Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 650

The HipHop Archive Presents: Classic Crates

'The mission of Classic Crates is to collect, preserve, and make accessible the rich heritage of Hiphop as an American art form. The Hiphop Archive and Research Institute (HARI) and Harvard University’s Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library have partnered for the Classic Crates project that will feature 200 classic vinyl records selected by DJ and producer 9th Wonder. Peter Laurence of Loeb Music Library is the project liaison for this unique collaboration that will bring together a collection of Hiphop “standards,” along with LP versions of earlier recordings containing the original music used for their samples. The recordings and other related content will be housed and made available for research at the Music Library.' +Hiphop Archive 
Classic Crates from The Hiphop Archive on Vimeo.
 

Council of Feminist Thought: Is Hillary Clinton the Feminist Candidate?

'Claudia Garcia Rojas is a Chicago-based writer, activist and anti-gender based violence advocate. She is also a Doctoral candidate in Black Studies at Northwestern University. Thelma Uranga is a small business owner and a teaching artist and Communications / Development Coordinator at ElevArte Community Studio. They joined Jesse Menendez on The Morning AMp to talk about Hillary Clinton's campaign, whether she is the Feminist candidate and whether her policies represent all women or just some women.' -- Vocalo  

Blavity Presents The Third Space with Guest W Kamau Bell

On this episode of The Third Space , host Faiza Farah is joined by W Kamau Bell-- +Blavity   

Breaks, Rare Grooves, & Disco Treats: A Mix by DJ KamauMau

'A mix of breaks, rare grooves, and disco treats featuring: Bobby Womack + Dionne Warwick + Eddy Grant + The Talking Heads and Others.'-- DJ KamauMauBreaks, Rare Grooves, & Disco Treats by Kamaumau on Mixcloud

Lynn Nottage's New Play 'Sweat' Examines Race + Immigration Amidst Industry Decline

'The aptly titled Sweat is all about work — and the fear of losing it. In the new play by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lynn Nottage, change is coming for workers at a steel tubing plant. "They've got buttons now that can replace all of us," one character says. Sure enough, the company is about to move production to Mexico and ask longtime union workers to accept lower wages. They refuse, and end up locked out and replaced by immigrant labor.'

When White Democrats in North Carolina Formed the 'White Government Union: A Clip from 'Wilmington on Fire

'The Wilmington Massacre was a bloody attack on the African-American community by a heavily armed white mob with the support of the North Carolina Democratic Party on November 10, 1898 in the port city of Wilmington, North Carolina. It is considered one of the only successful examples of a coup d'état in the United States that left countless numbers of African-American citizens dead and exiled from the city. Wilmington on Fire (dir. Christopher Everett) gives a compelling historical and present day look at this event showing how the violent overthrow of an existing government not only cemented white supremacy in the city of Wilmington and the state of North Carolina but also throughout the United States of America.'
Wilmington on Fire: White Government Union (clip) from Wilmington on Fire on Vimeo.

Marco Pavé: Art Entrepreneurship--From Hobbyists to Lobbyists | TEDxMemphis

'Rapper, business owner and activist, Marco Pavé delivers an inspiring talk on how the arts saved his life. Beyond his individual story, Marco discusses how "cradle-to-career" arts policy that focuses on infrastructure to support artists can boost the local economy, address poverty by creating pathways to entrepreneurship, and consequently deter crime.'-- +TEDx 

Would This Have Happened in Auburn Hills? on the Flint Water Crisis by Lawrence Ware

