86 Search results for "billboard"

No matter how much sex there can be or how generous your pay checks come, you still have not experienced real amazement until you’ve been to a Chicago-style poetry slam. For four years, the end of February and beginning of March has marked the season in which I unleashed my craft. As a freshman in […]

Black students trail peers in graduation rates at Memphis-area universities Richard Morgan, The Commercial Appeal, February 26, 2011 Give the Children Music: Inspiring Our Youth Through Hip Hop Charles Howard, Huffington Post, February 26, 2011 Seminar in York examines hip-hop’s influence on youth Bill Landauer, Daily Record/Sunday News, February 26, 2011 Documentary reveals everyday life […]

Last week, it was reported in the press that Aretha Franklin was to undergo a mysterious surgery. Her released statement on the matter was upbeat yet vague, leaving fans and admirers guessing as to the seriousness of the situation. Well apparently the situation is indeed quite serious. Sources are telling the media that the Queen […]

I was blessed last week to hear one of our most profound scholars Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu. His lecture was an alarm bell sounding the state of emergency in our communities especially economically. One of the incredible stats he presented was that the black community combined made $836 billion dollars last year, but we spent only […]

According to Rollingstone.com, album sales nationwide reportedly hit its lowest low since the use of Soundscan first began, way back in 1991. The week of August 8th through August 14th generated a measly 4.95 million albums sold. Even worse, the last time overall album sales reached such a low…was earlier this year, when album sales […]

I’ve had my fill of LeBron James this season.  Seriously.  I’m not interested in being a witness to anything James-related until on or immediately after July 1.  I’m no longer watching interviews wherein James tells the viewing audience things we already know.  No more James free agency countdowns.  No more terrible renditions of “We Are […]

Despite Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best intentions, her character Uncle Tom has become a pejorative term aimed at black American’s accused of selling out to white folks. In the novel, he was supposed to be a good man, a Christian man, but it was Christianity that led him to, even under questionable conditions (say slavery), continue […]

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 […]

  Earlier this week, legendary producer Dr. Dre officially announced his intentions to release his long-awaited 3rd and (allegedly) final album, the now-mythical Detox, in 2010. Of course, we’ve heard this shit before; every year since 2007 or so has been the year Detox would finally see a release, and each time it never materialized. […]

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.

By the end of 2000, D’Angelo was without question THE man, receiving commercial and critical success, and thus free to go in any direction he wanted artistically. And then he disappeared.

Despite all the recent news stories of well-intentioned whites bombarding American borders with black babies–colored children are not in high demand. They are not, as celebrity child-collectors would have you believe, the next big thing. Instead, they are in America and abroad, getting their asses kicked by hunger, by poverty, by disease, by parent-less homes, […]