Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 889

Putting ‘Yeezus’ Aside: Jasiri X’s Urgent Spreadable Media by Mark Anthony Neal

Putting ‘Yeezus’ Aside:  Jasiri X’s Urgent Spreadable Media
by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
In a celebrated and much remarked upon three-minute spot that aired during Game 5 of the NBA finals, artist and entrepreneur Jay Z remarked  “we don’t have any rules, everybody’s trying to figure it out. That’s why the internet is like the Wild West…the Wild, Wild West.”  It was an admission from one of the most visible tastemakers of urban culture that the old models of the culture business have long given way to a great unknown.  Of course Mr. Carter can make such pronouncements with the backing of Samsung and Live Nation—the only risks he’s really taking are purely aesthetic.
For an artist like Jasiri X, and many others, the Wild, Wild West is more than a metaphor.  Jasiri X has staked his career on producing urgent spreadable media that undermines the very structures erected to keep a broader public from accessing thoughtful media, not sanctioned by the major media outlets and corporations.  With very little, if any, radio airplay and lacking “major label” backing, Jasiri X has managed to become part of the cultural landscape with videos like “What if the Tea Party was Black?,” “I am Troy Davis (T.R.O.Y.),” which sampled the Pete Rock & CL Smooth classic “They Reminisce Over You,” and “Trayvon.”  YouTube was still a new phenomenon for many folk when Jasiri X released his breakthrough track “Free the Jena 6.”  Indeed these single videos—posted with full lyrics—recall the late poet Dudley Randall selling single page poems—broadsides—for a distinctly analog generation nearly fifty years ago.
Jasiri X’s latest track and music video “We Are the New Nat Turners” is evidence of what has really shifted in a world of sharable and spreadable culture.   As Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green  note in their recent book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in Networked World (NYU Press), “this shift from distribution to circulation signals a movement toward a more participatory model of culture, one which see the public not as simply consumers of preconstructed messages but as people who are shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media content in ways which might not have been previously imagined.” This particular cultural logic seems uniquely suited for the aesthetic impulses of Hip-Hop culture, which has long been committed to refashioning culture for its primary constituents.
Jasiri X’s “We Are the New Nat Turners” was made available for viewing on YouTubeand for download Band Camp  on the eve of major releases from Kanye West (Yeezus), J Cole (Born Sinner) and underground hero Mac Miller (Watching Movies with the Sound Off).  For Jasiri X, any fissure in the official cultural narratives that both applaud or denounce Yeezus, for example, is a victory. 
As such, “We Are the New Nat Turners”—like Black Twitter and the “Rachet”—serves as a B(l)ackchannel, a counter-resistance, that is increasingly more critical to Black political discourse than those “Black” media outlets that claim access to the Obama White House.  Literally a space to talk-back, the B(l)ackchannel functions much the same as the not-so-“hidden transcripts” that anthropologist James C. Scott describes in his classic Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990)—hidden in plain-sight, as it is, amongst a barrage of “big data.”
An important aspect of this sharable media moment is that it provides new dictates for the Black critical intelligentsia.  While certain cultural products—no  matter what their aesthetic value—will prove alluring because of the access they provide to the broader media landspace – this being written from someone with a new book with a large chapter on Jay Z—we also have a responsibility to support those artists whose work will be ignored, and worse still, dismissed.  In our critical responses to Black cultural productions and other cultural products, we need to understand the reality of spreadable culture and be willing to “talk back” accordingly.
***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including the recently released Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (NYU Press).  He is the host of the weekly webcast Left of Black , which is produced in conjunction with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, where Neal is also a Professor of African & African American Studies.  You can follow him on Twitter at @NewBlackMan.

Jasiri X: 'If They the New Slaves, We the New Nat Turners ' (dir. Haute Muslim)

Produced by Religion. Shot by Haute Muslim 

Download New Nat Turners at http://jasirix.bandcamp.com/

New Album Ascension Available Herehttps://itunes.apple.com/us/album/asc...