Would This Have Happened in Auburn Hills? on the Flint Water Crisisby Lawrence Ware | @Law_Ware | NewBlackman (in Exile)
The water crisis in the city of Flint represents one of the most egregious examples of dereliction of duty in the state of Michigan’s long history of dereliction. The 274-page release of emails shows a local government unresponsive to the consistent complaints of residents because of fiscal concerns over water supply and conflicting reports of lead contamination. This would not have happened in Auburn Hills, the middle class, mostly white suburb of Detroit. No, the residents of Flint are dealing with lead poisoning, the extent of which we will not know for many years, because they made three primary “mistakes”.
1: They are mostly black
The racial composition of Flint is 56.6% African American. I have no doubt that if it had been white residents voicing their concerns about the quality of the water, the response from the state government would have been swift and aggressive; but the slow response represents an expression of a kind of institutional empathy gap.
This ‘gap’ refers to a cognitive bias wherein a person underestimates the visceral nature of pain experienced by another—it is particularly applicable when the person in pain is black. Therefore, since those in power were responding to mostly black folks, I find it unsurprising that they were less responsive to the complaints filed.
Environmental racism was a concept developed in the 1980s. It refers to the “disproportionate exposure of blacks to polluted air, water and soil.” Poverty and redlining are the primary reason why black and brown people disproportionately live in industrialized areas that expose them to higher amounts of pollutants. Add, now, unresponsive public officials that give rise to an institutional empathy gap to the list of things that contribute to environmental racism.
2: They Were Poor
Reading statistics about Flint and poverty makes me think of stories my mother, aunts, and uncles would tell me of living in rural Oklahoma. They would often tell me that they were poor, but they were unaware of it because everyone else around them was poor as well. For them, it was just a way of life. The same is true of Flint.
The US Census Bureau recently reported that Flint, Michigan is the second most impoverished city for its size—right behind Youngstown, Ohio. Just over 40 percent of the municipality’s residents are living at or below the poverty line. Those in power find it easy to turn a deaf ear to the cries of poor people—especially if those poor people happen to be largely black.
3: They are Democrats.
The people of Flint, Michigan, throughout history, have consistently voted democratically. No, that’s putting it too lightly. Let me put it this way: I have no doubt that Bernie Sanders would give Hillary Clinton a serious fight for the votes of the city. In 2006, the Bay Area Center for Voting Research ranked Flint as the 10th most liberal city in the United States. It was ranked as more liberal than Baltimore, Maryland, and Cleveland, Ohio. I think this is important in understanding the response of the Republican Governor Rick Snyder and his Republican Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, and Attorney General.
Put bluntly, since the voters in Flint, Michigan, are a lost cause and of no use to the Republican-led state government, those in power have little incentive to respond to the complaints. Compound this political disincentive with what has been explicated above (racism and classism), and you have a recipe for disaster. As the citizens of the city lost hair and developed rashes, as poor brown children drank water that was tainted with E. Coli and smelled of metal and gas, those with the power to help did nothing.
Representative Dan Kildee was elected to represent the citizens of Flint. He called race “the single greatest determinant of what happened in Flint.” That may be true, but it doesn’t help to be poor and democratic in Michigan, either. In fact, as this water crisis shows, it can get you killed.
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Lawrence Ware is an Oklahoma State University Division of Institutional Diversity Fellow. He teaches in OSU's philosophy department and is the Diversity Coordinator for its Ethics Center. A frequent contributor to the publication The Democratic Left and contributing editor of the progressive publication RS: The Religious Left, he has also been a commentator on race and politics for the Huffington Post Live, NPR's Talk of the Nation, and PRI’s Flashpoint. Follow him on Twitter: @law_ware

Transitioned: on the Illusiveness of David Bowie

Transitioned: on the Illusiveness of David Bowieby Charles Hughes + Deborah Elizabeth Whaley | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Editor’s note: David Bowie transitioned on January 10, 2016. Transitioned. That seems an appropriate word. Bowie was always different; for him to transition from this world to another seems apropos for a man so illusive. I asked two scholars of art (one a musical historian and the other an expert in visual art) to offer reflections on a man so seminal to pop music. I thank them for their contributions. --Lawrence Ware

