hip hop is dead (?)

"Hip hop as I knew it and loved it is dead and I've mourned that a zillion times."
-Joan Morgan, Hip Hop and Feminism Conference
April 8, 2005

Since attending the Hip Hop and Feminism Conference at the U of Chicago earlier this month, I've been meditating on Joan Morgan's sentiment. It was during one of the evening sessions--after a full day of theorizing, bemoaning, and dialoguing about what can be done to save hip hop--and Morgan was joined on a panel by eminent hip hop scholar Tricia Rose and seasoned feminist activist and Spelman professor Beverly Guy-Sheftall.

Hip hop as I knew it is dead ...

Morgan spoke plaintively. And I understood what she felt--what she meant--because I knew hip hop as she knew it; many audience members did. Having come of age in the seventies and eighties, we had witnessed the birth of hip hop (even those of us growing up on the west coast) and had been exposed to the entirety of the culture--tagging, breakdancing, dj-ing and scratching, beatboxing and MCs who could really, I mean really rip the mic.

Certainly hip hop as we knew it wasn't completely free of sexism and misogyny. While we hip hop babies were fortunate enough to grow up in the era of Eric B and Rakim, KRS-One, Salt n Pepa, MC Lyte, Public Enemy--do I need to go on?--the 80s also ushered in Luke and NWA. Morgan's point however is that there was a broad spectrum of hip hop to choose from. I listened to it all and knowing NWA's lyrics by heart didn't make me want to shake my teenage ass in any music video. I did find myself chanting "fuck the police" on occassion though.

But alas, hip hop as we knew it is dead...

Yet I'm a bit wary of nostalgia. Us old heads can lament the fact that hip hop's commercialism has spun out of control. We can complain that most of what we hear on the radio is some version of some tired ass "I grew up in the hood so I'm a real nigga" formula. We can yell at the top of our lungs after watching the bizzillionth video set around a pool, featuring a rapper surrounded by scantily clad video vixens shaking their asses and grinding them against said rapper and his pimped out entourage. We have many reasons to be sad and angry and to be in mourning because we witnessed hip hop when it was fucking great!

But the very existence of a (well-attended) Hip Hop and Feminism conference seems to suggest that although hip hop as we knew it is dead, hip hop is not. If Alice Walker is right and "anything we love can be saved" then maybe all our efforts at that three day conference will not be in vain. Maybe old heads and new can tap into hip hop's transformative potential and instead of resurrecting hip hop as we knew it, perhaps we can grapple with it as it is and make it even better than it was.

about this blog

"for colored girls who drink cosmos when suicide seems too gauche" contains my post-soul, POMO, 3rd wave, hip hop boho meanderings. i have to thank my sistafriend lynn for the ntozake shange inspired witty turn-of-phrase that heads this column.

despite my reverence of the blues, this ain't no sad ole blog. for me, the blues is passion and desire as much as it is despair. it's all the happy-sad that makes life interesting.

i've also incorporated some previous blog posts from my former column "black notes." unfortunately that blog became overrun with obnoxious links to porn and viagra sites, hence the switch. those archives are condensed here for your reading pleasure.

cheers

previous pieces from "black notes"

July 16, 2003
Digging Suzan-Lori

I arrived early to Book People in order to beat the long checkout lines and grab a seat near the front of the small platform. A bronze-red satin curtain draped behind the podium supported a poster board likeness of the book jacket. Bold yellow letters announced the title. A cameo of a blueswoman supplied the mystery.

I sat in the second row of a fast-growing crowd, more diverse than most gatherings I attend in Austin. College students and professors commingled with book-club members, avid readers, mothers and artists. A beautiful coily-haired black woman in office attire sat beside a liberally-tattooed Anglo-Hispanic neo-hippie wearing soiled jeans and a Lollapalooza t-shirt. A seated mother kept her trained eye fixed on the swift movements of her little boy’s feet, darting from the Children’s section to Buddhist Poetry and back. The audience’s anticipation didn’t lessen their chatter.

After a thoughtful introduction, a pair of black-jeaned legs descended from a stairwell. I raised my eyes to meet a happy heap of dreads covered in a black ski hat that almost concealed a lovely set of eyes—warm, brown and deeply sincere. A crimson guitar hung comfortably on her right shoulder, adding a splash of color to her all-black attire. I’d never heard an author perform music at her book signing, but I was intrigued to say the least. Afterall, books don’t only tell tales, they also sing songs. And more often than not, black books sing blues songs.

Though Getting Mother’s Body heads my summer reading list, I attended the signing having only read the flap of the dust jacket. From the title, I imagined Parks’s novel dealt with a young woman becoming like her mother, figuratively taking on her body. I thought about the similarities between me and my own mother. How our eyes always betray our feelings. Especially to each other. How the timbre of our voices sometimes deepens at the end of our sentences. The closeness between me and my mother made Parks’s story line even more compelling.

But Suzan-Lori Parks’s premiere novel—from what I surmised from the description and the author’s rendition of a chapter—complicates the symbiotic relationship between mother and daughter. The Beede family’s journey to “get” (read: dig up) mother’s body is more than just a treasure hunt. It’s an excavation of a family’s past. It’s about loss, memory and retrieval. Ironically, a member of our listening audience asked Parks about her fascination with the past, as much of Parks’s work revisits history. The tone of the fiery young questioner resounded with the “get over it” mentality that characterizes America’s relationship to the past. Why the obsession with the past? Why dig up all that ole stuff? Aptly, Parks’s work honors Faulkner’s adage: “The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.”

Appropriately, Parks concluded her reading on a blues note, treating us to a performance of one of the songs that pepper her text. The chords stayed in my head throughout the evening, supplying a soundtrack to a narrative already so melodic, it begs to be read aloud. I’m still taking pleasure in Suzan-Lori’s word-songs, but check back soon for a review of Getting Mother’s Body.

