama an amazing degree of latitude, allowing him, for instance, to remain relatively unscathed even when he placed the Rev. Rick Warren on the Inauguration Day program.

But to date he has taken no significant action on this front and, more critically, his administration is actually being outpaced by state legislatures around the country.

Read the Full Essay @ CNN.com

Black Music Month '09: The Legacy of Jerry Butler’s Songwriter’s Workshop

BLACK MUSIC MONTH 2009

Chicago Soul Connection:
The Legacy of Jerry Butler’s Songwriters Workshop
by Mark Anthony Neal

Pop music history is filled with examples of singers who first honed their songwriting skills and offered those skills to more established acts, before making a name for themselves singing their own material. Most famously, Carole King was a staple at the famed Brill Building in New York City churning out pop confections with partner Gerry Goffin for the likes of The Shirelles, Little Eva, and Aretha Franklin, whose version of King and Goffin’s “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman” remains a Soul standard. After a decade behind the scenes, King stepped forward in the early 1970s with Writer (1970) and then Tapestry (1971), the latter which established King as one of the definitive singer-songwriters of the era. No less a famous example can be found in the case of Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, who toiled at Motown for nearly a decade creating classics like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “You’re All I Need to Get By” before becoming major stars in their own right in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Contemporarily, there’s the case of Shaffer Chimere Smith, who offered his compositions to Marques Houston, Mario (“Let Me Love You”) and Christina Milian, before stepping out front as Ne-Yo. Singers need songs, and no one understood that better than the legendary song stylist Jerry Butler, when he created the Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop in Chicago in the early 1970s. Though few remember it Butler’s workshop would have an impact on Soul music throughout the 1970s eventually figuring in the rise of Natalie Cole as the first real challenge to Aretha Franklin’s status as the “Queen of Soul”

Jerry Butler began his professional singing career in the late 1950s as the initial lead singer for The Impressions. Butler was 18-years-old when the Chicago based group topped the pop charts with “For Your Precious Love” in 1958. Among those in the group was a 16-year-old songwriter and guitarist by the name of Curtis Mayfield, later to become one of the most recognizable singer-songwriters of his generation. Though Butler was with the group for only a short time, he and Mayfield forged a productive professional relationship that led to Butler’s success recording as a solo artist in the early 1960s. Recording with with the black-owned Vee-Jay Records with the Butler/Mayfield collaboration produced hits like “Need to Belong” and “He Will Break Your Heart.”

Butler also had access to the remnants of Tin Pan Alley—the cadre of New York based songwriters and producers that were at the heart of American popular music in the early 20th century—in this case, the aforementioned Brill Building where Butler scored hits recording tracks by Brill Building residents like Hal David and Burt Bacharach (“Make It Easy On Yourself”).



When Butler signed with Mercury Records in 1966 and was again in need of strong material, he turned to two young and unproven songwriters and producers named Leon Huff and Kenny Gamble. Butler’s work with Gamble and Huff coincides with the most productive and popular period of the Soul singer’s career with a string of hits including the ballad “Never Gonna Give You Up” (later covered by Isaac Hayes on Black Moses), “Hey Western Union Man” and “Only the Strong Survive,” which became Butler’s first Gold single and gave an early inkling of the uplift music that Gamble and Huff would become known for in the 1970s. Recalling his work with Gamble and Huff, which produced the legendary The Ice Man Cometh recording, Butler writes in his autobiography Only the Strong Survive: Memoirs of a Soul Survivor,

Huff would be on the piano , while Kenny and I would come up with lyrics. Huff and Kenny would come up with concepts and play some chords, and I started singing. That’s how we came up with ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.

When Mercury Records balked at Gamble and Huff’s efforts to get a greater percentage of the profits from their production efforts with Butler, the relationship was dissolved in late 1969, though Butler would record two albums with the duo for Philadelphia International Records a decade later. Having worked with songwriters and producers like Gamble and Huff and Curtis Mayfield before them—folk who literally defined the sound of Soul music for more than a decade—Butler’s career was at a crossroads. Butler writes in Only the Strong Survive, “

I was in a terrible dilemma. Should I risk my professional reputation recording substandard material? Or should I use what I had learned over the years to lay the groundwork for developing songwriters who would supply me—and others—with quality songs for a life time. I chose the latter.

