Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 349

Solange - When I Get Home (Director's Cut)

The extended director’s cut of Solange’s interdisciplinary performance art film When I Get Home. Directed Solange Knowles  with contributing directors include Alan Ferguson, Terence Nance, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Ray Tintori.

Sophia Chang Speaks on the Process Of Creating Her Audible Memoir, 'The Baddest Bitch in the Room'

'Sophia Chang is a badass of the music industry. As the daughter of Korean immigrants in predominantly white suburban Vancouver, she grew up shunning the "model minority" myth. Armed with a fierce sense of independence, she moved to New York City and infiltrated the world of hip-hop, yet remained mostly in the shadows of the artists she supported. With her debut memoir, The Baddest Bitch in the Room, Sophia Chang is finally ready to grab the mic for herself. In this Audible Original by Hello Sunshine, Sophia Chang drops knowledge about her motivating journey that took her from record label boardrooms to the Wudang mountains as she built a life shattering biases about Asian women.' -- BUILD Series

Intersectionality Matters with Kimberlé Crenshaw: Life, LIberty & the Pursuit of Nappyness With Tracee Ellis Ross & Brittany Noble Jones

'On this special episode of Intersectionality Matters, host Kimberlé Crenshaw dishes with Mixed-ish star and PATTERN founder Tracee Ellis Ross on their respective journeys towards loving their own natural hair, aesthetic freedom, and how the current convulsive political moment is expanding the social justice imaginary. We also hear from award-winning journalist Brittany Noble Jones about her personal experience with hair discrimination in the workplace and modeling self-love for the next generation. Tune in for an inspiring look at Black women’s tireless advocacy for life, liberty and the pursuit of nappyness.'

Rewind The Scene: Asante Blackk & Lyric Ross

'Lyric Ross and Asante Blackk told Shadow And Act all about what it was like to film Deja and Malik's first date as shown in episode 7 of the fourth season of This Is Us, "The Dinner and The Date." In this installment of our Rewind The Scene series, Blackk and Ross talked about some of the high points of filming the episode, such as taking in the sights of Philadelphia, as well as some of the challenges.' -- Blavity

Black in Blue: A Mt. Gilead Police Story (dir. Seneca Modest)

'Black in Blue: A Mt. Gilead Police Story chronicles four police officers who served in Mt. Gilead and Montgomery County. Seneca Jermaine Modest is an aspiring film student from Rockford, Illinois. As a graduate student at Duke University MALS/GLS, he seeks to combat the objectification and voyeuristic view of marginalized communities by representing individuals and communities without fear or bias.'
Black in Blue: A Mt. Gilead Police Story from Center for Documentary Studies on Vimeo.

Black Homeowners, Real Estate Racism and the Mechanisms ofPpredatory Inclusion

'African American studies scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor examines the mechanism of racism in the American real estate industry - as post-1968 public policies pushed Black renters and homeowners into a racially stratified, predatory housing market without Civil Rights protection, a predatory inclusion took shape, funneling wealth into private industry and foreclosing the futures of Black families for decades to come. Taylor is author of the book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership from University of North Carolina Press.' -- This is Hell! 

Mpho Matsipa: On Spaces of Possibilities and African Mobilities

'In this interview by Léopold Lambert, Mpho Matsipa describes the spirit and contents of the exhibition she curated in 2018. Entitled “African Mobilities: This is not a Refugee Camp Exhibition,” this powerfully-curated gathering of artworks provides the bases of a conversation about the notions of mobilities and temporalities in the context of the African continent, from the mind-expanding maps of the Chimurenga Library and the cartographic entanglements by Daba Wgaruvam Thembinkosi Goniwe and Nolan Oswald Dennis to the futurist vision of Olalekan Jeyifous and Wale Lawal. Mpho Matsipa is a researcher at the Wits City Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She has a degree in architecture from the University of Cape Town and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.'  -- The Funambulist Podcast 

Broken Bodies at Amazon

'This year, Amazon rolled out one-day delivery on selected items. The convenience is alluring, but what is the true cost of speedy shipping? A new investigation by Will Evans for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting shows that workers at 23 Amazon fulfillment centers across the country are being injured at more than double the rate of the industry average. In some facilities, it’s four or even six times that average. Workers say speed is a major factor. Strains and sprains are the most common kind of injuries we found, but that can put a worker out for weeks or months. Sometimes, workers don’t recover from the injury and must manage chronic pain far outlasting the time they worked at the company.' -- Reveal

A New Jim Code? Ruha Benjamin in Conversation with Jasmine McNealy

'From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and even deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin presents the concept of the “New Jim Code" to explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity: by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Benjamin will also consider how race itself is a kind of tool designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice and discuss how technology is and can be used toward liberatory ends.'-- the Berkman Klein Center 

Reflections of a God Emcee: A Review of Rakim’s 'Sweat the Technique: Revelations on Creativity from the Lyrical Genius'

Reflections of a God Emcee:  A Review of Rakim’s Sweat the Technique: Revelations on Creativity from the Lyrical Genius by Tyler Bunzey | @t_bunzey | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
In 2019 conservative internet shock jock Ben Shapiro felt intellectually empowered by his father’s background in music theory and claimed that rap isn’t music during an interview with indie rapper Zuby for Shapiro’s YouTube show. Shapiro outlined three dominant components of Western music—harmony, melody, and rhythm—and claimed that rap only meets the rhythm component, calling it “basically rhythmic speaking.” While Shapiro’s comments are kind of like saying a dry-age ribeye fails to meet the qualifications of what makes a good lobster, his comments come with no surprise to those familiar with the discourses surrounding rap’s musicality. 
After all, Bill O’Reilly famously went after Ludacris when Pespi used him for a new ad campaign in the early 2000s. Stones guitarist Keith Richards famously said in 2015 that rap was for “tone-deaf people.” Gerald Benjamin, Director of the Benjamin Center for Public Policy Initiatives as SUNY New Paltz, told the New York Times in 2018 that rap is not “real music.” These types of critiques, all contemporary, have been thrown at rap since its first commercial hit in 1979. They all have strong racialized undertones of determining what “counts” as music and have a long history in the Western evaluation of black art, dating back to Hegel’s declaration of black music as “detestable noise” in his Lectures on Aesthetics, Volume 1 (1835). The only thing noteworthy of these comments is that rap is denigrated along the same lines of artistic demerit in 2019 that Tricia Rose was writing against in 1994 with the first comprehensive monograph about hip-hop, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
Obviously rap owes its naysayers absolutely nothing. Hip-hop has a global impact as a musical form from marketing to fashion to diplomacy to the way that pretty much all contemporary pop sounds. Rakim—the god emcee and half of the innovative hip-hop duo Eric B. and Rakim—exposes, however, the complexity behind rap composition that its detractors insist on missing in his new memoir Sweat the Technique: Revelations on Creativity from the Lyrical Genius, written with veteran writer and activist Bakari Kitwana.. 
This is not to say that the memoir makes a case for rap. If you don’t like rap, Rakim likely doesn’t give a damn what you think. Instead, Rakim maps his own techniques and tricks to his writing process, showing how composing rap is a complex, multi-faceted process that includes understanding of musical principles, writing profusely, learning audience interaction and performance, and understanding branding as a way to communicate your message. Part autobiography, part liner notes, part how-to manual, and part artistic meditation, this memoir is unrivaled in type and content, especially for the hip-hop community. Preserving his legacy while leading young emcees through what he has learned about composition, Rakim’s memoir places discussions of rap’s artistry onto another planet, projecting the discussion of what rap can be into another discursive universe altogether.
