Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 754

Black Love...Matters: Raheem DeVaughn’s 'Love Sex Passion' by Mark Anthony Neal

Black Love...Matters: Raheem DeVaughn’s Love Sex Passionby Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? was the product of a hard-earned battle with the head of his record label, Berry Gordy.  Gaye’s brother-in-law perhaps rightly thought that Gaye was squandering his  mainstream success by recording a protest album. Gaye had the last laugh; What’s Going On? was not only a commercial success—achieving   multi-platinum status and becoming Motown’s best selling-album at the time, the recording also became a template for every imagined Black protest album for nearly three generations. Indeed during every generational nadir of Black social life, the call is for that generation’s What’s Going On? In his seminal book on Black Cultural Politics, the Richard Iton cites the anti-apartheid protests of the mid-1980s as a narrative “last hurdle” for mainstream R&B. As Iton write, “with the formal end of apartheid, even such nominal references to racial hierarchy and marginalization would largely disappear from the lyrics of R&B recordings.” (In Search of the Black Fantastic, 127). If there was a male R&B artist, John Legend notwithstanding, that we might expect to be up to the task of at least matching Gaye’s intent, if not his execution, it would be Raheem DeVaughn.  Though his Twitter handle claims his status as “The Love King,” his oeuvre provides evidence of an artist who has consistently addressed social and political issues that seemingly have been jettisoned from R&B for at least a generation.   With songs like The Love Experience’s “Until,”  The Love and War Masterpeace’s “Bulletproof” (channeling Curtis Mayfield) and the recent collaboration with Kenny Dope (of Masters of Work fame) and Chicago’s Rhymefest on “Final Call,” (“I’m back on my ‘Marvin Mayfield’)—a song recorded in 2014 to acknowledge the Nation of Islam’s annual Saviours’ Day Celebration--DeVaughn has cultivated a solid fan base that expects him to regularly find that balance between the sacred (the sexual) and the profane (the political) in R&B. Like the political accounting  that Gaye’s What’s Going On? documented in the aftermath of the killings—Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton, Robert Kennedy, George Jackson, to name just a few—and the heightening of State repression with the incarceration of Angela Davis, Huey Newton and the Attica Uprisings being prime example, it might be expected that DeVaughn’s new music might serve ideally as a soundtrack this moment of #BlackLivesMatter. Though DeVaughn’s Love Sex Passion might seem more concerned with buttressing the most commercial aspect DeVaughn’s brand—a bunch of little warblers nipping at his heels—it perhaps poses other questions.  Like how does one index desire, pleasure, one’s appetite and even need for the carnal in the midst of trauma and crisis?  Love Sex Passion is not without precedent. Love Sex Passion falls somewhere in the same tight-fitting jeans that inspired  Gaye’s Let’s Get it On, his full-length follow-up to What’s Going On?,  and Bob Marley’s Kaya. Tracks from the latter were recorded alongside Marley’s classic Exodus, yet the sweetness of songs like “Satisfy My Soul” and “Is This Love” is a reminder of the warm bed that awaits, even the revolutionary; the love letters shared between George Jackson and Angela Davis, serving as exhibit L. Less a retreat from the politics of the moment or even an alternative site to pursue a sensuous and sensual Black life, the pursuit of love, sex and passion establishes a politics of its own. For example, Gaye’s “If I Should Die Tonight” (from Let’s Get It On) takes on even more significance because it was recorded in an era when the losses were real and often; again thinking about Black Panther leader Fred Hampton laying next to his pregnant partner Deborah Johnson on the night that he was murdered.   Yet the relationship and sexual life that Hampton and Johnson obviously shared with each other was part of the “toolkit for survival,” if you will, that is often given short shrift in our collective memories of movement.  Writing about the Black lives that mattered during the antebellum period historians Jessica Marie Johnson and Treva Blaine Lindsey ask readers to consider notions of pleasure and desire in the life of Harriet Tubman: “We do not imagine the adrenaline rush she may have felt, the pleasure she might have taken in dodging slave catchers, patrols, police. We do not imagine nights where she may have touched herself to extend the feeling, slipping her fingers inside her clothes and between her thighs to hang onto the sparkling rush…” ("Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom"). Raheem DeVaughn’s vocal style, which relies on a level of emotiveness often at odds with the profitable images of Black masculinity that circulate in the music industry, provides a sonic mapping of that “wetness” that Johnson and Lindsey refer to in their essay.  DeVaughn may be the most erotic male R&B vocalist of his generation, doing so in a way that often transcends lyrics.  Thus DeVaughn has eroticized the Political, and in the instance of Love Sex Passion, he politicizes the Erotic. Undergirding standout tracks like “When You Love Somebody”  on DeVaughn’s Love Sex Passion is that recognition there is always somebody, somewhere, waiting for you; and sometimes we don’t make it back home.  In the case of  “Black Ice Cream,” there’s the creamy mouthful of joy in the private darkness of another night spent on the street, hands-up--a narrative more compelling because of the examples of Alexis Templeton and Brittany Ferrell.
The most successful artists are able to sustain their career by being aware of the needs of the audience. After a summer and autumn of attending to matters of Black Lives, Raheem DeVaughn’s Love Sex Passion demands that we also attend to the matters of Black Love.

