When I looked at “Soul Train” host Don Cornelius back in the ‘70s, I didn’t see a pro-black entrepreneur who would become the “African American” Dick Clark.

I saw my dad. And his entire generation.
- Eric Deggans, Tampa Bay Times

“‘Soul Train’ created an outlet for black artists that never would have been if it hadn’t been for Cornelius,” said Kenny Gamble, who with his partner, Leon Huff, created the Philly soul sound and wrote the theme song for the show. “It was a tremendous export from America to the world, that showed African-American life and the joy of music and dance, and it brought people together.”

News of Mr. Cornelius’s death prompted an outpouring of tributes from civil rights leaders, musicians, entrepreneurs, academics and writers. “He was able to provide the country a window into black youth culture and black music,” said Lonnie G. Bunch III, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. “For young black teenagers like myself, it gave a sense of pride and a sense that the culture we loved could be shared and appreciated nationally.”
- James C. McKinley Jr. New York Times

The genius of it all was THIS was the first time that black people were proud to be called AFRICAN.

Psssh. Before 1971? — I mean on the real – ’til like the early 80s on some schoolyard insult game ish? If someone called you “african” that was the most insulting degrading lower than low, “I’m finna f**k you up” type of insult.

I know right? Why?

To control our mentality during the slave period we were taught we were the lowest of low.

To control us AFTER slavery during the Jim Crow era we were taught we were the lowest of low.

The first introduction to entertainment (of which we were allowed to participate) was minstrel entertainment an over exaggerated buffoon display of shame and ugliness that we STILL CARRY TO THIS DAY (minus the makeup) (hello hip-hop….but that is another piece altogether).

To say with a straight, dignified face that BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL was the RISKIEST radical life-changing move that america has seen. and amazingly enough for one hour for one saturday out the week, if you were watching soul train….it became contagious. next thing you know you are actually believing you have some sort of worth.
- Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, from The Roots, on OKPlayer

The ’70s and ’80s were just the period during which the best soul music was created and the best records were done. Whenever I walk into a store or any kind of environment, these kinds of songs from that period still play and I wonder if it’s a “Soul Train” tape. Because during those two decades, we were on top of them all in one way or another, either presenting the guests or playing the records. We were just flat out in love with the music.
- Don Cornelius, as quoted in The Los Angeles Times

Cornelius’ reported suicide, alas, tells us something about the nature of American success. All the man’s equity, affluence and well-deserved public acclaim were not, in the end, of enough comfort to salve his private pain — a struggle with illness, a nasty divorce.

To the people who make up the community that Cornelius created, the man is nearly a saint. We can see it now: the double line of dancers forming just beyond the pearly gates, awaiting the ingress of soul’s earthly impresario.
- Dan Charnas, NPR

By Arturo R. García

He was both the host and the ambassador for generations of artists, dancers, and music lovers. He was a journalist and an activist. And he was the conductor of “the hippest trip in America.”

Wednesday, everyone who ever listened to him wish viewers “love, peace, and soul” mourned the death of Don Cornelius, who was found in his home by police after apparently committing suicide.

Cornelius developed and hosted Soul Train, the kind of show that makes words like “influential” seem small. Soul Train ran for 35 years, making it the longest first-run syndicated show in history. But the show almost didn’t grow out of being a successful local program on WCIU-TV in Chicago.

As Christopher P. Lehman wrote in his book A Critical History of Soul Train On Television, however, Cornelius set out to show broadcasters the best the show had to offer:

When Cornelius decided to take “Soul Train” into nationwide syndication in 1971, he made a very savvy choice of which Chicago episode to pitch to broadcasters. he took to California the episode that featured the Dells, the Staple Singers, Tyrone Davis, and the Chi-Lites. At the time all four acts were very popular on urban radio. Moreover, three of them had crossover hits in the 1970-71 season. The Chi-Lites’ “(For Gods Sake) Give More Power To The People” was among the top thirty songs for at least one week. The Staples Singers scored with “Heavy Makes You Happy (Sha Na Boom Boom).” Davis had the biggest hit with “Turn Back The Hands Of Time.” Cornelius contacted all the group leaders to inform them of his decision to use their appearances in order to try to sell the show on the West Coast.

Cornelius’ canniness paid off: production on the national version of Soul Train, based out of Los Angeles, began that summer. However, for the next two years, he continued to host the local version of the show alongside the national one. But as the syndicated version of the show grew, so did its importance–not just to an audience that Cornelius correctly predicted was looking for what he called “a black American Bandstand,” but for the performers; as Lehman noted, in the days before Black Entertainment Television, black acts had to choose between playing to the all-white audiences on Bandstand or rely strictly on radio exposure.

The show’s platform went beyond the artistic: early acts brought with them feminist and anti-Vietnam War messages that wouldn’t have flown on other shows. And as The Roots’ Questlove wrote on OkPlayer, the presentation that Cornelius introduced to American television made him, “The MOST crucial non political figure to emerge from the Civil Rights era post [19]68″:

To say with a straight, dignified face that BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL was the RISKIEST radical life-changing move that America has seen. And amazingly enough for one hour for one Saturday out the week, if you were watching soul train….it became contagious. Next thing you know you are actually believing you have some sort of worth.

The whole idea of Afrocentrism in my opinion manifested and spread with “Soul Train” in its first 6 years.

Besides the performers, fans also found a new platform on Soul Train: young people of color got the chance–the first chance, for many–to see their peers on-screen, showcasing their own moves. As Lehman writes, the show’s exposure also yielded benefits for the Chicago-area dancers on the WCIU version of the show, where Clinton Ghent took over as host after Cornelius moved west. For one dancer, Crescendo Ward, his turn in the spotlight literally saved his life:

He once had to take home a girlfriend who lived in the Cabrini Green projects, which the Vice Lords gang claimed as their territory. After he had parted from her, some of the gang members approached him and demanded, “Represent!”

He responded, “No love,” which meant that he did not belong to a gang.

They proceeded to pat him down and take his money until one of them yelled, “Yo, wait a minute – that’s that “Soul Train” motherf-cker!” As the others recognized him, they stopped the mugging and began taking a collection for his bus fare home.

By contrast, interactions between fans and performers on the L.A. version of the show were tamer, but in at least one instance, more pivotal: an oft-told story mentions that, after one appearance on the show, Michael Jackson–by that point already a longtime friend of Cornelius’–spent time with several of the show’s better dancers, so that he could learn some of their moves.

In his book, Lehman points out that Train outlasted many of the shows it influenced, like Club MTV, Yo! MTV Raps, BET’s Video Soul and Fox’s In Living Color. But the changing musical landscape wrought by his successors led him to step down from his signature role in 1993. The show carried on with rotating guest hosts thru 2006, with MadVision Entertainment buying the property two years later.

“I took myself off because I just felt that 22 years was enough,” he told The New York Times two years after switching to an off-camera role. “The audience was changing and I wasn’t.”

The audience might have changed, but it never forgot him: last July, the show’s set and memorabilia was enshrined in the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

Compiled by Arturo R. García

The live performance is brutal, a storm of laidback blues and thunderous notes, and as raw as if the song’s betrayal had happened just earlier that evening. James punishes that microphone until you pity it. At one point she begins to pounce on the word “baby,’’ booming its syllables like they’re meant to sound like gunfire.

Dr. John eventually saunters over from his piano, looking like a dog that’s just peed on the rug. He’s supposed to appease James for stepping out on her – “It wasn’t nothin’ serious / I guess I was just a little delirious’’ – but even he knows it’s in vain. Hell hath no fury like this particular woman scorned.

At the end of the performance, James embraces Dr. John, her head resting on his shoulder, and I like to imagine James is thinking what I’m thinking: Where the hell did that just come from?

In just six minutes, that, to me, is the essence of Etta James. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.
- James Reed, The Boston Globe

She was an accident, born to a fourteen-year-old black girl in Depression-era Los Angeles. She never knew her father, but thought that he might have been the famous white pool player, Rudolf “Minnesota Fats” Wanderone, whom she met in the nineteen-eighties. Like Marilyn Monroe, that other famous blonde Los Angeleno, James was more or less an orphan, spiritually anyway, abandoned by her mother who ran off to chase men (as a child James called her “the Mystery Lady”) and handed over to a number of caretakers in the meantime. And, again like Monroe, by the time James was a teen-ager, she was filled with ambition and confusion. One played off the other. A foster father would beat her until the girl with the powerful voice sang for his friends. Afterwards, she’d return to her cold, wet bed; James was a bed wetter.

By the time she was a teen-ager, James was reunited, if that is the word, with her mother, who took her to San Francisco, where James’s love of R.&B. saved her, to some extent—but is talent enough if one has been continually unloved by those unreliable specimens, other people? That was what her big sound was about—a deafening cry in the wilderness of her unconquerable loneliness. She was fat: with drugs, food, incredible technical skill. But nothing could fill her up. All she could do was try to expel—shake off—some of the evening’s exertions (looking for dope on a more or less daily basis amounts to a job in itself) in the recording studio, where she sang a kind of speeded up blues, which I do not associate with R.&B. so much as it being just James’s singing, a variation of a sound I’ve heard all my life: black mothers calling down from various tenement windows for their children to come on in and eat their supper, or take some kind of nourishment, emotional and otherwise.
- Hilton Als, The New Yorker

I used to go to Baltimore at least two or three times a year, at the Royal Theatre. Remember that theater? Now that was a bum theater. Everybody that ever went there would be terrified to go. ‘Where are you working?’ ‘Oh, I’m working at the Royal Theatre in Baltimore. And then I’d go to the Howard Theatre in Washington.’ There was one more — we called them the funky three.

They were the funkiest theaters because people would come in there with pickles, with olives, with boiled eggs and get ready to throw all kinds of stuff at you. And the thing is, they used to throw the stuff. It wasn’t heartbreaking to people like me or Sam Cooke. It was the older entertainers that didn’t understand. ‘Why are they going to be throwing popcorn at me?’

Everybody knew, ‘Oh boy, here’s Baltimore.’ When I pulled up, I knew the vegetable stores were going to make a little money that week. Tomatoes — it didn’t matter. If they’d get you really good, like, get you in the face, or on your body, I would just laugh about it.