+++
Charles Hughes is the Director of the Memphis Center at Rhodes College, where he designs courses, programs and partnerships. A scholar of black history and culture, he is author of Country Soul, one of Rolling Stones’ 10 best books on music published in 2015. Follow Him on Twitter: @CharlesLHughes2Before the release of Blackstar, David Bowie’s final album, its producer Tony Visconti told Rolling Stone that Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly was a key influence on Bowie and his collaborators. But Visconti also claimed that the influence was less musical than conceptual. "We wound up with nothing like [To Pimp a Butterfly], but we loved the fact that Kendrick was so open-minded and he didn't do a straight-up hip-hop record. He threw everything on there, and that's exactly what we wanted to do.” I agree with Visconti that Blackstar’s debt to Kendrick Lamar is more about scope and feel than about particular musical markers. Still, I hear K-Dot’s musical imprint throughout Bowie’s final record. (And I’m not the only one.) I recognize Lamar’s fluid vocality and layered rhythms in “Girl Loves Me.” I hear his pinched harmonies and jagged song structures in “Blackstar.” I sense the similarity in how Lamar and Bowie use saxophone – played brilliantly by Kamasi Washington and Donny McCaslin, respectively – as both center and subtext. I get the fractured jazz, the troubled beats, the quivering textures, and the interplay between epic and intimate. I find a shared beauty and strangeness, a mutual interest in frailty and salvation. “I remember you was conflicted,” Kendrick says. “Look up here, man, I’m in danger,” Bowie answers. I could be overreaching, I suppose. Still, some of Bowie’s best and most successful albums were direct and sophisticated responses to the latest vanguards in black popular music. Maybe I’m just sad and it’s timely, but right now I hear Blackstar as one of the most interesting of those responses. Regardless, one of the key lessons that I learned from David Bowie is to keep listening. So that’s what I’ll do.+++


