Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 644

‘Cause I Slay: A Beyoncé Timeline for February 2016 by Simone C. Drake

‘Cause I Slay: A Beyoncé Timeline for February 2016by Simone C. Drake | @SimoneCDrake | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I would like to construct a timeline and consider how it calls for a much deeper analysis of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s recent trending on social media as well as traditional news media. Almost two weeks ago, Beyoncé was featured in Coldplay’s new music video release, “Hymn for a Weekend.” The following week and approximately twenty-four hours prior to her scheduled performance at the 50th Super Bowl with Coldplay (the headliner) and Bruno Mars, she surprised the world when she dropped a new music video and song, “Formation.” Before media pundits and bloggers could fully get a grip on what had happened, Beyoncé and a cadre of black women took over the turf at the Super Bowl and stole the show from Chris Martin, the lead vocalist of Coldplay.
Because “Hymn for a Weekend” features Beyoncé in a Sari and head scarf, oddly adorned matha patti, and Mendhi painted on her hands, accusations of cultural appropriation circulated globally in blogs and news media (all of these sartorial practices are also prevalent in East Africa).
Because “Formation” opens with the first shot showing Beyoncé poised on top of a half submerged New Orleans Police Department cruiser, cuts to Victorian parlors, Hurricane Katrina turmoil, Mardi Gras parades, plantation doorsteps, wig shops, police officers surrendering to a young black boy dancing in all black, and then back to a final shot of Beyoncé once again atop the cruiser that is fully submerged as the screen fades to black, she has been proclaimed by largely black female academics and cultural critics to be “unabashedly black.”
And because her Super Bowl performance continued the narrative of formation, in a literal sense, with Beyoncé and her dancers clad in black leather and black berets, producing the letter X—undoubtedly paying homage to Malcolm X—in drum line formation on the Super Bowl turf, it became clear that Beyoncé chose to honor the 50th Anniversary of the Black Panther Party rather than the 50th anniversary of the Super Bowl on the most important Sunday of the year.
In a period of less than two weeks, much ado has been made on both sides of the spectrum about the whirlwind of performances. For some Beyoncé is a savior who is finding a political voice. For other she is an anti-white Benedict Arnold. And still to others she is nothing more than a capitalist appropriator or hyper-sexualized stereotype. I have no interest in debating or adding to the proclamations and indictments. Instead, I want to read between the lines of her performances and flesh out a different set of politics I think are at play.
In her “liner notes” Regina Bradley begins to dig deep into the creolized landscape and culture of Louisiana, identifying the African rootedness of black life and culture that are illuminated by the haunting past depicted in “Formation.” Bradley moves even further in the direction I want move in her Washington Post article that posits Zora Neale Hurston as a foremother to Beyoncé. The politics I would argue that are overlooked by Beyoncé enthusiasts stuck on the celebration of blackness are how the lack of recognition of a black women’s tradition of cultural production in the US is political. These politics fuel the anti-Beyoncé/anti-black backlash.
In my forthcoming work on black masculinities, I propose that black men deserve the grace Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs insists black people must not only imagine for themselves, but that while doing so, they must also love their blackness. This concept of grace is relevant when thinking about how Beyoncé’s three recent performances can be read together as one self-affirming, black woman’s narrative of belonging.
Like some critics, when I wrote about Beyoncé’s “Beautiful Liar” duet and video collaboration with Shakira on her B’day [deluxe edition] album, I could have simply labeled it cultural appropriation and criticized her for capitalist pursuits. That would have been easy. Just as it is easy to watch the Coldplay video and say Beyoncé has no business embracing Desi culture, because she is both African American and a capitalist. Just as it is easy to question whether a multimillionaire gets to be a voice that critiques white supremacy and structural inequalities.