Baltimore was always a really raunchy city, compared to Washington D.C. But in Baltimore, I would just be waiting for ‘em. I’d say, ‘Well my hair’s blonde but tonight it’s going to be tomato red when we leave here.’
- Etta James, interview with The Baltimore Sun, published 2012

I had a real nice figure and I was tall. And I remember this singer Joyce Bryant … She wore fishtail gowns, sequined fishtail gowns, and she was black, and she had the nerve to wear platinum hair. And then I also loved Jayne Mansfield, because Jayne Mansfield had the blond hair and had like the poochie lips and the mole and all this. So I think what I did, it was kind of combine [them]. … I wanted to look grown, you know; I wanted to wear tall high-heeled shoes, and fishtail gowns, and big, long rhinestone earrings.
- Etta James, interview with NPR, 1994

James has a Grammy, a string of classic hits and a 1993 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame under her ever-shrinking belt (James recently lost 100 pounds; her doctor wants her to shed 50 more). But she’s also had her share of broken hearts, broken men, and thankfully, a broken two-decade addiction to heroin. This is one woman who has seen it all.

Her eyes cloud over, and her voice softens. “I can only go there, go there again, be there, do that again – some things I just won’t do again,” she says. “But the other things, I will.”

Maybe that’s why she sings what she sings in that unmistakable manner. Maybe that’s why she dances. James herself doesn’t even know for sure. But this she knows: She’ll always be happiest singing the blues.

“I can’t be talking about the moon and the stars. It has to be something heavy. Something heavy that I can say, ‘That’s right,’ “she says, touching her hand to her head. “That is right!”
- Denise Quan, CNN, 2002

By Guest Contributor Rachael Kay Albers, cross-posted from Latina Fatale

It is after midnight and I’m in a taxi on the way back to my barrio, mouthing the lyrics to a song on the radio that I’m proud to know the lyrics of when, suddenly, I stop (fake) singing. Spanish is my second language and memorizing song lyrics doesn’t come as easily to me as it does in English—if I can successfully sing along to a song in a café or on the radio, I wave the useless ability like a flag. But, as I silently croon in my cab tonight, I realize that, in my quest to hone my dual language lip syncing abilities, I have paid absolutely zero attention to the content of the lyrics I’m not singing.

The song on my cabbie’s radio is “Lamento Boliviano,” (Bolivian Lament). You may know it for its famous chorus:

Y yo estoy aquí
borracho y loco
y mi corazón idiota
siempre brillará
y yo te amaré
te amaré por siempre

(And I am here
drunk and crazy
and my stupid heart
will always shine
and I will love you
I will love you forever)

As I listen carefully to the lyrics, I imagine the scene being described: a drunk, desperate man declaring his undying love to his wronged mujer after saying, in earlier lyrics, that he feels there is a volcano of rage inside of him. I have lived this scene. The drunk, desperate man “in love” is not nearly as romantic as the Enanitos Verdes — the Argentinean rock band that croons “Lamento Boliviano” — make him seem. He can be, in fact, quite dangerous, especially when he says he has an, um, “volcano” inside of him.

Ugh — sexist lyrics glamorizing alcoholism and violence in Spanish, too? I think, dumbly. How has the thought never occurred to me before? I mean, what did I expect from the music that just happened to be playing the many times I have been fondled or — I’ll just say it — humped on various dance floors across Mexico? Hip hop gets the rap in the United States for violent, misogynistic lyrics with country music coming in at second place—both deservingly. But, what about the music I’m listening to in Latin America?

I decide to survey the music I have been deafly enjoying for the last few years, focusing on salsa, bachata, and reggaeton— genres I enjoy socially as well as for lip syncing purposes. I learn that salsa, a descendant of Cuban son, developed in the 1960s in the Latino barrios of New York City as an expression of the urban working class experience. Bachata was coming of age at the same time in the Dominican Republic—music many say was born out of the frustrations of Rafael Trujillo’s oppressed masses. Reggaeton, largely influenced by hip hop, developed later in Panama and, like salsa and bachata, the music has political roots, as well. Many feminists theorize that the emphasis on salsa, bachata, and reggaeton’s role in Pan-American working class resistance has obscured the genres’ treatment of women.

Working class resistance or not, under a microscope, the songs ooze sex—the ruling class sponsored kind that either idealizes or demonizes women while simultaneously objectifying them. Females across these genres are cast in three main roles:

• The young, virgin fruit, ripe to be plucked—by the song’s protagonist, of course
• The experienced seductress who drives the song’s protagonist to sexual desperation
• The deceptive, transgressing bitch who wrongfully broke the protagonist’s heart

She is usually anonymous— unnamed— and identified only by her physical characteristics and/or sexual desirability. That, or her wickeness and sexual impurity, as in the “scorned lover” songs so popular in bachata. In all cases, she is the victim of pre-meditated violence on the part of the protagonist, who vows in his lyrics either to use her sexually or abuse her violently.

For example, take these bachata lyrics: “Sabes que soy tu dueño / Y que vengo prendi’o’” (You know I’m your owner / And that I’m inflamed) and later “Yo vengo a partir brazos / A rescatar lo mío” (I’ve come here to break arms / To reclaim what’s mine). Or what about the salsa song “Cuando fuiste mujer”? “Conmigo aprendiste a querer y a saber de la vida / Y a fuerzas de tantas caricias tu cuerpo formé” (With me you learned to love and to know about life / And I molded your body with the power of my caresses). I’ll spare you the stuff about trembling and “moaning love.” Still, reggaeton is worse. Here’s one of my favorites: “If you wan’ me to take you, you must taste my yogurt.” I’m pretty sure someone has yelled that one at me in the street. And there are hundreds more like it.

You may be wondering what all the fuss is about, anyway. After all, if I wasn’t paying attention to the content of these songs before, why bother now? And if I am so unhappy with salsa, bachata, and reggaeton, why don’t I just stop listening? No one is forcing me to lip sync these lyrics.

The thing is, what first caught my attention about the lyrics of “Lamento Boliviano” was their eerie familiarity. The angry, drunk, amor-stricken man at one’s door is not a musical folktale, but a reality, both in the Americas and across the world—and it is one that I have lived. Popular music informs and reflects how we see ourselves and relate to one another as a society. That a music’s lyrics are violent and misogynistic is troubling and telling in a time when man on woman violence is so prevalent in the places where it is popular. I could easily go back to ignoring the content of the songs I listen to—in Mexico or any country—but I would be ignoring key landmarks on the worldscape of oppression.

In “Así Son’: Salsa Music, Female Narratives and Gender (De)Construction in Puerto Rico,” Frances R. Aparicio writes about “the underlying connections between sexuality and listening to popular music,” especially in countries like Puerto Rico — or Mexico! — where music and dancing are so influential in the years when a young person is constructing his or her sexual identity. The same was true in the suburb of Chicago where I grew up listening to pop, rock, and country music—not without their own elements of machismo. I still remember the lyrics of the Dave Matthews Band song I was dancing to when I met the first boy I ever “loved” (at the wise age of fourteen): “Crash Into Me,” with its closing line, “Hike up your skirt a little more and show the world to me.” Listening to that song on repeat over the course of my adolescence, I imagined myself as that elusive love interest, tempting men with my mysteries, hoping they would, as Dave insinuated, unlock some earth-shattering secret with our sexual intimacy. And sometimes I still feel that way! Looking back, there’s no denying that the Dave Matthews Band — and many similar bands — had a hand in shaping my early sexual self.

Connecting my experiences to those of my Latina sisters, I have to think that many of my tocallas were similarly influenced by the music they have been listening—and dancing—to since adolescence. What songs do young women who grow up with salsa, bachata, and reggateon listen to on repeat? I wonder. Which images influence their social and sexual formation? I think, remembering the female figures they have to choose from—the ripe, young virgin; the experienced seductress; and the deceptive, transgressing bitch. (They are a busy bunch, well represented in popular music, literature, art, and theater spanning centuries of cultural history). How can women resist the roles carved out for them by patriarchal pop culture? I ask myself.

In the conclusion of “Así Son,” Aparicio, while critical of the violent, chauvinist attitudes expressed in salsa music, urges readers like me not to despair—that Latina women have become active participants in the way gender is constructed in their cultures and they do this by engaging with chauvinist song lyrics and reflecting upon them, privately and publicly. Lise Waxer’s essay “Las Caleñas Son Como Las Flores: The Rise of All-Women Salsa Bands in Colombia” examines this deconstruction in action as Colombian women shatter the glass ceiling of the music industry and seize salsa as their own in orquestas femeninas, directly engaging in the cultural conversation on gender and sexuality. Indeed, wasn’t my own lyrical awakening during “Lamento Boliviano” an example of “reading” music and simultaneously deconstructing the gendered language within?

But, is dialogue and deconstruction enough to drown out the macho male voices on the radio, in the bar, or at a party, singing about sexism in all its glory? Pumping millions of dollars into the ongoing North American campaign against misogyny in hip hop hasn’t stopped rappers from portraying women as high-end prostitutes or punching bags. From that angle, all this dialogue ends up looking like lip syncing. If feminists really want to make some noise, they’re going to need to write new music. Come on, ladies! Let’s sway to the sound of women organizing to overthrow the patriarchal system that is all but thanked in misogynist musicians’ liner notes. Let’s write the lyrics to our own liberation. Then, and only then, can the human race truly begin to make beautiful music.

Top image courtesy of vdrg danceschool

In keeping with their moves toward global domination, 2NE1 is performing in Times Square today along with the other three MTV Iggy Best New Band finalists.

If this part of their launch is successful, they will be better positioned to make a dent in the US pop music market where many other popular Asian artists have failed before. Despite having huge fan bases overseas, artists that make their debuts in the US have generally been faced with lukewarm receptions. BoA’s self-titled English language release dropped in 2009 and barely dented the charts. Hikaru Utada (who to be fair, spent as much time in NYC as Japan coming up) attempted to make a genre-crossing album with 2004′s Exodus, which spawned a #1 single on the dance charts, but absolutely no impression elsewhere despite her work with hip-hop heavy weights like Darkchild and Foxy Brown. Utada’s 2009 English release This Is The One was designated a heat seeker with almost no radio airplay – but still only sold around 15,000 copies stateside. The Wonder Girls are still struggling to stay in the limelight after entering the charts with “Nobody” in 2009 but still trends fairly low. Se7en and Rain’s attempts never really got off the ground.

After watching good artists try and fail to make it in the US market, I began trying to find a pattern. Why was this happening? The reasons vary – particularly because artists often use their entry to the US as a kind of reinvention, which can be risky – but a big component is that American marketers/listeners had no idea what to do with them.

But, luckily for 2NE1, they have a secret weapon: Nicki Minaj.

