Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 657

2015: A Year in Mass Shootings

'News reports from the scenes of mass shootings in the U.S. were all too familiar in 2015. In total, there were 372 mass shootings in the United States last year, as of the morning of Dec. 31. These shootings, quantified by the website MassShootingTracker.org as involving four or more people, killed 475 people and wounded 1,870.' -- +PBS 

Black Studies for the Digital Soul: Upcoming Episodes of Left of Black (Spring 2016)

Black Studies for the Digital Soul: Upcoming Episodes of Left of Black (Spring 2016)
•  January 15 – Left of Black on the Root with Bettina LoveFull Episode S6:E15 Available on January 18
Bettina Love is the author of Hip Hop's Li'l Sistas Speak: Negotiating Hip Hop Identities and Politics in the New South  and co-editor of Black Feminism in Education: Black Women Speak Back, Up, and Out
• January 22 – Left of Black on the Root with Anne-Maria MakhuluFull Episode S6:E16 Available on January 25
Anne-Maria Makhulu is the author of  Making Freedom: Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and the Struggle for Home
• January 29 – Left of Black on the Root with Judy Richardson & Charlie CobbFull Episode S6:E17 Available on February 1
Judy Richardson & Charlie Cobb are veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Richardson is co-editor of Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC; Cobb is the author of This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible
• February 5 – Left of Black on the Root with Tanisha FordFull Episode S6:E18 Available on February 8
Tanisha C. Ford is the author of Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Gender and American Culture)
• February 12 – Left of Black on the Root with Rennie Harris + Thomas DeFrantz + PureMovementFull Episode S6:E19  Available on February 15
#BlackMovementMatters: Rennie Harris is founder and artistic director of Rennie Harris PureMovement. Thomas DeFrantz is the author of Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture and co-editor of Black Performance Theory
• February 19 – Left of Black on the Root with Ed Pavlić + Guest Host Tsitsi Ella JajiFull Episode S6:E20  Available on February 22
Ed Pavlić is the author of  Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners.  Guest host Tsitsi Ella Jaji is the author of Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity.
• February 26 – Left of Black on the Root with Adam MansbachFull Episode S6:E21  Available on February 29
Adam Mansbach is the author of Angry Black White Boy: A Novel + Rage Is Back: A Novel + Go the F**k to Sleep
• March 4 – Left of Black on the Root with Alexis De VeauxFull Episode S6:E22  Available on March 7
Alexis DeVeaux is the author of Yabo + Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde
• March 11 – Left of Black on the Root with Bert Ashe + Natalie Bullock BrownFull Episode S6:E23  Available on March 14
Bert Ashe is the author of Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles. Natalie Bullock Brown is director and producer of the forthcoming documentary baartman, beyoncé & me.
• March 18 – Left of Black on the Root with Simone DrakeFull Episode S6:E24  Available on March 21
Simone Drake is the author of Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity.
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Left of Black is produced at the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, in conjunction with the Center for Arts + Digital Culture + Entrepreneurship at Duke University.

