633 Search results for "pop life"

All things considered, Usher ain’t been the same since Confessions.

You know that; I know that.

Just seven years after Andre 3000 shattered every boundary and limitation Hip Hop ever really had with The Love Below, B.o.B. stands as the ideal culmination of that album’s incredible influence. Compelling, audacious, and genuinely upbeat and life-affirming (rather than “conscious,” pessimistic or whiny), B.o.B.’s The Adventures of Bobby Ray is definitely “Hip Hop,” but […]

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hVp47f5YZg Imagine walking in downtown Chicago or on any main avenue in a well-populated city. A black women (that is not noticed on an average day) is walking down that street and she takes her shoes off directly in front of you, and tosses them to the side. Now you, the curious onlooker might think […]

“Are you doing your part?” and “Save the planet.” During Earth Week, we’ll being hearing a lot of these phrases, both part of “going green” and saving our worn down environment. But hey…why is the focus of this wildfire movement limited to the abused natural resources? Don’t get me wrong I am all for living […]

Winehouse was touted as a world class vocalist, a supremely gifted songwriter, and a certified game-changer within the landscape of popular music. And then everything went wrong. Very wrong.

This week I had the opportunity to speak at Spelman College’s 8th Annual Seven Women at the Cross. For those who are not familiar with Seven Women at the Cross Services it is a time when women preachers and speakers recount the last seven days of Christ living on Earth through the stories of the […]

In 1964 at the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer said, “All my life I’ve been sick and tired . . . Now, I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Even though these words were distinctively about Southern racism, I find myself unconsciously gravitating to these words to talk about the […]

Since embarking on a solo career in 2003, Beyonce has completely mastered an intoxicating mixture of R&B and Hip Hop that redefined Pop music in the 2000s, her live performances continue to stun audiences around the world, and her fierce protection of her private life from media scrutiny has allowed her to cultivate a largely blemish-less superstar status. All things considered, Beyonce is clearly the greatest and most influential female pop artist of the 2000s.

Jimmy Santiago Baca, a leading contemporary Latino poet writing in the United States, reminds us that “Poetry’s mission is to subvert, to question, to challenge, provoke, to flail one’s vulnerability and voice into the marvelous whirlwind of poetry’s awe, flagging at the horns of the raging beast that is societies gluttonous comfort…affirm poetry at any […]

In a 1991 Senate confirmation hearing  Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas said:  “This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any […]

Like Che printed t-shirts and Darfur doo-rags, tragedy has become fashionable. It isn’t rare that I find someone trading stories (with great excitement) about a friend of a friend who was in Indonesia during the tsunami, or meet an artist eager to proclaim that he lost everything in New Orleans. Surely, a life of meaning […]

  On November 24, 2009 in an article form the Washington Post, it has been reported that joblessness for 16 – to – 24 year old black men has reached proportions similar to the Great Depression; i.e., 34.5 percent of black men between the ages of 16 – to – 24 are jobless, which is […]