It may seem strange to look at Nicki Minaj as the the person who put a crack in the Billboard ceiling big enough for 2NE1 to break through to the top spot, but it is her inherent strangeness and genrelessness that is opening the door for other women artists to bend the rules.

Both Minaj and 2NE1 are barrier breakers, crossing into pop music but bringing the swagger of rock and hip hop. For Minaj, she’s dominated the pop charts with rap ballads like “Super Bass,” and lent honeyed vocals and verses on Lil’ Wayne’s “Knockout”. 2NE1 is far, far more aggressive in appearance than more traditional pop groups like The Wonder Girls, which could have been a liability. But here too, Minaj’s eclectic fashion sense wins the day, as she’s appeared in everything from fetish gear to rococo swag:

Both Minaj and 2NE1 are also combatting societal scripts about what women of color can be. While Minaj occupies a space defined by feminist contradictions, she still actively defies the proper “place” for a black woman in the broader pop music space. Considering the limited spaces where black women are allowed to appear, it’s remarkable how Minaj has carved out a space for herself in both urban markets and the fashion industry. 2NE1 is facing off against stereotypes around Asian American women – particularly the submissive stereotypes that would push them out of the more aggressive sides of the pop and hip-hop scenes. Think about it – it was hard enough for Jin, an Asian American rapper that proved himself time and time again freestyling on 106 and Park, to get taken seriously in the US market even when signed to the Rough Ryders label. And despite putting in tons of work on the West Coast underground scene, there was no place on the airwaves for Far East Movement – until they completely overhauled their sound and image, sailing up the the charts with more simplistic rhymes and dance-oriented beats. Asian women have an even harder climb – the roles are even more constrained by race and gender expectations. Since I don’t follow folk and indie rock, I can’t comment on Thao Ngyuen’s presentation. But here’s 2NE1 – and they don’t fit anything that’s currently a path to radio airplay. And they for DAMN sure don’t fit the existing Asian stereotypes – I don’t see them getting a show on Cartoon Network anytime soon. Especially not with lyrics like this:

Ridin’ down Seoul city
Black on black Lamborghini
Haters can’t never see me
Come and get me, too slow
I’m bout that paper chasing
Body, fly face amazing
Burn burn keeps it blazin
Too hot to handle, can’t touch this
You think you with it with it
But you can’t hit it hit it
U know I got it got it

Cuz I’m so bout it bout it
I let them hoes know
I run this show show
We get it poppin
And we stick you for your dough dough
Cuz I’m so bad bad
But I’m so good good
Yeah I’m so bad bad
And I’m so hood hood!

Hell, they might even make it on hip-hop airwaves. On a recent trip to the airport, one of my local hip hop stations started playing “Party Rock” – and since everything’s got a dance beat on it nowadays, anything could happen!

What is also fascinating to me is their simultaneous acceptance and rejection of beauty. While Minaj and the 2NE1 crew are considered attractive by conventional standards, they each grapple with culturally influenced ideas of beauty. Early on in her career,I read an interview with Minaj where she responded to someone criticizing one of her more out there looks by saying something like “maybe I don’t feel like being pretty to you today.” In our culture, where women are marketed heavily based on their sex appeal, it was interesting to see Minaj reject that framework, even as she courts it. (She has also advised girls that sex appeal isn’t enough to get ahead.)

I thought of Minaj’s comments while listening to 2NE1′s “Ugly,” a track where four beautiful women identify with unattractiveness.

2NE1 and Minaj’s embrace of unattractiveness/ugliness seems strange on its face, but it makes a lot of sense. For Minaj, rebelling against the tyranny of forced attractiveness (kind of like when men shout at you on the street to smile, when they have no idea who you are or what you are dealing with) is a way of maintaining the true self. It’s strange that not wanting to be pretty all the time is almost a revolutionary notion, but here we are. Along those same lines, 2NE1′s lyrics on “Ugly” refer less to a physical reality and more to an emotional state:

I think I’m ugly
And nobody wants to love me
Just like her I wanna be pretty
I wanna be pretty
Don’t lie to my face
cuz I know I’m ugly

[DARA] All alone
I’m all alone x 2

The idea that beauty is tied in with feelings of self-worth should be familiar to most folks, regardless of their awareness of feminist theory. But it is fascinating how many similarities emerge, whether we are talking about the tyranny of “thickness” or Korean women marching through the alphabet trying to find the perfect body line.

While both artists approach this from a different perspective, they are complicating the conversation around beauty in ways that generally haven’t happened in a long time. To build in a point of reference, it’s been eleven years since TLC dropped “Unpretty” and eleven years since Joydrop released “Beautiful.” Occasionally, a singer will vocalize feelings of insecurity around their looks – but since this isn’t popular, it isn’t often done. (Interestingly, 2NE1 balances “Ugly” with “I Am the Best” on their album – a song for all moods, I suppose.)

So, the chances are looking for for 2NE1 to gain a toehold in the American market – marketers and audiences only have to look at Minaj’s star to allow 2NE1 to shine.

By Guest Contributor Alyx Vesey

Warning: this post contains spoilers

Like a lot of cult classics, Walter Hill’s The Warriors has gained new audiences over the years, while maintaining a firm base of die-hard fans. Given the title, it is clear that the focus is on one particular. But for me, it’s a real shame that the film isn’t called The Lizzies. I’d much rather see that film.

The other gangs in The Warriors, vying for turf in downtown New York City, are peopled by boys and men, with their concerns privileged. But it’s the Lizzies – the only all-female gang in the movie – who truly kick ass on camera, making their brief time on screen especially frustrating. Warriors Vermin, Cochise, and Rembrandt barely escape their run-in with the fearsome group, who work together to deftly outsmart them. Of the gangs the Warriors encounter during the film, the Lizzies are their most formidable adversary.

Their resourcefulness and physical prowess as a group is in marked contrast to D.J. who, apart from her languid speaking voice and fluency in street lingo, is fairly inconsequential to the plot. Another woman, Mercy, selflessly commits herself to the Warriors’ cause. The only other woman who comes close to sharing the Lizzies’ commitment to stomping out oppressive nonsense is an undercover police officer who arrests Warrior Ajax after he attempts to rape her. Think how much more powerful these individual characters would be if they followed the Lizzies’ example and worked together.

The film, based on Sol Yorick’s 1965 novel, embeds commentary about the civic blight brought on by urban decay and provides something of a counter to often-romanticized historical accounts of New York City during a period of near-total economic collapse. It also showcases Bobbie Mannix and Mary Ellen Winston’s impressive costume design, as each gang uses a uniform to establish (and, in many cases, stereotype) group identities. Its’ stylistic indebtedness to comic books is prescient, as well as indicative of American film’s ongoing relationship with comic and radio serialization. Film franchises continue to be built on the folklore of properties owned by Marvel and DC Comics. Directors like Zac Snyder incorporate comic book storytelling devices into their films. And people still dress up as Furies for Halloween.

But plenty of folks dress up as Lizzies too. What I find especially unfortunate about the Lizzies’ truncated appearance is that they are a multiracial all-female gang. Roughly a decade after The Warriors, it became increasingly commonplace to include at least one woman or girl of color in films and television programs in groups of girlfriends. Much of this could be attributed to attention toward multiculturalism and political correctness in the 1990s. Coinciding with the decade’s commitment to inclusivity, groups like the Spice Girls were notable for their inclusion of women of color, even though Mel B. was labeled as “Scary Spice.” But for the most part, musical girl groups remain segregated, particularly as they align with certain generic conventions. 60s-era girl groups like the Shangri-Las had a direct influence on rock music, and punk in particular. Their delinquent image also helped shape the identities of bands like the Runaways, the Go-Gos, and the Donnas. Peer groups like the Supremes emphasized glamour, wealth, and elegance.

Rather than dialog the Lizzies with girl groups, it may be more useful to think of the gang in New York’s musical context. By 1979, hip hop was reaching beyond the block parties and graffiti culture of the outer boroughs and beginning to intermingle with punk. It’s easy to obscure female involvement in East Coast American punk by overemphasizing contributions from Patti Smith, Blondie’s Debbie Harry, Talking Heads’ Tina Weymouth, as well as ignore some of punk’s problems with racial appropriation and fetishization that they inherited from the Beats. However, hip hop, Afro-pop, and reggae’s influence helped prioritize musical inclusivity and eclecticism, both in generic applications and instrumental collaborations.

Furthermore, a sister act from the South Bronx formed a year before The Warriors made its debut at the multiplex. Renee, Marie, and Valerie Scroggins performed under the name ESG. The first two letters stood for their birthstones, emerald and sapphire. The last initial represented their commercial aspirations to make gold records. What resulted was an inventive combination of expressive funk polyrhythms, eerie punk minimalism, and cavernous disco breaks that left such an impression on punk and hip hop artists while offering little in the way of financial compensation that the group released an EP in 1992 pointedly titled Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills.

As it remains something of a rarity to see girls establish homosocial bonds with their female peers in television and film, it is even less likely that media texts include girl friendships across racial categories. While I’m not here to bury the Spice Girls, I do believe the seeming inability to fully integrate mediated representations of girl groups speak to the racial politics of self-selecting friend groups. Feminism, at least in western countries, continues to practice racial segregation and tends to privilege the concerns of straight, able-bodied, middle-class, cisgender white women. This was a problem at the dawning of the American women’s rights movement when suffragists lobbied for white women’s right to vote while many within the ranks feared giving black people those same rights would weaken their efforts.

Feminism’s unwillingness to see its own white female privilege continues to play out in a variety of ways, whether in popular media, professional arenas, and even political activism. How else can we explain the presence of a protest sign at New York’s SlutWalk that featured both a racial slur against the African American community? How could something like this happen in a city of such racial and ethnic diversity as New York City?

Extrapolating further, how can a group representing diverse identity categories who gathered as part of an international movement to eradicate the subjugation and brutalization of women and girls be a fringe interest? As I wish that the Lizzies were central characters in The Warriors and hope that more media texts prioritize nuanced representations of multiracial homosocial bonding, I also encourage future films, television shows, and musical groups to take up and improve upon this challenge. One example I can think of is 1996’s Girls Town. A film about three New York City high school girls who become radicalized as a group after their friend commits suicide after being raped by her boss, Girls Town suggests the possibility that girls can establish bonds across racial and ethnic categories. If we continue to insist on more nuanced representations and form coalitions in our daily lives with these goals in mind, we may live in a world where the Lizzies get their own movie and that the girl gang members of color offer more than superficial concessions toward diversity.

By Guest Contributor Julia Caron

Florence + the Machine released the latest video this past Friday, for “No Light No Light,” the third single from their new album Ceremonials. Since frontwoman Florence Welch is known for her theatrical music video productions, the clip was eagerly awaited by her fans.

The video, directed by Iceland-based duo Arni & Kinski, has already garnered over 800,000 views on Youtube, in addition to generating countless responses over the images in the video. It’s actually slightly astounding how much racist imagery they managed to pack into just four minutes and 15 seconds.

You can watch the video for yourself to get your own interpretation, but if you can’t watch it for whatever reason here’s a brief summary: Welch, a thin white red-haired British woman, is the focal point, but at various points, we see what seems to be an Asian man in blackface, misreprentations of the voodoo religion (which of course inflicts harm on the poor white woman). The overall plot of the video seems to be of a white woman pursued by “darkness,” represented by the aforementioned man in blackface, who ends up falling into “whiteness,” represented by a choir of young white boys in a church. Oh yes, that old trope. Black = evil, white = good. Echoes of British religious imperialism and its violent history of colonization abound. You get the picture.

The video has already attracted criticism from around the blogosphere, and Jezebel’s Dodai Stewart mapped out why the representaion of the Voodoo religion in the music video is not only negative, but factually incorrect:

Haitian Vodou is a religion that is very misunderstood. Slaves were brought to the Caribbean against their will and forbidden to practice their traditional African religions as well as forced to convert to the religion of their masters. The Bond movie/Eurocentric/Americanized viewpoint presents Vodou as an evil, primitive version of witchcraft. But it’s a religion like any other, with a moral code, gods and goddesses. Many ceremonies deal with protection from evil spirits.

In addition, the “voodoo doll” itself has been misconstrued. In Haiti, it was traditional to nail small handmade puppets or dolls to trees near graveyards; these small figures were meant to act as messengers to the spirit world, and contact dead loved ones. It’s safe to imagine that European folks didn’t understand this — and assumed an evil intent behind a doll with nails in its body.”

On the other hand, all sorts of defenses and excuses are being pulled out of the hat to try and label this music video as anything other than what it is: racist. Glorifying the white female central character as representing goodness, all while vilifying the evil dark skinned heathen Other. The number of times this has been done in film date back to one of the very first blockbusters, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, and continue on until today with this latest incarnation. But in this age of “colour-blindness” and “post-racial” talk, we confront a fairly new beast: vehement denial.

That’s where a large part of the problem with the discussions around this music video lie – the desire to talk about anything other than race. Fans of Welch’s have offered their own denials, including:

•  ”it’s not blackface, he’s green!”
• “It’s not blackface, people in Britain don’t know about blackface.”
• “It’s not blackface, it’s a representation of darkness.”

Even fans who will readily agree that this music video is “symbolic” and uses darkness (in the shape of a, lest we forget, a human being, an Asian man in blackface who practices voodoo and chases Welch) to represent “evil” and whiteness to represent “good” will still find ways to vehemently deny it is racist. “Maybe it looks like it could be racist, but it didn’t mean to be!” they say. When it comes to confronting the argument of whether or not the video was “intentionally” racist, I’ll point to  minh-ha t. pham’s response for Threadbared to Crystal Renn’s yellowface photoshoot, where she explains:

Racism is so deeply entrenched and pervasive in many societies that everyday racism is often unintentional. On the other hand, what is always intentional is anti-racism. The struggle against racism resists the pervasive ideologies and practices that explicitly and invisibly structure our daily lives (albeit in very different ways that are stratified by race, gender, class, and sexuality). Anti-racism requires intentionality because it’s an act of conscience.

What Pham hits on there is the need to first acknowledge we live in a world where racism and white privilege exist. In the end, the excuses over why “No Light, No Light” is not racist are pointless to entertain if you can’t even begin to acknowledge that. You’d have to live in a very sheltered world to believe that this video is anything other than a giant platter of rehashed racist imagery.

Now, one thing I’m surprised others have not raised in their criticisms of the “No Light, No Light” music video is that this isn’t the first time Welch has been criticized for being “culturally insensitive,” to put it mildly. Her other music videos could hardly be excused as perfect, either.

A quick look at “Dog Days Are Over” (which has over 20 million views on Youtube) features a mishmash of unidentified Othered cultures in the background, such as women in head scarves banging on drums, an all-black gospel choir with silver foreheads, and two blue women (yes, blue). The already very light-skinned Welch is painted an even whiter white, and is featured prominently in the foreground leading the masses of ambiguously ethnic backup dancers in a frenetic crescendo:

At the end of the video, they all explode into bursts of bright colours, leaving the “wild” Welch draped in a furry tattered garment, waving a flag.

What these music videos show is the amount of misrepresentations around race that many (white) artists are able to use, all under the guise of “art.” It happens in fashion photoshoots, music videos, films, books, etc on more occasions than one could possibly count. While it happens all the time, that does not make it any more defensible. And being a fan of an artist who makes a misstep and ends up creating something racist, intentionally or not, does not oblige you to running to their defense. Being a card-carrying fan of an artist or musician does not make them infallible.

Discussions about whether or not Welch is personally responsible for this racist music video have cropped up. When you break it down and imagine the number of people who were behind the storyboarding, choreographing, casting and creative direction around this video, it is slightly astounding that not one person raised concerns about how problematic this video is. Many petitions have cropped up, asking that “be pulled, edited, or reshot and she and her label should issue a sincere apology.” In putting forth this music video attached to her album and her persona, Welch has given it her unspoken seal of approval. In this case, she has also simultaneously alienated any number of people of colour and critical folks in her fanbase.

We’ll probably be waiting with bated breath, as Welch nor her label have responded to the public outcry so far.

In the end, the most important and all too often ignored factor in the case of this racist music video is just that: calling it racist. The fact that in 2011, a top-selling young creative artist has released a music video like this one means we still need to have conversations about racism, stereotypes, blackface, and impact that images in music videos like these ones have. Let’s take this opportunity to talk about how to hold artists, including pop stars, accountable for propagating racist imagery. Let’s talk about why blackface is always wrong, about why reductive stereotypical misrepresentations of people of colour are harmful and need to be confronted, and why we still have to unlearn colonial histories and legacies.

By Arturo R. García

No doubt we all thought this at one point yesterday: Heavy D is gone? But he just came back!

Hev – born Dwight Errington Myers in Mount Vernon, N.Y. – died Tuesday at the shockingly young age of 44. Unlike Joe Frazier, the rapper/actor had not been reported as suffering from any illness; in fact, he tweeted his condolences for the boxer:

At the time of his death, Heavy had seemingly only begun to step back into the public eye: last month he appeared at both a Michael Jackson tribute show in Wales and at the BET Music Awards, and moviegoers saw him in the new Eddie Murphy film Tower Heist. A video of what would turn out to be his final interview, with Tim Westwood, went online just yesterday.

That interview now stands as a summation of his career arc: growing up as an artist in New York’s hip-hop community; the origin of the classic “TROY (They Reminisce Over You);” and his “nerve-wracking” comeback, cut off way too soon.

During his career, Hev was able to gather a group of rap heavyweights and get them to do their thing without cursing; he teamed up with both Michael and Janet Jackson; he was a father and the president of a music label; he was witty and ribald without being crass; and as he told Westwood, he put in weeks’ worth of rehearsal for his BET performance because he cared. That love for the music was always evident, and that might be what fans will miss the most.

By Arturo R. García

In 1957 she had a Billboard-charting single called “Love Is Strange,” a duet with ace guitarist Mickey Baker. The song has been used in movies from “Dirty Dancing” to “Mermaids” to “Casino.”

But after “Love Is Strange” the Harlem-born musician moved to New Jersey with her husband to raise their children. Sylvia and Joe Robinson were ambitious. They built a nightclub favored by boxers and Motown stars, and a recording studio where Robinson began writing songs for other artists. Al Green rejected one because he found it too sexy. So Robinson sang “Pillow Talk” herself.
- Neda Ulaby, NPR

However, it was in 1979 that Robinson began forging her indelible mark on an emerging art form that began taking shape at clubs and dance parties in New York. Inspired after listening to people rap over instrumental breaks, Robinson formed the Sugarhill Gang. Comprised Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright, Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien and Henry “Big Bank Hank” Jackson, the trio rapped over a rhythm track that sampled Chic’s 1979 R&B/pop hit “Good Times.” It was the first commercial hit for the burgeoning rap revolution and for Robinson and her husband’s post-All Platinum label Sugar Hill Records, named after Harlem, NY’s Sugar Hill neighborhood.

Robinson later signed seminal rap act Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five to Sugar Hill. The group struck top five (No. 4) status on the R&B charts with the socially conscious “The Message,” featuring Melle Mel and Duke Bootee in 1982. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.

“‘Ms. Rob doin’ the job’ was a rhyme boast on recordings from Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five,” Public Enemy frontman Chuck D recalled to Billboard.biz. “Sylvia’s artistic talent and public notoriety have been mimicked without due credit for the past 30 years in the recorded art form she birthed. She was a black woman who pushed the button and turned the key to crank up a billion-dollar industry.”
- Gail Mitchell, Billboard Magazine

By 1979 Flash was approached by legendary record producer/store owner Bobby Robinson of Enjoy Reords, who wanted to Rrecord Flash and the Group. During this same period Cowboy, Melle Mel, Kid Creole and former Funky Four member Raheim had recorded a record for Brass Records called “We Rap More Mellow” under an assumed name, The Younger Generation.

Soon After, Flash and the Furious Five (with Raheim now a member) began recording for Robinson, with their first 12-inch single for the label being “Superappin’.” Disappointed with Robinson’s inability to get them on radio, the group soon signed with Sylvia Robinson’s Sugar Hill Records, on the strength of her promise to get them to perform on the backing track of a record that was a DJ favorite at the time, titled “Get Up and Dance,” by the group Freedom. Flash and the Furious Five’s first record for Sugar Hill was, in fact, titled “Freedom,” and was a hit with the Hip-Hop crowd. During that same year the group recorded the song “Birthday Party”
- Grandmaster Flash bio on Sing365.com

By Arturo R. García

Before we wade back into regular programming for the rest of the week, I wanted to give some shine to this collaboration between two musicians our readers in the Bay Area may already know, Quinn DeVeaux and Meklit Hadero, on their cover of the Arcade Fire’s “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels).”

Hadero, who was born in Ethiopia but raised in Iowa, Florida and New York, gathered critical attention in the wake of her debut album, on a day like this … last year. Since basing herself in San Francisco, she’s completed work for the San Francisco Foundation and Brava! For Women In The Arts. She also founded an Ethiopian artist collaborative group, the Arba Minch Collective.

For his part, DeVeaux is best known for leading the Blue Beat Review, a New Orleans-style band he contributes both lead vocals and guitar. This cover is a bit of a departure for DeVeaux in particular; while the Review focuses on jump-blues numbers like “Come And Go,” the interplay between him and Hadero is decidedly more relaxed in nature. As Cover Me’s Caroline Lees wrote in her review, “DeVeaux and Hadero strip the track down to impeccable harmonies and acoustic guitar, infusing it with a gentle poignancy that gives the lyrics new depth. Hadero’s ethereal vocals are particularly striking, the clear centerpiece of this introspective cover.”

A decision is expected today on the fate of Troy Davis, the Georgia man seeking to avoid the death penalty for the 1989 murder of Savannah, Ga., police officer Mark MacPhail.

Davis is currently scheduled to be executed on Wednesday. But even as Davis’ past attempts to clear his name have been rejected in the court system, seven of nine witnesses in his case have recanted their prior statements, with many of them saying their testimony was tainted by police pressure.

One of the two witnesses who has not recanted his story, Sylvester “Red” Coles, has been implicated in the crime by the other seven in subsequent affadavits.

Davis’ plight has inspired at least two songs: in the first video, “I Am Troy Davis,” rapper Jasiri X lays out the case over the beat from Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth’s “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y),” while questioning the state of Georgia’s judicial system:

The system’s broke so fixed
2 decades no Christmas
Execution dates 4 listed
get organized show resistance
go online sign those petitions
Black Americans know the difference
It’s a new day but the same old lynching

The second, “Song for Troy Davis,” by singer/songwriter Nellie McKay, is mostly fueled by audio from news reports regarding the case and a statement from Davis himself:

This is Troy Anthony Davis, and I’ve been sitting on georgia’s death row for 16 years for a crime i did not commit. It’s a struggle for me and my family, as well as the victim’s family, who I sympathize with dearly. Because they have been cheated out of justice, just as I have. Because of Amnesty’s [International's] assistance, I am still sitting here alive today being able to have a conversation. I want to continue to urge you to sign the Amnesty petitions. This situation could have happened to anyone, but it needs to start with me.

Davis’ plight has attracted more support for him over the past few days, with another protest scheduled for Tuesday morning in Atlanta.

Besides Amnesty International, groups like Color Of Change and the NAACP have also joined the efforts to spare Davis’ life. If they are successful, it would be the second high-profile execution to be stayed in the past two weeks, following a Sept. 15 order from the Supreme Court delaying the execution of Duane E. Buck in Texas, based on racially-biased testimony against him by a prison psychologist.

Update: The Associated Press is reporting that Davis’ bid for clemency was rejected by the Board of Pardons and Paroles. You can e-mail the Chatham County District Attorney’s office here, or by phone at 912-652-7308 to request a stay of execution for Davis.

By Arturo R. García

It’s Sept. 16, which means it’s Mexican Independence Day – please remind any friends who might be confused about the occasion that it’s not in May – and also time for our annual peek at musical goodness from the (personal) Motherland.

Kicking it off in the clip above is Molotov, rock en español‘s longtime agent provocateurs, who are celebrating their 15th anniversary this year with a tour, and are expected to drop an album later this year.

Overall, though, this year’s spotlight is a bit different from our 2010 and 2009 installments, mostly because of the rise of a new genre, ruidosón, a successor of sorts to the Nortec movement from earlier this decade, which fuses old-school rhythms with modern tech to create a sound that, while retaining some familiarity, is exploring new territory. More beats than you can handle are under the cut.

Maria y Jose – Puerto Alegría (2011) by TJMUSICALLIANCE

The Name: María y José
The Style: Antonio Jiménez (there’s no María, for the record) is one of ruidosón’s burgeoning leaders, with two albums already under his belt.
The Buzz: ““Puerto Alegría” is an immediate contender for -2011 Song of the Summer-, and it’s undeniably, María y José’s catchiest song yet. It’s so sticky you could easily confuse him with a popstar. ” – Club Fonograma

Ritmo de Amor by Los Macuanos

The Name: Los Macuanos
The Style: Three-man Ruidosón crew rides a similar chill wave as MyJ, with music bridging the gap between traditional grupero music and club-friendly sounds.
The Buzz: “Los Macuanos take inspiration from a wealth of resources — New York City no-wave, Detroit techno, rural Mexican music; the list goes on—and I wouldn’t be surprised if San Diegans eventually get keen on their borderless sounds.” – San Diego CityBeat.

Javier Estrada – Songo Latino by djjavierestrada

The Name: DJ Javier Estrada
The Style: Hailing from Monterey, Nuevo León – the same city that gave us the mighty Kinky – Estrada is as prolific as he is prodigious; all four of his Ritmo Del Mundo mixtapes were released within one year.
The Buzz: “Whether injecting gravitational strength to The Police’s ‘Roxanne,’ outing Lalo Mora from his norteño cave in ‘Mi Casa Nueva,’ or adding some bloody spills of his own in María y José’s ‘Violentao,’ Estrada is a force of mammoth tropical bass and technological nature.” – Club Fonograma

The Name: Mexican Institute Of Sound
The Style: EMI Mexico President Camilo Lara steps out from behind his desk to create traditional/tech pastiches comparable to groups like Nortec Collective. Released the Suave Patria EP right around the time of last year’s guide.
The Buzz: “Fusing the sounds of old Mexico with different tracks and sounds that make you wanna pull a dance move or two while all the head-nodders will get their fill of bass is what this release is about. As eclectic as sounds come while retaining it’s roots it’s nice to see musical history repeated in a fresh and palatable way to the generation of now.” – When Giants Meet.

The Name: Ximena Sariñana
The Style: A bilingual, jazz-trained pop chanteuse, Sariñana is decidedly SFW but still fun, so don’t be surprised if Sariñana breaks on thru to the most rarified of airs – Adult Contemporary stations – sooner rather than later.
The Buzz: “Hers is one of the most ambitious pure-pop full-lengths of 2011 — one that puts her jazz training to good use and highlights her idiosyncrasies, but never forgets that she’s making music for mass consumption. Sariñana springs from these tracks a fully formed character: playful, giddy, occasionally difficult, worried that she can’t keep up with the angels but determined to stay sweet even in the face of disappointment.” – New Jersey Star-Ledger.

The Name: Pipe Llorens
The Style: It takes a certain amount of confidence – or arrogance – to release a self-referencing documentary when you’ve only got two albums to your credit. But Torreón punk-rapper Llorens, who’s called “Coahuila’s Bad Boy” so often it’s probably on his business cards, is wry enough to make it hold up, as the trailer to said film, Indies, demonstrates. The same attitude pervades his rhymes, as he tells stories in the relaxed style of that scenester friend you want to get annoyed by, if only he wasn’t having so much fun.
The Buzz: “Well, I’ve moved around a lot since I was very young and I still do with my music. But I like having Torreón as my home base. If I were to move anywhere, I think it would be to California. My dream is to move to Los Angeles, open a Chipotle, and just work on music all the time. And become a surfer. With a blonde chick.” – Remezcla.

The Name: Les Butcherettes
The Style: Frontwoman Teri Gender Bender made her name early on in Mexico with an in-your-face performance style that emigrated with her to Los Angeles when she assembled the Butcherettes’ current lineup. The band has gone on to open for heavyweights like Queens Of The Stone Age and Jane’s Addiction, and delivered an eye-opening set at this year’s Lollapalooza.
The Buzz: “Teri’s voice and musical style is often associated with those of Patti Smith, PJ Harvey and Karen O, and she intently stares into the gaping eyes of those who press themselves against the stage with a nearly menacing scowl, transfixing them with her commanding aura while belting out songs about love, loss and sometimes even Republican takeover of Third World countries.” – What’s Up Magazine.

One of the primary songwriting and producing teams of Motown, Ashford & Simpson specialized in romantic duets of the most dramatic kind, professing the power of true love and the comforts of sweet talk. In “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” from 1967, their first of several hits for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, lovers in close harmony proclaim their determination that “no wind, no rain, no winter’s cold, can stop me, baby,” but also make cuter promises: “If you’re ever in trouble, I’ll be there on the double.”
- Ben Sisario, New York Times

Nickolas Ashford was born in South Carolina and grew up in Michigan. He moved to New York in the early 1960s with $57 in his pocket, hoping to make it in show business.

He was attending Harlem’s White Rock Baptist Church when he met Valerie Simpson, a New Yorker who sang in the choir and also had musical ambitions.

They recorded together briefly and unsuccessfully in 1964 as “Valerie and Nick,” but had more success with writing songs – which at first, said Ashford, they sold for $75 apiece.

Their first big hit was Ray Charles’s “Let’s Go Get Stoned,” which hit the top 10 on the R&B charts in 1966, and soon after they signed to Motown.
- David Hinckley, New York Daily News

“Competition brings out the best in you,” he said in 1976. “You don’t know how much reserve you really have until you push yourself. There were so many good writers and producers there. You felt you had to call upon yourself for more than you had previously been doing.”

That push made Ashford’s work stand out, Motown songwriter Janie Bradford said. “The quality was very polished and professional… Nick had a way with words.”

Describing the duo’s gospel influence on their popular songs, Ashford told The News in 1972: “We feel that we have brought a particular feeling across the bridge to the R&B idiom. And … whether you are singing R&B or soul, you have to get it because it’s that deep.”
- The Detroit News

Though they had initially performed together in 1964 as Valerie & Nick, after meeting a year earlier at Harlem’s White Rock Baptist Church, they didn’t fully break out as R&B stars until the late ’70s and ’80s with songs like “Don’t Cost You Nothing,” “It Seems to Hang On,” “Found A Cure,” “Street Corner” and “Solid.” They generated excitement onstage with the tall, leonine Ashford trading harmonies with the sultry Simpson.

Ashford, who was born in Fairfield, S.C., and raised in Willow Run, Mich., had originally aspired to be a dancer.