It takes a bit more critical thought, however, to think about if there are any alternative and less polarizing ways of interpreting the surely intentional scheduling of three controversial performances in less than a two-week period. Political? Yes, but I think the politics extend beyond Stokely Carmichael conjured Black Power.
My analysis of “Beautiful Liar” is part of a larger book project. In Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity I propose that select African American women culture producers appropriate various theories of African Diasporic cultural identity in order to construct a transnational identity that they are often denied. Because African American women often are not mobile or do not take up residence outside of the US, they tend to be overlooked in African Diaspora and transnational studies.
However, when African American women appropriate Latinidad, as does Beyoncé in “Beautiful Liar,” or Vodoun and creolité, as she does in “Formation,” or Candomblé and Brasilidade, as do other artists I study, I argue we see a more complex blackness emerging—one that moves outside of nation-based and race-based identity constructs.
For Beyoncé, this looks like the creolized blackness Bradley registers in “Formation.” It also looks like the appropriation of Latinidad in not only the “Beautiful Liar” lyrics and music video but also in the re-release of the B’day album with Spanish-language tracks and duets with Shakira and Alejandro Fernández.  And where so many others only see either cultural appreciation or cultural appropriation, I see a much more critical—meaning consciously deliberate—act of appropriation in “Hymn for a Weekend.” In that video Beyoncé has positioned her undeniable black body—a lighter complexion and bleached hair does not make anyone not register her as black—as a transnational black body. In each instance, then, hers is a black body (and intellect) that is aware of a world outside of the spaces in which she dwells, whether Houston, New York, or her roots in Louisiana and Alabama. It is a black body that is learning to know itself through a mélange of African Diasporic theories of cultural identity and global expressions and practices.
It is also a gendered black body that is coming into her own as she thinks about how her feminist ideologies are put into conversation with her evolving racial pride and investment in a broad ranging social justice. Is that coming into being messy? Always. Is it perfect? Never. Can it result in performances of Orientalism in both “Beautiful Liar” and “Hymn for a Weekend?” Absolutely. Did I mention that finding one’s self is a messy endeavor? I sure did. I believe, however, that what I refer to as her cultural appropriations of everything from Latinidad to Vodoun to Desi culture represents a far more complex blackness than allotted to African American women by both dominant society and by many African Americans.
And when we think about the role gender plays within racial identity formation and social standing, her retraction of “You just might be a black Bill Gates in the making” to “I just might be a black Bill Gates in the making” in “Formation” says something about her larger project not simply being grounded in capitalism (something nonetheless really important to post-emancipated blacks).
With those lines and her brigade of afro-coiffed soul sistahs, Beyoncé is critically appropriating a transnational blackness that positions black women at the center of both progress (read capitalism) and activism (think Black Lives Matter). These appropriations and centering lets us know what Beyoncé told us she already knows, “You know you that Bitch when you cause all this conversation.” Because in many ways, there is no more palpable of a claim of citizenship than when the, “Best revenge is your paper.” I see that revenge as twofold. Yes, it is the revenge that affords her Givenchy, but it is also the revenge that affords her (and her husband) the ability to donate $1.5M to the Black Lives Matter movement and for her to have ever so quietly donated $7M for a housing complex for low-income and homeless Houstonians. And that is how Beyoncé truly slays.
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Simone C. Drake is Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University.  She is the author of Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity (LSU Press) and her second book, When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making will be published  later this  year by the University of Chicago Press.

#TheSpin: Black Princeton Professor Arrested for a Parking Ticket + Beyonce's 'Formation'

On this episode of #TheSpin host Esther Armah is joined by Professor Yaba Blay + Monifa Bandele +  Lynnee Denise + Professor Imani Perry, who was recently arrested by Princeton Police officers for a parking ticket.  Armah and her guests also discuss Beyonce's 'Formation' video.

#TheSpin: Black Princeton Professor Arrested for Parking Tickets + Beyonce's 'Formation'

On this episode of #TheSpin host Esther Armah is joined by Professor Yaba Blay + Monifa Bandele +  Lynnee Denise + Professor Imani Perry, who was recently arrested by Princeton Police officers for parking tickets.  Armah and her guests also discuss Beyonce's 'Formation' video.

The Fire This Time: Ferguson and the Future of Race in America

'Activist Thinkers Nyle Fort, Brittney Cooper, Imani Henry, Kiese Laymon, Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, and Frank Roberts discuss the Ferguson moment and its impact on the Future of race in America. Presented by NYU's Center for Multicultural Education and Programs.'
The Fire This Time: Ferguson and the Future of Race in America from NYU-TV on Vimeo.

Left of Black S6:E17: Black Women + Style + the Global Politics of Soul

Left of Black S6:E17:  Black Women + Style + the Global Politics of Soul
Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal (@NewBlackMan) is joined in studio by Tanisha C. Ford (@SoulistaPhD), Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the author of Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (UNC Press, 2015).
Neal and Ford discuss the impact and influence of late South African vocalist Miriam Makeba, the sartorial politics of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Student Activism, and Professor Ford offers her Top-5 of Black Power Anthems.
Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University and in conjunction with the Center for Arts, Digital Culture & Entrepreneurship (CADCE).
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Episodes of Left of Black are also available for free download in @ iTunes U
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Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlack

A USC Program is Changing the Face of the Predominantly-Male Gaming World

'While shooting, sport, and fantasy games dominated the top 10 list this year, the University of Southern California is proving that gaming isn't an all-boys club. The school's game design program is bucking an industry trend: Women now outnumber men at both the graduate and undergraduate level. And they are enrolled not just because they love games, but because they hope to change the culture and demographics of gaming.' -- +Public Radio International (PRI)   

Maurice White...of Memphis, Tennessee by Charles L. Hughes

Maurice White...of Memphis, Tennesseeby Charles L. Hughes | @CharlesLHughes2 | NewBlackMan (in exile)
Maurice White came from Memphis. Many treatments of his life skip over these years or mention them only as prelude. But the city – specifically the black neighborhoods of South Memphis – played a key role in establishing the musical approach and communal vision that made him one of pop music’s great artists.
Born in 1941, Maurice White grew up in a center of black accomplishment and expression. During the first decades of the 20th century, South Memphis produced countless important musicians and also many of the city’s Civil Rights leaders and rank-and-file. He lived in Lemoyne Gardens and Foote Homes, housing projects whose residents included famed ambassadors like White but also everyday folks whose hard and brilliant work nurtured the community amidst the injustices and intrusions of the Jim Crow era and beyond. One of them was White’s grandmother, who raised him and – like their neighbors – provided him with a model of love and persistence that defined Earth, Wind & Fire.
As a child and teenager, White absorbed a local soundtrack that blurred divisions between gospel, jazz, and R&B in much the same way as his later recordings. His father played saxophone as part of Memphis’s large and influential community of jazz players. He sang gospel at church with friend David Porter, later a key architect of southern soul.
White absorbed the sound and vision of the marching bands that performed in his neighborhood. And he learned his craft at Booker T. Washington High School, where he played drums in the band and befriended students like future Stax Records mainstay Booker T. Jones. These formal and informal lessons led White to Chicago, where he played sessions and live shows while studying at the Chicago Conservatory of Music.
Meanwhile, Memphis became a key site for the soul explosion. “Stax started having so much success,” White told a reporter in 2007. “I figured, 'Man, maybe I should have stuck around.'” 
White didn’t stick around, of course, but Earth, Wind & Fire joined a conversation in which his hometown (including some of his friends and collaborators) played a key role. The group’s gospel-infused hits mined the same terrain as Staple Singers or Al Green, while its intricate, Afro-futurist funk echoed that of Isaac Hayes or The Bar-Kays. Their 1979 utopian disco anthem “Boogie Wonderland” even featured vocals by former Stax artists The Emotions.
Maurice White kept his head to the sky, but he also engaged his old neighborhood in an extended call-and-response.
Today, that neighborhood faces significant structural challenges and the ongoing slander of its black citizens. Despite ongoing attempts by South Memphians to improve and reimagine their communities in the face of disinvestment, they are routinely blamed for its supposedly endemic danger and irreparable dysfunction.
Still, the residents of South Memphis remain connected and committed to the same projects that helped produce the astonishing music of Maurice White. His indelible work helps us to understand these projects and – more importantly – to celebrate the people who engage in them. He demanded that we see the shining stars, no matter who they are. And South Memphis is full of shining stars.
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Charles L. Hughes is Director of the Memphis Center at Rhodes College. His book, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South, is now available from the University of North Carolina Press. Follow him on Twitter @CharlesLHughes2.

