Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 962

Essence Presents 'Coffee Talk' with Olympic Medalist Cullen Jones

Essence
Olympian Cullen Jones talks about his quest for success in swimming and teaching others to swim as well.

Oyin Handmade Presents New Growth: A Hair Journey! Featuring Carolyn Malachi

Oyin Handmade
Oyin Handmade presents New Growth, a Hair Journey! Featuring Grammy-nominated recording artist Carolyn Malachi. Join us for her grow out project and stay tuned for other hair stories to come!

Is William Gibson A Modern Day Oracle? | Idea Channel | PBS

PBS Idea Channel 
The science fiction writer William Gibson has not only written some fantastic scifi novels, but in the process predicted the internet, Miku Hatsune, reality TV, and a crazy amount of other technological and societal developments that have come into being. His impressive rate of accuracy seems almost mystical. Sure, he's essentially just an entertainer, but he's got a better batting average than Nostradamus, who was actually TRYING to predict the future. We may not need oracles as much as we did in the past (what with science and all), but a look into the future can be exciting and an awesome preparation for what's to come.

Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth: "We Need a Pussy Riot"

ExplodedView MEF  Three members of the Russian Punk Band, PUSSY RIOT were arrested, tried and jailed for performing a protest song in a church. Members have cited Sonic Youth as being one of their inspirations. Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon is inspired right back.
 Produced by Exploded View: exploded-view.org[image error]

Rape: The Male Crime

Rape: The Male Crimeby Haki Madhubuti

there are mobs & strangers
in us
who scream of the women
wanted and will get
as if the women are ours for the
taking.

our mothers, sisters, wives and
daughters ceased to be the
women men want we think of them as
loving family music & soul bright wondermints.
they are not locker room talk
not the hunted lust or dirty
cunt burnin hoes.
bright wondermints are excluded by association as
blood & heart bone & memory
& we will destroy a rapist's knee caps,
& write early grave on his thoughts
to protect them.

it will do us large to recall
when the animal in us rises
that all women are someone's
mother, sister, wife or daughter
and are not fruit to be stolen when hungry.

a significant few of their
fathers, brothers, husbands, sons
and growing strangers
are willing to unleash harm on the earth
and spill blood in the eyes
of
maggots in running shoes
who do not know the sounds of birth
or respect the privacy of the human form.

*** Haki R. Madhubuti, Founder & Publisher of Third World Press, former university Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Chicago State University and the Ida B. Wells-Barnett University Professor Emeritus at DePaul University.[image error]

Brooklyn Mack: From Ball Player to Ballet Star

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Bomani Jones: 5 Questions for 2012 NFL Season

SBNation 
While Bomani was kicking back on vacation, here are some things he was thinking on for the upcoming NFL season--from Tebow to Adrian Peterson to Randy Moss. He was also thinking you may have missed some of the early Bomani & Jones episodes.....

Fresh, new episodes coming at you next week as we get football season underway.[image error]

Disappearing Acts: Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone & The Erasure of Black Women in Film