Thus the Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop was founded in Chicago in January of 1970. A year later, the workshop became a joint venture with the Chappell music publishing company which made an initial investment of $55,000 for the project.

The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop did little to revive Butler’s career—though his second Gold single “Ain’t Understanding Mellow” with Brenda Lee Eager was a product of the workshop. By 1972 though, the workshop had generated $4 million in records sales and produced about 30 chart singles recorded by the likes of The Dells, Isaac Hayes, Aretha Franklin, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Betty Everette. Despite its modest success, the real story of the Jerry Butler Songwriter’s Workshop wasn’t what it produced, but the talent that came through its doors and went on to greater success. Workshop veterans include Terry Callier, who with fellow workshop participant Larry Wade, worked on The Dells' Freedom Means (1972) recording which produced their classic “The Love We Had (Stays on My Mind)” as well as Callier’s own brilliant Cadet recordings Occasional Rain (1972) and What Color is Love? (1973)—both produced by Charles Stepney, architect of the early Earth, Wind and Fire sound. Other veterans of the workshop were Len Ron Hanks and Zane Grey who wrote L.T.D.’s breakthrough hit “(Every Time I Turn Around) Back in Love Again”(1977) and later scored their own Disco hit “Dancin’” (1978) recording as Grey and Hanks.

The most successful veterans of The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop were the duo of Chuck Jackson and Marvin Yancy. Jackson, the brother of the Reverend Jessie Jackson, was an art director at Playboy Magazine when he joined Butler’s workshop. Yancy, was the musical director and pianist at his father’s Chicago Church when he met Jackson at Reverend Jackson’s Black Expo in 1971. The two made a musical connection and the initial fruits of their collaboration was the formation of the group The Independents which featured Jackson, Yancy (who preferred staying in the background) Helen Curry, Maurice Jackson (no relation), and later Eric Thomas, who was a member of Reverend Jackson’s Operation PUSH Choir. Recording with dual leads Curry and Chick Jackson, in the spirit of the deep Soul recordings of the Soul Children, The Independents produced a series of soulful, moody and gospel inflected mid-tempo and ballad numbers including “Leaving Me,” which sold over a million copies in 1973, “Baby I Been Missing You,” “The First Time We Met,” “In the Valley of My World” (later sampled on Jay Z’s remix of “Allure”) and the stirring “Let This Be a Lesson to You.”



Despite the group’s moderate success, Jackson and Yancy disbanded The Independents to seek other opportunities. Jackson and Yancy’s fortunes changed when they had a chance encounter with the daughter of Nat King Cole, who was performing at a local club in Chicago. Natalie Cole had been performing a collection of pop standards and soft rock songs, contemplating signing with a major label, but wary of being "exploited" as the daughter of a pop icon. That all changed when Jackson and Yancy took Cole into Curtis Mayfield’s Chicago studio and recorded the demo for what became “Inseparable.” As Cole told The New York Times Stephen Holden in 1976, “I went back to R&B with my producers who gave it a little extra sophistication.” That sophistication translated into Cole’s first album Inseparable (1975), recorded for her father’s longtime label Capitol. The album eventually spawned two chart-topping singles—the title track and “This Will Be”—and earned Cole two Grammy Awards in 1975 including the award for “Best R&B Performance, Female”—the first person not named Aretha Franklin to win that category in 8 years.

