Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 478

‘SexyNotSilent’ Exhibit Is Colorful Exploration Of Women’s Many Faces

'Visual artist Natasha Powell Walker was struck by the dichotomy required of her as a woman in corporate America: at work she had to be cutthroat and self-promotional, while her friends and family expected her to be loving and nurturing as soon as she left the office. The struggle to deal with these conflicting expectations led Powell Walker to create a series of paintings that represent the many characters women embody and the multitude of faces they present to the world. Powell Walker’s work will be on display in the Friedl Gallery on Duke’s East Campus in a new exhibit beginning Jan.18. State of Things Host  Frank Stasio talks with Powell Walker about her art, how it resonates at this moment of greater societal reckoning with how women are perceived and treated in the workplace; She gives an artist's talk about the exhibit at the Friedl Gallery on Jan. 25.'

Preview: GREAT PERFORMANCES Presents Nas Performing “Illmatic” with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center (Feb 2 on PBS)

'Two decades after the album’s critically acclaimed release, hip-hop artist Nas teamed up with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, to stage a symphonic rendition of “Illmatic,” one of the most revered albums in hip-hop history. The new concert film Great Performances — Nas Live From the Kennedy Center: Classical Hip-Hop captures the energy and nostalgia of this collaborative performance and premieres nationwide Friday, February 2 at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings).'

"Get Out" writer-director Jordan Peele on Race Today

'One-half of the duo Key & Peele, Jordan Peele has burst beyond the sketch comedy universe with one of the year's most critically-acclaimed films: Get Out, a satirical horror film in which a black man uncovers the terrifying secret beneath the surface of his white girlfriend's hometown. Correspondent Tracy Smith talks with Peele, a Directors Guild of America nominee and a front-runner for an Oscar nomination, about the state of race relations today, about President Trump's attitudes on race, and how art can help bring progress.' -- CBS Sunday Morning

Flint in Slow Motion: Segregation, Environmental Racism and East Chicago's Poisoned Ground

'Investigative reporter Rebecca Burns surveys the toxic legacy environmental racism and housing discrimination in East Chicago, Indiana -- as a public housing complex built over the site of a former lead smelter poisoned generations of people, far beyond the concern of developers and politicians responsible for the site's location. Burns wrote the article "On Poisoned Ground: East Chicago’s legacy of lead pollution" for The Baffler .

Op-Docs: Black Colleges in the Age of Trump (dir. Stanley Nelson)

'Stanley Nelson is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning director and producer of the feature-length documentary from which this film is adapted: “Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities,” which will air on Independent Lens on February 19. His previous Op-Doc is “The Black Panthers, Revisited.”'

The Power That Never Diminishes by Charles Bane, Jr.

Elizabeth Catlett
The Power That Never Diminishes by Charles Bane, Jr. | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Firmly steering the tiller of an unwieldy boat on a growing wave, sails of the feminist movement are being directed by women who are ever and ever more woke towards a feminism that must define its triumph as the triumph of the Black Woman. In her lies a historic strength rooted in a social gospel.
We cannot go back to a civil rights era where marches and boycotts were directed from church -we are too religiously diverse ( or doubting) for that now - but we can imitate the methods that originated there and which from the pulpit sounded like lightning, or a trumpet calling humanity to pilgrimage.
Here is one undeniable creed: there is no space between the fight for: fair immigration, the safety of transgender persons, the right of a woman to her own body, a country safe from gun violence. All these and more are righteous causes and the keen observer recognizes that in the feminist struggle may lie the hope of achieving them all, for before the Gospels were set to paper, Hebrew sages wrote that Providence “ counts the tears of women.”
A social gospel is still relevant and the sharp among us must look to its practical history even as we describe the light of its victories to gatherings in synagogues and mosques.
Let us recognize Black women as spectacular beings, as are the gender-changed and the deep-eyed behind their veils. But let us add to the arching goals of feminism the qualifier of Black equality to prove the movement’s true worth.
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Charles Bane, Jr. is the author of The Ascent Of Feminist History

Golden Globes Fade to Black to Protest #MeToo; But for Black Working Men Dressing for Success Always a High-Stakes Scenario