Disappearing Acts: Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone & The Erasure of Black Women in Film by  Nicole Moore | HuffPost BlackVoices
"I've never changed my hair. I've never changed my color, I have always been proud of myself, and my fans are proud of me for remaining the way I've always been." - Nina Simone
When I think of Nina Simone I think of her dark chocolate skin, her full lips and her tight 'fro. Her looks were and still are every bit as relevant and powerful as the songs she sang. As a matter of fact, her undeniable African features defined and empowered her musical career. So it's no small wonder that people are outraged at hearing last week's confirmed announcement that Zoe Saldana, an Afro-Latina with a café au lait complexion and fine facial features, has been cast as the High Priestess of Soul in an upcoming bio-pic. The fires were fanned this past weekend when an interview by the film's writer and director, Cynthia Mort, surfaced in "Entertainment Weekly" where she talks about the biopic as something seemingly more inspired by Nina with composite characters than a film about Nina and the real-life characters from her life.
Zoe Saldana, best known for her roles in Avatarand Columbiana, may have the acting chops to play the lead in a feature movie, but when it comes to playing Nina Simone, I'm not so sure. It's not simply that Saldana looks nothing like Simone, a woman who could spit out a truthful and caustic Mississippi Goddamn that reminded you in no uncertain terms that she had been rejected because of her skin color. 
Casting Saldana also attempts, if inadvertently, to erase the memory of Simone's revolutionary ebon image from our minds and history's musical canon. Saldana as Simone specifically challenges the message of Simone's music and undermines the power of her well-documented resistance to conventional ideas of beauty and colorism. Nina's success and appeal had as much to do with her talent as it did with her having big lips, wide hips and that Mama Africa bosom. Unlike Lena Horne, Diana Ross & The Supremes, and Tina Turner whose crossover success was as much a result of having talent as well as having sexy live performances and glamorous good looks, Nina used her experiences with racism, colorism and sexism to ignite her music with strength and resilience heard so defiantly in To Be Yong Gifted & Black for example.
Because Simone's blackness extended as much to her musical prowess as to her physicality and image, it's perplexing that the film's production team, led by Jimmy Iovine, expects anyone, particularly in the black community, to (re)imagine Nina Simone as fair-skinned, thin-lipped and narrow-nosed? I guess if you look at Hollywood's history of casting black female roles, especially in biopics, it's not all that surprising.
With a few exceptions – Angela Bassett as Tina Turner, Halle Berry as Dorothy Dandridge and Beyonce as Etta James – Hollywood  has a long history of giving black actresses the finger by casting white women in the lead of films based on the lives of black women -- most famously Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. Angelina Jolie was given the green light to portray Mariane Pearl, an Afro-Cuban Chinese, French writer in the 2007 adaptation of Pearl's A Mighty Heart, which we kinda let slide because, well, it was Angie. But then she was cast again in a role based on a black woman character in the film Wanted, an adaptation of the same titled comic book series in which the main character is a black.
And the real kicker came in 2008 when St"uck, the true life story of African-American Chante Mallard, for which Suvari had the nerve to sport cornrows. If it only requires cornrows and a full-lipped box-office bombshell to secure these roles originally penned as black women, then what's to prevent any blonde, brunette, pale-skinned actress from playing black? And if that's the case, then surely Hollywood types also think a light-skinned Black woman can portray a dark-skinned Black woman.
Tim Burton and the other producers behind Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter certainly thought so when they cast Jacqueline Fleming, a bi-racial woman, as Harriet Tubman. And hell, even Aretha Franklin wants Halle Berry, a bi-racial woman, to play her in her own life story. And yes, Halle is the highest paid Black actress in America, but is that reason enough for her to represent every Black women on the big screen? From X-Men's Storm to Zora Neale Hurston's Janie, to Dorothy Dandrige and now possibly The Queen of Soul, Halle's image has seeped into America's (cinematic) consciousness as the face of every Black woman making it seem like we are this monolithic community of sistas. 
If Aretha, known as much for her voice as much for her thickness (and her taste in hats) doesn't even think full-figured, Oscar-winning actresses Mo'nique or Octavia Spencer would be great choices to portray her life story, I'm really not surprised by Zoe's casting. And I get that actors do not have to resemble the famous personas they portray, but when there are so few empowering images of Black women in TV & film, details like weight, skin color and hair become serious sticking points amongst Black folk.
And doors do not open for Black actresses with dark skin as readily or as often as they do for their male counterparts. Actors like Wesley Snipes, Sidney Poitier, Don Cheadle, Idris Elba, Bill Cosby and Sam Jackson do not encounter the same level of marginalization and erasure as Whoopi Goldberg, Regina King, Viola Davis and Alfre Woodard.
Then there's Tyler Perry, who has produced films like Diary Of A Mad Black Woman and a remake of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls, and has cast a number of Black actresses in his movies. Unfortunately, when the lead female character in many of these flicks is a gun-toting, outspoken, Bible-thumping, righteous she-ro named Madea-- Tyler Perry in drag-- and the other Black women are depicted as non-sexual or hyper-sexual, emotionally scarred, spiritually bereft women who just need God, Madea and a man to be happy, self-poised and empowered, then even and especially these portrayals affirm the notion that Black women are monolithic, simple and bordering on irrelevant. If a man in a dress with a gun is a box-office hit and popular with Black audiences then Hollywood takes note and actresses who look like Viola Davis or Regina King find themselves disappearing from the big screen.
Since the announcement of Saldana as the lead in Nina's biopic was made, a petition on Change.org has been created, which demands that Saldana be replaced. Supporters of the petition would rather that role go to Lauryn Hill, Adepero Oduye, India.Arie or Viola Davis. The petition, however, has been met with criticism by some who believe the role of Nina Simone is turning into a debate about one actress being "blacker" than another. Those who support Zoe, who is outspoken about being an Afro-Latina, say that her Blackness should not be defined by the color of her skin or the straightness of her hair. The fact that Zoe is Black Dominican is all that should matter. If standards of Black beauty in this country didn't have a history of being valued and de-valued based upon their semblance to whiteness as the standard then maybe it wouldn't matter.
In 1966, the woman born Eunice Kathleen Waymon penned The Four Women, which begins, "My skin is Black/ My arms are long/ My hair is wooly/ My back is strong/ Strong enough to take the pain/ Inflicted again and again." Nina had the posture, past and physicality to make this song not only brazen, but also believable and therefore revolutionary in it's telling. How can Saldana possibly bring the pain in an afro-wig and, God-forbid, dark makeup? The producers may as well cast Madea because if it's going to be all about make-up, wigs and fat-suits, ain't nobody bringing it like Mr. Perry.
***
Nicole is the Founder and Editor of theHotness.com. Follow her on Twitter: www.twitter.com/thehotnessgrrrl

Sampling Michael: Rhythm, Masculinity & Intellectual Property in the ‘Body’ of Michael Jackson

Sampling Michael:  Rhythm, Masculinity & Intellectual Property in the ‘Body’ of Michael Jackson by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
When Michael Jackson reached the commercial apex of his career in the mid-1980s, he did so not only on the strength of his formidable talent and creative vision, but also as the most visible embodiment of the broad traditions of African-American and Diasporic musicality.  Much has been made of Jackson’s early development on the chitlin’ circuit of the mid-west in the 1960s and the influence of popular figures like James Brown and Jackie Wilson on his performance.  Less has been made of the influence of vocalists like Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross and notably William Hart of the Delfonics. Throughout his development Michael Jackson functioned as an archival resource of Black movement, voice, and gender performance, which he deftly managed and negotiated in performances that were as flawless as they were fluid.  As Michael Jackson was always in conversation with a broad range of Black vernacular expression, it would figure that he would ‘sample’ from Black Culture as often as he was ‘sampled’.  As such the free exchange of cultural practices and ideas that flowed through the body of Michael Jackson raises interesting questions about intellectual property and proprietary artistic rights and the ways that Black culture has historically subverted conventional wisdom in these matters.
Michele Wallace—in a critique of Jackson that is not nearly remembered enough—described Jackson at his creative peak in the 1980s as an emblem of “Black Modernisms,” Black artistic expression that was “in consistent pursuit of meaning, history, continuity and the power of subjectivity.”Jackson’s inspirational archive was wide-ranging, but for my purposes I’m most interested in the Chitlin Circuit, which in the spirit of Jackson’s interests in the career of P. T. “The Greatest Show on Earth” Barnum, served as Jackson’s musical and performance circus. The Chitlin Circuit allowed Jackson to enact his signature performance gesture; that of rendering his primary influences as obscure, while making his own performance of those influences ubiquitous.  This move by Jackson is as much about his artistic ego—his interest in being the “Greatest Show on Earth”—as it was about his respect for cultural and racial communities that privileged the sharing of artistic expression beyond the scope of what we currently understand as intellectual property. As such Michael Jackson’s artistic sensibilities find resonance in the sampling practices largely associated with contemporary Hip-Hop production; practices that are themselves deeply indebted to communal sharing practices long valued in localized Black communities.
In a discussion on NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan, noted cultural critic and music journalist Nelson George engaged in a spirited debate with fellow music critic Bill Wyman over the debt that Michael Jackson owed to Elvis Presley in terms of creating a pop music audience.  As always, underlying virtually every comparison between Presley and Jackson, is the question of the more specific debt Jackson owes to Presley’s music and accordingly, the oft-diminished influence that a earlier generation of Black Blues and Rhythm and Blues artists had on Presley. This is an old debate, one that Jackson sheds light on in his memoir Moonwalk, where he casually dismisses Presley’s influence—a tactical choice no doubt, regardless of whether truthful—choosing to instead to highlight the influence of Chitlin’ Circuit artists such as James Brown, Jackie Wilson and Joe Tex, whom he saw many times, standing in the wings on stage after he and his brothers opened for such acts on the Chitlin’ Circuit.  George’s desire to distance Jackson from Presley is fully in line with his broader project of establishing originary contexts for Black Music, one in which the claiming of Jackson within the Chitlin’ Circuit is crucial.  But such influences are multi-directional; When Wyman later mocked Jackson’s relationship with hip-hop—citing Justin Timberlake and Usher Raymond as examples of Jackson’s tangential influence on the Hip-Hop era, it was clear that Wyman hadn’t been listening or watching very closely.   
Part of Michael Jackson’s singular brilliance was his capacity to archive a virtual history of Black musical performance and movement and to then to reproduce this archival material beyond simple mimetic sensibilities to create something that was truly original.  As Richard Schur writes in his book Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law, “African American originality departs significantly from dominant notions of creativity…the creativity of black vernacular speech emphasizes  language use over language meaning.  It matters not whether a speaker/writer first coined a phrase, idea or expression; what matters is the art by which it is used to convey a new meaning and make a new connection.”Such a moment can be heard on the track “PSA” from Jay Z’s  S. Carter Mixtape, produced by Just Blaze and released in 2004.  