Black Men Ski: on the Drizzyfication of Black Music by Mark Anthony Neal

Black Men Ski: on the Drizzyfication of Black Musicby Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The question was forwarded by one of my more astute students, wondering aloud about the general demobilization of Black rebellion in the past generation, and the ways that the “State, has redirected Black aggression onto something other than the intended target,” as represented in the music.  The ensuing discussion, in a class focused on the politics of Black popular culture, led us to an evaluation of what is *not* being heard--and by absence we were not necessarily talking about lyrical content that could easily map onto the Black Lives that Matter--but rather sonic diversity, as in what kind of sounds do we hear, or even more alarmingly, what kinds of sounds do folk not even know that are not hearing?
A perusal of Black radio in the 1970s, or trip to the local mom and pop record store--how’s that for an archaic reference, when even Tower Records is recalled in nostalgia--or even a warm summer evening on The Stoop (the Twitter of the Analog Generation) meant that one would hear voices like Barry White, Isaac Hayes, Teddy Pendergrass (with and without The Bluenotes), or even Joe Simon in regular rotation.  
Who is singing a Black Male Bottom in contemporary R&B?  And while I know some of our more misguided think-piece denizens will want to correlate the lack of the “vocal bass” in contemporary R&B with transitions of Black masculinity and gender in general (as embodying some sort of unquantifiable loss), the reality is that such claims could also be made about the Top.
Who is this generation’s Ted Mills (of Blue Magic Fame), Russell Thompkins, Jr. (of Stylistics Fame), Tony Washington--the queer, out lead singer of The Dynamic Superiors--let alone Philip Bailey and Smokey Robinson or the Soul Man Diva Sylvester? And before anyone responds with The Dream or Raheem DeVaughn, understand we’re talking about an era in which you could not listen to Black radio and not hear a falsetto voice.
Look I love me some “Hotline Bling”, but in the Drizzyfication of contemporary Black music--what we might more appropriately identify as the “Drake Drone,” not to be mistaken for the “Fetty Wap whine"--listeners in the mainstream have been denied full access to the wide range of Black male vocalizations--and thus are denied access to a fuller range of Black emotions and ideas, as conceptualized as sound.
This is not even to consider such issues at the level of genre, where we can, admittedly celebrate the generational collapsing of something that might get called R&B with something that might be called “Hip-Hop,” though neither are what I would call them twenty-years ago, though that honestly is not the problem.  
And it is here that we might consider Mark “Stew” Stewart--Passing Strange in moments of Afro-Diapororic travel, in ways that the late Richard Iton would identify as the ‘R-O-U-T-E-S” of diaspora as opposed to the more nominal roots we set beneath us. Though in another iteration it could be Chocolate Genius aka Marc Anthony Thompson, “Chasing Strange” or as another way to say Negroes--whether they are a problem or not--sitting as it were, reading the news in the Colored Section with Donnie, and never being heard, let alone seen, via any thing that could claim, a public, mainstream affinity with that which gets identified as Blackness.
In 2006 Stew performed “Black Man Ski” in a TED-talk highlighting the queering of being a Black Man in Aspen who happens to ski--this in the years before a Black POTUS or Don Lemon’s emergence  as an arbiter of all things Black (and pathological) on a cable news channel of some note who oroginal lead anchor was a Black man by the name of Bernard Shaw (stew on that for a moment).
“Black Man Ski” also appears on Stew and the Negro Problem’s 2012 recording Making It.  Perhaps as an index of a shift, Drake appears in his 2015 music video “Hotline Bling,”  in a sartorial style that, in passing, might be described as Black Aspen chic--with requisite snow sport movements, ‘cause ain’t nobody really ice-skating in the hood.   The absurdity of Stew’s original image is now writ normative via the body of the requisite Black post-racial subject (of Canadian origins), whose own ability to explore and disclose the emotive interiority of said post-Racial subject, is hailed as novel--and perhaps rightfully so.
But to listen to listen to Stew is to be reminded that one person’s “Rock Musical” was two generations ago, just another of another series of nights on this thing called the Chitlin Circuit; a young Army vet, picking them lines behind the Brothers Isley, and while a few too many would claim that this gentleman did not contribute to this enterprise that we call Black music, despite the fact that his  spirit runs through everyone of of those 3+3 iterations of those Brothers Isley, which no one would deny represents the genius of Black Musical production.
Or three Women from South Jersey and Philadelphia, singing they won’t be fooled again or another Carolina genius--and I’m talking North, as in the same state that produced Coltrane and Nina Simone-- playing in the cosmic slop, and these are just a few markers from the top of somebody’s head, who fucks with an archive that was just as expansive as it was then, as it is now when it’s being curated by Youtube, Pandora or Apple Music.  
Everybody can sing “On My Own” along with Patti, and it might be the unblackest shit she’s done, for those who quantify such things, and what does it mean that somebody will claim it as her closing statement for a career that began in the 1960s and continues now--she on some 21st century version of the chitlin’ circuit, where items from Whole Food sit in the green room, as opposed to the actual chitlins (or her sweet potato pies) that were once the item of choice.  
And we’re not romanticizing the trauma and violence of being Black when the chitlin circuit was really the only way out for a generation of artists who knew they could never, ever leave, but there’s something to be said about the stank and funk, and the squalor and the dankness of Blackness that has all be squeezed out of the most accessible examples of the tradition. 
The Weeknd ain’t nothin’ but Ne-Yo with an interesting hairdo, and neither are as interesting as Bobby--"The King of R&B"--Brown was in his prime, and don’t nobody remember Luther Ingram or Johnnie Taylor or Billy Preston or DJ Rogers or Bobby Blue Bland  to name just a few.  Recalling that Bobby Womack once covered Bob Dylan, looking at that Watchtower, about a decade before U2 began to feature the song on tour.  The common link being that gentleman strumming them lines behind the Brothers Isley.
And this is not about the sheer nostalgia of wishin’, ‘cause there ain’t nothin’ wrong with Negroes wishin’,  but allowing the music to take us to the freedom that we imagine, or more apropos perhaps, have not yet imagined--to consider a tradition that not only inspires folk to take to the streets, but to imagine a future and a freedom, where such instances are no longer necessary.  Freedom is about the will to dream it, and the struggle to create the space for that dreaming. Freedom is the late Sekou Sundiata reminding us that we are the dream of  “some slave...whenever they got a little space to climb inside their heads and be free.” ***
An early draft of this essay was prepared for  the Performing Blackness Symposium: "Stew, The Negro Problem and Passing Strange" curated by Professor Lisa B. Thompson at the University of Texas at Austin.
 

BlackademicsTV: Towards a Black Feminist Archaeology + The History of Black Women in US Prisons

'Dr. Whitney Battle-Baptiste uses Black feminist archaeology as a tool for social justice today; Dr. Kali Gross examines the history of Black Women’s over-representation in United States’ prisons.' -- +KLRU-TV 

Reginald Dwayne Betts Reads from 'Bastards of the Reagan Era' Accompanied by Tsitsi Jaji

Poet Reginald Dwayne Betts reads from his new collection Bastards of the Reagan Era , featuring piano and vocal accompaniment from Tsitsi Jaji.

Jason King on Natalie Cole: "Underappreciated But Never Forgotten"

'Natalie Cole,  who ended Aretha Franklin's eight-year Grammy-winning streak deserves more credit than she's usually afforded; according to +NPR Music critic and NYU Professor Jason King,  she was influential and flexible and a phenomenal singer.'  

Murs & 9th Wonder Presents "Brighter Daze" -- The New Album

Rapper Murs and Producer 9th Wonder continue their more than decade long collaboration with Brighter Daze.  

Teaching American Actors How to Do African Accents

+Public Radio International (PRI)'s Andrea Crossan reports on the difficulties American actors have in capturing the complexities of African accents. 

Ted Lange: From 'Trick Baby' to 'The Love Boat' (Acting in the 1970s)

'Actor/Director/Playwright Ted Lange discusses his key movie and TV roles from the 1970s in this exclusive clip. Lange also reflects on the struggles he faced on the set of The Love Boat(1977-87), where he fought to have his character, Isaac have a more prominent role than just "the black guy in the bar."' 

Troubling Trend: Transgender Murders Spike

+Al Jazeera America News's Ines Ferre travels to Detroit to report on the rise of Transgender murders in the city.