Mr. White! *said in echo*: Charting the Black(ness) by I. Augustus Durham

Mr. White! *said in echo*: Charting the Black(ness)by I. Augustus Durham | @imeanswhatisays | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
In the liner notes for the last studio album Maurice White helped to executive produce for Earth, Wind and Fire, Illumination (Sanctuary, 2005), he wrote:
The Message . . .“The path of illumination is achieved by living day to day. Take responsibility for every moment and thus we reach illumination.”PeaceM.W.Searching for the light
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To say that these past days have not been vicissitudinal in black life would be an understatement: Friday would have been the 21st birthday of Trayvon Martin, a bittersweet milestone for someone snuffed out so young; it was also the night the NAACP Image Awards were broadcast (was it me or did the statuette look significantly smaller than in years past?!); Saturday and Sunday, we were called to get in #Formation, and have been thought to pieces ever since (some of them good!); and after we completed lining up, we witnessed Cam Newton and his (BLACK and blue) Panthers fall short, only to then have the quarterback be called a boy (they still do that?!) and be mocked through racial encodation by one of his own.
This is not an endorsement: this is a recap of the five-day news cycle.
In some ways, these intracommunal goings-on are emblematic of those timeworn phrases: you can’t have it all, and you certainly can’t take it with you. But somehow, some way, Thursday’s loss has been overshadowed by the past few days, a loss that is as elemental as some of the occurrences of the past five days have been elementary.
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I say your name in echo because you have faded away. just. that. quick . . . ly.
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It is astonishing to think that well into my father’s lifetime, when Nielsen Soundscan started charting album sales, there was actually an album chart called Top Black Albums. This chart title did not change until well into my own lifetime in 1999. Within six years of albums being scanned under that banner, Earth, Wind and Fire dominated that charting for the better part of a decade plus. The group made black albums.
Instead of pondering how green was my valley, may I instead pose—how black are our albums?
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last night i had a conversation about blackness. one of my interlocutors put on the table a query recently posed to her: do black people have any cultural rituals equivalent to jewish people, like say shabbat? she posed music and religion as sacred rites. i posited cotillions, someone else fraternity and sorority culture. someone said blackness is a performance of rebellion on the inside and of the outside and of the outside of the outside. and then we surmised that often, when one tries to theorize blackness, it is difficult because it is an unspeakable sentience. and then i said like the head nod. and then someone else said or like when you are taught to acknowledge one of us when you walk past him/her, whether in haste or at leisure.
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in other words, we know a black album when we hear it.
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Maurice White, in tandem with Philip Bailey, wrote, produced, and sang really hard music. When you listen to “Can’t Hide Love”, you really need the range chops to pull it off: before the vamp, it borders on baritone singing at the lowest point all the way up to high tenor. I haven’t even mentioned the falsetto at the end! Or how the song has been sampled (8-9!) And then when you think about White producing on songs and projects like “Best of My Love”, “Don’t Ask My Neighbors”, or “Boogie Wonderland”—what we realize is that black music has a sound, a sound we know. In the same way that we know Prince’s influence when this or this or this comes on the daily device shuffle. Maurice White has left a (black music) calling card that has a recorded singing message when the call goes to voicemail.
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Although I recognize that Maurice White was born under the sign of Sagittarius, hence the name Earth, Wind and Fire, I reminisce about my childhood and the missing links: Water and Heart. Yes, Mr. White *said in echo*, your body of work is suggestive of you, in a nostalgic fit, being Captain Planet—a transcendent creativity of afrofuturistblacknationalisticdiasporica that made this planet, sonically, better. Your light search is completed—let the funk of Elsewhere illuminate you.
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As you levitate, we elevate.