Besides the spoken word introduction, the first voices that you hear is that of the Jackson 5, with Michael’s high-pitched falsetto searing above those of his brothers.  The sample is from the track “Walk On” which was a staple of the Jackson Five’s national tour from 1970 through 1971.  This particular sample was likely lifted from the soundtrack to the group’s “live” television special Going’ Back to Indiana which was broadcast in September of 1971.  The song itself was a reworking of Isaac Hayes’s brilliant re-arrangement of the Hal David and Burt Bacharach classic “Walk On By,” which was originally recorded by pop singer Dionne Warwick.  With a small repertoire of their own original songs during that initial national tour, the performance of “Walk On” did multiple labor, giving the group a foot in the deep orchestral funk that Hayes was crafting for the Stax label, as well as the Psychedelic Soul of groups like Sly and the Family Stone and Norman Whitfield produced Temptations.  Hayes later returned the favor by charting with Clifton Davis’s “Never Can Say Goodbye” only months after the Jackson did the same with the song. 
Yet in Jay Z and Just Blaze’s version of the song, included on a recording that is partly named in recognition of Jay Z’s proprietary intellectual property and a song that serves a momentary rupture of the seamless iconography that is Jay Z (as opposed to S. Carter), there is a consciousness of Michael Jackson’s presence in the production, if only because of the obscure and ubiquitous  nature of that presence.  As the hallmark of great sample based hip-hop production is to obscure the origins of the music, Michael Jackson is an early purveyor of such practices, essentially obscuring the Isaac Hayes original, which while continuing to stand on its own, has been sonically muted in the Jackson Five’s performance—something that was as much a tribute to the musicianship of the Jackson Five backing band—Chitlin’ Circuit veterans skilled in making themselves “present” in other people’s music—as it is for Jackson’s singular talents to lovingly erase traces of his own influences.  Some would call this virtuosity.  Again as Schur might describe theses practices, “Sampling is not simply the reshaping and reuse of recorded text, but a method of textual production…that proceeds by listening for and incorporating discrete parts, rather than completed wholes, and constructing an aesthetically satisfying text out of them.”Such mimetic virtuosity was a hallmark of Michael Jackson’s performative gestures from the very beginning of his professional career.  As an adult he recalled that as a child he was “like a sponge, watching everyone and trying to learn everything I could.” Jackson’s working archive was the Chitlin Circuit, where he could literally, as he puts it in his memoir Moonwalk, study “James Brown, from the wings,” knowing “every step, every spin and turn.” Of Jackie Wilson, Jackson writes that he “learned more from watching [him] than from anyone or anything else.”  Again perhaps this is a tactical choice by Jackson, paying deference to Wilson five years after the singer’s death, though there is archival footage of Jackson’s Motown audition that looks like a “how to dance like James Brown” video.  Nevertheless the broader point is  made; Jackson may have been the most successful archivist of the Chitlin Circuit, though most of that influence was rendered transparent by Jackson’s mimetic genius.  Jackson himself outs part of his theft practices in a lyric from “I’ll Be There” where he swags  (or swanks, to shout out Dwele) Just look over your shoulder, honey” which is directly lifted from the late Levi Stubbs’s on the Four Tops’ track “Reach Out, I’ll Be There.”
Despite the post-race rhetoric that became as much a part of Jackson’s presentation in the late 1980s and 1990s as were the denials of sexual misconduct, Jackson was always in conversation with his influences as witnessed by the photos of The Manhattans, Stevie Wonder, Luther Vandross and Quincy Jones on the wall of the character Darryl’s apartment in the film short for the song “Bad.”  Little known fact, Vandross was expecting Jones to produce a debut solo album for him in the late 1970s, when the accident of fate, that was The Wiz (in which Vandross’s song “Everybody Rejoice” appears) brought Jackson and Jones together, changing the career trajectories of both Vandross and Jackson, who became the opposite poles of Black music and crossover pop in the 1980s, though Vandross was never as “rhythm and blues” and Jackson, never as “crossover pop” as some claimed.  Vandross’s photo in the video for “Bad” is akin to Jay Z saying to Lil’ Wayne a generation later, via a cell phone call,  “I see you.”  The short film for “Bad” was itself a sample from the tragic death of a Harlem prep school student Edmund Perry.
