The Hip Hop Anthropologist

With the dearth of Black newsmagazines that flourished in the '70s, there are virtually none left standing. And the Black new space has become a hellscape with the current cast of characters tantamount to allowing the inmates to run the asylum. I grew up watching Tony Brown, John Johnson, Melba Tolliver, Gil Noble, and Bill McCreary; listening to Wayne Gillman and Gary Byrd on Black-owned radio; reading Sepia, Jet, and Ebony magazines, which were a mainstay on the cocktail tables of every Black household. I was filled with pride to see well-groomed, well-read, and well-prepared hosts, reporters, and producers deliver content in solemn, measured tones devoid of amateurishness that characterizes two particularly reprehensible hosts, which spanned the Black experience. Those days are long gone. Now we are left with a seventy-year-old guy who looks like a babble head that crucifies the English language day in and day out unscripted on a syndicated radio show that he allows his "fr...

A Black commentator made an interesting, provocative analysis about Black women in a recent podcast. He suggested that the hosts of another well-regarded podcast with two black female (neither of whom are married) and one black male (who is married) host "cryin" over Kamala Harris' loss, invective against the Democratic donor class, who are primarily wealthy, white Jewry out to also protect their whiteness, and sense of betrayal by white women is either misguided or born of naïveté or both. The commentator suggests the sisters along with their contemporaries are victims of their own choosing because they brought into [white] feminism hook, line, and sinker along with those $1,000, 8' long cadaver weaves they fling around unashamedly like vain, adolescent, white girls in a pathetic ode to white supremacy. They fucked around and found out that white feminism was just that exclusively "white."  The Women's Liberation Movement was fostered by young, white, l...

Comic-actor Katt Williams has the opportunity to assume the mantle of filmmaker in the vein of the first Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux producing commercially viable, culturally relevant, historically accurate films that leave a lasting legacy that Tyler Perry and 50 Cents eschew - preferring coin over culture. "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" was produced on a shoestring budget by Black filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles in 1971 for around $150k. "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" was released to limited distribution. It grossed $15,000,000 or $116,912,592.59 in today's dollars, demonstrating to Hollywood that Black themed films have a commercially viable market.  Like Hip Hop music, however, the Hollywood elite, primarily wealthy, white Jewry, wrested creative control from artists with predatory contracts leaving a profane, polluted, cookie-cutter, follow-the-bouncing-ball bastard that denigrated Black women, glorified criminality, and promoted drug cult...

 Obviously, nothing is disqualifying any longer if mediocre why tees with marginal experiences in the departments they were imprudently nominated to run (into the ground) are allowed to skirt FBI national security background checks (an exhaustive process that normally takes upwards of six months) in chump the brain dead comic carnival barker aka klueless the klown's zeal wreak havoc on the administrative state: a vast, sprawling, and complex federal bureaucracy, poised to hinder his wacky schemes. Instead of pointing out the obvious hypocrisy, we must insist on criminal justice reform as it relates to criminal history reporting requirements. If undereducated Black men who have been trying to turn around their lives after a criminal conviction for a non-violent crime in their distant past cannot pass a criminal background (forget about a national security) check for an entry-level job paying roughly $50k/annum, activists need to affirmatively be demanding criminal background check r...

 While we're rightfully bemoaning tRump's triumphant reemergence as the first convicted criminal to become president, we have not seriously considered its lasting ramifications. The primary one is what happens when all of the lapdogs in the Executive and Legislature have to confront an unhinged, unmoored, and unrestrained tRump defying a Supreme Court order attempting to reign him... The very same Supreme Court that has granted conservatives a veritable wish list, a unilateral wet dream, of regressive decisions rolling back decades of precedent, losing its own identity in the process, along with any modicum of respect as a consequence. Don't think it could happen? I say 'when' not 'if' it happens, what will the country looks like after the final Grand Oaf Party controlled bulwarks fail🙄I guarantee MAGA will immediate repeal all of the Civil Rights Acts, the Social Security Act, AFDC, ACA, and then start dismantling the Reconstruction - i.e., 13th, 14th, and...

Sistas claiming to be conscious first need to lose 8' long cadaver or Brazilian wigs, which is a pathetic ode to Eurocentric standards of beauty that diminishes their advocacy, self-respect, and agency while affirming their subservience. Black women futilely trying to look like white women while playing lip service to liberation, espousing self-determination tongue-in-cheek, is the textbook definition of cognitive dissonance. It is jarring. They cannot be taken seriously because I cannot get past their $1,000 sewn-in, dead girl, weaves or synthetic wigs to actually hear what they have to say. The voluminous horse-like manes get in the way of any substantive conversation.

 Not to worry. The tattered remnants of the Grand Oaf Party will emerge like a specter from the ashes of our moribund democracy to push back against trumpty dumpty's authoritarian yearnings once chump the brain dead comic carnival barker aka klueless the klown starts the wholesale dismantling of the intelligence community (which has been eerily silent knowing tRump is a spy at best, a Manchurian candidate at worse), breaking long-standing treaties like NATO, the Abraham Accords, and the Paris Climate Treaty; green lights China's annexation of Taiwan, destabilizes the 27 resource-rich Sub-Saharan African [read that: "shithole"] countries on an industrial scale enabling his billionaire buddies to exploit these countries free of interference by popular, democratically elected leaders, while giving Israel free reign to totally decimate the Palestinians. The internal strife, the civil war, coupled by a House prayfully led by Hakeem Jeffries will render MAGA impotent after ...

 Gaza is a fait accompli. The world community has thrown in the towel allowing a scorched earth campaign by the Zionists to eradicate the hapless, helpless, and hungry Palestinians. Apparently the surrounding  Arab countries do not give af. Why should we (as Black folks care)? The tRump administration will pipeline the gasoline from Saudi Arabia to Nut N' Yahoo to fuel the total elimination of the remaining elderly, infirmed, women and children. North Africans and people from the Middle East immigrating to the United States - including the Palestinians - are classified as "white." More importantly, they realize that asperation like 80% in Dearborn (MI) did by casting their votes for stinky without the brain (who told these Muslims that he plans on reimplementing the infamous Muslim ban) on Tuesday, November 5, 2024. Black folks who are not well-off, well-heeled, or wealthy like 50 Cents or Kodac Black or Waka flocka or any other numbskull rapper supporting chump the brain...

I do not care about immigrants, period. I do not care about white women, period. I do not care about Latinos who identify as either "white" or white adjacent, period. No other progressive Black ought to either. And until the Democrats understand this fact, we will continue trying to court these ungrateful constituencies. Ones that showed their collective asses on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, by overwhelming voting for chump the brain dead comic carnival barker aka klueless the klown. I am more concerned about the federal merit system (civil service) where Blacks over index in GS-03 through GS-18 items; Article III court judge appointments (and centrist Democrat senators like Fetterman cross party lines to confirm radical, right wing ideologues because the "country must move forward" or some other rationalization), the Attorney General, DOJ, Department of Education and the social safety net. Those cabinet level appointments will directly and adversely impact our commun...

  We have been holding "space" in this country since before our forced immigration here over 400 hundred years ago. The generational trauma to our collective psyche has some of US identifying with our oppressor (Stockholme syndrome) in the vain hope that whitey will be less brutal, release some pressure from his size thirteen jackboot on our necks, while others take an opposite stance. I am personally done because my anger is not directed toward whitey for doing what they do to preserve their 200 year headstart. My angst is directed at deaf, dumb, and blind Black folk who refuse to rise up collectively to effectively push back against the oppression because they are "not all that racist," or "maybe tRump needs to come back," or "I had more money under tRump", or whatever other bizarre rationalizations they can conjure up in their pea brain for supporting a documented bigot. The fact of the matter is chump the brain dead comic carnival barker aka ...

  "Q" was in a class by himself. In addition to all the well-deserved accolades, he was also a talented pianist before taking up trumpet and becoming a respected trumpeter in his own right prior to writing, composing and producing, before finding his lane, arranging. His lush instrumentals were notable for their signature orchestration, which had a classical music flavor seeminglessly woven with jazz sensibilities. Like many "naturals," he got his start while still in high school. He went to the "woodshed" mastering his craft with some of the very best "Big Band" leaders in the business before carving out his own niche. Frank Sinatra said he had never seen an arranger score a song a quickly as "Q." Sinatra collaborations with "Q" stand the test of time as some of the best selling albums in the waning genre. His foray into pop with Michael Jackson are the stuff of legends propelling the star to superstardom. Little know fact is...