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July 25, 2001
Music
Purple Hazy 
"To be sure, the cultlike status is not undeserved. As Perry points out, 'Prince was the preeminent artist of the 1980s, and he deserves a place in the pantheon with James Brown and Louis Armstrong.' In his 1989 autobiography, Miles Davis--not known for handing out compliments--wrote that Prince could be the next generation's Duke Ellington. 'But among those guys,' Perry notes, 'I can't think of anyone who suffered a more precipitous fall in a shorter period of time.'" City Pages
July 24, 2001
Beef-a-Real
The Struggle to Get Past Stereotypes "What has happened is that black-centered TV comedy has become a ghettoized genre, used by emerging networks to gain a quick, loyal audience and abandoned once mainstream (read: white) viewers are in sight." St. Petersburg Times
Beef-a-Real
This Door Didn't Just Open "'My agent tried to get me meetings at "Seinfeld" and "Frasier," and they weren't interested,' she remembers. '"We don't need that voice," is what we would hear over and over again. But yet you've got white folks writing black shows. When I was on "Fresh Prince," at one point, I was the only black writer on the show. It was all Jewish men. You mean to tell me that you need that voice to tell a story of a hip-hop kid living in Bel-Air?'" LA Times
July 22, 2001
Music
Ladies First "And still, while Bond and a handful of others have earned respect in hip-hop's fight club, female DJs on the whole have a long misogynist road ahead of them. Hip-hop culture's undercurrent is organically violent toward women. Videos, anthems, and artists go to supa-dupa homoerotic lengths to reaffirm their unyielding devotion to their brothers and neighborhoods, and their rabid disdain for the opposite sex." Village Voice
July 19, 2001
Review
Mythology and Heroism in the Slave South "More recently, popular filmmaker Mel Gibson refused to incorporate images of African Americans turning on the white master class during the Revolution, despite a wealth of evidence suggesting that slaves flocked to the Tory cause in the hopes of gaining their freedom. Gibson's film The Patriot countenanced the white American revolutionaries' use of violence against the British, even fetishizing it through scenes in which the film's hero -- a figure loosely based on 'the Swamp Fox' Francis Marion -- shoots, slices, and skewers a series of fantastically evil British soldiers. Yet the filmmakers rejected the possibility that such tactics might be employed by African American slaves against their white oppressors." Support Drylongso and order He Shall Go out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey.
H-Net
Review
The Ghost of Denmark Vesey: Black Labor, Southern Politics, and the Case of the Charleston Five "The show of force was dazzling: police helicopters hovered overhead; land units road on horses and others in armored vehicles; canine units held snarling dogs at bay; black-clothed police squads stood poised with beanbag bullets; patrol boats cruised the waterside of the terminal, apparently staving off a possible union invasion by sea. 'You would think there was going to be a terrorist attack on the State of South Carolina,' Riley says." Chris Kromm
Political Animal
The War Against J-Lo "But the black 'N' word defenders miss the point. Words are not value-neutral. They express concepts and ideas. Words reflect society's standards. If color-phobia is one of its most powerful standards, then emotionally laden racist words easily reinforce and perpetuate stereotypes. And a hyper-racially-charged word such as the 'N' word does precisely that. It is the most hurtful and enduring symbol of racial oppression. It has a grotesque history." Davey D addresses the issue in this article and another on the use of the word.[The editor hates the alternative, "the 'N' word" currently in use. It's baby talk and just plain dumb.] Salon
July 18, 2001
Political Animal
"Race Relations": The Problem with the Wrong Name "How is it that we apply such benign language to such a malignant problem? It is rather like diagnosing a melanoma as a skin rash, and prescribing a topical salve. Putting the wrong name on a problem is worse than having no name at all. In the latter instance, one is at least open to filling the conceptual void. In the first instance, however, words lead us down a blind alley. They divert us from the facets of the problem that should command our attention, and as the analogy to melanoma suggests, they lead to remedies that are ineffectual or worse." New Politics
July 17, 2001
Political Animal
The World's Most Popular Drug "Caffeine unquestionably supports a physical dependence, as proved by the withdrawal symptoms associated with its abrupt discontinuation. It also has several additional characteristics in common with drugs that support a clinical dependence syndrome. These characteristics include both caffeine's ability to improve people's moods, self-confidence, and energy and what researchers call its ability to act as a reinforcer, or what in laymen's terms might be phrased as 'the more you get, the more you want' factor. Yet despite the reasonableness of the hypothesis and considerable anecdotal evidence, it has been demonstrated only recently that there actually are users whose pattern of caffeine consumption merits a diagnosis of clinical dependence syndrome." Tom Paine.com
Poetry
Seed of Mango, Seed of Maize "I saw one of my grandmothers once/in a photograph." drylongso.com
Political Animal
An everyday bloodbath in Jamaica The law was used for hundreds of years to enslave Jamaicans, so respect for it doesn’t come easily, and a desire to get hold of the slave owners’ most potent symbol of power - the gun - is perfectly understandable. The people have had the vote since 1943, but it’s not what they use if they want change. They use the altogether more fundamental Jamaican political instrument: brute force. Scotland on Sunday
Contribute
SPOKEN WORD CONTEST GUIDELINES
Contribute
Call for Participants: African American Family Reunion Research Project Stephen Criswell, a folklorist and professor at Benedict College in Columbia, SC, is conducting an extensive two-year study of African American family reunion traditions. This study, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, will document ongoing reunion traditions, investigate the origins of such large-scale gatherings of African American families, and will offer a long-overdue scholarly analysis of a phenomenon important to individual families and to the African American community as a whole.