Deborah Elizabeth Whaley is an artist, curator, writer, and Associate Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. Her recent book is Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (2015). Her first book is: Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities (2010). Follow her on Twitter: @dewhaley
Like many, I have a David Bowie story, that is, I remember the first time I heard his music. My musical tastes are eclectic, something that strengthened during the five years I worked at Wherehouse record store during my undergraduate years, but the majority of music I listened to as a pre-teen, teenager, and young adult was alternative rock. Yet, I came to David Bowie’s music not through rock, but through soul music; it was on the Black radio station KSOL 107.7 that I first heard David Bowie’s song “Fame,” which was later followed by my older sisters and I seeing his performance of “Fame” on Soul Train that same year in 1975.
I actually did not know Bowie was not Black until after seeing him on Soul Train, since most artists on R&B radio at the time were Black. When white artists were on Black radio in the late 60s and 70s, it seemed like a sign of solidarity with Blackness even if not as a sign for Black struggles. For Bowie, his relation to Black struggle as it intersects with music is archived in an interview he did with MTV where he chastised their decision to either not play Black artists or to play Black artists at times that were not peak viewing hours.
I did not see this Bowie interview when it first aired (thanks to cultural critic Lawrence Ware for making me aware of it), but I did grow up watching MTV for more hours than I care to admit in the early 1980s and after. MTV led me to Bowie’s larger repertoire including what became one of my favorites -- 1980’s album Scary Monsters. “Ashes to Ashes” and “Fashion” were on heavy rotation on MTV, and it was about that time I fell in love with his music and with rock music more broadly, including rock acts like Journey, The Babys, and Pat Benatar. By the mid-80s, my David Bowie fandom waned. As I teenager, I still held on to my love of soul and rock music, but was deeply entrenched in alternative music subcultures and kept my Bowie listening to older albums released before Bowie’s Let’s Dance.
Sure, we all (my peer group) secretly listened to a Top 40 music gem every now and then, but if it was not on college radio (KSJS 90.5’s alternative music programming in San Jose), it became open for ridicule during our lunch hour. In my undergraduate years, my peers and I would invest in the game of cultural capital; we marked prestige in our subculture by professing indie label musical tastes and collecting vinyl and imports at a time when CD’s were all the rage. Peter Murphy, former front man of Bauhaus, became my new David Bowie (Bauhaus covered Ziggy Stardust in 1982). Murphy’s collaboration with TV on the Radio and Trent Reznor is a good example of why, after all these years, he still holds this place in my alternative-soul heart.
Social media, popular news, and traditional news outlets are now flooded with Bowie stories since his passing on 10 January 2016. Questions about Black affinity for Bowie, Bowie and underage girls, and the role that race may play in vindicating predatory practices, are circulating alongside and within memorial pieces about his musical legacy – from “Ziggy Stardust” to his trenchant and timely political critique “I’m Afraid of Americans” – to his recently released Blackstar. Writer Pearl Cleage’s powerful rhetorical essay about Miles Davis, “Mad at Miles,” is instructive to these conversations about the ways consumers navigate their decision to demarcate the life practices of a musician from the music that they make and the role that gender consciousness may play in these decisions.
Yet, Bowie is very different from Davis and other musical and popular celebrity icons many are comparing him to (Chris Brown and R. Kelly, for example); he is also an icon of queer, nerd, punk, and disco subcultures. Those who identified with, praised, or ignored Bowie’s fluid performance of gender and sexuality over the years may grapple with their comfort with a non-celebrity whose gender and sexuality is not codified or easily marked as “gay,” “straight,” “male,” “female,” queer, or trans. Bowie defies the language and grammars of these (material) identity constructs and his malleability transformed multiple communities.   
I use Bowie’s music and music videos in my classes on a regular basis, and I generally preface listening sessions with the caveat that we are not listening for pleasure, though we may find the music pleasurable, and that we will learn to analyze popular artifacts that we consume in everyday life outside of binaries. Bowie’s “China Girl” is instructive in my Social Construction of Whiteness and Introductory American Studies courses to deconstruct aspects of his Orientalism. In addition, what are we to make of a somewhat throwaway line in one of my favorite songs, “Ashes to Ashes,” where he uses the term “Jap girl?” How does “I’m Afraid of Americans” illuminate and critique American exceptionalism?
While I often use digital musical examples, this past September, I played “Ashes to Ashes” and additional songs from a Bowie album in my first-year writing and rhetoric course as an example of compelling and contradictory arguments in lyrics and in musical compositions. I wanted them to hear Bowie and other select musical artists on vinyl; we waxed on portions of Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes,” Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall,” Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” as well as contemporary musical selections and journal entries they uploaded to our course blog.  
Many questions were entertained that evening: What arguments do you think Bowie and other artists are making and are their arguments convincing? What type of rhetorical strategies (logos, pathos, and ethos) do they use to persuade listeners about the struggles of everyday life? What contradictions are present in the arguments musicians make about real life in their music? These are ongoing questions also entertained in my Black Popular Music course as we study the music of blues, bebop, dub, Afropunk, soul, and hip-hop artists.
When I asked my Rhetoric class at the end of the term which class sessions they found the most useful and why, I was actually surprised many mentioned the day we discussed music journalism and I brought in my old albums and portable turntable. Even though our discussion that September evening stood out to me as one of the best and in some ways the most challenging, especially when aiming to deconstruct an argument in music with no lyrics, I later wondered if I seemed silly and old-fashioned with my dusty albums and record player.  
However, their take-away from that evening was refreshing to hear: Music lyrics and instrumental compositions contain contradictory elements and arguments. Musicians are no less complicated than the music they make, and there is much to learn from the reality of those contradictions. In the wake of Bowie’s passing and given the ensuing conversations about the music and the musician, I wonder if my Rhetoric students are like me -- thinking about the multifaceted dimensions of our conversation while listening to and learning from the ruptures and sutures that the music and the man represents.

#TheSpin: #BlackGirlMagic + the Radical Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

In this episode of #TheSpin, host Esther Armah is joined by Joan Morgan + Christina Greer + Shani Jamila in a conversation about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Radical Legacy" + #BlackGirlMagic.