As First Black American NHL Player, Enforcer Was Defenseless Against Racism

Val James became the first American-born black player in the NHL in 1982. He faced vicious racism, including fans throwing bananas on the ice. After 30 years in silence, he is talking about it now. -- NPR Code Switch

The Man Who was Spock (Video Obituary)

New York Times Video obituary for Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015)

Professor James Braxton Peterson to Visit Duke University on March 4, 2015

Professor James Braxton Peterson to Visit Duke University on March 4, 2015

The Role of the Black Public Intellectual:A Conversation with James Braxton Peterson and Mark Anthony Neal
Wednesday, March 4, 20154:00 pmDuke Forum for Scholars and PublicsOld Chemistry 011 (Duke West Campus)
***
The Hip-Hop Underground and African American Culture:A Lecture by James Braxton Peterson
Wednesday, March 4, 20156:30 pmRichard While Lecture Hall (Duke East Campus)
***

Duke Alumnus Professor James Braxton Peterson (Trinity ‘93) is director of Africana Studies and Associate professor of English at Lehigh University.  A regular contributor to MSNBC, Professor Peterson is also the host of The Remix on WHYY in Philadelphia. He is author of  The Hip-Hop Underground and African American Culture: Beneath the Surface.
***
Events sponsored by the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship (CADCE), The Department of African & African American Studies and the Duke Forum for  Scholars and Publics

Meet Six People Who Celebrate Being LatiNegro

'In 2010, the census bureau reported that Latinos comprised 17% of the U.S. Population. About 3% of said population are Black Latinos — that’s about 1.2 million. This number doesn’t include the 11 million undocumented immigrants in America and some 36% of Hispanics reporting themselves as ‘other’ in race.' -- Fusion

Death in the Suburbs: Reinventing the American Mall

'Rumors of the mall's death have been slightly exaggerated. Anchor stores are leaving -- stores such as Sears and JC Penney -- but high-end malls are reporting record sales. And many suburban malls are witnessing a rebirth.'-- Noel King reports for Marketplace  

The Remix: Anthea Butler Lets Loose on ISIS terror, Twitter Trolls and Beyonce's Grammys Fail

' Anthea Butler is no stranger to maneuvering between the realms of pop culture, religion, and politics.  On the latest episode of The Remix with James Braxton Peterson, the author and associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania moveseffortlessly between discussions of Beyoncé's recent Grammy performance of a gospel classic — "the driest, dumbest performance of 'Precious Lord' I have ever heard" — to a critique of Twitter's ineffectiveness at shutting out trolls.'

The Last Day of Childhood by Mark Anthony Neal

"#SnowDay" courtesy of Misha Gabrielle NealDuke Professor and Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal recalls the snow days of his childhood and the rare chance to experience another with his growing daughters.

The Last Day of Childhoodby Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I can’t say that snow days were ever my thing.  The store-bought, commercially approved  greeting card images of young White children rollicking in the snow, sledding safely into their dad’s arms, mom waiting to nestle them with a steaming cup of hot cocoa were always incongruent with my reality: pissed stained, muddied slush. 
The 'hood is still 'hood, even when it was blanketed with 11-inches of snow.  As a kid, every time I heard Johnny Mathis sing “Winter Wonderland” I thought he was out of his fuckin’ mind.
Raising my daughters in the South, snow days have different flow; schools days are cancelled more often than not, for what amounts to sugar dustings, on the top of sheets of ice. I get the safety issues associated with the cancellations, though I often find myself telling tall tales (that are not all that tall), about having to still get to work on days when 17-inches of snow fell the night before.   
Both daughters were too young to remember the Christmas day in Schenectady that gifted us 3-feet of snow; we departed for Austin, Texas  the following summer having enough of those northeast winters.
And yet on a late February day in North Carolina, the Gods of Winter felt need to give us a legitimate snow day; 8 inches of snow in the Triangle, which given the challenges of the region, pretty much amounts to that 3-foot White Christmas.
The youngest, just on the verge of teenagedom, morphed straight from pajamas to hooded coat and pink garden boots; she and the dogs were rollicking--yes, rollicking--in the snow before I could blink an eye.  The oldest, often far too consumed with school and swim practice, left the comfort of her bed--and the always elusive promise of sleeping-in--to cooly sit on the stairs of the porch (with one of the dogs) to take shots from her camera.
While I have often been dismissive of the middle-class comforts that my partner and I have worked damned hard to ensure for our daughters, and even more so, the idealized middle-class lives that get depicted on television and film, I found myself, at this moment, living that very greeting card that I so despised in my youth.
As a snow-ball whizzed past my face, amidst demands that after breakfast we make a snow person (as if I knew how to or even cared how to), I was reminded (as I am often these days) of how fleeting these moments are.  Sooner than I like to admit, both daughters will be out of the house, living their own lives, charting the paths that we’ve tried to prepare them for.  Watching them from the porch was as much about seeing them begin to say goodbye to their childhoods, as it was the last day of childhood for me.

Addis Ideas Creates App to Address Challenges Faced on African Continent

' Addis Ideas is disrupting the extant approach to African development, which incorrectly relies on western philosophy to solve African issues. Addis Ideas is an application that solely relies on African innovation.Our mobile application crowd sources African development ideas from African nationals and the African diaspora.' #WhereAfricanIdeasMatter

Left of Black S5:E21: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom

Left of Black S5:E21:  Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom 

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal (@NewBlackMan) is joined in studio by Professor Jessica Marie Johnson (@jmjafrx) and Professor Treva Blaine Lindsey (@DivaFeminist), co-authors of the essay "Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom." In the essay Professor Johnson (Michigan State University) and Professor Lindsey (The Ohio State University) grapple with the “erotic lives of black women during slavery,” offering a “new lens with which to comprehend the lived experience of chattel slavery.” The essay was published as part of a special issue of Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism.
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).

*** 

Episodes of Left of Black are also available for free download in @ iTunes U

*** 

Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlack