Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 418

Soundcheck: Composer and Drummer Tyshawn Sorey Explores Time

'Newark-born composer, multi-instrumentalist, collaborator, and 2017 MacArthur Fellow Tyshawn Sorey, is also the Assistant Professor of Composition and Creative Music at Wesleyan University. Sorey heads a newly-formed ensemble that incorporates turntablism, electronics, and spontaneous composition. Tyshawn Sorey and collaborators Graham Haynes (trumpet), Val-Inc (electronics, percussion, and turntables), and Brandon Ross (guitar) join us in-studio.' -- Soundcheck

On Seeing an Africa Beyond Our Anti-Blackness

'Writer Zoé Samudzi examines the blindspots in the Western political imagination when it views Africa - as a continent flattened and dehumanized by our anti-Blackness, and a site of continued economic and military predation by imperialist Western governments - and calls for the left to examine its own internal and international racism problem. Samudzi wrote the article Africa’s Place in the Radical Imagination for ROAR Magazine.' -- This is Hell! 

'Fight The Power': The Isley Brothers, Public Enemy and A Tale Of 2 Anthems

'NPR's American Anthem series brings together two songwriters — Ernie Isley of The Isley Brothers and Chuck D of Public Enemy — whose respective versions of "Fight the Power" eyed the same struggle.'  

‘I Gotta Fight for My Girl’: Adam Levine, ‘The Voice’ and the Kinship of Whiteness by Stephane Dunn

‘I Gotta Fight for My Girl’: Adam Levine, ‘The Voice’ and the Kinship of Whiteness by Stephane Dunn | @DrStephaneDunn | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Every week during the season of TV’s The Voice, competing singers have to reclaim the right to be there. What happened two weeks or three prior - whether the artist got the most votes, the least votes or was number one on iTunes the prior week - never equals a guarantee of staying. Each singer is as good as the last performance voted on. Fans don’t always reward the best voice performance.  Competing singers and viewers must ride with the frustrating, jarring incongruities between talent and popularity. That’s why the coaches, in this case Adam Levine, Blake Shelton and whichever current two female coaches on The Voice’s absurd rotation happen to be in the chairs, must do their absolute best to be mentor-coaches that champion the talented overlooked underdogs on their team.
During a crucial elimination round, Adam Levine made a mockery of that pretense when he did the unthinkable and told his fans  that instead of voting for his singer DeAndre Nico who clearly outperformed Blake team member Dave Fenley, they should vote for his young team member Reagan Strange. In his words, he had to fight "for his girl" because she can't do it for herself. And clearly, too many fans uncritically followed his lead. Reagan Strange was in the bottom three and was present, as Carson Daly kept repeating, but too ill to perform.
While there has been some social media furor over Levine throwing Nico "under the bus" or 'Kanye Westing" him, not enough, if anything, will be said about the not so covert gendered racial implications of the Levine spectacle with assistance from the strangely unprepared Voice rule makers.
These days gendered racial politics become real enough to confront primarily when they are ‘visible’ through some controversial language uttered on-air or over Twitter or when racial violence makes news. Harder to call out is the kind of insidious and persistent racial politics that is rooted in the conscious of American culture and in individuals through social conditioning and personal identification which comes to the fore often in emotional moments. These days, heavy highlight on this is often limited to major elections or reflections on a historical episode like the OJ Simpson trial when it’s okay to address how racial and or gender bias influences people’s choices.
Levine cast Reagan Strange and himself as star sympathetic players in the narrative he wrote from the coach’s chair. To paraphrase him, he had to rally behind Strange because of his "special relationship" with her and he has "two little girls at home. He was thinking as a father. [Read: Reagan was like his own].
It was a very John Grisham A Time to Kill Jake-like summation. In the movie adaptation, Jake, played by Matthew McConaughey, asks the all-White jury members to imagine that the victim is a little White girl who was violated by two White men instead of the young Black girl (Tonya Lee) who is the actual victim  in order to get his Black client (Sam Jackson) acquitted by the southern White jury .
DeAndre Nico was clearly the favored when the voting began and deserved to be after his performance, but with Levine’s emotional display of kinship with Reagan Strange over his other singer, they were suddenly neck and neck then Strange a sliver ahead. Completing the narrative of the girl like one of his daughters needing and deserving to be rescued, The Voice was quick enough to heighten the melodrama by suddenly showing Levine’s imaginary other daughter, cutting to a dewy eyed Reagan Strange, clinging to her mother and looking impossibly young and tragic in what appeared to be a white robe.
But let’s say the covert racialized gender implications of Levine’s spectacle still seem too far-fetched to grasp. Imagine the situation reversed. DeAndre Nico is ill and cannot fight to stay with a last performance and Reagan Strange performs and bests Blake’s singer.
Cut to Adam Levine. He is sympathizing with Nico remarking how sad it is he can’t perform. He reminds us that DeAndre Nico is a great singer, and it’s all so sad. But he has none of the personal identification he cited in his endorsement of Reagan. He doesn’t see or characterize DeAndre Nico as a tragically robbed figure. He does not  equally value Nico’s story, his disappointment, or possible fate as the older contestant and as a black male R&B singer with arguably less time, opportunity,  and representation in the semi- and finals rounds of the show.
Nico’s inability to take the stage, his not being a young White girl that would provoke Levine’s association with his own or faith in him as a sympathetic figure for viewer support doomed Nico personal even before he performed so well.
It was disheartening for what it taught Reagan Strange and Levine’s girls at home and for what it reiterated to DeAndre Nico and viewers. The content of your talent and representation does not trump personal alliance even if you do the best performance of the battle moment The personal and cultural identification of all three singers - Nico, Strange, and Adam Levine most of all, played the defining role in who stayed when he determined that one of his singers was his really his own. So much for being judged by the performance.
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S​tephane Dunn is a writer and professor and the director of the Morehouse College Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies Program​ (CTEMS). Her ​publications include the 2008 book Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films(U of Illinois) and a number of articles in mediums such as Ebony.com, The Atlantic, The Root.com, Bright Lights Film journal, and others. Follow her on Twitter at twitter @DrStephaneDunn and www.stephanedunn.com.