Golden Globes Fade to Black to Protest #MeToo; But for Black Working Men Dressing for Success Always a High-Stakes Scenario by Jackson F. Brown | @JacksonFBrown | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Of course, Hollywood would protest its own structural inequality with a retreat to sartorial conservatism. So don’t be confused by the all-black garb worn by men at Sunday’s Golden Globes. Far from a nod to tradition, black symbolizes solidarity with the (mostly) women who’ve highlighted the film industry’s rampant sexual misconduct in recent months—capping off 2017’s wildfire #MeToo movement with the safest fashion diktat possible.
Donald Glover and David Oyelowo best stash those fashion-forward brown velvet Gucci and printed, purple D&G numbers from Globes past back in their respective closets and dust off the penguin suits. Trust that the irony won’t be lost on black male professionals facing their own sartorial dilemma outside Tinseltown.
While the Mark Zuckerbergs and Tim Cooks of the world sport hoodies and Nikes to the office and sartorial standards across industries likewise trend toward the casual, it would appear that many a black male administrator, donning traditional dark suits, tie pins, and pocket squares, has missed the memo. The optics of one’s leadership—especially for black male leaders in primarily white institutions—most certainly matter, but at this critical sartorial moment, a reality check is in order: dressing too formally for one’s occupational context turns otherwise respectable attire into a spectacle.
Encountering a black male professional in, for example, innumerable college towns across the U.S. can be as rare as finding a black male lead in a Hollywood rom-com. And as 2009’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr. arrest-tuned-Beer-Summit incident suggests, it’s no secret black professionals face disproportionate scrutiny and challenges to their legitimacy in the face of these demographics. On some level, fastidiously keeping the bowtie symmetrical and a lint roller on standby are as much measures of self-preservation as preening.
Let’s not forget, “dressing for success” in the Zuckerberg sense produced a fatal outcome for Trayvon.
To fellow black males, the motivation for this trend is clear. Formal attire makes a readily legible claim about one’s respectability and legitimacy in the way the mustache served for an earlier generation of black men as a symbol of their manhood, particularly in light the Jim Crow custom of labeling black men as “boys.” In our current moment, however, such black male claims to legitimacy are valid yet inconsequential if they are made at the expense of a broader acceptance of black men in our workplaces and communities.
After all, whether organizing a Black Student Association solidarity march or managing an academic office, to which even professors arrive in Polos and denim, neither job necessarily requires a cashmere sport jacket or a herringbone vest. In fact, overly formal fashion runs the risk of not only socially isolating black males from their more business-casual-inclined colleagues (“He thinks he’s too good for this job.”) but also creating a relational gulf between black males and their primary clients—on university campuses, students. “Dressing for success” in the conventional sense could, in other words, actually hinder one’s job performance and career objectives and prospects.
Certainly, professionals chasing the dream of a corner office in an executive suite should dress to look the part if they are so inclined. And, for college instructors, study after study has indeed indicated a correlation between students’ initial perception of faculty members’ credibility, competence and knowledgeability and the formalness of their dress.
Moreover, there is admittedly something to be said for high personal fashion standards and, indeed, a refreshing awe in spotting a finely groomed, formally attired black male at a primarily white institution—like experiencing Denzel Washington’s dramatic entrance in his latest action thriller. But encounter that Sunday suit in one too many HR symposiums, budget briefings, or staff potlucks, and one begins to wonder for what one’s colleague is compensating.
My generation of black Xennials learned the primacy of professional attire early on. I gathered my education perusing my parents’ walk-in closet: my dad’s institutional garb, pale dress shirts and dark slacks, lined uniformly on one side, the silk tongues of his numerous neckties slung over two hangers wedged in the corner, his “regular” clothes—sweaters, tube socks, T-shirts—relegated to the top shelf, out of my reach.
Such formative impressions are not easily forgotten, much less dismissed. I admit it was my father, his dogged yet weary devotion to maintaining formality and order as a black male administrator at a secondary educational institution, I saw in the mirror, myself, each time I slipped a half Windsor to my Adam’s apple before work. But a new cultural climate suffuses our educational campuses and corporate offices these days, one that is collaborative and accessible rather than didactic and buttoned-down. It’s high time black men—and Hollywood—got wind of the change.
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Jackson F. Brown is a senior administrator in Black Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and a contributing and advisory editor for Literary & Visual Arts Journal.