The couple, who had been married since 1974, were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2002. They recorded eight albums for Warner Bros., including four that went gold, five with Capitol and two independently. Their last album, 1996′s “Been Found,” was a collaboration with poet Maya Angelou.
- Steve Jones, USA Today

By Guest Contributor refresh_daemon, cross-posted from Init_Music

Even though I’ve been able to mildly appreciate the various idol pop songs that are produced by the mainstream Korean pop industry, it’s only been in the last couple months that I’ve been particularly drawn to any particular idol group and its music. This group is YG Family’s 2NE1, a girl idol pop quartet, which debuted in 2009.

Interestingly enough, I first encountered 2NE1 via an introductory post regarding the discussion about cultural appropriation on Racialicious and before anything else, I was struck with the group’s eye-popping wardrobe and surprisingly found myself appreciating the production and songwriting of “Fire”, but soon after, my awareness of the group faded until Anna/helikoppter at IndiefulROK pointed towards a cover of 2NE1′s “I Don’t Care” by folk songstress obsession of mine, Osoyoung.

Again, in its stripped down arrangement by Osoyoung, I was struck by the smart songwriting and even lyric writing of the song and ended up searching out the original and promptly got addicted, searching out the videos that were made for their original debut and onto their first album. And while I have to credit former 1YTM member Teddy Park’s excellent production and songwriting talents for drawing me into the group, as he is 2NE1′s principal producer/songwriter, I have to say that I was also impressed by the image projected by this group, which might have started off a touch cute, but the quartet quickly developed a very defined image of feminine strength and independence.

Part of the reason why I think 2NE1 captures my attention in a sea of idol groups is precisely because of this projected attitude. There is no end to the number of girl groups who capture both the images of being innocent and cute and super sexy, but one of the off-putting elements to these images (along with song lyrics and performance) is that it often seems to be designed within the culture of male patriarchy. Specifically, the images projected seem to be designed to appeal to men, or to appeal to women to appeal to men. The virgin/whore paradigm is arguably locked into the image of many of these girl groups and even when many of the girl groups inevitably go for their “tough/sexy” image, even the dance choreography is often designed to be overtly submissively sexual (in particular, appealing to cis-hetero men).

Now, perhaps it’s because the quartet is rooted in a hip-hop ethos, common to most of YG’s performers, but the women of 2NE1 project a strong air of self-expression (even if manufactured). You can see this in their rather crazy hybrid of high and street fashion in their wardrobe, which can certainly be sexy, but even in its sexiness, with its high hemlines and bare midriffs, also manages to capture a kind of owned toughness, often accented with armor, spikes, chains, studs, and/or wild patterns and urban graphics. Likewise, the dance choreography of the group is heavily grounded in street styles, lending the group assertiveness, but does not ignore their own conception of strong femininity, which, like other girl groups, can project an air of sexuality, but you’ll notice that their dance moves, even when sexually hinting, are often aggressive and self-possessed (like the locomotion thrust move in “I Am the Best”), being more outward displays than come-hither invitations.

And yet, for all the strength on display, 2NE1 also doesn’t ignore the fact that even strong women can desire companionship. However, the group’s “love” songs are usually songs of regret (“It Hurts”), loneliness (“Lonely”), or moving on (“I Don’t Care”, “Go Away”). In some sense, this might speak a lot to strong women out there, who often find their strength in conflict with the competitive men that they might come to have affection for. And when you combine this multi-faceted approach to strong femininity with smart, ear-catching productions, songs and lyrics, often courtesy of the surprisingly thoughtful Teddy Park, you have what’s possibly the most inspiring girl group out there for young women (and men) to enjoy. In some ways, this quartet is a kind of spiritual inheritor to the Spice Girls in terms of projecting an image of being a strong, willful, female pop group that is self-possessed, all captured on some ear-and-eye-grabbing songs, videos and performances.

And for both catching the attention of my ears while still providing a small measure of strong femininity in a sea of Korean girl groups catering either directly or indirectly to men, I’ve developed quite a fondness for these girls and their producer. I see them as providing hope and strength to all the young women who absorb their music, salving and shoring them up against the avalanche of patriarchy that they inevitably face throughout their lives. And sure, they might be a Korean group with limited international exposure outside of Asia, but if there’s any Korean idol group that I’d want to be an international success, my pick would easily be 2NE1.

I don’t know if that means that you could call me a Blackjack (the 2NE1 fan club), but I’m pretty certain that you could call me a fan. Thanks, 2NE1, for holding it down for young women out there, everywhere.

This all started with J*Davey.

The first sunny morning I experienced in San Francisco, right before I went to hang with the Wikipedians, I checked my email and was treated to a free download of Jack and Brook’s cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit“.

Little did I know that later in the year I would get a chance to try to contextualize the impact of Nevermind, and Nirvana, and I would do it in the pages of Spin thanks to my awesome editor Charles Aaron. (The magazine is on newsstands now, page 45, and in digital form.)

My pitch for a piece exploring the 90s, and cultural angst was accepted, and the opening paragraph of my pitch was so well received it ended up as the opening for the article. But when I sat down to research, I realized I was making some assumptions about writing on culture that weren’t going to bear out. And after interviewing J*Davey, Jeff Chang, Laina Dawes, Allison Wolfe, Simon Tam, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Frannie Kelley, and Felix Contreras, I realized I had an 8,000 word draft that had to fit into a 2,000 word space. So a lot of really amazing thoughts – especially thoughts that veered a bit too far from the angst theme we eventually settled on – ended up on the cutting room floor. What’s the deal with Generation X? What did NWA and Nirvana have in common? How did corporatization impact the grunge movement? Did the grunge movement push out black rockers? I could have written a dozen other articles based on the stories people told me, but alas, print has space limits.

Still, I wanted to share with you all a bit of the overflow. Fun quotes and discussions after the jump.

Jeff Chang is consistently amazing as an interview subject. Every time I’ve interviewed him, he’s just given me a solid 30 minutes of amazing quotes, which always makes me want to die when I have to edit them down. He’s in the final version of the piece, talking about the mood of so-termed Generation X (a designation he called “bullshit”) and and movements. But here’s what he said about Nirvana and NWA:

Nirvana and NWA, to me, are both sides of the same coin. So it wasn’t ever surprising to me that you have Nirvana fans listening to NWA and NWA fans listening to Nirvana. I am also not surprised that both came out of the West Coast, both movements kind of being ignored by the East Coast establishment. These movements came out and said “here’s who the fuck we are” so in a strange way they were kind of parallel.

Chang also talked about the moment he discovered Nirvana:

My Nevermind moment came before Nevermind. I saw Sonic Youth at the Cress Theater or something in Seattle.And this guy comes on stage with long hair, just trashing it out, and I was like “Who are these guys?” They were primal, really primal. They must have gone through all of Bleach. They played “Love Buzz” and it was one of those moments when you weren’t listening, you were inside the song. I didn’t see Kurt’s face the entire time – just his hair. But the emotional pull was so powerful, it was almost like you could feel inside Kurt’s pores – you were just there. And I still get that feeling now. Even when I listen to his music now, I get that feeling.

With Hendrix, you admire his virtuosity. But you never feel like you can be him. With Janis, you could never be her. With Jim, you never wanted to be him. They were all martyrs for the rock and roll cause, but they still felt distant. But when Kurt died, it was like we all died. You just wanted to protect him because you could have been him. His work was always rich because it was within reach, it was always accessible, emotionally accessible. He didn’t feel like a distant rock god or goddess. Kurt was ours.

A lot of people probably feel the same way about Kurt that they do about Tupac. Kurt was the person you could be, but Tupac was the kid down the street that you loved. Maybe it’s the same thing.

I also got to speak to Jack Davey and Brook D’leau of J*Davey, via Skype, which is always cool. Jack made it in, but I had to cut Brook, even though he had some interesting insights on our changing culture.

Brook D’Leau:

Over the last 15 or 20 years or so since the internet has emerged, it’s this huge abyss of everything and nothing. There are more critics, a lot more people to say something about something. So there are a lot of artists walking on eggshells [to please critics] but that’s delusional. These [critics] are people in their homes, living their life on the internet and it can be trying for artists affected by popular opinion. Anything that has some substance or any real meaning, they don’t like to market it because it will be offensive to someone. Everyone’s so PC right now, so anything that bucks the system stands out. Everything is so homogenized right now. The trends now – I mean the internet gives you access to the new trend, but there aren’t a lot of people standing firm in their selves.

Then I asked both Brook and Jack if they thought there would ever be another Nevermind:

Jack: I think so…I think people are at their wits end and are waiting for someone to wipe the slate clean. You know, it’s like the Rapture…we don’t have a date for it, but it’s coming. People are opening their minds to it, but it’s really going to take someone very persuasive, who can carefully break down these constraints called political correctness. Once people are doing being PC, we can open our minds to a new Nevermind.

Brook: I think the reason why a band like Nirvana was able to do what they did at that magnitude was because they didn’t take themselves seriously, they didn’t take society seriously – all they knew was what was inside of them. Nirvana was successful because they didn’t care what the hell else was going on. if more people did that, we’d actually have something.

I wanted to interview some Riot Grrls for the piece, since they were such a huge part of that movement. Kathleen Hanna declined, pointing me to a video where she said she had already answered most of these questions. I suppose that’s one of the problems with doing a piece on something so well known – everyone tangentially related to Nirvana has been interviewed millions of times between 1994 and now. But I did get in contact with Allison Wolfe, the self-proclaimed “riot granny” from Bratmobile, who took time out from her ridiculous schedule to talk to me on the phone about various things. Her memory of Nevermind was hilarious – I think part of this quote made it in, but here’s the whole one:

I remember thinking [the Nevermind album] was the beginning of the end. Like, there goes the neighborhood! Everything that was so fun, home-grown, community supportive, and stimulating was about to go McGrunge. I loved Nirvana, but I could see it was something no longer special to our community. They were great, but their audiences got worse and worse as they expanded. There was no longer a place for us politically minded girls. Well, there probably never was, but we inserted ourselves in there anyway, and I think those bands valued us. I remember Nirvana’s first big show at the Paramount in Seattle, just before Nevermind’s release. Bikini Kill and Mudhoney opened, and a bunch of us riot grrls went up to the show. A lot of people backstage treated us girls badly. We weren’t taken seriously. In that arena, Bikini Kill wasn’t taken seriously either. [...]

My [twin] sister told me she was at a Nirvana show once after they got really huge and was just getting pummeled. It was not a safe place for women. And they played “Rape Me,” all these sweaty shirtless guys screaming rape me and being pushed around – and she was just like I’m done. And she went backstage and told Kurt and he was really upset – [he kept saying] “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t know what to do. And I always remember that story. After a while, it gets out of everyone’s control, even the creators.