Follow Jasiri X https://twitter.com/jasiri_x

LYRICS
I'm tired of Black murders
If they the new slaves we the New Nat Turners
No bodyguards no entourage
We them Cinque niggas taking the Amistad
Bombaclad we need to fast like Ramadan
The industry's a bunch of fake heros like Comic-Con
Behind that mask you Robert Downey jr
My sheros got a 2 million bounty on her future
Mutulu's locked in San Bernardino County as a shooter
You some go a long to get a long howie y'all neutered
I'm a mother f*cking Truther
My truth scars you gonna need a mother f*cking suture
Don't let these new Stephen ass niggas recruit ya
Cause when Monsieur Candie gets tired he gonna mute ya
And I ain't Django either
I ain't waiting for no white man to come and give me my freedom
I won't join em I'll beat em leave em rottin in the hot sun
Rockin em with the shotgun Shotta I'm the top one
Tell the coroner box em eulogize then drop em
If the chose is freedom or death then what's the option?
Oh y'all them RG3 niggas
Smiling at the camera them happy that y'all can please niggas
I'm Barack but Fonzworth is a marine nigga
Deep like the mind of Farrakhan I'm on my dean nigga
That's why I never believe niggas
Oh you got them instagrams how come we never see pictures
Then claim God but never read scriptures
So we worship fame because a celebrities richer
So Jesus becomes Yeezus
then I guess Kim Kardashian is Mary Magdalene
And all her sins are cleansed through the camera lens
But then again maybe I'm just rambling
Line up these industry CEOs and let me battle them
Show Jimmy Iovine the crime scene with his headless brethren and tell him sign these 
And when I hear sirens disconnect his neck from his spine clean
The difference my spitting is the equivalent of using ya high beams
All I want is you and ya mind freed the time needs H
Way more than a nice beat and a rhyme scheme
Cause all that bull shit y'all talking don't fertilize seeds
I heard it takes 2 chains to make a slave
One on your physical frame and one on ya brain
And once they got ya mental enslaved it runs like a train
So what are you really saying when you claim you stuck in the game
See they create corporations cause they never wanted fame 
So the nigga that you see is the nigga that's underpaid 
Damn just another slave 
I'm Jean-Jacques Dessalines I swing a mother f*cking blade
X

An Intimate Lecture w/ ?uestlove @ Red Bull Music Academy 2013

RedBullMusic
An intimate sit down and lecture with ?uestlove: drummer, DJ, music journalist and record producer at the Red Bull Music Academy space in New York.

Official Trailer: 'Friend of Essex' (dir. Amir Dixon)

AMIRNOWTV

Nu Nation in association with Shot Wide Open Productions Presents 

Friend Of Essex (2012)
Visit www.NuNationNow.com for premier dates and details
Written and Directed by Amir DixonPhotographed and Edited by Ryan Mahoney

"Roomieloverfriends" | Episode 4 of 5‬ ‪ [Season 2‬]

Issa Rae Presents

"Roomieloverfriends" is a BLACK&SEXY.TV production @blackandsexytv

Starring Shayla Hale, Andra Fuller + Ausen Jaye


Created and Written by Dennis Dortch + Numa Perrier @MissNuma

Executive Producer: Issa Rae
Produced by Numa Perrier

Produced by Desmond Faison 

Associate Producers: Irwin Daniels, Krystal Bradford, and Dean Russell

Directed by Dennis Dortch

Cinematography by Will Novy
Post Picture: Brian Ali-Harding
Edited by Jamila Glass

Make Up: Sydney Milan

Hair: Erin Smith

Edited by D. Dortch

Production Assistant: Jean Black, Maya Morales



Special Thanks: Brian Ali-Harding, & Desmond Faison

FEATURED MUSIC:

Gwen Bunn
"Right Now" 
www.reverbnation.com/gwenbunn

Kira Hayze
"When You Walk In Temporary Love"
Twitter: @kira_hayze

Theme song "Chemistry" written and performed by Allegra Dolores @allegradolores

Produced by Henry "Lukecage" Willis


PURCHASE + DOWNLOAD AT: ‪‪http://blackandsexytv.bandcamp.com/‬‬

Inside "Magna Carta Holy Grail" with JAY Z + Samsung

SamsungMobileUSA
JAY Z's new album Magna Carta Holy Grail comes to Samsung Galaxy fans first. Be among the first million to download the app on June 24th and get the album free July 4th, three days before the rest of the world.