Blackness in Sequence by Mark Anthony Neal

Blackness in Sequence  by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)  

In December of 2017, Kendrick Lamar released a vinyl collector’s edition of his critically acclaimed album Damn., but unlike the original release, the collector’s edition was sequenced in reverse order. Given the flexibility that digital music platforms allow, some fans had already experimented with the reverse sequencing, leading off with the 9th Wonder produced “Duckworth” instead of “Blood.” Lamar admitted to The Independent (UK), “I don’t think the story necessarily changes, I think the feel changes. You listen from the back end, and it’s almost the duality and the contrast of the intricate Kendrick Lamar. Both of these pieces are who I am." (Aug 2017)  Lamar’s further admission that sequencing is “something that we definitely premeditate while we’re in the studio" highlights how important song order (what I'm referring to here as sequencing) remains  for artists in an era where technology allows listeners to easily shuffle song order or skip songs that they don’t like; it is not unusual to hear young folk say that there are more than a few songs they have never listened to on an album, simply because they don’t have to.

That Lamar released the reverse sequenced version of Damn. as a vinyl album is not insignificant; the genius and limitation of vinyl is in the difficulties associated with skipping songs and the impossibility of changing sequence.  Lamer was, in essence, forcing some listeners to experience the album as he might have originally intended it.

The sequencing of an album was something that I took for granted as I began to consciously seek out music as a child. Though my home was filled with my father’s vinyl collection -- largely made up of Gospel quartets and quintets like the Soul Stirrers and Mighty Clouds of Joy, and Blues and Jazz artists like B.B. King, Jimmy Smith, Bobby “Blue” Bland and Jimmy McGriff -- my mother’s platform of choice was the 8-Track cassette, a long obscure format, whose popularity in automobiles and home stereo systems peaked as I was growing up in the early 1970s.

Though the 8-track offered a kind of portability that albums didn’t -- The Columbia House mail-order service exploded in the late 1960s and 1970s because of that portability -- and you didn’t have to worry about damaging records (the reason why I was never allowed close my father’s turntable), the 8-Track format had several clunky conventions, such as the changing of its four channels during the midst of songs, or that sequencing sometimes had to be jumbled to allow for songs to fit neatly into the format.

It was via the 8-Track format that I first listened to the Jackson 5’s second album ABC(released in May of 1970) -- the aptly titled Third Album, released in September of 1970 is the first vinyl album I ever bought -- which began my childhood love-affair with the Jackson 5. Yet because of the quirkiness of the album sequencing of 8-tracks, the first track I heard from the album was “La La Means I Love You”, which opens the 4th channel. “La La Means I Love” -- a cover of a Thom Bell produced classic from the Delfonics --  remains one of my favorite Jackson 5 songs, in large part, because of my initial listening experience; one would never start an album halfway through side B, which is where the song appears on vinyl.  Years later when I purchased the album in the compact disc (CD) format, I was in fact shocked that the album didn’t start with the Delfonics cover.

To be sure Berry Gordy had little interest in the sequencing of Motown releases in the 1960s and early 1970s, as he was trying succeed in an industry that was not driven by the singles chart, and  not album sales. Yet the emergence of Stereo recordings and FM radio in the 1960s helped shift the form, content and process of popular music, as jazz and progressive rock groups began to create concept albums that took advantage of the new sonic technologies, including multi-track studio recordings.  


Thus when one listens to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew (1969), what one hears is sequencing (and editing, with producer Teo Macero) that function as acts of curation. And this not say such curation didn’t occur on same level (often as negotiations between artists, producers and record labels) prior to the late 1960s, but  when emboldened by new technologies ands new platforms such as FM radio, such curation took on greater significance -- particularly as Black artists came to greater public voice in tandem with the Black liberation movement of the 1960s.

That sequencing as curatorial act, or what I’ll just call the sequencing of Blackness or Blackness in sequence, might hold political value in the spirit of aesthetic choices -- and I’m thinking of recent works by Margo Natalie Crawford ( Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First Century Aesthetics ) and Gershun Avilez ( Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism ) that highlight continued resonances from that period -- was not lost on Berry Gordy.