Wolfe and I got to talking, and I told her how I was being informed by other things during the grunge era – mostly hip hop and the women there. (I was aware of grunge and riot grrl, but it was really limited to what I heard at my friends houses on on Top 40 radio – I didn’t really embrace rock until 1997.) So we got into a side convo on women in hip hop:

A large part of erasure is women being written out of history. There were so many amazing women hip hop artists – Yo Yo, Monie Love, MC Lyte, Roxane Shante, Queen Latifah, Salt-n-Pepa, just like real people with real message, singing about real things. It definitely had style and flair and sexuality, but there was a lot more to it as well. And at the same time with Public Enemy – there was so much cool and engaged hip hop. It was something that really inspired me and my friends in riot grrls. But women have just been brushed under the rug.

We even talked about backlash and corporate power, a theme that kept coming up time and time again.

I think [the move away from politics in music] is backlash. People in power don’t like to feel like they are out of control. In the early 90s there was so much energy, a kind of rebel spirit in all of these things. But mass culture in the end has to control it, defang it, declaw it, and spit it back out as a product. So in the end it’s just a fad. [...] So you think you’re political, but it’s just a fad. And suddenly we’re post. Post-feminist. Post-racial. Like anything has really changed. Things have gotten better, but there’s still racism, classism, sexism – women are still ending up in ditches. Dead women are still the opening on TV shows.

I then asked Wolfe about an interview she gave to Church of Girl where she said “I don’t want my entertainment/culture/scene just co-opted and sold back to me by Clear Channel or MTV.” We talked a bit about watered down versions of empowerment – I mean, I was a Spice Girls feminist, but yes, it was equal parts marketing message and feminist pop cultural discourse. Wolfe contextualized the shift like this:

I think about when I was in middle school, who was I crying over? Duran Duran. I’d much rather girls be crying over the Spice Girls instead of these guys they can’t obtain. I mean, I’m like Riot Granny – but I’m in a band now with these young girls who know about everything. And they think it’s funny because they don’t know about these obscure bands – but they just troll YouTube all day and discover so much stuff. So in a way it’s kinda cool that they have access to all these historical things…but sometimes I wonder if it’s too easy, that they don’t struggle for these things or experience them live, or amass these experiences where you discover bands because you played for them.

I also wanted to talk to folks outside of the sphere of grunge. When I first started researching for the article (back when I thought it was going to be about suicide narratives, Kurt Cobain and Notorious BIG, and how race plays into attitudes about suicide), I just did a quick search on black kids and Nirvana. I figured someone had to have written about the impact of Cobain on brown kids in the suburbs, right? Wrong! This article may exist somewhere, but it isn’t on the internet. So I started reaching out to black rockers to ask their memories and perceptions. Rob Fields, friend of the blog and creator of Bold As Love offered his thoughts, and also put me in touch with Greg Tate of the Black Rock Coalition. Unfortunately, Tate got back to me too late to be in the article, and I had to cut Rob, but one day I want to circle back to his last thought:

In terms of memories associated with Nevermind, it was definitely a combination of that video for Smells Like Teen Spirit and the music itself. I remember seeing a lot of videos on “The Box” back then, and it had this whole, gauzy Matt Mahurin look to it. The cheerleaders with the scrawled circled A on their uniforms suggested something slightly demonic. Musically, the thing that I immediately noticed–and always loved–was that rumbling bassline. It always sounded kinda black to me.

The impact on black rockers? I remember a lot of folks in the BRC really loving it. It was a big album that fall and into 92, so everybody seemed to be listening to it. But in terms of other musicians, I feel like what was really exciting us was that it seemed to be a moment in which black rock bands might break through. We were hopeful. Here’s what I can remember: Living Colour released their Biscuits EP that year. Fishbone released The Reality of My Surroundings. Lenny Kravitz’s Mama Said came out that year. The Family Stand released the critically acclaimed Moon In Scorpio. Eric Gales had his first release on Elektra. Sony released Eye & I’s debut album. 24-7 Spyz would release Strength in Numbers in the summer of 92. My point is that there was a lot of black rock bands that seemed to be on the verge of breaking through. We were more hopeful that things would change for the better, and it had very little to do with Cobain & company. To be fair, though, the focus on Seattle grunge probably pulled critical attention away from bands like Spyz and Fishbone.

Metal critic Laina Dawes, who did end up in the piece, also noted the expression that allowed Cobain to resonate with so many people would have been blocked from the mouths from those designated as others:

When Nevermind came out, it seemed like the perfect blend of rebellious, angry punk, macho heavy metal and youthful disillusionment. I had a friend who was a die-hard, Joe-Jock metalhead, yet he was able to tap into the feminine, sensitive side of Kurt Cobain’s lyrics, loved him in an almost homoerotic sense, and who sobbed like a child when Cobain died. Nevermind was really the voice of that generation of youth who didn’t buy what Regan had tried to sell; who didn’t want to become their parents whom they….not despised, but felt like they sold their souls for a rigid conformity that only the youth could see was a bullshit, soulless existence. Unlike today, that era seemed to legitimately know and believe that making money was not going to bring them emotional or spiritual happiness – something that we, in this age, seemed to have conveniently forgotten. That generation questioned authority – not through violence, but by looking to popular culture’s elders and sub-dwellers; by reading books and lyrics from people whom they seemed to feel had the key to enlightenment. While simplistic, that act of investigation through developing one’s knowledge and questioning authority in a non-aggressive manner, seems to have been totally lost in this age of technology.

As a young black girl, I didn’t quite get the angst on Nevermind, as I knew that Cobain, despite his poverty-stricken childhood and physical ailments ( some self-inflicted, some not), had more societal privilege than I would ever have. But I appreciated the effort, and the music was so diverse and enraptured so many different kinds of people and thoughts, that you were allowed to take from it what you could to suit your specific existence, and run with it. After all, his lyrics tapped into a vulnerability that transcended across racial and gender lines. But some had the luxury of speaking about it openly and garnering a legion of fans who would be their to and others were chastised for it. I was always well aware of the contradictions.

And finally, the cut that hurt the worst, was leaving our blog home girl Mimi Thi Nguyen out of the final product when I adored what she had to say:

I remember the ’90s through something of a static screen; it was the time of my pop culture blackout, since I imagined myself to be too punk to care. I recall that I worried that post-Reagan (and the first Bush), that our political and cultural labors would lose their urgency under the more liberal face of the Clinton administration. Indeed, in the ’90s, we witnessed a raft of draconian measures targeting immigrant populations, youth of color. I was also a women’s health care activist and organizer and a clinic defender, and some of the worst violence against clinics and abortion providers happened in the ’90s (clinic bombings and several murders), as well as the emergence of new legal tactics to restrict access to women’s healthcare. I suppose I saw this mirrored in the mainstreaming of independent music too. By the time Nevermind came out, I was already invested in punk, and not a fan of the Sub Pop sound, and no doubt a critic of the corporate music industry when I bothered to consider it at all. I didn’t feel that Nirvana or Nevermind had anything to do with me, frankly.

The memory I most associate with Nirvana is the cover of a 1994 Maximumrocknroll (issue 133), featuring a closely cropped photograph of a gun barrel inside someone’s mouth with the headline, “Major Labels: Some Of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked.” At the time, I worked at the not-for-profit record store Epicenter Zone, located in the Mission District, which was affiliated loosely with the magazine, and I remember too that we were all shocked when Cobain killed himself — with a gunshot.

I don’t even know what ’90s fashion is; I was dressed in black for most of that decade. I was never into grunge as either a sartorial or musical style, but I would hazard that grunge as a fashion or anti-fashion statement emerged from thrifting as scavenging practice for anti-corporate cultures. I know that grunge became commercialized in the ’90s, alongside the music, though again I plead pop culture blackout. (Ugh, plaid.) The 2010 revival did not appear to bear this particular historical memory, but perhaps I’m wrong; perhaps it did hold out hope for some semblance of an “authentic” way of being.

I remember the ’90s as an outsider in an outsider subculture. Over the course of the decade, I found that it was too late to save punk rock for me. I still have what I consider to be punk-rock reflex, but my identification was made precarious and partial especially in confrontation with punk rock’s whiteness, its masculinist bent, and its often reactionary politics and aesthetics. (Once a straight, white punk boy wrote a song about wanting to rape me. Just another reason why I made the compilation zines …Race Riot, about race and racism in subcultures.) Throughout the ’90s, I learned over and again that punk rock was as contentious a cultural, political and social sphere as any other. For me, punk rock was not an exception to the rule, to the so-called “mainstream,” and neither are punk rockers.

I wrote this in a column for Punk Planet: Does my presence necessarily or automatically critique punk rock hegemony? Did the presence of women in punk rock mean that riot grrrl did not fundamentally tear at the social fabric of unquestioned masculinity and privilege in punk? Does the fact of Latino or Asian American or black or queer participation within the span of punk rock history negate the mountainous evidence of racisms and homophobia? (Answer to all of the above: NO.) Without downplaying the complex acrobatics of identifying, what are the terms and logic of inclusion? What do I have to look like, act like, speak like, in order that I might become one of the gang? Or consider: do you read my presence as a reaffirmation (to your relief) of your punk rock (and Americanist) bootstrap ideology of exceptionalism and self-made individuals? “Oh, she’s different than the others.” (That’s not my idea of a compliment.)

I wish all this could have fit, but I had to find a way to squeeze in disco, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, Rickie Vasquez, Aeon Flux, and emo. I also couldn’t get a firm bead on Nirvana and the Rock en español movement that Felix Contreras pointed me toward. Such are the issues with time limits and space. But hopefully, I’ll get a chance to revisit it some day.

Please help support – check out the issue, buy a copy, and help keep our voices in the cultural conversation.

So, I’m writing this piece for Spin on Nirvana, Nevermind, and the Death of Cultural Angst, really focusing on the 90s. And one of the cool things about writing about Nirvana is that I generally don’t get asked to do so. I write about race, I write about gender, I write about class. So most people don’t peg me as someone who felt really strongly about Nirvana or any other rock movements – despite the fact that I was a black girl growing up in the suburbs. So Nirvana had a very interesting cultural effect on me and people that I knew. One of the big things was the fact that Nirvana was an anti-racist, anti-sexist band. Their liner notes from Incesticide* , after they started to get super popular, they put in this note that was like “If you don’t like women, blacks, or gays, leave us alone.” A really, really bold move. But at the same time, we wonder is Kurt Cobain really and truly as iconic as we say?

