Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 669

See CHI-RAQ or Not?: A Spike Lee Appreciator & Film Writer Tries to Answer

See CHI-RAQ or Not?: A Spike Lee Appreciator & Film Writer Tries to Answerby Stephane Dunn | @DrStephaneDunn | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Still, thought is free . . . . But if the women join us from Peloponnesus and Boetia, then Hand in hand, we’ll rescue Greece.                                            Anthenians [men]: I want to strip at once and plough my land
Spartans [men]: And mine, I want to fertilize at once
Lysistrata: And so you can, when Peace is once declared . . .-- from Lysistrata,  Aristophanes
A few weeks ago after leaving Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, trying to ignore folks’ question, ‘did you like it?”, I thought about Bamboozled (2000) not that Chi-raq is anything like that film. Bamboozled caused debate and division and provoked some confusion and questions about it and the direction of Lee’s work; some Spike Lee fans and moviegoers hated it and others didn’t get it weren’t down with the satiric style, the representation of identities, etc.
According to Box Office Mojo, Bamboozled grossed about $190, 000 opening weekend and grossed a little over 2,274,000 overall. But Bamboozled has become a film that’s generated some serious intellectual consideration over time, and it seems Lee’s pointed critique of contemporary and historical Hollywood racial politics gained appreciation. I do not know what the fate of this December’s Chi-Raq is going to be in terms of the box office or what it’s cultural and intellectual measure over time will be – though certainly it will be engaged. I do know this; Chi-Raq will provoke some head scratching, shoulder shrugging, confusion, hate, praise, debate, and some what the #$#%%??????. And this is not altogether a bad thing.     
Chi-Raq, starring Nick Cannon, Samuel Jackson (Dolmedes), Angela Bassett, Wesley Snipes, Jennifer Hudson, John Cusak, and Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata recasts the famous Greek drama of the same name. In this, taking a classic drama and giving it a cinematic contemporary twist or revision – Lee has not done something new. We’ve seen numerous modernized takes on Greek and Shakespearan dramas. However, Lee wades into doubly risky territory, one because a lot of folks will neither be familiar with the ancient drama or be interested in a movie that chooses not to adopt familiar Hollywoodish narrative structure in recasting it but instead employs some of the strategies of theatrical [stage] storytelling from monologues to the chorus voice, and two because the cultural and contemporary setting (Chicago) and the black-on-black crime and gun violence problem is not only highly visible but highly staked and controversial especially in Chicago, which keeps competing yearly to top or lower slightly it’s previous year’s black murder rate.
Spike Lee has never been afraid to go bold, heavy, and experimental, from thematic content to mixing in and innovating on different artistic forms and cinematic approaches [say documentary & feature film devices]. But contemporary popular Hollywood film has helped nurture a movie-going public that has narrative expectations and one is that moviegoers can skip the book or the Greek drama reading, so to speak, and just see the movie.
Staged around 411 BCE, Aristophanes’ famous drama offers heroine Lysistrata, an Athenian woman who takes on the twenty years plus Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Lysistrata manages to gather the warring men’s wives and lovers together and convince the reluctant women to withhold all loving [sex in all forms] until the men construct a legitimate peace. The premise – a woman stepping into men’s ‘business” and out of her prescribed role in the domestic sphere temporarily – could lead to an easy read of it as a before-it’s-time kind of feminist text.
I vaguely recall the one time classroom discussion I ever had about the Greek drama way back in undergraduate revolving around a debate over whether Lysistrata and the drama stood as challenges to patriarchy and if she was a kind of feminist or not. On the one hand, she makes a stand that puts her in the unusual role of challenging the men, disrupting business as usual in the political public sphere, and forging a shrewd critique of war and men’s mismanagement of it. On the other hand, her ‘power’, the women’s power collectively, reinforces their traditional place in relation to men, locating that power in sex, in their so-called feminine wiles sexual bodies, and traditional femininity which is in its proper place in the home as willing caretakers of men and children and sexual mates for their men; to this they plan to return as soon as the men stop fighting each other to the point of extinction and play nice. Stronger academics and intellectuals than we students at the time had been fighting over this and claiming Lysistrata as feminist or anything but long before and will continue to do so.
Lee chooses to retain the premise of Lysistrata and gives a nod to a few other elements, including the name of our heroine. Samuel Jackson’s Dolmedes plays part court jester and part ‘chorus’ (narrator) showing off the familiar rhetorical flamboyance and persona we know, more, at points, to effect over-the-top impact than to inform and signify on the state of violence in the streets and the sexed battle between the woman and the men.
Lysistrata launches the sex boycott to force her lover, Cannon’s Chi-Raq, and his opponent Cyclops (Snipes) to broker a peace and end the violence between their two warring gangs. Her mission is triggered after the young daughter of Hudson’s is shot and killed in a drive-by. Lee’s intentions are good, even noble. He clearly wants to give voice and face to the victims and dramatize the emotional and social impact of violence on the community collectively hence visual references to fictional and real victims of the absurd violence. The intention does not always match and achieve the outcome throughout the film as stylistic choices and narrative unevenness overshadow at different points the representation of that emotional ethos needed to truly invoke that heartbreaking connect with the victims and the surviving loved ones.
The original Lysistrata by Aristophanes was very frequently described as “bawdy” that’s today’s R-rated, sexually explicit, and raw. The women and men bask in sexual verbal duels and the women are as hot and reluctant to abstain from sex as the men. But Aristophanes’ drama did not try to achieve the task of humanizing the innocent dead victims or community folk held prisoner in a sense by the violence around them or mix contemporary language and a heavily media treated social problem with a sensibility, humor, and language from thousands of years before it as Chi-Raq does.
Because of the scope and nature as well as timeliness of the subject matter, Lee’s tasked with retaining the sex denial premise and some of that ‘bawdy’ rhetorical play and sensibility in the original drama. But how to do this without at the same time overly sexualizing or merely eroticizing the women in particular as well as the men, or reducing the narrative’s representation of the socio-political sexual politics to merely spectacle, overwhelming the bigger story that motivates the sex strike?
The result is an experiment that’s partly too overly ambitious to cover the scope of a tremendously complex, tragic, urgent social and political reality. Chi-Raq does not wholly fail in all its effort, but it doesn’t altogether succeed. Rather it bumps into some jarring narrative stops, starts, and twists and dangling, questionable thematic threads, and scenes. Spike Lee’s intentionally pointed melodrama and interplay between contemporary African American urban culture and the present reality of Chicago and the ancient play [for example, at points the superfluous, poetic dialogue] and the text’s theatricality means Chi-raq won’t be easy viewing – but you already know that from Lee’s masterful premarketing and because well, it’s Spike Lee after all.
I know – I took the long way around. Don’t go see Chi-Raq because you expect to see a millennial Do the Right Thing. Don’t go see it as a Spike Lee fan expecting a film you’ll be able to fit into the many Spike Lee films you’ve seen over the last twenty years and don’t go as a moviegoer expecting and demanding a slickly made, neat looking, traditional Hollywood, feature film treatment of Chicago’s street violence. Check Chi-Raq out and expect a timely, provocative, messy, film about a heartbreaking problem. 

It already is and will provoke real talk -- some will be about the director’s stylistic choices and approach to the film, about the quality of the filmmaking, and about how he treats heterosexuality, and problematically, women -- especially black women’s identities and bodies as well as black masculinity, but some will also hopefully be about how Lee dares mightily with Chi-Raq to examine the nature of our nonexistent, futile, and revolutionary struggle with the violence in our streets, and the extraordinary means that we have and have not gone to in order to stop it.

Writer and professor Stephane Dunn, PhD, is the director of the Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies program at Morehouse College. She teaches film, creative writing, and literature. She is the author of the 2008 book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (U of Illinois Press). Follow her on Twitter: @DrStephaneDunn

#Culture360: Trump & the Preachers + #BlackOnCampus + Cam’s Dab

In this edition of #Culture360 WUNC’s Frank Stasio talks with Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University professor of African & African American studies, and Natalie Bullock Brown, professor of film and multimedia at St. Augustine’s University about Donald Trump’s controversial meeting with Black clergy, #BlackOutBlackFriday, student protests on college campuses and Cam Newton’s infamous Dab.

Blank on Blank: An Animated Nina Simone on Fleek

"I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life. I have a chance to live, as I've dreamed." -- Nina Simone tells journalist Lilian Terry in this interview from July, 1968. -- +Blank on Blank 

What Is It Like To Be Black On Campus? A Primer

'Student protests are erupting on university campuses throughout the U.S. Why are Black students calling for change?' -- +AJ+  

Intersection: Being Melissa Harris-Perry Is a Full-Time Job

'Professor, feminist, TV host, activist, mom, rabid hip-hop fan--Melissa Harris-Perry works seven days a week balancing all her identities. Now Perry is on the front lines of an intersectional fight for racial justice and women’s rights.  Harris-Perry talks with Intersection Host Jamil Smith.'
 

Left of Black Host Mark Anthony Neal's Genetic Ancestry Reveal

Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal has his ancestral DNA analyzed during a special presentation of Left of Black, recorded with a live audience at the John Hope Franklin Center.
The event featured a panel with Professor Rick Kittles (Co-founder of African Ancestry and the Director of the Center for Population Genetics at the University of Arizona) + Professor Charmaine Royal (Associate Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Director of Genomics, Race, Identity, Difference [GRID] at Duke University) + Karla FC Holloway (James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University with appointments in the Law School & African and African American Studies) + Alondra Nelson (Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Dean of Social Science at Columbia University). 
 

Mixed Messages: The Complex Art of Erykah Badu by Emily J. Lordi

Mixed Messages: The Complex Art of Erykah Baduby Emily J. Lordi | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
What was Erykah Badu doing, welcoming R. Kelly to the stage of the Soul Train awards on Sunday and calling the accused child pornographer and rapist her “brother”? It was one thing for BET to orchestrate his closing act; for the live audience to dance, nary a conscientious objector among them, to a medley of Kelly’s hits; and for a multiethnic group of revelers at Kelly’s onstage “house party” to perform collective amnesia or dismissal of the charges against him. But for Badu to host the party and stand beside him? Many fans expected better.
And yet. Badu’s gender politics have always been complex. Ever since her emergence in the late-90s as the incense-burning, head-wrap-rocking “earth mother” of the neo-soul movement, Badu has fashioned herself as both an innovative inheritor of black feminism and a conservative custodian of black family values.
Although her music channeled icons like Billie Holiday and Chaka Khan, and her early videos adapted black feminist classics like Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls (“Bag Lady”) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (“On and On”), the radical force of Badu’s work, as critic Jason King surmised, was limited by her idealized images of procreation, motherhood, and domesticity. As early as 1999, just two years after her spectacular debut album Baduizm, King worried that Badu’s “positive vibe” veiled the hetero-patriarchal model of racial kinship that her work seemed to proscribe.
Over a decade later, Badu has survived the trials that drove so many of her neosoul contemporaries (temporarily) underground, and her gender politics have continued to change along with her body of brilliantly shape-shifting work. This is not to say that those politics have always evolved.
If Badu’s 2010 video for “Window Seat” affirmed black women’s bodies and critiqued the system whereby, as she put it, “people are uncomfortable with sexuality that’s not for male consumption,” the healing mixtape she released during the violently anti-black summer of 2015 was—unconsciously, it seemed—dominated by male artists. Titled “Feel Better, World!” the mixtape’s tracklist of 18 jazz and soul songs included only three songs by women: two by the Emotions and one by Badu herself.
Her new telephone-themed album, But You Cain’t Use My Phone, which she also calls a “mixtape,” manifests this complex relationship to gender at the deeper levels of production and form. Here the self-described “analog girl” creates a layered electronic world, one largely populated by men and filled with male voices. In addition to covering several songs by male artists, Badu features male rappers, collaborates with producer Zach Witnessin, and credits her son Seven with artistic and promotional assistance.
In this sense Badu creates the most male-centric work of her career. It is also her most abstract work, because But You Cain’t Use My Phone is not only about phones—it is more broadly about mediums, whether mixtapes or telephones or telepaths. More specifically, it is about the difference a medium makes, especially when that medium is the gendered voice.
Opening with an overture of dial tones and breath, the album subordinates messages to the often-inaudible mediums that transmit them. Badu’s overture hearkens back to her epic breath suite “I Want You,” while also literalizing the fact that she will breathe new life into her 1997 hit “Tyrone.” As she repeats the classic line, “but you cain’t use my phone,” she initiates the album’s method of reinvention through abstraction. Mixing elements of trap, house, and R&B, Badu chops and screws songs and melts lyrics down to hooks that slide through dawn-of-rap synthesizers and 808 beats.
Her overture continues to foreground medium over message as Badu advises the person who “can’t use her phone” to find another means to communicate. Suggested alternatives include “a message in a bottle,” “Morse code,” and “a towel and some smoke.” Her ingenious remake of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” includes a fabulous interlude in which she assigns numbers to the various messages a caller might wish to leave on the “Erykah Badu Hotline”: “If you’re calling to beg for some shit in general, press 4; if you’re calling to beg for some shit but this is that pre-call before the actual begging, press 5...” The messages themselves remain muted, incidental.
Badu not only amplifies mediums but also accents her own role as one. This is clearest in the album’s cover image, which depicts Badu as the goddess Kali in the form of a sound system. Like the name of Badu’s independent label, ControlFreaq Records, the image conveys autonomy and mild perversity: the Kali figure gazes at the viewer, legs wide open as if to beckon, while pushing her own buttons to pleasure herself. The role of medium is both powerful and passive.
Badu plays this complex role in part by recording versions of songs by male artists. The songs she covers or samples include New Edition’s “Mr. Telephone Man,” the Isley Brothers’ recording of Todd Rundgren’s “Hello, It’s Me,” Usher’s “U Don’t Have To Call,” Tupac Shakur’s “Whatz Ya Phone #,” and Drake’s “Hotline Bling.” Badu is playful about these revoicings—where male singers address a “girl,” she addresses a “squirrel”—but there is power in her acts of recreation. When she deconstructs Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” she sings the first verse but omits the self-pitying lyrics of the bridge. In that section, Drake “feels left out” now that his ex, who “used to always stay at home, be a good girl,” is going out and possibly even sleeping with other people. Badu’s silence on this matter speaks.
She plays medium in subtler, more passive ways as well, by crafting musical contexts for rappers’ verbal work. Although the album contains fewer lyrics than any of Badu’s other efforts, male rappers deliver most of them. Atlanta rapper ItsRoutine enters to quicken the tempo of “U Use to Call Me” and “What’s Yo Phone Number,” and Andre 3000’s logorrhythmic rap on “Hello” provides sharp contrast to Badu’s laconic approach. 
When male voices enter, as on “What’s Yo Phone Number,” Badu occasionally assumes the gendered role of backup singer. She thus exposes the process by which women become mediums for men’s messages, the backdrops against which they can shine. This is the logic of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” video, for instance, which opens and closes with shots of women in a phone sex call center; unmemorable, unmeme-able, they exist to frame Drake’s dancing. That virtually all media coverage of Badu’s own album has, to date, foregrounded her collaborations with male artists is at once ironic and perfect, because it demonstrates how women artists are figured as mediums even when they are the main attraction.
The song “Phone Down” uses the medium of the gendered voice to explore these power plays. In this shimmering song of seduction, Badu tells a lover that she’s going to “make you put your phone down,” an understatement on par with Drake’s allusion to the “one thing” that his ex’s late-night calls used to signal. But the song also evokes Drake’s music in its tone, harmonies, and rather creepy sentiment. “You ain’t gonna text no one when you’re with me,” Badu sings. Insofar as the lyric recalls the isolating logic of “Hotline Bling,” it begs the question of how this message would change if delivered through the medium of a male voice. On “What’s Yo Phone Number,” Badu enacts just that experiment, trangressively shifting Tupac’s come-on into her own voice before transferring it back to a man.
In one of her more curious decisions, she has a similarly deep voice reprise her own own song, “Telephone.” This 2008 elegy for J Dilla moves the concept of the medium into another register, evoking those figures, often women, invested with the power to speak with the dead. The song’s lyric transmits a phone message to J Dilla from Old Dirty Bastard, who “wants to give you directions home,” to heaven. This was apparently a fever dream experienced by Dilla himself, who told his mother about it, who told his friends. “Telephone” so lovingly transmits that story that it highlights another function of the mixtape as a form: that of love letter. You Cain’t Use My Phone, with its titular in-group reference and hip, clever, and beautiful songs, is a love letter to Badu’s fans. But its complex gendered messages also reveal that not all shape-shifting is progress.
***
Emily J. Lordi is the author of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature and a forthcoming book on the album Donny Hathaway Live. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Beyond Mrs. Jones: 5 Other Songs You Should Know from Billy Paul