Black Women Who Brunch: Voices from the Writers Room

'Black Women Who Brunch, co-founded by Lena Waithe, gathered to discuss where the industry could do better and what they wish their colleagues would know about being a Black woman in the business.' --
The Hollywood Reporter

Black Women are Dying From Cervical Cancer in Alabama

'The Federal and many state and local governments are not doing enough to prevent cervical cancer deaths, which are largely preventable, Human Rights Watch said in a report issued today. Approximately 4,200 women a year die in the United States from cervical cancer, including disproportionately high numbers of Black women. The 103-page report, “It Should Not Happen: Alabama’s Failure to Prevent Cervical Cancer Death in the Black Belt,” documents how state and federal policies contribute to a treacherous reproductive health environment in Alabama, where women are dying from cervical cancer at rates higher than in any other US state. The report presents the experiences of women mostly from the Alabama Black Belt, a largely rural region of Alabama that is primarily African American and has high rates of poverty and poor physical health. Human Rights Watch found that governments are not doing enough to facilitate access to reproductive health care services and provide information to prevent these deaths.' --  HumanRightsWatch

Zócalo Public Square: What Does the Life of Frederick Douglass Tell Us About America?

'From his youth, as a slave growing up in antebellum Maryland, Frederick Douglass saw the double-ness of American life. He recognized the gulf between the nation’s enlightened principles and its racist policies, the fissure between the noble rhetoric of its white ruling class and the violence with which that same class bound African Americans in captivity. And through the lenses of his formidable intellect and his flammable oratory, Douglass later would confront his own double-ness—his simultaneous love for, and rage at, the United States. A packed audience at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown Los Angeles wrestled with some of those same contradictions, set to the rhythms of a free-flowing conversation between Yale historian and Douglass biographer David Blight and cultural critic, comedian, and author Baratunde Thurston, who moderated.' --  Zócalo Public Square

Voter Suppression in the Twenty-First Century: a Conversation with Carol Anderson

'In the November midterm elections, Stacey Abrams, a gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, arrived at her polling place to cast a vote for herself, only to have a poll worker claim that she had already filed for an absentee ballot. Carol Anderson’s book One Person, No Vote explores how measures designed to purge voters rolls or limit voting have targeted Democratic and particularly minority voters. Anderson sees voter-identification laws and a wide range of bureaucratic snafus as successors to the more blatantly racist measures that existed before the Voting Rights Act; she describes the resurgence of voter suppression as an expression of white rage. “It is not what we think of in terms of Charlottesville and the tiki torches,” she tells David Remnick. “It's the kind of methodical, systematic, bureaucratic power that undermines African-Americans’ advances." White Americans, she says, see themselves as trapped in a kind of “zero sum” situation, in which all advances for people of color must come at whites’ expense.'  -- The New Yorker Radio Hour

A Trap Jazz Classic: Bridget Ramsey ----- Save Your Love for Me featuring Ursula Rucker

'University of Pennsylvania professor Dr. Guthrie Ramsey is excited to announce “Save Your Love for Me,” a new music video and single release from his imprint, The MusiQ Department. Recorded by Bridget Ramsey, backed by the Dr. Guy’s MusiQology band, the song is a remake of  the timeless classic by Nancy Wilson and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley.  The video is the Ramsey family’s love letter to Philadelphia—filmed locally at spaces such as South Philly’s recording space Turtle Studiosand the record collector haven Brewerytown Beats. The city’s creative arts community—in the midst of a renaissance—is highlighted in the music video shot by William Wolf. It also highlights a multi-generational group of local musicians, led by the poet and spoken-word recording artist Ursula Rucker, who performs in the track’s introduction before Ramsey’s airy, buoyant vocal grows throughout the recording, taking the casual elegance of the Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley classic and building to a vocal and instrumental crescendo.' 

What the New York Times Doesn't Write About When it Writes about Policing and White Supremacy.

'Writer Natasha Lennard explains what the press misses about the links between White supremacists and the police - from anecdotal, incidental reporting that misses the historical and structural anti-Blackness of law enforcement in the US, to the absent coverage of the movement for Black Lives, itself a challenge to the media's consistent blindspot on policing and racism. Lennard wrote the article Even the FBI Thinks Police Have Links to White Supremacists - but Don’t Tell the New York Times for the Intercept.' -- This is Hell!