Tef Poe - "Message To Macklemore (#52weeks)"

'Tef Poe—the St. Louis MC, writer and co-founder of HandsUpUnited—just dropped "Message to Macklemore" in response to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis' top-selling "White Privilege II." The powerful response record is part of Poe's #52Weeks campaign which has him recording 52 new freestyles over 52 weeks.' -- Bakari Kitwana for Colorlines

Trump, Vulgarity, and the Entitlement of the 21st Century TyCoon Show

Trump, Vulgarity, and the Entitlement of the 21st Century TyCoon Showby Anthony Kelley | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The term has a history as a common racial slur to denigrate African-Americans: "coon." And in the late 19th century, the term reached what became its apogee of parlance in American vernacular culture as a substitute verb, describing performances of the most disturbing order. By the time they achieved a staggering level of popularity and success as American entertainment, “Coon Show” was a common synonym for such performances instead of the paradoxically more dignified phrase to describe "Blackface Minstrelsy."
Baked into the toxic dessert that served millions of paying audiences their titillating cakewalks in that era was the fact that any performer who participated in these shows (and yes, racial minstrels came in all colors beneath their coal-ash based makeup--see Marlon Riggs's laser-precise documentary, Ethnic Notions (1986),  or the more fictionalized Spike Lee work, Bamboozled (2000) for background--had to navigate their conscience through what has become a rather commonplace dilemma in today's media: In order to achieve or secure monetary gain, how far am I willing to debase standards of decent human behavior in a public forum?
Until the year 2015, we have never seen a U.S. Presidential candidate intentionally offer in speeches, on a live mic, in large, video-recorded public assemblies, words that so grotesquely cross the line of what the FCC must consider obscenity. But recently, on multiple occasions, the candidate leading in national polls of the (formerly?) "family values"-based Republican party, Donald J.  Trump, has crossed this line with reckless abandon, leading to moments like this.  
Fox News, the RNC, and Talk Radio have shown exactly zero backbone in calling out the indecency or vulgarity of their dirty golden boy. Meanwhile, over 12 other candidates--some even having to drop out of the race in the obscene, onerous shadow of the front runner--have expressed themselves with linguistic self control, for the most part. And yet, the crowds stand by their Curser In Chief.
Even Trump's star endorser, the faux-evangelical Sarah Palin, who seems to now support the idea that "kick ISIS's (the ignorant, vocabulary-limited word of choice for backside)" is a perfectly acceptable and role model-worthy public discourse for all observing children and people of conscience. (In all fairness, our current President, a Democrat, should accept some blame for contributing to today's Pandora's Box of irresponsible political language. But Palin's relatively benign dip into naughty language makes sense, when the vulgar leader of this group, hyped up on the jingoistic caffeine of the tea that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Bill O'Reilly have served their so called "tea party" for a decade, is dropping f- and s-bombs  with no remorse.
The post-Trumpian Republican inebriation with the performance of hatred and denigration, coupled with their desire to remain rich and famous, dissolved their frameworks of decent public, amplified verbal expression, much like minstrel performers who contributed to (and sometimes continue to) the mockery of an oppressed people during and after the era of Blackface Minstrelsy.
Based on the fanatical cheers of Trump's minions, there is a groundswell of support for our nation to become more tacky and vulgar than we have ever been. I wonder if the same followers would support eliminating FCC standards? You know, that "freedom of speech" that so many claim to espouse for themselves while trying to control in others? (See O'Reilly's discomfort with actual free speech in this interview with Cam'ron and Dash).
To Trump, having achieved Tycoon status is his license to perform a TyCoon show of the highest order in politics: rich entitlement that readily overrides most of America's  expectations of a public national leader's responsible public language. These expectations are, in fact, explicitly (pun fully intended) prescribed in American legal norms; But Trump, in his rambling, self-absorbed inanity and profanity, intentionally violates our nation's resolved norms.
If a survey asked America if taking a drag from a cigarette and blowing the smoke into a four year old's face is acceptable, a resounding "no" would be a reasonable consensus.  But in his post hip-hop trolling state, Trump embodies the classic scenario of a rich, egotistical bully blowing toxic smoke into the face of a non-smoker while standing in a building full of signs saying "No Smoking Allowed On Premises."
If this purported future President cannot even demonstrate the discipline to adhere to codes of decent language as designated by Congress, why would anyone believe for a second that he could exercise an inkling of restraint in the most powerful office in the land? And might the brash disregard of basic human courtesy regularly enacted in Trump's rich, entitled, white face TyCoon show of a campaign eventually devolve into a presidency of flippant and brutal disregard of our laws against Congress and the people? You betcha.
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Anthony M. Kelley is a Musical Composer.