Stephen Criswell
July 12, 2001
Contribute
Uncivil War "The anti-Joyce campaign swung into high gear. Skirmishes began on the ground at Temple. Asante led a demonstration in the middle of campus, complete with bullhorns and placards that proclaimed, 'Joyce must go!' Temple's campus police seized a pin-stuck voodoo doll with a note attached that read, 'Joyce must die!' It had been stuffed in Joyce's department mailbox. The keyhole in her office door was injected with Krazy Glue. Notes were scrawled on a bathroom's walls and mirror; in permanent black marker, they spelled out 'F--k Joyce.'" Village Voice
July 9, 2001
Political Animal
Chaos in Haiti Repels Even Drug Dealers "Grand-Goave's free-for-all began about 5:30 a.m. that day, moments after 8,400 pounds of cocaine landed on the beach. Local police had been tipped off to the shipment; some were probably hired protection for the traffickers, said one local officer who asked not to be named.
Soon the police were overwhelmed by thousands of townspeople, most of them armed with machetes or homemade guns. Outnumbered, the police ultimately gave up and, witnesses said, even helped distribute the sacks. In the end, police officially seized just 300 pounds." L.A. Times
July 8, 2001
Political Animal
Black Folks, Killing Jokes, and the Journey of the Self "Having suffered centuries of oppressive colonization and demonization, African American artists, and citizens in general, have learned to publicly mask our pain in an illusion of wellness." drylongso
The Stacks
Spotlight on Kara Walker The nature of art is controversy; yet, the silhouette tableaux of Kara Walker pushes the art controversy envelope over the edge. A bibliography of Kara Walker, her work and exhibitions. drylongso
July 5, 2001
Music
No Place Like Home "This is the North Philadelphia that produced singer Jill Scott and basketball star Dawn Staley. Their successes are testaments to the power of perseverance. And to the lies that numbers and images sometimes tell."
Philadelphia Weekly
Music
The Evolution of Rap Music in the United States "I have come to the conclusion that there can be no conclusion to my unit on the evolution of rap music in the United States because rap music is still in a state of evolution. There are areas that I have not even attempted to explore that rap music has begun to influence. For example, gospel music is one musical area in which they are beginning to produce their own rappers. Which leaves me to wonder how long it will be before other types of music in the United States such as country music embraces rap." Henry A. Rhodes: Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute
Political Animal
Review of Nissan Car Loans Finds That Blacks Pay More "And among all customers who were charged a markup, blacks consistently paid more than whites, according to Professor Cohen. Black borrowers who paid a dealer markup were charged, on average, $1,351, compared to $989 for the whites whose loans were marked up." Registration Required. New York Times
July 4, 2001
Political Animal
Receiving Grace "Damn! It was her. She had been sitting two seats over from us the entire time. Vicky turned and looked at me with a face that displayed amazement and pity at the same time. I did not need her pity, because I had decided that I was not going to bow down. If she wanted to challenge me on what I said then we could hash it out right here and now, but before the fight I would try talking first." drylongso
July 2, 2001
Beef-a-Real
Israeli coach under fire after calling US blacks "dummies" and "slaves" "'There are two shades of blacks. There's the light-skin, who are a lot smarter than the dark blacks -- those are the real dummies,' he was quoted as saying on a tape of the lecture." Our question is, how did it come up in the first place? Africana.com