The oft-mentioned example of Jackson’s cover of Smokey Robinson’s “Who’s Lovin’ You” is just the first of a long tradition within Jackson’s oeuvre of him sampling from the archive.  Recorded in the spring of 1969, when Jackson was ten-year-old, “Who’s Lovin’ You” has drawn attention because Jackson conveys a sense a carnal knowledge seemingly well beyond his years.  As he would clarify in Moonwalk, in the early days of the group’s struggles on the chitlin circuit, it was not unusual for the group to perform at strip clubs.  This sense of sexual knowing that becomes evident in Jackson’s early recordings as a child—it was indeed part of his appeal, as witnessed in the now famous “Shake it baby” break-down from “ABC”—is an example of how cultural retentions from the Chitlin’ circuit, or the Black aesthetic underground, are translated in terms of Jackson’s and other artists’ sense of movement, voice, and sexuality when they hit the pop mainstream.  It is also a reminder that Jackson was always/already in drag, well before the release of Thriller in late 1982.
Jackson is less convincing  covering Bill Withers’ Ain’t No Sunshine” on his solo debut in 1971—no one will ever claim that Jackson made it his song—but the version that appears on Got to Be There is all Michael Jackson, as if he and Withers made two different songs.  Jackson’s version embodies the rhythmic quality of his vocal instrument, another early example of the way that rhythm, movement and voice are seamlessly  embodied in Jackson’s performance—recalling Jay Z’s admission to Charlie Rose a few years ago that what initially attracted him to Beyonce was that she “she sang like a rapper.” The jagged melismic mutations that mark Beyonce’s own vocal strategy is perhaps one of the purest tributes to Jackson’s vocal strategies (with gospel singer Kim Burrell also present in the mix.).
Perhaps the best example of Jackson’s early sampling practices can be heard on an earlier cover of The Delfonics “Can You Remember?” as Jackson tries on the grown man begging vocals of William Hart, producing a performance more wistful than demanding.  Jackson’s vocal authority—his willful desire to obscure—is  not yet fully actualized, a reality that is recognized with the spate of “wanna be” Michael Jackson vocalists that crop up immediately with the success of the Jackson Five.  While the Osmond’s “One Bad Apple” produced by Muscle Shoals veteran Rick Hall was more an attempt to capture the “Jackson 5 in a bottle,” in comparison New Birth lead singer Londee Loree was a dead ringer for a young Michael Jackson on tracks like their cover of “Never Can Say Goodbye” or most famously “It’s Impossible.”  The New Birth tracks were notably produced by Motown veteran staffer Harvey Fuqua.
We began to see Michael Jackson’s vocal authority emerge with the signature grunts, slurs, gasps and “schumas” that become part of the repertoire of the adult performer, leading  artist Faith Ringgold to suggest to her daughter Michele Wallace that Jackson “makes up words.”  Jackson’s vocal expressions were likely a broader attempt, one that might have been unconscious, to sync  his sense of rhythm with movement and vocal expression.  This percussive aspect of Jackson’s vocals are enhanced until the end of his career and can be framed by his performances on “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” “Remember the Time” and later “Butterflies.”  The closing segment of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is heavily indebted to the music of Cameroonian musician Manu Dibango and his song “Soul Makoussa.”  While Jackson’s debt to African pop were fairly well-known among older Soul and Disco fans—“Soul Makoussa” was a big club hit in the US in the mid-1970s—Jackson refigures those rhythms in his vocal runs on “Remember the Time,” a song and video that brilliantly trades on the affinity among young African-Americans for nostalgia, via the cultural phenomenon known as “Afrocentricity.” Theorist Fred Moten has noted the virtuosity of Jackson’s performance on “Remember the Time” noting the different inflections that Jackson uses with each enunciation of “remember.”
Despite popular perceptions to the contrary, Michael Jackson and hip-hop are artistic kin because both invested in the notion of  a cultural system of sharing. According to Schur, “While [the] Hip-Hop aesthetic fails to conform to legal fictions about cultural and property law boundaries, the result is not a pervasive, infringing cultural aesthetic. Rather intellectual property law has failed to untangle abstract legal fictions about creativity from how ordinary people within a shared cultural system convey meaning through the recording of signs, symbols, metaphors and icons.”
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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking For Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press). He is professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University and the host of the Weekly Webcast Left of Black . Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

Strikers Regroup at South African Mine

Al Jazeera English
Hundreds of defiant miners have regrouped for a protest near the spot where South African police killed 34 of their colleagues, as platinum giant Lonmin said less than a quarter of employees had shown up for work.

Meanwhile, the ANC national executive has met over concerns President Jacob Zuma is losing political support over his handling of the incident.

Al Jazeera's Tania Page reports from the Marikana mine.