July 30, 2003
kobe's caper

The July 28 Sports Illustrated cover featuring Kobe Bryant’s mugshot conjures up a comparable distasteful image: Time’s 1994 display of O.J. Simpson. Though Bryant’s visage wasn’t digitally darkened like Simpson’s, the implications of the two covers are the same. Black men in America are always already guilty.

Crimes such as driving a luxury car or standing at a bus stop in the “wrong neighborhood” are almost exclusively Black Male Misdemeanors. That strange offense of “looking suspicious” must be an innate affliction. And just in case you thought Emmitt Till’s death eradicated the “forbidden fruit” clause, cavorting with white women still calls for (at least) close surveillance in some states.

The mere allegation that a black man has committed a violent crime awakens the worst of racist stereotypes which reside in our nation’s subconscious, especially those that represent black men as violent and hypersexual. Public and incredibly mediated dramas like Simpson’s and Bryant’s spark heated dialogues about everything from the heroic status we naively bestow on athletes to the size of black men’s penises. Because Simpson and Bryant’s cases involve alleged violence against white women, both incidents easily become (mis)construed as racial matters.

Just browse through a few online discussion forums. I’ve visited bet.com and freekobe.com, among other sites, and though—unlike the Simpson matter—opinions regarding the Bryant case aren’t starkly divided along racial lines, readers have weighed in their views on interracial relationships, the tendency for “successful” black men to pursue white women and white women’s unbridled desire for black men. The forum at freekobe.com revealed the most uncensored and overtly racist commentary about Bryant and black people in general, entered by white supremacists with internet access and too much time on their hands. Yet even some of Kobe’s black supporters caution the metaphorical “black buck” to stay out of the “big house.”

Our preoccupation with race not only colors every issue that involves a black person as a racial issue, it also overshadows other important concerns which arise during rape allegations. Rape stands at the intersection of America’s culture of violence, power and misogyny. Yet, seldom does critical discourse about these issues occur when a woman accuses a man of raping her. More often than not, we question her behavior: What was she wearing? Why did she go to his room or house at that hour of the night? Did she say no? At what point did she say no? If a woman accuses a celebrity of rape, her character warrants even further scrutiny.

But what about the accused? Africana.com’s Lifestyle columnist jimi izrael argues in his piece “Falsely Accused” that “Any man can rape. But any woman can cry rape. How can a man protect himself from the false accusation?” It’s true that false accusers can ruin the lives of innocent men. Any book on lynching will tell you that.

But, bogus claims also make it more difficult for women who are raped to bring charges against their perpetrators. Without physical evidence, it’s already virtually impossible to prove rape beyond a reasonable doubt. As a result, countless women endure the trauma of rape for the rest of their lives while their assailants go free. How can we work to diminish violent crimes against women without making women out to be helpless victims or, at the other extreme, grilling them so severely—so as to prevent false claims—that actual rape sufferers are retraumatized in the litigation process?

Ours is a violent culture. Kobe’s caper only sheds light on the ways in which power, violence, sex and race intersect in our culture. I have no clue about the character, value systems or mental health of Bryant or his accuser. None of us really do. But I do know that the media circus has just begun in this case. A lot of harsh, racially- and sexually-loaded words will be levied against accuser and accused. And some woman somewhere was probably raped in the time it took you to read this piece of writing.

August 12, 2003
Why I Write

It’s been almost two weeks and…nothing. Why did I start this web log in the first place? Well…because I need to write. And write something that doesn’t rely on theory or close reading or academic blar blar.

Since starting grad school, I’ve been afraid that my creative muses would abandon me for a worthier instrument. I made the difficult choice to pursue a PhD instead of a creative writing degree because I want to do research and talk theory and be an educator. I didn’t realize how much my love and practice of creative writing would suffer.

Yet academia has also strengthened my poetry and fiction. An avid reader makes a better writer I always say. And the bulk of my work involves reading writers whose work inspired my pursuit of literature in the first place. In turn, I’ve had to hone my own writing skills to live up to what I consider real art.

This self-reflexive post stems from artist guilt. My muse hasn’t abandoned me, but I readily ignore her from time to time. This web log is a small but meaningful step toward atonement.

September 01, 2003
Da Band: "Blunted on Reality" Television

Making the Band began as an ABC reality show whose concept was the manufacturing of a “boy band.” Around the same time such cookie cutter groups as Backstreet Boys, *NSync, 98 Degrees and BBMak crooned lollipop melodies to floor-patterned dance steps and sold millions of records. America was ripe to witness the building of a boy band from the ground up. Intrigued viewers watched the clean-cut lads who would become O-Town argue, laugh and cry while honing their skills in hip-pop dancing and unremarkable five-part harmony. The show moved to MTV, ran a second season and sparked a hip hop sequel: Making the Band 2, P. Diddy Style. If O-Town and “Da Band” seem worlds apart perhaps it’s due to the high stakes that tend to underlie the production of hip hop music. Making it for some members of Da Band’s streetwise cast may be a matter of life and death.

P. Diddy tried to make the hip hop hopefuls understand these high stakes in the second episode of this season by having them recite the lyrics to Biggie Smalls’ “Juicy,” a classic testimony to the way that hip hop rescues many ghetto youth from lives of struggle and depravity. While “Juicy” further promotes the lavish lifestyle afforded to those who “make it” in the hip hop game, it also speaks to the dreams and desires of ghetto youth to better their situation as well as that of their family and community. Check it:

.....I made the change from a common thief
To up close and personal with Robin Leach
And I'm far from cheap,
I smoke skunk with my peeps all day
Spread love, it's the Brooklyn way

.....I never thought it could happen, this rappin' stuff
I was too used to packin' gats and stuff
Now honies play me close like butter played toast
From the Mississippi down to the east coast
Condos in Queens, indo for weeks
Sold out seats to hear Biggie Smalls speak
Livin' life without fear
Puttin' 5 karats in my baby girl's ears
Lunches, brunches, interviews by the pool
Considered a fool 'cause I dropped out of high school
Stereotypes of a black male misunderstood
And it's still all good

.....And my whole crew is loungin'
Celebratin' every day, no more public housin'
Thinkin' back on my one-room shack
Now my mom pimps a Ac' with minks on her back
And she loves to show me off, of course
Smiles every time my face is up in The Source
We used to fuss when the landlord dissed us
No heat, wonder why Christmas missed us
Birthdays was the worst days
Now we sip champagne when we thirst-ay
Uh, damn right I like the life I live
'Cause I went from negative to positive
And it's all
...(It's all good)

The members of Da Band hunger for the material success Biggie wrote about as well as a “life without fear.” Like many hip hop artists, particularly in the genre’s nascence, Da Band consists mostly of youth trying to escape violent city streets, avoid jail time and provide for their families. Of course I’m not suggesting that all hip hop and rap artists come from impoverished backgrounds. Rather, I’m speaking to the blues that underlie hip hop and most black musical production. The blues that speak to a collective traumatic history as well as a yearning and desire to live and thrive.

P. Diddy promised viewers he could take the Making the Band concept to a whole new level. I’m not sure that weekly screaming matches and fist fights are what he had in mind. Or maybe it is. The performance of violence and aggression has come to be so readily associated with hip hop music that a show about making a hip hop band, or rather making a hip hop band a spectacle, wouldn’t be complete without some cussing, drinking and late night parties. All that’s missing are the scantily glad girls around the pool. I guess we’ll have to wait for the video.

In other words, the manufacturing of a hip hop band may reflect the formulaic characteristics of today’s popular rap music in the same way that the first making the band mirrored the assembly line production of boy bands. On the other hand, P. Diddy has selected a talented and diverse group of artists with the potential, though not yet the discipline, to make quality music. Perhaps they will “make it.” The question is in today’s hip hop industry what does “making it” really mean?

September 26, 2003
Home

I moved to Texas. I moved to the suburbs! Two places I’d never…ever… wanted to live.
I didn’t see how I could ever feel at home in the twang-tongued, cowboy-booted, confederate flag outfitted South. Nor under the cricket-humming black bathed sky of suburban America.
Texas. The burbs. Neither seemed safe to me. Though southern politicians claimed Texas a safe haven from a more liberal North. And white folks claimed the burbs as a refuge from the inner city. The ebbs and flows of northern cities rocked me like warm, salty ocean waves. Wrapped in the arms of the crowd, I felt warmer somehow. And collective. Part of a current. Though those arms would at times become constricting, I felt safe. I felt at home amidst the towering concrete, brushing shoulder to shoulder with strangers, being lulled to sleep by siren lullabies and loud talk.

Home is a womblike space. Woman space. Rich and dark. And colorful. Spicy.

In contrast I’ve used the metaphor of “plain yogurt” to describe my ambivalence towards Austin, the part neohippie, part college town, which fancies itself “weird.”

Well I went to a weird ole art opening last Friday at the Arthouse on 7th and Congress. I’d heard that a somewhat “subversive” black performing artist was appearing as part of an exhibit entitled “Some: Of Place and Desire.” Said artist was reknown for crawling on his hands and knees down New York City blocks, wearing signs that displayed racial epithets and sporting an un-caped Superman outfit.

I watched William Pope.L out of the corner of one eye, viewed a muted video of his jaunt through Austin—carrying a plexiglass-encased pink neon sign that read COON—from my other. The bushy-headed professorial type seemed jovial enough, but I did not manage to insinuate myself into his throng of admirers. At times I also like to retain my sense of the artist’s mystique. Appreciate the work outside of its relationship to the artist. Damn, I sound like a New Critic.

Pope.L’s write-up of his walk through Austin with coon sign said he’d entered a citizen, left a stranger. I wondered what he meant and what about Austin made him feel isolated. I wondered yet I also knew the feeling quite well. I noticed while watching parts of his filmed walk how few people seemed to look at him or initiate conversation. Perhaps the significance of the word coon has escaped the current generation. Or maybe Austin’s too weird to care.

Pope.L also pondered if the slogan “Keep Austin Weird” is at all comparable to “Keep America Safe.” Funny how zones of safety for some become spaces of danger for others.

October 31, 2003
Platinum Dreads and Butt Pads

Peg motioned her head and eyes toward a woman in the corner of the room. Initially I thought my friend’s snickers were directed at yet another head of stringy, blond matted hair-posing-as-dreads that many white, neohippie Austinites insist upon wearing. Lower, her glance signaled, down there.

Butt pads. Barely camouflaged beneath black skintight pants. As if the platinum “dreads” weren’t enough.

Does J-Lo deserve credit for the current obsession with a fuller derriere? Perhaps Beyoncé has inspired a generation who once craved boyish figures to appreciate mo’ bootay! At least that’s what some of my female freshmen think. I took my comp students to an eating disorders display, thinking it would be an interesting complement to the book we’d been reading for several weeks, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.

My students are pretty sharp and most of them understood the paradox between our culture’s over consumption of food and the refusal to consume evidenced in eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia. The display featured a montage of photographs, poetry and miniature billboard signs lamenting a culture’s relationship to the body. I mourned for the disappeared and disappearing black, white and brown girls. I silently wept for the boys whose hearts had burst from steroid abuse.

"it's more … than just food. That's how it comes out, but really it's all the things about boys and men and being decent and indecent and good and bad" (190). - “Nyasha” from Nervous Conditions

I became fascinated by eating disorders and their relationship to women of color after reading Tsitsi’s Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions. I was particularly drawn to Nyasha, a spunky Zimbabwean adolescent, schooled in Britain and coming into her womanhood in her traditional Shona culture. Nyasha’s body, like all women’s bodies, is a site of contestation. Everyone has an opinion about how it should be adorned, where it belongs and what it should consume. Nyasha’s binging and purging is a harmful attempt to claim her body as her own and transform it into a space of resistance.