He’s important to note in our culture, but whose culture exactly are we talking about? How do we define culture? How do we define this nebulous “we” that makes up American culture?

For me, a big part of my culture was Tupac, and more broadly, hip-hop culture. N.W.A., Notorious B.I.G, all these people also dealt with cultural angst in the 90s. They also talked about society. They also talked about racial struggle, state violence. And yet, they aren’t seen as universal. TLC was part of the beginning waves of hip hop feminism. Back in 1992, they were rocking condoms, as a way to promote safe sex, they were talking about being the girls they wanted to be. That was culturally significant and important to me. But is that reflected in the wider culture? It’s even things like magazines that matter. Did teens in your area read Word Up magazine, like my friends? Or did they read Tiger Beat?

Where is your place in the culture, and how do you define it?

People try to say “this is the 90s” or “this is the 80s” – but whose culture are we talking about?

I interviewed Mimi Thi Nguyen for my article, and she described herself as a punk turned academic. And she talked a little bit about being completely off the corporate radar in the 90s. She was just like “Why? It didn’t mean anything to me.”

So on one hand, you have these things that were extremely iconic, that we form connections around. But at the same time, we have people who were around in the same time, same era, who got completely different messages – if they felt that this was important at all. And so, we start looking at these questions of movement, this question of culture. And how do we define it.

As media makers, we are in charge of shaping these perceptions. The voices that we leave out are the ones that help us determine what our culture is. We are the ones that are leaving this record, this documentation, for ages and ages to come. And so, when we leave people out, when we start erasing voices that don’t fit the narrative that we think they should fit, we start missing these large pieces of the puzzle. And over time what tends to happen, is that we’re so used to writing from one perspective, this thing Edwidge Danticat calls the single story**, that you forgot that other stories exist. Right? So then we start getting more holes, and more gaps in our cultural narrative.

The thing that people forget to understand is that the idea that culture will be nebulous, and can be something hard to define is actually a good thing. It’s a huge benefit for America. We are not homogenous and we aren’t supposed to be homogenous. We weren’t founded in an homogenous way, and we are supposed to be diverse and reflective of that in our media and our culture. And those of us who are arts and culture makers need to reflect that. If not, we just have incomplete sketches of who we are. And when we go to look back, and we wonder about things – like “What was Nirvana’s impact on the queer community?” – we can’t get that type of information, because we never thought to record it.

So the idea becomes how do we talk about our differences, and yet still talk about our culture?

How do we make room for every single person to speak?

And again, those of us who are in this room have access to some of the highest levels of media. We are the culture creators, even if we don’t have as direct of an impact as others do, we are still part of this field.

And one of the things I notice a lot when we talk about diversity, when we talk about these ideals, is that “I don’t have the time. I can’t work this other thing into the story. I can’t figure out how to make this diversity angle work.” As if diversity is this handcuff around you, instead of something that’s actually a benefit, instead of something that’s actually freeing. Because if we were to look at the world, through all of these different prisms, we would realize that the onus is off of us to provide the one definitive experience that will define out culutre, and instead we can start to talk to each other. We can start to understand each other. We can acknowledge that we are carriers of information. And we can acknowledge that every time we leave out a story – though we can’t get to it right then – but if we acknowledge that it’s missing, and we each work a little bit extra each day to start weaving in new narratives, things that we haven’t seen, articles we haven’t thought of yet, we will truly become one nation, under a groove.

—

*Was talking too fast. In the clip, I say insecticide. Corrected here for obvious reasons. Also, what they actually said is in the link, women, people of color, or gays, not specifically black folks.

**This was a misattribution. The writer who actually said it was Chimamanda Adichie, in her TED Talk.

Fun fact: The founding editor of Punk Planet, Dan Sinker, was in the audience. He is also the person behind the super popular @MayorEmanuel twitter feed.

At the dawn of the Latin alt burst in 1998, a Newsweek cover story announced “Se Habla Rock and Roll? You Will Soon,” and a year later the New York Times predicted Latin alternative was “Approaching Its Final Border.” But by 2005, the Los Angeles Times’ Agustin Gurza compared the Latin boom to an exploding rocket that breaks apart halfway into orbit.

But no matter how many times Mexico’s Café Tacuba held court in front of the gentle mosh pits of Irving Plaza, or local bands such as Los Amigos Invisibles proved that funk, pop, disco, salsa, merengue and occasional bouts of thrash metal could hold everyone together on the dance floor, there was something missing. The energy that came from Latin America, which had produced most of the significant bands, was not duplicated in American cities.

Latin alternative settled back into a niche accessed by the mainstream only in a rare NPR moment, while driving to New England to see the fall foliage. [Ricky] Martin has settled into life as a father; Shakira reinvents herself as part-stripper, part-philanthropist; [Marc] Anthony got a gig playing a cop on TV; and J-Lo, well, you know where she is.

How did this happen? Certainly the immediate atmosphere after the 9/11 attacks was characterized by the mainstream’s distancing from cultures from outside its borders. Although the decade began with Barnes and Noble and other booksellers offering extensive selections of books in Spanish, by its end more and more politicians called for English to be the country’s official language. And earlier this year, the Grammy awards dropped 31 categories, including Latin jazz and traditional world music.

- From “After the Latin Bubble Burst,” by Ed Morales, New Jersey Star-Ledger

…but she might be at Zoe’s show.

Monday night, I headed down to Black Cat to check out the J*Davey show. In the back room, sans air conditioning, an entire room full of alternablack folks waited for Jack and Brook to hit the stage. While I was waiting, I noticed the sheer diversity of black womanhood represented. Afros, braids, wigs, weaves, relaxers, dreads. Heels, Chucks, ballet flats, Birkenstocks. Women dressed like Jack Davey spoke to women dressed like Nicole Ritchie. Women in wrap dresses and heels swayed uncomfortably on the hard cement floor.

The first opening act was a lost cause, so Boyfriend and I ducked out for a burrito break. But we made it back in time to enjoy the second opening act, Elevator Fight.

Since the only glimpse of Zoe I’ve had is her screen sulking through X-Men: First Class, I was interested in seeing her persona as a frontwoman.  Most of the pics of Kravitz have her associated with this ethereal, elven queen, semi-bohemian, flowy 70s glam.  At first glance, it is totally possible to assume she’s on that same train as Zooey.  Come on –  she even lives in Williamsburg, which is the Holy City of Hipster Madness.  But there’s still a few things that seperate the Zoes of the world from the Zooeys. Kravitz appeared on stage wearing a black knit cap over messy hair and a shirt about seventeen sizes too large – her other stage outfits have ranged from conventional to rocker chic.  At twenty-two years of age, it’s clear that the kid is still trying on her personas.  As Jack Davey blew bubbles from the side of the stage, Zoe screamed out her triumph about gay marriage passing in New York, pledged to marry Jack, took shots with her band, and babbled her way through song intros.  She came off as anything but whimsical, and her rich vocals complemented songs titled “Post Empire” and “New Pussy.”  There was not a ukelele to be seen, but she did do an impressive headbang with one of her bandmates.

By the time she started yelling lewd comments when Jack Davey mentioned the fan was “blowing into [her] mouth,” I figured that if Zoe ever was mistaken for a manic pixie dream girl, she’d probably punch that guy in the head and make off with his jacket. Kravitz can pull off the look like a champion, but the trope – and what the idea implies about who she will and will not be publicly – is far too limiting.

Earlier: Who Is the Black Zooey Deschanel?

White rappers aren’t the problem. Exploitation of Black culture is.

Black culture is diverse with various meanings; and how one defines Black culture varies from individual. In the case of Kreayshawn, I’m referring to her misinterpretation of what she thinks Black culture and hip-hop is.

One could argue she is exactly what hip-hop has become–gimmicky, devoid of substance, whack, the glorification of a street life, sexualized and talentless. If that’s the case, is she appropriating Black culture or just a part of a watered down genre?

I don’t believe for one second her image is authentic. It is one derived of the stereotypical “sister girl” trope we’ve seen time and time again. Understand, I’m not arguing whether “sister girl” actually exists. I’m not even arguing that the “sister girl” is to be shunned. But Kreayshawn’s image, how she carries herself, her lyrics are all derivative of her very limited view of Black culture.
- From “Kreayshawn: Another Case of Appropriating Black Culture,” by Bene Viera, June 6

He was the spirit of the E Street Band, and the oaken staff that Bruce Springsteen leaned on.

Clarence Clemons — the Big Man with the big horn — died yesterday of complications from a stroke he suffered last weekend. He was 69.

“Clarence lived a wonderful life,” Bruce Springsteen said in a statement [Saturday.] “He carried within him a love of people that made them love him. He created a wondrous and extended family. He loved the saxophone, loved our fans and gave everything he had every night he stepped on stage.”
- New Jersey Star-Ledger

He was working as a youth counselor in Newark when he began to mix with the Jersey Shore music scene of the late 1960s and early ’70s. He was older than Mr. Springsteen and most of his future band mates, and he often commented on the oddity — even the liability — of being a racially integrated group in those days.

“You had your black bands and you had your white bands,” he wrote in his memoir, “and if you mixed the two you found less places to play.”

But the match was strong from the start, and his saxophone soon became a focal point of the group’s sound. In an interview with The New York Times in 2005, Jon Landau, Mr. Springsteen’s manager, said that during the recording sessions for “Born to Run,” Mr. Springsteen and Mr. Clemons spent 16 hours finessing the jazzy saxophone solo on that album’s closing song, “Jungleland.”
- New York Times

Reaction came from across the entertainment industry.

“Clarence Clemons was an electric, generous, sweet spirit. Taught me how to look cool with a sax. Goodbye Big Man,” tweeted actor Rob Lowe.

Added Questlove, drummer for the Roots: “RIP Clarence Clemons. A True Legend. Will be absolutely missed.”

An original member — and the oldest member — of the E Street Band, Clemons also performed with the Grateful Dead, the Jerry Garcia Band, and Ringo Starr’s All Star Band. He recorded with a wide range of artists including Aretha Franklin, Roy Orbison and Jackson Browne. He also had his own band called the Temple of Soul.

The stage “always feels like home. It’s where I belong,” Clemons, a former youth counselor, said after performing at a Hard Rock Cafe benefit for Home Safe, a children’s charity, in 2010.
- NPR