Immature/ImX singer and actor Marques Houston (You Got Served, House Party 3, Sister, Sister) just released the lead single “Cowgirl” from his forthcoming LP, The Best Worst Year Ever.
“Cowgirl” incorporates elements from Bobby Brown‘s 1988 hit “Rock Wit’cha” and touches of 1993 smash “Freak Me” by Silk from 1993 into a modern mid-tempo bop that’s already racked up close to 2 million YouTube views:
Jumping on the western wear trend and aesthetic Beyoncé reclaimed earlier this year via Cowboy Carter, in the Chris Stokes-directed video, Houston is dripped in a variety of swaggy boots, hats, vests and jeans, and lays out a line dance that is gaining momentum on TikTok via the #Cowgirldancechallenge.
Fans can look forward to the release of Houston’s new album, The Best Worst Year Ever, which debuts on August 30th.
The album is said to reflect a transformative year for Houston, filled with personal and professional highs and lows. It is set to be a landmark in his career.
Check out two of “Cowgirl”‘s throwback inspirations below:
Today’s GBN Daily Drop podcast is based on the Thursday, March 3 entry in the “A Year of Good Black News” Page-A-Day®️ Calendar for 2022 that features a quote from professor, author and former Black Panther Party member Kathleen Cleaver about the lineage of women freedom fighters in America:
You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.comor create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website (transcript below):
SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, this is Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Thursday, March 3rd, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.
It’s a quote from professor, author and former Black Panther Party member Kathleen Cleaver from her 1998 essay, “Women, Power and Revolution”:
“I think it is important to place the women who fought oppression as Black Panthers within the longer tradition of freedom fighters like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells-Barnett, who took on an entirely oppressive world and insisted that their race, their gender, and their humanity be respected all at the same time.”
Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.
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The award-winning documentary series America ReFramed, a co-production of WORLD Channel and American Documentary, Inc., launches its landmark tenth season with the world premiere of Fannie Lou Hamer’s America, a portrait of the fearless Mississippi sharecropper-turned-human-rights-activist.
The season begins with a special presentation on PBS on Tuesday, February 22, 9:00 to 10:30 p.m. ET, followed by its broadcast on WORLD Channel on Thursday, February 24.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s America focuses on the incredible life of one of the Civil Rights Movement’s greatest grassroots leaders, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the injustices that made her work essential.
Airing during Black History Month, the film is produced by Hamer’s great-niece Monica Land and Selena Lauterer and directed by Joy Davenport. This special is a copresentation with PBS and Black Public Media.
“Fannie Lou Hamer’s America is a powerful film, one that illustrates the challenges and sacrifices so many faced in fighting for the right to vote,” said Sylvia Bugg, Chief Programming Executive & General Manager at PBS. “We are excited to work with WORLD Channel to bring this exceptional America ReFramed documentary, that highlights contributions of women of color both on screen and behind the camera, to audiences.”
This marks the weekly series’ move to its new Thursday time slot, with many titles available to stream beginning February 22 on worldchannel.org, WORLD Channel’s YouTube Channel and on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and the PBS Video app, available on iOS, Android, Roku streaming devices, Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Smart TV, Chromecast and VIZIO.
Esteemed poet, professor and activist Sonia Sanchez, 87, has been awarded the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for being an artist who “has pushed the boundaries of an art form” and “contributed to social change.” The prize includes a cash award of $250,000.
Sanchez has been a leading figure of the 1960s Black Arts Movement, having written more than 20 books including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, I’ve Been a Woman, A Sound Investment and Other Stories, Homegirls and Handgrenades, Under a Soprano Sky, Wounded in the House of a Friend(1995),Does Your House Have Lions? (1997), Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (1998), Shake Loose My Skin(1999), Morning Haiku(2010) and most recently, Collected Poems (2021).Her subjects range from Black culture, feminism, civil rights, philosophy and peace, and Sanchez, according to the New York Times, “is known for melding musical formats like the blues with traditional poetic forms like the haiku and tanka, using American Black speech patterns and experimenting with punctuation and spelling.”“When we come out of the pandemic, it’s so important that we don’t insist that we go back to the way things were,” Sanchez said to the New York Times. “We’ve got to strive for beauty, which is something I’ve tried to do in my work.”
Other notable recipients of the Gish Prize include artists such as Ava DuVernay, Spike Lee, Suzan-Lori Parks, Walter Hood and Chinua Achebe.
Among dozens of distinguished honors that Sanchez has received throughout her life Sanchez has also received the 1985 American Book Award for Homegirls and Handgrenades, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities for 1988, the Langston Hughes Poetry Award for 1999, the Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Robert Frost Medal and the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the Academy of American Poets’ inaugural Leadership Award.
Musician, actor and activist Janelle Monáe partnered with the African American Policy Forum to create “Say Her Name (Hell You Talmbout),” an anthem protesting police violence and calling attention to 61 Black women and girls who were killed by law enforcement.
The 17-minute song features 15 other Black female artists and activists, including Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, Beyoncé, Alicia Keys, Chloe x Halle, Tierra Whack, Isis V., Zoë Kravitz, Brittany Howard, Asiahn, Jovian Zayne, Angela Rye, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Brittany Packnett-Cunningham, Alicia Garzaand MJ Rodriguez.
“This International Daughter’s Day and we are proud to stand with the African American Policy Forum’s #SayHerName Mothers Network & Kimberlé Crenshaw as we honor the Black women and girls who lost their lives at the hands of police,” Monáe said in a statement.
“We support the tireless work that #SayHerName has been doing for years to help bring these mothers justice for their daughters. This work is too important to do alone and can only be sustained through our collective voices,” she added. “We take up this call to action as daughters ourselves trying to create a world where stories like these are no longer commonplace. This is a rally cry.”
It’s no secret that I’m a die-hard Aretha Franklin stan. Have almost all the records, read all the books, seen all the documentaries, the concert film, watched the limited series, made several Spotify playlists (because one will never ever be enough).
So it should be no surprise the wait for the MGM feature Respect starring Academy Award winner Jennifer Hudson, delayed from release last year due to the pandemic, has been a long one for me. And from the looks of this featurette, it will have been well worth it:
This featurette excites me not only for the music and what look to be great performances from Hudson, Mary J. Blige as Dinah Washington and Forest Whitaker as Aretha’s father, Reverend C.L. Franklin, but also because of what director Liesl Tommy and screenwriter Tracey Scott Wilson say in it about their approach to the film.
How does the woman with “the voice” find her voice? Knowing that the filmmakers focused on dramatizing Aretha’s artistic journey and how she “musicalized her lived experience,” makes me feel like Respect will be The One.
It also helps greatly to know Franklin’s family supports the movie – her cousin Brenda Franklin-Corbett, who sang backing vocals for Aretha, even appears in the featurette.
Respect will be released in theaters on August 13.
And… bonus…
“Here I Am,” an original song recorded by Hudson for the film, recently became available on several streaming platforms, including Spotify. Check it out!
Michelle and Barack Obama announced yesterday that they have executive produced and Netflix will stream We the People, a 10-episode television series aimed at educating children on United States civics lessons, starting on July 4 of this year.
Across all three-minute music videos, the Obamas have enlisted artists such as Grammy and Academy Award winner H.E.R., Andra Day, Janelle Monáe, rapper Cordae, rock singer Adam Lambert, Frozenand Frozen 2composers Robert and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Hamilton‘s Daveed Diggs, Brittany Howard, In the Heights and Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, Brandi Carlile, KYLE, Bebe Rexha, , and Biden inaugural poet Amanda Gorman to perform original songs and compositions that will soundtrack each narrative.
Episodes were directed by Peter Ramsey, Trisha Gum, Victoria Vincent, Benjy Brooke, Mabel Ye, Tim Rauch, Jorge R. Gutierrez, Daron Nefcy, Everett Downing, and Kendra Ryan. Each episode will offer lessons on basics of U.S. citizenship and rights, evoking the beloved Schoolhouse Rock series that originally aired on ABC in the 1970s.
Other producers on the project include Black-ishcreator Kenya Barris and Doc McStuffins creator Chris Nee.
Ahead of We the People‘s July 4 premiere date on Netflix, the show will premiere at a free screening in the DOCS Talks section of the American Film Institute‘s DOCS film festival on Thursday, June 24.
It’s more than fitting that this year’s Black Music Month begins with the release of a tribute anthem honoring the legacy of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma on the 100th anniversary of its purposeful destruction, which was officially acknowledged by President Joe Biden in a speech yesterday.
“We Will Never Forget” is the featured track from LeBron James’ Springhill Company and CNN Documentary film, Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street, that premiered on CNN on the centennial anniversary of the Black Wall Street Massacre May 31, 2021.
This soul stirring song recorded by Omarion, Lalah Hathaway and Kierra Sheard, written and produced by Greg Curtis and executive produced by Michelle Le Fleur, honors the families and descendants of the 1921 Greenwood District massacre in Tulsa.
Proceeds from the single benefit social change grassroots organization Color of Change to aid the social justice movement to end systemic racism and racially motivated violence.
Color of Change currently has a campaign going to demand the Centennial Commission and City of Tulsa give 80% of the $30 million raised to the survivors and descendants of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Learn more about it here.
According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, high school senior Mariah Jones, who once lived with her mother and her older sisters at the Women’s Center & Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh, is now on her way to Vassar College in NY this fall on a full scholarship.
Jones, 18, is currently working with an astrophysicist at the University of Pittsburgh as a part of a project that endeavors to estimate the distance to other galaxies, an opportunity that came about when she cold-called Brett Andrews, a research assistant professor at Pitt.
“She had reached out to me and a bunch of other professors at Pitt,” Andrew said. “Her curiosity and her drive make her unique. She’s taken the initiative and reached out to people she doesn’t know to make an opportunity for herself.”
That opportunity culminated in a prestigious QuestBridge scholarship to Vassar. QuestBridge is a national nonprofit based in CA that connects exceptional, low-income youth with leading colleges and opportunities.
“I’ve always been a very aggressive, very strong-willed person and I’m very open to taking challenges head-on. I don’t let anything stop me.”
To see Jones talk about her interests and journey, click below:
Many may know Lorraine Hansberry as the award-winning playwright of the now-classic 1959 Broadway play A Raisin in The Sun, adapted into a 1961 movie starring Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee in 1961, and remade for television in 2008 starring Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald, Sanaa Lathan and Sean Combs.
Some may know of her family’s fight to end restrictive housing covenants in Chicago that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (Hansberry v. Lee), or of her civil rights activism and advocacy for universal healthcare, women’s rights, and for the demise of colonialism and imperialism.
A few may even know of her embrace of her queer identity and desire to fight for gay rights at the end of her life.
I know all of these things because my personal connection to Lorraine Hansberry started when she became the first (and only) Black woman writer I got to read as a part of English curriculum in either middle school or high school in the 1980s.
We read Raisin In The Sun as a class in 11th grade AP English. So when my teacher Dr. Victor had his students spend our spring semester studying one author in depth of our own choosing, I chose Lorraine.