A year after the release of Inseparable, mainstream newspapers like The New York Times were publishing articles openly asking if Natalie Cole was the “new queen of Soul?” (November 21, 1976). If Cole seemed to have an affinity for Franklin’s style, it wasn’t an accident. Jackson and Yancy’s “You” was recorded by both Franklin and Cole in 1975 (it was the title track of Franklin’s 1975 album) and “This Will Be” was initially offered to Franklin. With musical taste changing, Jackson and Yancy (who was briefly married to Cole in the late 1970s) were able to package Cole with a pop-jazz sound, not unlike that of Cole’s father and Jerry Butler in the early 1960s, but with the Gospel sensibility that Jackson and Yancy were most familiar with. Cole alludes to this dynamic telling Leonard Feather in a 1976 Los Angeles Times piece, about her practices of overdubbing her own background vocals instead of using backup singers:

I imagine two group; I call the N sisters and the Colettes…the Colettes—they’re a commercial kind of group—and I’ve given them names like Jody, Betty and Suzie. But the Ns are gospel singers.

The Cole, Yancy, Jackson collaboration would produce five albums and several million-selling singles including 1977’s “I’ve Got Love on My Mind” (from Thankful) and “Our Love” which was released later in the year on Unpredictable. At her peak in the 1970s, Cole music was the very definition of crossover pop music, though it was always steeped in the Gospel aesthetic that Aretha Franklin helped mainstream a decade earlier. As Cole told Feather,

I really didn’t think I could sing all that good until I began working with [Chuck and Marvin], but they can communicate to me exactly what feeling they think is right for a particular song.

No doubt Jackson and Yancy’s time at The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop, contributed to them becoming better songwriters, but also helped them become much more adept at managing talent in the studio—something that is increasingly a lost art.

After the dissipation of her professional relationship with Jackson and Yancy and eventual divorce from Yancy (who was an emerging Gospel star when he died in 1985 at age of 35), Cole went through her well documented struggles with addiction, only to reemerge in 1991 as a major pop star by literally embracing her father’s musical legacy winning three Grammy Awards for Unforgettable…with Love (1991).

For Butler’s part, he was always clear about his investment in the songwriters workshop. As he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1973,

The idea for the workshop came out of self-interest. I had obligations to do thirty sides for Mercury…Tin Pan Alley, where you used to be able to go get a couple of songs, has died for all intents and purposes.” Butler added, “I knew Chicago was not the music center that it once was. But at the time, I knew there were a number of young cats in Chicago with a lot of songwriting talent, who just didn’t have any place to take it to. And even more important, nobody to encourage them. (quoted in Robert Pruter’s Chicago Soul).

Butler’s comments are just a reminder that great artists need great material and as the popular recording industry has become more producer driven and given to star-gazing, the industry is far more interested in discovering the next Aretha Franklin or Beyonce, than the next Carole King or Chuck Jackson and Marvin Yancy.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999) and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003). A frequent contributor to The Root.com (Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive), Neal maintains a blog at http://newblackman.blogspot.com. He is currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for NYU Press.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell Takes a "Stand"

Commentary: Don't Hold Obama to Race Agenda
by Melissa Harris-Lacewell

On May 24, TV One aired the latest installment of [Tavis} Smiley's accountability campaign: a two-hour documentary titled "Stand." Recycling Spike Lee's Million Man March film, "Get On the Bus," Smiley assembled a group of prominent black male public figures for a bus ride through the South.

Ostensibly, this bus trip would provide Smiley, professors Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson, Dick Gregory and others an opportunity to reflect on the meaningful upheavals in American society and politics in the summer of 2008. "Stand" was an enormous disappointment.

Its low production value, wandering narrative, flat history and self-important egoism did little to reveal the shortcomings of the Obama phenomenon. Instead, the piece exposed and embodied the contemporary crisis of the black public intellectual in the age of Obama.

Read the Full Essay @ CNN.com

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Melissa Harris-Lacewell is associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University. She is the author of the award-winning book Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, and writes a daily blog titled The Kitchen Table.