One of the four major formal strands present in Rakim’s memoir is his meditations on his process and art. He opens the book with a prologue about his process that begins by narrating what goes on in his head when he begins to write. He doesn’t describe what he is doing. This part isn’t a how-to manual. Instead, he describes the affective significance of emcee composition: exploring how the room feels, sounds, and looks as his awareness heightens in his writing process. He tells us that he writes to “achieve omnipresence” and get an original idea, meditating to allowing his brain to be freed from earthly chains. This meditation on his process, like others peppered throughout the book, gives an unprecedented look at the feeling of writing from one of hip-hop’s most prodigious rappers to pick up a pen and paper. 
Coupled with his poetic meditations are very practical suggestions of how to compose rap like Rakim. The God Emcee leads us through his various processes, from mapping out his words on homemade graph paper in order to get as many internal rhymes as possible to writing songs from finish to start in order to overcome writer’s block. The how-to sections of his memoir, often intertwined with his liner notes or autobiography, help aspiring lyricists to develop their own craft while allowing hip-hop critics and academics like myself to have an inside view of his compositional process. What is clear in these sections is that Rakim is very intentional about his technique, and the excellence of his discography is largely dependent on his insistence on always pushing himself further as a writer and an artist.
Many of these how-to sections can be found in what I call his liner notes sections, five of which are interspersed throughout his memoir. In a beautiful mode of pedagogy, Rakim includes the lyrical content of a song and then describes the process of composing that song—both in terms of techniques and the actual studio process. As an admixture of artistic history, jazz liner notes, and RapGenius annotations, these sections provide formal history and analysis of the composition of his solo hits like “How to Emcee,” The Mystery (Who is God?),” and “Casualties of War.” For hip-hop heads, these sections are invaluable records of how one of the most innovative emcees constructed his work. After all, liner notes are rare if non-existent for most hip-hop records, so much so that Brian Cross developed a collection of his own liner notes in Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies. Rakim’s memoir, intertwining history and technical instruction, gives readers an opportunity to get rare insight into the composition of five of his solo tracks. 
The last element interspersed throughout Sweat the Techniqueis Rakim’s autobiography, narrating the story of his life, his innovative work with Eric B., and his solo career. The main structure that holds the liner notes, how-to sections, and artistic ruminations is his life story from his birth to the present day, showing how his practices developed from the lessons that he learned growing up. He details his rise, his struggles to define his style against a mainstream that didn’t understand it, his formation of a rap persona and identity, and how he drew boundaries as an artist as he matured. Rakim shows us that to be an innovative and prodigious rapper, one has to have a clear identity as an artist; there were countless personal, artistic, and industry obstacles that he encountered from the development of his slow style to his refusal to take on a gangsta persona, and he claims that without knowledge of himself that he got from his family, his personal studies, and his faith, he would have been led astray on his journey. 
What separates Rakim’s memoir from other rap memoirs is that he is eager to allow the multiplicity of rap’s aesthetics to flourish as he discusses his techniques. Unlike’s Jay-Z’s Decoded which makes a case for the literacyof hip-hop’s composition, Rakim juxtaposes word choice with audience interaction, verbal flow with penmanship, and musicianship with performance to show that rap communicates far beyond a written poem spoken over beats. Rakim’s technique is as much oral as it is written, and he is always careful to show how truly complex rap composition is. Hidden in his stories about studio composition, reading widely, and growing up in New York are the ways that hip-hop’s forms of communication like writing, speaking, performing, and making music are always intertwined, irreducible to one another. Coming from one of hip-hop’s most traditionally literate composers in terms of his process and style, this message is fundamental to understanding how Rakim views the hip-hop’s formal musical characteristics. 
There is truly nothing quite like Sweat the Technique out there when it comes to understanding how rap works and how artists perceive their own composition. Rakim, along with Kitwana, has created a record of his creative process, confirming that the beauty of his work comes through the craftsmanship that rap’s critics like Shapiro think is absent. According to Rakim, rap is much more than spoken words over beats. All you’ve got to do to see it is sweat the technique. 
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Tyler Bunzey is a  Teaching Fellow and Doctoral Student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.  Follow him on Twitter: @tbunz3