But black girls don’t get eating disorders. At least that’s what we’ve heard for years in the U.S. and abroad. Clinical studies purport that black women have better body images and tend to be more comfortable with round, curvaceous physiques. Though I do think curvy is cuter and have been comfortable with my own body for the most part, I’ve had plenty of post-25 battles with my weight and with my feelings about my weight. From yo-yo dieting to diet supplements and protein shakes, I’ve feasted, fasted and feasted again only to be reminded that my mental, spiritual and emotional health is the real issue at hand, not the curvier me I see in the mirror.

I wonder too if those “experts” consider overweight black women in their eating disorder studies, especially those who are dangerously overweight and use food for emotional comfort. I wonder if their version of body image includes skin colorism, which exists in black and Hispanic communities and dominates communal and societal constructs of “ethnic” beauty. J-Lo’s butt might be Puerto Rican and plump, but I suspect the whiteness of her skin makes her image more acceptable to mainstream aesthetic norms than it would be if she were noticeably Afro-Puerto Rican.

Likewise, if Beyoncé sported a natural, unprocessed, or unweaved do and if she were a darker, less-blond version of a black girl with a big ole butt, would my eighteen year old blue-eyed-blond freshman find her beautiful?

November 14, 2003
down-home city

It’s kinda like New York less much of the grit and grime: a down-home city with cosmopolitan flair.

Last weekend I took my first trip to Chicago. A familiar bluesy tune blared from Midland Airport’s baggage claim speakers, singing the greatness of “that same ole place, sweet home Chicago.” The rotator belt spun round and round in time to the repeating tune. Bags disappeared one by one, snatched by anxious hands. I stood and stared bagless and pissed. I’d packed Diana Ross style, prepared with enough outfit changes to fit most any occasion. I was meeting my friend the fly fashionista and felt compelled to match her sense of style. Or at least not to look frumpy in her shadow. Still, my bags failed to arrive before we left the hotel for our first taste of Chicago night life. I freshened up and consented to wear the black jeans and cream sweater I’d flown from Austin in.

I was in a city again. The night breathed and throbbed, impassioned by bodies and movement. I felt revitalized. Free.

The fashionista suggested – to my delight – that we nibble and sip at The Shark Bar on our first night. The Shark boasts soul food with class at a reasonable price and an upscale atmosphere with plenty of eye candy. Luckily my friend and I had both made deals with ourselves that calories consumed away from home don’t really count (eye calories included of course).

Upstairs, hip hop – ole school and new – moved the crowd. Brothas and sistas everywhere shed scarves, coats and other winter frocks, warmed by the dark womb-like feeling of the room. We sat at the bar. I drank in the crowd.

I readily accepted drinks, conversation, compliments and dances from some of the most polite and handsome brothas I’d seen in quite some time. The social deprivation I felt in Austin was alleviated, at least temporarily.

The next day: shopping Chicago by daylight. Shopping with the fashionista is always an enlightening experience. She has natural designing talent and a keen eye for what looks good, on who, and when. I learn through fashion osmosis.

Fashionably attired, thanks to the arrival of luggage, the fashionista and I scavenged the vintage and thrift shops, looking for that eye-catching piece that jumps off the rack into your arms and refuses to leave. Didn’t find it, but we did get a good tour of Lincoln Park’s hip lofts, lofty Victorians and streets full of “pride.”

That night, the fashionista wanted to go trendy and hip for dinner. I wanted good food and, of course, more eye candy. My friend who’s a foody had suggested Bucktown’s Café Matou, an undiscovered haven of culinary goodness and I was inclined to follow her advice. The fashionista however said that according to the concierge, Bin 36 was the ‘in’ place to be. In spite of my misgivings, I agreed to do trendy.

Bin 36 wasn’t … bad. The crowd just lacked…funkiness…and punch. Since it was a wine bar however, they offered an assortment of flights for a less-than-expensive cost. Quite a delight for a wine lover like myself.

After several wine tastings and an overpriced dinner, we were exhausted. But back at the hotel, black and brown people in evening finery caught our attention.

Apparently the Urban League was having its annual banquet. The fashionista and I asserted ourselves into the merriment and ended the night with one last cordial with two merry well-wishers.

On my final day, after presenting my paper (oh, did I happen to mention I was ‘attending’ a conference?), I went with another friend to Giordano’s for what else but a yummy Chicago stuffed pizza.

Back at the airport, I felt a little blue. My romance with Chicago had been love at first sight and too short-lived. I hope to see her again sometime, when the weather’s warmer and I have lots of time.

November 21, 2003
“Brother Outsider”

“Rustin stands at the confluence of the great struggles for civil, legal and human rights by African-Americans and lesbian and gay Americans.” --Walter Naegle

Wednesday night, I went to a screening of Nancy D. Kates and Bennett Singer’s documentary tribute to Bayard Rustin, Brother Outsider. The screening, taking place a day after the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared the state's ban on gay marriage unconstitutional, featured Rustin’s tireless commitment to not only civil rights, but also to human rights worldwide. Rustin advocated acting with our bodies. And his own body—a highly visible black, gay male body—acts as a text upon which we can read some of the most significant struggles of our times.

Toward the end of the documentary, Rustin remarks that the barometer for human rights in the 60’s was the way our country treated African Americans. For the 80’s, the decade in which he died, he spotted the measure for human rights in the way we treat gay and lesbian Americans.

If Rustin’s observation is true, Americans have taken the proverbial one step forward and two steps back where human rights are concerned. Let’s test Rustin’s analogy. Blacks and homosexuals are said to “contaminate” an otherwise sanitized, lily white mainstream. Both groups are subject to violent attacks if they should “forget their place” and say… chose to walk down the wrong street or whistle at the wrong woman or man or hold hands in public on the wrong park bench. Though the fight for race equality is far from over, the analogies that exist between our country’s discrimination against African Americans and gay and lesbian Americans should alert us to how much farther we need to progress as a society.