Moral Mondays: A Model Grassroots Movement by Benjamin Todd Jealous

Moral Mondays: A Model Grassroots Movementby Benjamin Todd Jealous | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
On April 29, seventeen dedicated activists were arrested for civil disobedience at the North Carolina General Assembly as they protested attacks on education, health care, voting rights and the poor. Six weeks and six "Moral Mondays" later, nearly 400 people have been locked up, and the nation is watching.
This is what democracy looks like.
The peaceful protests were started by Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP State Conference. Rev. Barber has spent decades fighting for the poor and working class in his home state, building diverse coalitions like the Historic Thousands on Jones Street People's Coalition and the Forward Together Movement. Despite name-calling and threats of violence, he has continued to build his grassroots movement to fight poverty, racism and the discriminatory policies of the "Old South".
Those coalitions were put to the test when North Carolina lawmakers decided to embrace one of the most radical agendas in the nation. In the space of a few months, lawmakers rejected $700 million in federal unemployment benefits and passed up federal funds to expand Medicaid for half a million people. At the same time, they voted to raise taxes on 900,000 poor and working class people; slash funding for pre-school and kindergarten; and spend time pursuing wildly unpopular proposals, like a bill that would let legislators receive gifts from lobbyists.
Then, following a pattern we have seen across the country, they tried to cement their agenda by suppressing the vote. Rather than convince the public to vote for them on merit, legislators introduced a voter ID bill that would disenfranchise nearly 500,000 voters, and planned to roll back early voting, same-day registration and Sunday voting.
The community had seen enough. What followed was a textbook example of how grassroots organizing can and should work.
In late April, Rev. Barber and the HKonJ coalition organized the weekly Moral Mondays protests at the State House in Raleigh. Next, Rev. Barber engaged the NAACP's broad network of 100 youth and adult units, organizing 26 local protest events across the state. In Halifax County, where one out of four people live below the federal poverty line, locals packed Mount Hope Baptist Church. In the small city of New Bern, more than 250 people packed a community center and cheered two community members who had been arrested at a Moral Monday. Each event made its own point while reinforcing the larger message.
Rev. Barber also took the advice of Dr. King: "If you are comfortable in your coalition, then your coalition is too small". The protestors getting arrested each week are from all different backgrounds - veterans and students, schoolteachers and blue collar workers, professors and doctors, labor and environmental leaders, and clergy of different races, classes, faith communities and even physical abilities. They are unified by shared values and a belief in what Rev. Barber calls "a deeply moral and constitutional vision of society" where "the focus of public policy is justice for all and care for the common good."
I was particularly moved by the words of Dr. Charles van der Horst, a white doctor from the UNC School of Medicine who would clearly benefit from the legislature's agenda. He spoke outside the State House last week about the concept of fusion politics:
"This is not a black thing, this is not a white thing. This is not a poor thing, this is not a rich thing. This is not a Christian or Jewish or Muslim thing. What hurts one person, hurts us all."
Dr. van der Horst is absolutely right, and his message should reverberate on a national scale. North Carolina will not thrive if it insists on selling off the rungs on the ladder to the middle and upper class. In the same way, America will not prosper if our leaders refuse to address wealth inequality and the same attacks on education and voting rights.
Luckily, America is listening. The protests have earned growing national press, and last weekend Melissa Harris-Perry devoted a segment of her national Saturday morning television show to the campaign. Moral Mondays have become a catalyst for a broader debate on public policy and the common good.
The question is whether North Carolina will listen to its own people. Only time will tell, but as Rev. Barber and the state's activists have proven time and time again, they will not stop fighting until justice is won.
***
Ben Jealous is president/CEO of the NAACP. 
Contact:  Ben Wrobel 917-846-0658 bwrobel@naacpnet.org @NAACPPress

Thoughts on ‘Raising’ Resistance: Parenting in the Midst of Crisis by Stephane Dunn