Beyond Mrs. Jones: 5 Other Songs You Should Know from Billy Paul
by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

For far too many, Billy Paul (December 1, 1934) is thought of as a one-hit-wonder. That hit was “Me & Mrs Jones”, which topped the pop charts in 1972, and established Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International Records as a commercial and cultural force. Mr. Paul was a grown man in his late thirties when he recorded “Me & Mrs Jones”-- evident with the song’s subtle though brilliant riff on Doris Day’s “Secret Love” in the opening--but it does not define Mr. Paul’s career. Billy Paul did a total of 10 studio albums for Philadelphia International Records--8 after his so-called breakthrough with 360 Degrees (which featured “Me & Mrs. Jones”); Paul did a total of 12 projects with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff.
Here are five songs from Billy Paul’s catalogue that folks should also know, drawn from my personal favorite Going East (1971), Paul’s first album for Philadelphia International Records, 360 Degrees (1972), When Love is New (1975) and Let Em In (1977), where Paul is perhaps the first "pop" artist to sample Malcolm X's voice.

This is Your Life--Going East (1971)

 
Love Buddies--Going East (1971)


Am I Black Enough For You?--360 Degrees (1972)


When Love is New--When Love is New (1975)



Let Em In -- Let Em In (1977)

Two Generations: Sculptors Betye Saar & Alison Saar Talk Art + Race + Gender

A conversation with sculptors Betye Saar and Alison Saar, who live and work in Los Angeles -- +The New York Times 

100 Years Of Billy Strayhorn--Emotional Architect Of Song

'Composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn spent the bulk of his career in service to the Duke Ellington Orchestra. He wrote some of the most popular songs of the 20th century — without ever hiding who he was.' -- +NPR