Marriage perhaps is the lynchpin example. It took South Carolina until 1998 to remove a ban on interracial marriage from its constitution. States are amending their constitutions once again to codify marriage as a union between a man and a woman. In the case of interracial marriage, the “threat” was the mongrelization of America. Racists felt that once they allowed blacks and whites to marry, light brown children would sprout up everywhere and “pure” whites would become a distant memory, a humorous and perplexing topic for future archaeological digs.

But what is the Defense of Marriage Act struggling to preserve? The image of an “ideal” citizenry? The Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best fantasies of white nuclear familial bliss? Well, guess what folks? Those portraits never existed for most of us anyhow. And they certainly don’t now.

And what about marriage is really worth defending? Americans are fast becoming least likely to marry and most likely to divorce than those in other westernized societies. And yet desperate women keep submitting alluring photographs and convincing pleas to ABC and FOX, hoping to compete for and get a ring from the next “Bachelor” or “Millionaire.” The media portrays marriage as one big fat “Average Joe” inflected joke!

Still, there are some who see value in the institution of marriage. Some who make a decision to work together as partners in marriage and perhaps in parenting. Some who want to legalize their union in spite of the many…many shortcomings of the way marriage gets performed. But only some of us are free to exercise that decision.

Perhaps Rustin was right. Maybe today King’s famed “I have a dream” speech would envision a day when people of all colors, men and men, women and women could join hands and say “I do” at last…”I do” at last…thank Goddess almighty…”I do” at last.

January 03, 2004
new (year's) eves

If I still made New Year’s resolutions, a practice I gave up awhile ago, I’d probably resolve to post to this web diary more regularly. Resolutions aside, the promise of a new year allows us to reassume the posture of birth. It offers us the chance to begin again and perhaps even make some improvements.

But alas every beginning is also an end and one of the things I’m most excited about at the beginning of this new eve is the last season of Sex and the City. Yes I’m an avid fan and have followed the four sassy grande dames of HBO through all their complicated twists and turns in relationships, sex and sexuality and self-development (or lack thereof). Admittedly, I’ll miss the New York divas but all good things…

You know the rest. Afterall it is a cliché. So what does all this have to do with black notes? Well actually it has everything to do with being and living black. It’s about (black) absence. And a loss I feel so palpably each time I watch Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte engage the cycle of birth, sex, aging and death. This absence is everywhere present in the dramatization of four thirty-something white women’s sex lives.

I asked a sistafriend (a bit rhetorically) why black women can’t be represented in the fullness of all our sexual and personal complexity. As much as I enjoyed Living Single and applaud the small attempts made by Girlfriends to go beyond the surface of comedy and stereotype, I mourn the loss of black women’s sexuality, of my own sexuality, each time it has to be glossed over by or hidden behind a joke. Whenever it’s forced undercover and under the wraps of the comic. When it’s either made invisible beneath the banner or RESPECTABILITY or (re)thingified/objectified and hypersexualized (read: Jezebel’s unimmaculate resurrection repackaged in Dolce and Gabanna).

It goes without saying that all women are subject to (or maybe subjects of) objectification. But what possibilities are available for black women to represent and assert ourselves sexually without recourse to a traumatic history and a nightmarish soundtrack (that’s on repeat by the way) confining us to and defining us as exchangeable commodities?

The pain and trauma of Leticia Musgrove, Halle Berry’s character in Monster’s Ball, and of the film itself gets buried beneath the publicity about the “sex scene” (which is about anything but and everything but/and sex) and Berry’s naked body in raw animal (at least he didn’t fuck her in the ass) display, (finally) made available to all who were curious in the first place and unfairly teased by her tits in Swordfish and all those hungry men who prefer chocolate ice cream (like Hank) got a feast that day.

Is it just irony that Berry was cast as the "tragic mulatto" in Queen?

I see the pain when I look in Halle Berry’s eyes (perhaps because I actually look [through the screen that separates us] there).Who owns her body?Can black women own our bodies?Could there be a black “Samantha”? Would a black Samantha be able to rise above the pornographics of a Lil’ Kim?

The four women in Sex are certainly not to be romanticized or idealized. But unlike the "Four Women" Nina Simone enlivens in her lament of black women’s lost sexuality and personhood, those four women can perform as sexually speaking subjects without SHAME arriving, uninvited to break up the party.

January 24, 2004
Navigating Black Austin

When I moved to Austin from Atlanta, I thought I had entered another universe. One where most of the men wore dockers and polo shirts, and most of the women were blondish (my term for unnatural blonds) and where almost everyone was white.

Now granted I hang with all types (ethnicities, nationalities, sexualities, religions and classes) of people. But there are reasons why all the black kids sit together in the cafeteria. Strategically essentialist black spaces provide refuge, resistance and potential antiracist activism. The handful of black folk in my Austin social circle was and is still comprised of mostly academics. People I met in my grad program or through UT’s black graduate student association. But I wanted to get to know local black Austin. All cities have black cultural communities, right? RIGHT?!

So at every African dance performance, hip hop concert, open mic slam jam, jazzy joint, I discovered the folk that comprised black Austin. They’d appear as if by magic at the now defunct black female owned Empanada Parlor. They’d support black dance companies visiting from other cities and sometimes show up at plays directed by Boyd Vance. I joined soulciti.com and hopped on the Austin soul train. Amazingly, I got to know many black Austinites by name. Most by face. I’d follow their trail and get my dose of blackness wherever I could. Even in spaces I found slightly uncomfortable.

My friend Ayanna first told me about The Firm, a group of black professionals who host social events throughout Austin. Ayanna was my lifeline to black Austin for awhile. We’d met in Cali and I took an instant liking to my smart, funny and pert homegirl. She had a “real job” and circulated in social circles not reliant upon or related to academe. For me she became the keeper of Austin soul, a treasure I yearned to claim for my own.

Do I even have to say that anything called The Firm immediately makes my dreds stand on end as it exemplifies the corporate culture of America that I so detest? Hence, my first level of discomfort. The Firm social events reminded me a lot of First Fridays, held in most major cities for buppies to meet and mingle. Or meet and market:

my second level of discomfort. Meat markets dressed up in any color or outfitted in any couture make my skin crawl. I fume at the way male eyes scan the bodies of every woman in the room. I ache as women wait to be selected from the herd. I get bored out of my fucking mind with the bevy of wall supporters, afraid to loosen ties, hike up skirts and dance. Dance I said!

The culture of respectability which, to me, aptly characterizes buppy behavior couples with very limited expressions of individuality. Most of the sistas wear processed doos and different versions of the same outfit. Brothas, generally clean cut and tucked in, sports attire when permitted. But it’s not the outward manifestations of conservatism that displace me. It’s that most of the folk in these spaces move through the world to an unspoken but agreed upon set of rules. Rules that I defy for fear of becoming a fraction of myself. Which inevitably happens in these spaces. Am I being too rowdy…is my skin too dark. Hair too nappy? Does my see-through blouse make me look like a skank?

So why do I go? My friend Chris—a black Austinite who doesn’t share my need for black spaces or whose been told enough times that he’s not black enough anyhow that he can resist the need for such spaces—absents himself from these events. He knows that his presence there would be an absence anyway, by canceling out who he really is and supplementing a lesser version of that person.

So why do I go? Because not going would be like resigning myself to Austin’s Anglo culture. Because I have fun sometimes and in spite of. Because sometimes there's a slammin DJ. Because wherever I live I want to preserve my linkages to black community. Because the higher I go in academia, and the fewer people I encounter who look like me, the greater my need to seek them out and hold them in my gaze. Even for just a few hours. And even if they don’t exactly look like me either.

February 05, 2004
the trouble with janet

One second set off an alarm that resounded around the nation. The diva sashay. Kick-ball-change, look, look. Exchanged and knowing glances. The last line of the song announcing the act’s climactic intent. Most of us blinked and missed it. Even if you didn’t blink, ya kinda missed it.

If only the public would display a comparable degree of alarm and outrage for a broadcast that occurred on September 12, 2002. The date might sound familiar as a day and a year after nine-eleven-oh-one. Some of us remember it as the beginning of a long and twisted campaign of deception that sent UN inspectors on a wild-goose chase for WMD’s.

But surely a flashed nipple is far worse than lying to the entire world and shipping people’s sons and daughters off to die in an unjust war while using the deaths of the World Trade victims as spin and excuse to defy millions of feet marching in protest and former allies turning a deaf ear to unsupported rhetoric and unsubstantiated “evidence.”

A nipple flash is much, much worse than our refusal to publicize the Iraqi body count.
And I tried to avoid writing about it but the press has got me fuming and the song and dance about protecting our children just doesn’t jibe with me when what’s “acceptable” on network is everything but full-frontal and a peek-a-boo of a nipple concealed by a rather large ornament just doesn’t seem to be any more revealing than most Victoria’s Secret commercials or those see-through, low-cut couture gowns worn at award’s shows.

And haven’t most children seen a nipple or two before anyway?

You might be wondering what one thing has to do with the other. What does Janet’s nip have to do with Bush’s tall tales? The level of outrage aimed at MTV/CBS for the double-J shuffle and the recent “crackdowns on indecency” seem to me another telling sign of this age’s revivified conservatism, which purports to protect children, and protect women (at home and abroad) and protect marriage, but really aims to keep us trapped in fear and victimized by nightmarish color-coded alert systems.

Do we need protection from desire too? From sexuality, from bodies? Certainly the entire act was a marketing ploy for the release of Janet’s upcoming album (similar to the Brit-Madonna liplock), but what was really so offensive about it? Was it (albeit staged) desire’s intrusion into “family time”—in black and white, and draped in leather—that provoked such outrage? Could it have been the S/M subplot of the act? Surely it wasn’t the subtly veiled violence of the skit that set off people’s alarms. We were watching a football game afterall. On the same station that airs real and fictional combat. Did as many people complain—did they feel alarm and outrage—when station after station aired victims of the world trade center plunging, headfirst, to their deaths?

I’d rather see a breast any day.

February 09, 2004
stank you

If Justin Timberlake had any balls, he would have escorted Janet Jackson to The Grammy’s instead of his mommy. But enough about the former boy-band castrato. Funk is back … and it’s better than ever!

The highlight of The Grammy’s for me—other than seeing Prince, decked out in purple and looking fabulous—was Funk’s takeover of what was, up to that point, a pretty damn boring show. I had been anticipating performances from both halves of the Aquemini equation. And who better than “the elements” (ya’ll know who I’m talking bout) to bring in “The Way you Move.” Ole school handed over the baton to new, confident of their ability to take the next leg in stride. The performance was capped off by Robert Randolph and who else but the reigning majesty of P-Funk, George Clinton.

Outkast’s well-deserved Best Album award, presented after Andre 3000’s rather odd costume choice and lively rendition of “Hey Ya”—am I the only one who got freaked out by the green menace, which at its worse appeared in the form of Snoop Dogg’s pimp suit? Anyway, the best album choice renewed a little of my faith in the academy’s ability to appreciate real talent. So did fifty cent’s empty-handed exit.

Packaging their solo projects as a double CD proved a clever and lucrative choice for Big Boi and Dre. But Speakerboxx/The Love Below is much more than a publicity stunt. These solo ventures showcase the individual genius of each member, underscoring their unique contributions to the badass hip hop funk that is the totality of Outkast.

Who else has the balls to put rap lyrics to a techno beat and add a hook from Patti LaBelle into the mix? Or to feature the voice of the sexy Rosario Dawson in a love song reminiscent of Prince’s “She’s always in my hair” and add samples from “My mind is playing tricks on me”? Outkast has pushed the limits of hip hop and contributed to its evolution as a genre. They have appeased hip hop heads like myself who have become bored with ‘bling’ and with the gangsta posers who wear it.

So to Outkast I wanna say “stank you, smelly much” for “Liberation” (if you haven’t heard it, you betta ask somebody) and for funking hip hop up!

March 23, 2004
blue/body/memory
1. blue

Sit there and count your fingers
What can you do
Old girl you’re through
Sit there, count your little fingers
Unhappy little girl blue.

“Little Girl Blue” served as an appropriate overture for Love Sorceress (Sorciere D’Amour), a documentary screening of Nina Simone’s 1976 Paris concert. Tim Langevin aptly describes the show as more of a “performance art piece” than a concert. The sounds that issued forth from the piano as Nina caressed its keys went beyond music to entrance listeners attending the actual concert as well as those sitting in the theatre around me. The words her voice consented to speak revealed more pain than they concealed. Words cannot contain the kind of pain exposed by Nina’s sleepy-lidded eyes. Humming and moaning have to take over sometimes.

Nina launched into a rendition of Morris Albert's “Feelings” toward the end of the concert, pondering aloud to the audience what kind of pain had to produce the words to that song:

Feelings, nothing more than feelings,
trying to forget my feelings of love
Teardrops rolling down on my face,
trying to forget my feelings of love.

I had always found the song pretty corny. But perhaps the break in it, the wo-o-o gut-wrenching moan reached that deep place in Nina. She sang the song like she knew that kind of pain all too well. She urged the audience to sing along.

2. body

A few Thursdays ago I attended a reading by 2002 Cave Canem prizewinning poet, Tracy K. Smith. Tracy read from her collection The Body’s Question. Watching her small form and listening to her soft-spoken meter, I wondered about those questions and about the body’s power to speak to and for us. What demands does it make upon us? And when and how must we deliver?

My answers came during Saturday’s screening of Mirrors and Windows: A Conversation between Lucille Clifton and Sonia Sanchez. Clifton introduces her self as a willing instrument. She says “poems … wanted to be written and I was available.” Are those words and stories inside and yet beyond us? Do they transcend our intent? Take over our body? What is our responsibility to them?

Sonia Sanchez undertakes the responsibility as a poet, “to receive from the universe words that will sustain me and others.” Many evenings I have taken shelter and comfort in her words. The blue and black ones, the woman words… they rock and remind me. I remember.

3. memory

My delicious love affair with Austin’s (small but detectable) black art scene—and my blues sensibility— lured me to the debut of Sharon Bridgforth’s love conjure/blues on March 6. Sharon is an amazing writer/performer who, for me, represents all that’s good and beautiful about central Texas. The “act of sharing” that transgresses the boundary between performers and audience seems to be the crux of what makes her productions so profound.

Love conjure/blues is a performance of memory. Sharon wrote it as a novel, and in the “speakerly text” tradition of much black literature, it begged to be read/sang aloud. The conjuration was appropriately staged in a circular arrangement. The “performers” sat in an inner circle and the “audience” enfolded them. A sea of melodic voices swelled the room. The spirits were properly invoked. And our enslaved, our freed, our queer, our happy, our mournful ancestors joined us in communion.

Like most conjurations, this one was so timeless that I’m not entirely sure how long we stayed there together. Only the moments of laughter, silence, tears and a feeling of being in that Otherly place remain. Memory work is a powerful thing.

April 22, 2004
Black Wit

I look forward to every rerun. My stomach aches and my eyes water while I gasp for breath between raucous bouts of laughter. This brotha’s hard hitting comedy brings new meaning to ‘shock’ and ‘awe.’ But in a good way.

If you haven’t been watching Chappelle’s Show, you must be living under a rock. Dave Chappelle, the new king of Comedy Central, treats audiences who want a dose of wit with their comedy to the funniest thirty minutes on television. Yes, even funnier than Bernie Mac (no disrespect of course).

Picture a comedy show with skits that range from a portrayal of a white family with the last name Niggar, circa 1950’s -- to a blind black man who thinks he’s white and heads up the Klan -- to reoccurring spoofs on Lil’ John’s wild outbursts of ‘w---wwhat?!’ and ‘okay!!!’ in his indecipherable rap lyrics. Okay, you have to watch to understand.

And Chappelle’s Lil’ John imitation is just one way he incorporates hip hop into his show. He also offers running commentaries in several of his skits about the failure of law enforcement agencies to find and prosecute the murderers of Tupac and Biggie Smalls. Like Chris Rock, Chappelle ends his show with hip hop performances that usually highlight those MCs who are outside of the mainstream, commercialized rap industry.

In fact, I think it’s safe to say that Chappelle’s Show evidences a hip hop aesthetic found in the art of many black thirty-somethings. An aesthetic that is deliberate in its ‘unrespectability’ and its defiance of conventionality, but that still retains consciousness and social criticism.Described at the Comedy Central website as “the comedy equivalent of crack,” Chappelle’s Show will hook you if you try it. Although his skits entail a lot of cussing and may sometimes make you cringe, they always leave you with thought-provoking laughter.

May 06, 2004
Cheap Thrill

Everyone’s talking about it.The women at Spelman lambasted it.Could it possibly be that distasteful?

My friend Whit placed the tape in the VCR with kitten gloves. She wanted to make sure we got the full experience, including the cautionary spiel read by a woman who sounded like a phone sex worker.

The beat was unmemorable. The “lyrics” sounded like a jingle made up by an adolescent boy. The blatant misogyny: nondebatable. But what saddened me most about Nelly’s “Tip Drill” video was watching the bevy of black women cheapen themselves to a degree comparable to the way in which our mother-ancestors were degraded on the auction block. Except this time, the purchasers were black men.

Nelly defenders claim that the women performing in the video are exercising choice. Agency. Like sex workers in the porn or prostitution industry. And yet, I find myself wondering about the desperation that fueled those women’s “choice” to parade around semi-nude in a rap video, prostrated like animals, allowing men to fondle, hump and throw money upon or (in the most disgusting case) run a credit card through their asses. I find it difficult to believe that women with agency need stoop so low for attention or money or even a cheap thrill.