Thoughts on ‘Raising’ Resistance: Parenting in the Midst of Crisis by Stephane Dunn | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
This time of year, I admit, I start thinking about fathers and parenting and the joys and struggles of raising my child. A lot of it has to do I'm sure with the fact that stores and commercial and unasked for sales ads in the mail bombard me with the silly suggestion that I need to remember my father and my son's, and buy him a razor or old spice or some golf balls because its Father's Day. And I know it’s because my father, both the biological one and the one whose name I bear and whom I loved as Daddy, are both dead, and each in their absences and presences while growing up inevitably shaped me in specific ways.
There are many days out of a year that I think of them quite  honestly. But this year I am thinking  of another father too, Emad, a resisting Palestinian filmmaker whose critically acclaimed film, Five Broken Cameras (with Guy Davidi) shares the story about the nonviolent resistance  of a village against both the concrete and wire walls that the Israeli government builds and continues to build on their land. The filmmaker father and his collaborator frame the story of a village's lengthy struggle through the father's narration of both the life of five cameras—as  they are broken during their attempts to record the truth of their ongoing struggle—and his  youngest son Gibreel's transition from baby to toddler to little boy. What's most striking is the father's and the mother's stunning, brave choice, to allow the boys, including Gibreel, to witness the nonviolent fight against the wall and all of its bloody consequences. 
The father's voice narrates throughout – sometimes meditative about his fears for the boys in the midst of his resolute choice to groom them with the reality of the life and death costs of their resistance, and the conviction that it is necessary despite these costs. Their uncles and neighbors are arrested for nonviolently trying to protest the wall and some are wounded and are killed as the young boy witnesses. Even his father, before the eye of the camera and the eyes of the little boy, is critically injured. I am struck raw by his choice—both  for himself to keep filming and his choice for his children to let them watch—to teach them so early about the necessity of their resistance in the face of terrible odds and costs.
I think that one of my greatest impulses as a mother has been to protect my son. His first three years have certainly been, in part, punctuated by the sound of my voice, bidding him to 'be careful', 'to watch his head,' to not run too fast, and to 'STOP'. His father, my partner, is protective too but he has also been more willing to let him wander, possibly, into a little bit of danger and the possibility of learning the difficult or hard way.
My father too, a brilliant, multi-talented, funny, alcoholic, taught me too, inadvertently, that childhood innocence is neither a given or indefinite, and in the end my survival in the midst of violence and confusing disruptions taught me and shaped me as much as the laughter and fine experiences that  we shared.
Emad Burnat sees that his children will not come away unscathed if they are not on the front lines; they will not be safe in the homes where soldiers can evict or bulldoze them at a moment's notice or arrest sons no matter how young, for such offenses as charges of throwing rocks as soldiers. Emad and his wife's weary, stunning choice to critically wean their sons on the necessity of unrelenting resistance puts me on notice as a human being and a mother that a choice is necessary. I am reminded of something—resistance to oppression is part of my ancestral legacy.  
And in making the choice to resist the ignorance about the truth and the silence on the immoral complicity of myself and the US in the oppression of Palestinian mothers, children, and fathers—no matter how seductive—I  am making a choice to arm my son with this knowledge early, and to do so unrelentingly and unapologetically.
***

Stephane Dunn, PhD is a writer and Co-Director of the Film, Television, & Emerging Media Studies program at Morehouse College. She is the author of the 2008 book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas : Black Power Action Films (U of Illinois Press), which explores the representation of race, gender, and sexuality in the Black Power and feminist influenced explosion of black action films in the early 1970s, including, Sweetback Sweetback’s Baad Assssss Song, Cleopatra Jones, and Foxy Brown. Her writings have appeared in Ms., The Chronicle of Higher Education, TheRoot.com, AJC, CNN.com, and Best African American Essays, among others. Her most recent work includes articles about contemporary black film representation and Tyler Perry films.

The Feminist Wire: Feminists We Love—David Ikard & Mark Anthony Neal

The Feminist Wire

Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University)  and David Ikard (University of Miami) recently co-edited an issue Black Male Feminism for Palimpsest (Volume  1, Issue 2), where they bring together a range of scholars and social critics to explore the dominant questions surrounding black male feminism.
***
Neal and Ikard are feminists that I love not simply because of the work that they do, but because they have model what it means to be male feminist scholars inside and outside the academy.  Both Neal and Ikard continue to teach me not only about the important theoretical debates, and the discursive articulations, but what it means to integrate feminism into my daily praxis, my pedagogy, and my parenting, thus paving a way for my growth as teacher, father, partner, friend and person.  Enjoy!--David J. Leonard

"Just Checking" Cheerios Parody Responds to Haters [video]

Written & directed by Kenji
Starring Andrea Barnett, 
Hollis Witherspoon & Joyelle Nicole Johnson
Assistant Director - Vincenzo Piccano
Co writers - Mark Normand & Eddie Lombardi