GM's Bankruptcy and Obama's Race Problem

GM Bankruptcy Hurts People of Color Hardest
by Seth Freed Wessler

When General Motors filed for bankruptcy on Monday, it left behind a long trail of grievers-- twenty-one thousand of them. The loss of these good, union jobs and the many more that will be shed when related businesses close are devastating families and communities. For Black workers, who are highly concentrated in the auto industry, these have long been some of the few reliable jobs that pay living wages, supplying families of color the with the possibility of entering the middle class.

As we now know, high levels of unionization equate with smaller income gaps between people of color and whites. But in the economy we've inherited from the last three decades of deregulation and declining union density, people of color are increasingly relegated to low-wage, precarious work that pays too little to support a family. Unless Congress acts now to ensure that work actually pays, these workers will have few options and we'll only deepen the racial income and wealth divides.

Read the Full Article @ The Huffington Post

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Seth Freed Wessler is a Researcher at the Applied Research Center

Our Costly Mad Sports Love

special to NewBlackMan

Our Costly Mad Sports Love
by Stephane Dunn

Recently, a friend who was working in an athletic department at a big time sports school discovered just how much we love the money and thrill that comes with winning college sports programs. He was uncomfortable with the ease in which coaches and athletes expected and demanded that academic responsibilities be lightened, excused, and manipulated in the pursuit of building and maintaining strong sports programs. That such business is common at too many schools despite NCAA rules and supervision makes the very ordering of the term ‘Student athlete’ something of a joke.

The current revelation about the fraudulent allegations surrounding NBA Rookie of the Year Derrick Rose and the Memphis basketball program dramatically highlights some disturbing intertwining problems, including the NBA’s laughable one year of college requirement before draft eligibility and the still overall unimpressive graduation rates of black male athletes in Division I basketball programs. But this latest and still too little discussed Memphis scandal is especially symptomatic of how we’ve increasingly devalued education in favor of our mad sports love. For black male athletes aspiring to be the next Rose or favored NFL draft pick, this has far deeper ramifications as it feeds into a cultural tragedy that’s garnered more mouth speak than radical change in young athletes’ and fans’ consciousness: The devaluation of education as both a means to a future and ever more distant in our esteem –the value of literacy and the development of the mind.

There is a lot of blame to go around. Parents, students, coaches and recruiters, the NCAA, big time sports apparel companies, and the problematic bridge between college basketball and the NBA are particularly at fault in the Rose fiasco and the many instances of grade inflation and cheating at numerous schools over the years. Unfortunately, the exploitation of young black athletes is difficult to stem; they want to be the next Lebron James and parents want the same. The lure of reaping great financial rewards earlier rather than later is certainly understandable especially to the many athletes coming from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds. These young men can’t wait to buy Mama a house and purchase that first expensive dream car. For some, sports, like music, remains one of the most seductive channels for moving up in the world, out of poverty, and/or quite literally the ghetto.

Too many of these young black men never get a chance to think of formal education as a serious roadmap into a bright future. Athletes often get ‘special’ treatment; problems with literacy are overlooked, course failures becomes passes, and as we see with Rose, any potential barrier to the real goal –reaching the next level beyond high school and college- like an SAT test or a grade can be sidestepped if enough school administrators and coaches as well as sports leagues are willing to manipulate or at least look the other way to make it happen. The rise of AAU clubs has helped too. They might be a venue for developing athletic skills but they are part of an exploitative system in which young athletes become chess pieces in a competitive, lucrative tug of war. The development of these athletes’ basic skills and regard for their education is a casualty of the bigger focus on discovering and owning a piece of the next hot prospect. Instead, college athletes’ main job is sports; even gaining expertise in a non-athletic profession is secondary despite the so-called academic standard policies by schools and the NCAA.

This is not to suggest that every kid is or should be bound for college but it is sad that the percentage of black men in college (about 28% of the African American population ages 18-24) is not even higher while a still too large percentage (just over 10% of that age group according to a 2005 Census Bureau report) goes to prison. Despite an overall increase in recent years, a check of graduation rates for African American male athletes at some highly seeded basketball schools will reveal shameful numbers. Do we care if a million potential Roses can read and write well or at all or if they are cheated of many kinds of valuable learning or another potential gateway to a successful career? Do we care that while there are thousands of young black men who grow up dreaming of athletic fame and fortune, only a tiny percentage will actually end up being drafted or becoming highly paid NFL and NBA stars?

Certainly, this is not era in which we connect combined academic and athletic ambition and dedication to black athletes or celebrate it; this is not a Paul Robeson generation of student-athletes. Neither the mainstream sports media nor popular black media outlets – talk radio shows included spend a lot of time interrogating the implications and costs of the systemic exploitation of young athletes. The glamour of sports fame and the thrill of watching competition and the display of athletic prowess overshadow some nasty realities. Thus, the attention on black athletes who decide to stay in school and ‘risk’ many would argue, breaking a leg before being drafted and outstanding student athletes like Florida State football player and Rhodes scholar Myron Rolle, do not become hot topics of discussion.

There will continue to be NCAA investigations and sports programs suspensions and a few, like the current scandal, will get some momentary media attention but it’s really too little. A far greater number of violations will go undiscovered and unchecked. Meanwhile, a number of known and many more anonymous ‘student’ athletes will continue to gratefully and in some cases arrogantly accept the favors that come with being an athlete in high school and college, too many parents with visions of cheering famous sons will blissfully ignore serious academic deficiencies and performances or neglect to ask or interrogate academic development, the sports league clubs and high school and college recruiters and coaches at major sports schools and smaller ones will go on either directly or indirectly supporting the plethora of ‘tutors’ and teachers and test takers who ‘help’ athletes remain academically eligible, sport apparel companies will be on the hunt for tomorrow’s hottest marketing commodity, and the NBA will continue to feign concern about very young athletes’ readiness for the league with a policy that does little to either value education or develop very young athletes’ maturity. And the disregard of academic integrity and education will continue to be bolstered by our costly mad sports love.

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Stephane Dunn, Ph.D, MFA, is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Morehouse College. She has also taught at Ohio State University. A scholarly and creative writer, she specializes in film, popular culture, literature and African American studies. She is the author of articles and commentaries and the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008).

How George Tiller's Death Affects Black Women

How George Tiller's Death Affects Black Women
by Salamishah Tillet

George Tiller’s death should have civil rights activists up in arms. Where are they when black women’s lives are at stake?

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Kalup Linzy's Retrospective at the Studio Museum Harlem

Kalup Linzy's Retrospective at the Studio Museum Harlem

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Black Music Month '09: Remembering Ronnie Dyson

BLACK MUSIC MONTH 2009

Why Can’t I Touch You? : Remembering Ronnie Dyson
by Mark Anthony Neal

A few years ago, I sat in the lobby of a Greensboro, NC hotel, talking with R&B singer Rahsaan Patterson about his artistic influences. Patterson cited Eddie Kendricks, Frankie Lymon and Russell Thompkins, Jr. as obvious exemplars of the falsetto style that he represents so exquisitely today. But when the name of Ronnie Dyson is mentioned, Patterson is almost beside himself: “Dyson had a beautiful [expletive] voice. Beautiful,” exclaimed Patterson, adding that the late Pop-Soul singer was “one of the first voices that I remember hearing that possessed this quality in a male voice that was different from even some of the falsetto guys that I mentioned before.” Patterson was not alone. As Earl Calloway, longtime arts critic at the Chicago Defender wrote of the singer, “Dyson has the voice and talent to become the supreme super star of the ‘70s in the manner of Nat “King” Cole, Billy Eckstine, Frank Sinatra or even greater.” Yet some 35 years after Calloway's prediction, Ronnie Dyson, who died in 1990, has remained, at best, an afterthought and at worst, totally forgotten. What happened?

Born in Washington, DC in 1950 and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Dyson spent his early years singing in the choir at the Washington Temple in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of the borough. Dyson’s big break came in the spring of 1968 when he was cast, at age 17, in the Broadway production of the groundbreaking “rock musical” Hair. Dyson’s star-turn in the musical occurred at the opening with his rendition of “Aquarius”—a song purportedly written for him. That audiences are most familiar with The Fifth Dimension’s medley version of “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” which topped the pop charts for six weeks in 1969 and earned the group two Grammy Awards in 1970 as “Record of the Year” and “Best Vocal Performance by a Group” (both mainstream pop categories), speaks volumes about the difficulties that Dyson faced very early in his professional career.

Dyson had the misfortune, perhaps, to emerge in the late 1960s recording in the same era as signature Soul Men such as Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, and Donny Hathaway. Unlike many of his peers, Dyson’s musical sensibilities were more geared to the theater and the cabaret as than the Chitlin’ Circuit of the day. Dyson was above all, a song stylist who was most comfortable singing tunes in the vein of aforementioned Fifth Dimension, Nancy Wilson, Dionne Warwick, and Johnny Mathis. At the dawning of the 1970s and with Stax and Motown defining the sounds of Blackness for mainstream audiences, pitching the youthful Dyson to mainstream audiences with show tunes and 1960s pop standards was going to be a difficult sell. As such, Dyson spent the better part of the first decade of his career trying to find his voice. Nevertheless, it was a show tune, “(If You Let Me Make Love To You) Why Can’t I Touch You?,” from the musical Salvation! that gave Dyson his first taste of pop stardom in 1970, peaking at #9 on both the Pop and Soul charts.

Dyson followed up “Why Can’t I Touch You,” with a cover of Chuck Jackson’s (another progenitor of “white bread Soul”) “I Don’t Wanna Cry,” which made a tepid entry into the pop charts. Dyson then began to work, on what would be the most ambitious project on his career. In 1973, Dyson released One Man Band, working with the production and songwriting duo of Thom Bell and Linda Creed. Though Bell had earlier success with his work with The Delfonics and The Stylistics, his skills were in particular demand in 1973 after he had resurrected the careers of Motown cast-offs The Spinners and turned the group into the epitome of 1970s era Corporate Soul. Clearly Dyson’s record company, Columbia, was hoping find such success, not just for Dyson, but also Johnny Mathis who recorded I’m Coming Home with Bell and Creed in 1973. Dyson expressed excitement at the time telling the Atlanta Daily World, “I feel very good about the new product I recorded with Thom Bell. He’s probably the hottest producer in the world today…[and] his writing partner Linda Creed also helped a great deal,” adding that “they’re both dynamic people.”

Bell’s work with Dyson and Mathis was arguably some of the finest of his career and One Man Band is one of the best testaments to Dyson’s own talents, but neither recording found an audience. To add insult to injury, the second single from One Man Band, “Just Don’t Wanna Be Lonely” barely charted for Dyson, though the same song would become a major crossover hit for The Main Ingredient six months later. Granted, The Main Ingredient, then led by Cuba Gooding, Sr. was a known pop entity—their 1972 single Everybody Plays the Fool peaked at #2 on the pop charts—and their version of the song was arguably a better product, but there’s still little explanation as to why the song didn’t help Dyson find more success.

It would be nearly three years before Dyson would capture audience attention again and in the interim there were minor shifts in the black musical landscape as the so-called Philly Sound, culled by The Mighty Three outfit of Bell, Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff (using the same Philadelphia based musicians) and disco began to catch the attention of the major labels. Part of that shift also included the emergence of the duo of Chuck Jackson (not the legendary singer) and Marvin Yancy, who initially met in Chicago at one of Rev. Jesse Jackson’s (Chuck’s brother) Operation Breadbasket gatherings. After recording some deep Soul with The Independents, Jackson and Yancy found mainstream success with Natalie Cole who became a major pop star courtesy of Jackson and Yancy compositions like “This Will Be,” “Mr. Melody” and “I’ve Got Love on My Mind.” Indeed, Dyson’s work with the duo allowed him not only an re-introduction to Black audiences, but a another shot at crossover success. As Dyson noted at the time, “those times I fell from the public eye made it hard to get the acceptance back…but meeting Chuck and Marvin was like a whole new life.”



The initial product of Dyson’s work with Jackson and Yancy was The More You Do It (1976). The lead single and title track became Dyson’s highest charting single ever on the R&B Charts and in the parlance of record company executives, easily the “blackest” recording in Dyson’s oeuvre. Dyson followed up The More You Do It with Love in All Flavors (1977) and both recordings are testament to Jackson and Yancy providing, perhaps, the best musical environment for Dyson’s talents. Highlights from the recordings include a stellar and jaw-dropping rendition of Major Harris’s “Love Won’t Let Me Wait” (the likely template for Luther Vandross’s later version of the song) and Jackson and Yancy originals “Ain’t Nothing Wrong” and “No Way” which are on-par with the best of any of the Soul and R&B ballads produced at the time.

For the next decade of his career, Dyson essentially followed trends, mainly to the dance floor, though his subsequent recordings If the Shoe Fits (1979), Phase 2 (1982) and Brand New Day (1983) all contained glimpses of Dyson’s vocal genius, particularly on the track “Say You Will” from Phase 2. “All Over Your Face” was Dyson’s last foray onto the charts, finding some favor among audiences congregating in spaces like The Paradise Garage and The Loft. After a brief appearance on the soundtrack on Spike Lee’s first theatrical release She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Dyson disappeared from the public eye. After years of chain-smoking and other excesses, Dyson died at the age of 40 in November of 1990.

There are lots of reasons to speculate as to why someone with Dyson’s talents never achieved more lasting success; indeed the recording industry is littered with exceptional talents who never find the right material or audience. As a singer who craved mainstream success, at a historical moment when mainstream record companies were more concerned with selling “black” music to black audiences and much less interested in selling black artists to white audiences, Dyson had a difficult path to follow. His were difficulties that were shared by figures like Johnny Mathis (after the 1960s), Clint Holmes (“Playground in My Mind’), Al Wilson (“Show and Tell”) and a host of other black male singers from the era. When acts like Lionel Ritchie, Michael Jackson, and to a lesser extent, Jeffrey Osborne began to generate a mainstream appeal in the early 1980s and transcend the black music divisions at the major labels, they did so after cultivating a strong following among black audiences—audiences that in some instances they never recovered after they crossed-over. In the case of Dyson, he was a black pop singer that really had to cultivate a black following, and he never quite found that balance.

But Ronnie Dyson, if we are to be honest, was also challenged by his quite different investment in the performance of black masculinity at the time. This is part of what Rahsaan Patterson alludes to in his remembrance of Dyson as possessing “this quality in a male voice that was different.” Dyson, like Jimmy Scott before him and Rahsaan Paterson after him, possessed a vocal instrument that deconstructed and collapsed our notions of the hyper-sexualized black male soul singers of his era like Teddy Pendergrass and Barry White and Wilson Pickett from an earlier generation. In an arena in which the range of black male emotions continued to be restricted by corporate desires for only certain mode of black male expression, Ronnie Dyson was simply too emotive. In light of his own singing style Patterson admits “The fact that I can consciously sing a song in falsetto, knowing that people are gonna ask, 'Is that a girl?' doesn't bother me at all… It's scares them, because it's raw and it's real and it's human and it has no contrived phony bullshit on top of it. It's raw emotion." As Ernest Hardy brilliantly argues in his two volume collection Blood Beats "naked emotionalism renders almost any male in American culture suspect, but especially if he's of the Negro persuasion, and most especially if the emotion is not exaggeratedly countered with macho or thug signifiers." In simple terms, Ronnie Dyson was too suspect for much of his career.

In the end, Ronnie Dyson left an incredible body of work—much of it unavailable commercially at this time—and offers an example of a black male singer who was comfortable in his body—or rather, comfortable in his voice. Rahsaan Patterson perhaps says it best when he says that Ronnie Dyson “had this really independent spirit and freedom to just sing and express who he was.”