And then there’s the thematic element of the video, which I find so utterly fascinating. Nelly’s video insinuates—and black word of mouth confirms—that a “tip drill” is an ugly woman with a nice body or ass. Worthy of being fucked but not looked at. Tip drill is also a basketball term that describes players who line up at the free throw line and take turns shooting. The connection: a woman who is a “tip drill” gets passed from one figurative player to the next. Or as Nelly so “eloquently” puts it: “it ain't no fun unless we all get some. I need a tip drill, we need a tip drill.”

If you hadn’t already guessed, the “Tip Drill” video is quite a homosocial/erotic affair. A pack of “hard” men crowd together, watching each other pat women’s asses. Watching women grind on each other in same sex play (orchestrated for the male gaze of course). Is it a stretch to imagine that the abuse and outright hatred of women performed in the video and evidenced by the lyrics of this song subtly veils the men’s desire for each other?

Nelly says it best, “it must be ya ass cause it aint yo face. i need a tip drill, i need a tip drill.” If that’s the case, it stands to reason that any ass will do.

July 27, 2004
the meaning of memory

I took a journey to Mississippi. I took a journey into history. I began to understand the meaning of memory.

I went to Jackson Miss for a trauma conference. For discourse sake. To meet others brave enough to awaken ghosts and to endure the pain of bearing witness in their absence. Bringing together activists, academics and artists, “Unsettling Memories” attested to the multivalent ways we address grief. We analyze, we quilt, take snapshots and dance our way to memory. Ghosts speak in many tongues and may appear in the flesh (as Toni Morrison has shown us).

The conference was held in conjunction with other community events, all commemorating the 40th anniversary of the deaths of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—three martyrs of the Civil Rights movement. One of the most stirring recollections of these volunteers, and of Freedom Summer, came via Herbert Randall’s photographs. Each snapshot held a story. Some stories unfolded through Randall’s recollections of friends, events, laughter, imminent danger... Other stories resided in the breaks in his voice, his misted eyes. Silence. Former SNCC and Freedom Summer volunteers who sat in the audience honored the dead by calling out their names.

“We don’t even have a name in this country for what black people have been through.” --James Allen

James Allen, self-declared “picker,” writer and collector of lynching photographs explains trauma’s unspeakable quality. How can one make meaning of, come up with words to describe the lynching postcards that make up Without Sanctuary? Terror turned to festive merriment. Battered skulls and broken limbs. Charred flesh. Blood stained trees. Rivers and dams overflowing with blood of named and unnamed torture victims. How can one explain children looking on with pointed fingers? Gleeful women in dresses and bobby socks? Families out for a Sunday picnic…

There was a thickness in the air when we entered the Jackson State University Guest House, where the Without Sanctuary exhibit was being held. A gospel choir blared from the balcony. I longed for silence. Or jazz. Something without words, without a narrative to accompany what we were witnessing in that room. Allen and Littlefield did not wish to enlarge or change the photographs in any way. Viewers had to stand close. We had to really look. And sometimes look hard to make out human bodies from clumps of flesh, burned beyond recognition. Were we spectators or witnesses as our gazes—apprehensive, quick or lingering—generated threefold ocularity amid the camera, the photographed onlookers and us? Was our viewing an act of mourning, like a funeral? Were we there to lay those bodies to rest?

On Sunday, mourning’s political efficacy was tested. We got on the bus and headed for Philadelphia, Mississippi to join in the community’s annual memorial service for Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. This 40th memorial would be accompanied by a resolution to reopen the case, to prosecute the murderers. Grief would become grievance. Mourning would, in Douglas Crimp’s words, become militancy.

Public acts of commemoration can be tricky as we would soon discover. I thought of Dell Upton’s talk about public monuments and their demand for consensual sentiment. Memorials, like monuments, often want to give grievers hope, to placate us and make us feel better. Two memorials were being held in Philadelphia. One in the Neshoba County Coliseum, sponsored by the Mississippi Tourism Commission. The other, in Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, where the annual memorial service is usually held. At the coliseum, the audience was instructed to rise for the national anthem. The US flag dangled carelessly beside the Mississippi state flag, with its Confederate battle emblem in the corner. My friend and I remained seated. I had a sour taste in my mouth.

The sour taste turned full blown nausea as we were “welcomed” by Mississippi’s governor Haley Barbour who had the audacity to compare the fight for freedom during the Civil Rights Movement with the US’s invasion of Iraq! He called both a “fight between good and evil.” Does he even know what side he’s on?

The Tourism Commission previewed their oral history project. I wondered what version of history would be told. Barbour’s version of how Mississippi’s done a three-sixty since 1964? Or would we hear from residents of the dilapidated houses that line Mississippi’s roads? Would they include the voices of students who are receiving inferior educations? Or would the tourism project demand consensual sentiment?

We headed to Mt. Zion after the egregious display of politically-motivated speeches (with a few exceptions, including Congressman John Lewis). Mt. Zion had been reconstructed after two burnings. Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner had come to investigate one of the church burnings when they were killed. The church had limited capacity so most of us stood outside and watched by teleprompter. Ben Chaney boycotted both memorials, feeling they had been coopted by organizers and politicians. The second memorial was minus the political speeches but the program did seem a bit scripted, slated to end with a wreath laying to the tune of “We Shall Overcome.”

A friend and I insinuated ourselves in the packed sanctuary just in time for the SNCC takeover. David Dennis, former SNCC activist, reminded us to remember all of the lives that were lost during the movement. To remember that when Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner’s bodies were fished from that dam, at least three other bodies were found. He also encouraged us to honor those who are still here. Those who survived and are still fighting for justice. Dennis called all of the former SNCC members to the stage from inside and outside the sanctuary and asked that they be allowed to end the service “their way.” Their way was to sing freedom songs. “Tell Haley Barbour we ain’t scared,” we sang. “Before I be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave.” This is our memorial, SNCC workers declared. And mourning showed its efficacy and memory had real meaning as blacks and whites, the young and our elders sang freedom together.