Raising Cain...

Soul Train and Pain: New Book Explores The Legacy of Don Cornelius' Empire | Farai Chideya

This interview by Farai Chideya of Ericka Blount Danois reminded me of an experience I had this weekend watching (for the zillionth time?) In the Heat of the Night. The dvd I bought had some awesome bonus material that included a critical discussion of movie-making and Hollywood in the sixties as it impacted the actors, score composer (Quincy Jones) and production of this film. I realized how much I enjoy deeper/expanded discussions of the social order in which my favorite movies were made. Farai Chideya makes this point about Danois' book, Love, Peace and Soul -- which makes me think I'd like to read the book:

In her new book, Love, Peace and Soul: Behind the Scenes of America's Favorite Dance Show, Soul Train, author Ericka Blount Danois does more than a pop-chronology or even a look behind the scenes. She gets deeply into the history and sociology of a man and a media movement that reshaped how America looked at race, self-expression, and culture.

Soul Train's impresario Don Cornelius committed suicide in 2012. Today (September 27th, 2013) would have been his 77th birthday.

I got a chance to ask author Ericka Blount Danois how and why she so deeply explored Soul Train and Cornelius' life.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

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Rev. Lennox Yearwood: The Music of Our Struggle: Celebrating the Hip-hop of 2012

Interesting article from Rev. Yearwood...music and justice, music and healing...

As we celebrate the changing of years this is a good time to look back on the momentous year we endured. And to rejoice in the hip-hop music of 2012 that provided the soundtrack on our journey to hard-fought victories, and helped us cope with tragedy.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Listening to some Billie Holiday today...

This poem came round on a listserv today, and I thought I'd share. Billie Holiday died on July 17, 1959 at age 44. I was a junior high school student in Chapel Hill, North Carolina at the time. I heard my mom singing many of her songs before I knew there was such a person as Billie Holiday. Mom liked jazz and sang with a local dance band for awhile to make extra money. My deeper interest in jazz came much later, but my connection with mom always rings a little when I'm listening. Just a little bit ago, hearing Billie singing "I'll Be Seeing You", I got a little teary...

The Day Lady Died

By Frank O'Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton   

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun   

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets   

in Ghana are doing these days

                                           I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)   

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life   

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine   

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do   

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or   

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and   

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue   

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and   

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Source: The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (1995)

RZA's The Tao of Wu: Hip Hop Religion, Spiritual Sampling, and Race in a "Post-racial" Age | ReligionDispatches

With blurbs from Cornel West and Sifu Shi Yan Ming, the founder of the USA Shaolin Temple (who also provides the book’s foreword), The Tao of Wu aims to position RZA, in West’s words, as a “towering artist and deep thinker who has much to teach us.” Given the history and dominant discourse of young black men (especially those who rap) as anything but reasoning or reasonable, this book is evidence to the contrary. But this does not appear to be RZA’s aim. Consider the following quotes, which provide bookends to his narrative:

“If you live in the projects, you don’t leave them much.” 

“And God will show and prove that he is the Universal Changer.” 

An account as much about leaving the American ghetto as it is about a search for God, The Tao of Wu is one-part memoir, one-part spiritual narrative (the preferred form for asserting black subjectivity back to the days of Equiano), and one-part Hip Hop history (tied to a history of the Wu Tang Clan). If I were to play on the value that MCs place on wordplay, than I might describe it as his-story—that is, this is RZA’s account of rap’s rise from obscurity organized by his own quest for enlightenment and fame.

via www.religiondispatches.org

I know zero about hip-hop but I've been curious. I loved this article. Read the rest of it here.

Find out more at amazon.com's page for this book.