Well known was Gordy’s chiding of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On (1971) as being too political; but Gordy’s concern was as much about the album’s sequencing as it was Gaye’s political commentary; the first side What’s Going On was sequenced and edited as a 6-song suite.  At the time that Gaye released What’s Going On, he was largely a singles artist; “I Heard Through the Grapevine” (1968) was Gaye’s first #1 Pop hit (and Motown’s best seller at the time), though the album it appears on In the Groove, peaked at number #63 on the Hot-100 charts. “That’s the Way Love Is” (1970), Gaye’s last top-10 single before the release of What’s Going On, was featured in an album that peaked at 183 on the Hot-100 Charts!

In Gordy’s mind Gaye was a pop star -- the male counterpart to Diana Ross -- and not an artist, in the way that one might have thought of Miles Davis or Isaac Hayes, who had to provide production on nearly 30 Stax recordings in 1969, to be granted the freedom that became Hot Buttered Soul; Gaye saw himself differently.   

Yet Gordy’s grudging allowance to let Gaye release What’s Going On as the artist saw fit, not only helped Gaye have his most successful album to date (it peaked at #4), it became the template for later Gaye artistic and commercial achievements notably Let’s Get it On (1973), I Want You (1976), and the roundly panned Here, My Dear -- which 40 years later echoed in Jay-Z’s 4:44.  

More to the point, Gaye’s What’s Going On, in content and form, became a blueprint for a generation of Black musical artists seeking to moor artistic vision with political concerns, at the level of sequencing and editing; there was no greater example of this than the series of albums -- Innervisions (1973), Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974) and Songs in the Key of Life (1976) -- recorded by Stevie Wonder, in what was arguably his peak artistic moment. It is hard to imagine any of those Wonder albums being made, had Gaye not found success with What’s Going On. It begs the question though, as to how the music of Gaye and Wonder -- both pop stars by contemporary conventions -- might have been sequenced and promoted had they been originally released on current digital platforms?

Solange Knowles’s, A Seat at the Table, presents such an example of a curated album that functions on the level on concept album, while being pitched as a pop offering for digital audiences.  Many have commented on the symbolism of A Seat at the Table, with regards to Knowles commentary on racial and gender inclusion, though if we were to think of A Seat at the Table as a literal place setting -- curated for consumption -- there are moments that appeal to regional inclusion (a recovery of the dirty South) and that of her own very public immediate family.

With the use of interludes, Knowles and her producers are more heavy handed in the sequencing process; the interludes serve as logical introductions to some of the album’s songs, bridges between philosophical gestures, and also as footnotes to many of the album’s more nuanced contexts. A Seat at the Table  features contributions from Knowles’s mother Tina Knowles, her father Matthew Knowles, and most surprisingly Percy Miller aka Master P,  whose third interlude “For Us By Us” serves as A Seat at The Table’s denouement; -- the interlude and following track “F. U. B. U.” (with a nod to Damon Johns) and represents Knowles’s most dynamic claim on a Black Cultural Nationalists tradition.

Knowles’s use of interludes, not just as levity breaks, as has been the case on several classic Hip-Hop recordings, represents one of the strategies that artists will have to continue to engage, in efforts to encourage listeners to consume their art in the spirit of its curation.  In this regard Knowles, and her sister Beyonce, represents blueprints of their own, with A Seat at the Table, and Lemonade; blueprints that can be discerned in literal use of digital footnotes on Jay-Z’s 4:44.  No doubt Gaye, if he were still alive, would have taken notes.

Ijeoma Oluo: Black Women and the #MeToo Movement

'Seattle-based writer, speaker and Internet yeller Ijeoma Oluo joined Rebecca Carroll for a live taping of her podcast pilot Black Folks at The Greene Space at WNYC.  Oluo was named of of the most influential people in Seattle, by Seattle Magazine. She's the Editor-At-Large at The Establishment - a media platform run and funded by women. Her new book  is So You Want to Talk about Race.'

Over | Under: Erykah Badu Rates Aliens, Period Tracker Apps, and Porky Pig

'On this episode of Over | Under, Erykah Badu also rates landlines, airline safety videos, Fred Flintstone, and more in this episode of Over/Under.'