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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999) and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003). He is currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for NYU Press.

The Princess Wars

from The New York Times

Her Prince Has Come. Critics, Too.
By Brooks Barnes

“THE Princess and the Frog” does not open nationwide until December, but the buzz is already breathless: For the first time in Walt Disney animation history, the fairest of them all is black.

Princess Tiana, a hand-drawn throwback to classic Disney characters like Cinderella and Snow White, has a dazzling green gown, a classy upsweep hairdo and a diamond tiara. Like her predecessors, she is a strong-willed songbird (courtesy of the Tony-winning actress Anika Noni Rose) who finds her muscle-bound boyfriend against all odds.

“Finally, here is something that all little girls, especially young black girls, can embrace,” Cori Murray, an entertainment director at Essence magazine, recently told CNN.

To the dismay of Disney executives — along with the African-American bloggers and others who side with the company — the film is also attracting chatter of an uglier nature. Is “The Princess and the Frog,” set in New Orleans in the 1920s, about to vaporize stereotypes or promote them?

Read the Full Article @ The New York Times

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from The Root

Forget about whether the new Disney princess is black or white. The problem is with princesses. Period.

Enough With the Princesses!
by Monique Fields

There was Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas and Mulan.

Tiana arrives this fall in the first Disney film featuring a black American princess.

Set in 1920s New Orleans, The Princess and the Frog tells the story of a young waitress and gifted chef who dreams of following her father's lead and owning a restaurant. The trailer can be viewed online or on the big screen in the previews of Disney Pixar's Up, which opened May 29.

Tiana's creation has been lauded as a milestone. She is a first in a long succession of Disney princesses, which began more than 70 years ago. The toys she inspires will acknowledge the beauty of young black women as children of all colors identify with Tiana.

Still, as the mother of two young girls, I fear I will be doing damage control for years after the credits roll.

In a recent New York Times article, critics railed on whether or not Tiana conquers racial stereotypes. Forget about all that. The problem is with the princess mentality.

The princess mentality is pervasive in our society. Everything from baby bibs to bicycles is scrawled with the P-word. A mother has to shop long and hard to find clothing that isn't glittery or pierced with rhinestones. Just when you think you've defeated the princess marketing monster, someone else shows up on your doorstep with the cutest thing ever.

I'm not the wicked stepmother when it comes to princesses. I just want a dash of reality thrown into my daughter's entertainment from time to time.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Duke Professor Wins Philip Taft Labor History Book Award

from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations

Philip Taft Labor History Book Award
2009 Award Recipients

Thavolia Glymph & Jana K. Lipman

The Taft Labor History Prize Committee is pleased to announce the winners of the 2009 prize for the best book in labor and working-class history published in 2008. This year, the Committee is particularly happy to announce that we have co-winners of the prize. We believe that these two books represent the growth of labor history both temporally and geographically. Both books are deeply researched, beautifully written, and powerfully argued.

Thavolia Glymph's Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press) reconceptualizes the planter household as a workplace with labor and class as well as gender and race relations. Detailing the day-to-day relations between black and white women and how those relations changed, Glymph offers a telling critique of the limits of such notions as patriarchy, domesticity, and private versus public spheres.

Jana K. Lipman's Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution (University of California Press) examines how United States labor practices in a military outpost maintained neocolonialism. Foregrounding the women and men who lived and worked under the empire, Lipman demonstrates the importance of a transnational perspective and opens a window to a virtually unknown chapter of United States labor history.

This year the Taft Prize comes with a cash award of $1,000 for each winner. It is named in honor of Professor Philip Taft, an eminent labor historian and economist, who made outstanding contributions to the field of labor and working-class history during his lengthy career. The prize competition is administered by the ILR School at Cornell University in collaboration with LAWCHA (Labor and Working Class History Association) and has been held annually since 1978. The members of the 2009 Prize committee were: Jefferson Cowie, Ileen DeVault (chair), Nancy Gabin, Gilbert Gonzalez, and Joe Trotter.