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GBN Daily Drop Podcast: #JanetJacksonAppreciationDay (LISTEN)

GBN Daily Drop Podcast: #JanetJacksonAppreciationDay (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on February 13, 2022

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

Even though most Americans think of today as Super Bowl Sunday, on GBN’s Daily Drop podcast bonus episode we instead celebrate what’s been the day’s other moniker since 2018 — #JanetJacksonAppreciationDay.

You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.com or create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website (transcript below):

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a bonus daily drop of Good Black News for Sunday, February 13th, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.

Although today is known by most Americans as Super Bowl Sunday, for the past four years, thanks to Academy Award-winning filmmaker Matthew A. Cherry, it’s known among millions on Twitter and beyond as #JanetJacksonAppreciationDay.

#JanetJacksonAppreciationDay is where fans of Janet Jackson (aka “#JanFam”) flood their social media timelines with loving GIFs, memes, and videos of the legendary “Rhythm Nation” performer.

This annual trend began in 2018 in reaction to Justin Timberlake being invited to headline that year’s Super Bowl halftime. In 2004, when Jackson and Timberlake performed together at halftime, Jackson alone bore the blame for the “wardrobe malfunction” that occurred when Timberlake ripped a revealing part of her costume.

The moment that came to be called “Nipplegate” sparked controversy and damaged Jackson’s career for years while Timberlake’s soared.

Today’s #JanetJacksonAppreciationDay is particularly special because just a few weeks ago, the four-part documentary Janet Jackson and brother Randy Jackson executive produced on her life and career aired in the U.S. on Lifetime and A&E. In it, Janet shared footage and information from her life and career that had never seen or heard before by the public.

The widely watched doc set off a current surge of appreciation for Jackson’s contributions to popular culture in the following ways:

  1. top ratings in the U.S. and airings across the globe
  2. soaring iTunes sales and streams of her singles and albums, with Control hitting the #1 spot on the iTunes pop album charts 36 years after its release.
  3. Twitter and IG filled with fan and celebrity tributes alike.

As a #JanFam member myself since childhood – from Good Times, Diff’rent Strokes, the early albums and on – well, today I personally would like to appreciate Janet Jackson who, since 1989, has used her music to tackle and highlight issues such as racism, sexism, illiteracy, domestic violence and homophobia.

I wrote a piece on Good Black News about it last year and created a playlist to which I’ve included links in this episode’s show notes.

But I also appreciate Janet’s decades-long contributions to charities and causes such as the NAACP, the United Negro College Fund, Feeding America, and the American Foundation for AIDS Research, among so many others.

Currently, Janet is selling her vintage tour swag on The Real Real to support the non-profit organization Girls Leadership, which teaches girls to exercise the power of their voices through programs grounded in social emotional learning.

Some other sources that can help you get your Janet Jackson appreciation on are the incredible book in the 33 and 1/3 series dedicated to Velvet Rope by Ayanna Dozier, and Janet’s own 2011 part memoir, part health and lifestyle bestseller True You: A Journey to Finding and Loving Yourself written with David Ritz.

There’s also an awesome podcast called Janet Today, Janet Tomorrow, Janet Forever where cousins Courtney and Kam discuss Janet’s music and videos song by song, as well as conduct fun and informative interviews with musicians, dancers, stylists and the like who have worked with Janet throughout her career.

There’s also Janet Jackson’s own Instagram, her IG stories and Twitter, the hashtag #janfam to see posts from her devoted fan base and the hashtag #JanetsLegacyMatters, whose creators helped organize the grassroots push for Janet’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which happened in 2019.

And of course, you can always jump on social yourself and add to or check out the #JanetJacksonAppreciationDay tributes that are all for her! Links to everything I mentioned and more are provided in today’s show notes.

Additional sources:

This has been an extra-long bonus daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing, and available at workman.com, Amazon, Bookshop and other online retailers.

Music used in today’s episode includes “The Knowledge” off Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation: 1814 album, “Control (The Video Mix)” from the Control: The Remixes album, “All For You” from the 2001 album of the same name, and “The Pleasure Principle (Dub Edit – The Shep Pettibone Mix)” from Control: The Remixes.

For more Good Black News, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.

Btw, GBN’s Page-A-Day®️ Calendar for 2022 is 50% off at workman.com with code:50CAL until 2/28/22!

(paid links)

TV REVIEW: "Roots", airing Memorial Day on History Channel, A&E and Lifetime, Resonates in a Black Lives Matter Era

By goodblacknews on May 29, 2016
Malachi Kirby, center, as Kunta Kinte in “Roots.” (Credit: Casey Crafford/A+E Networks)

article by James Poniewozik via nytimes.com

The original mini-series “Roots” was about history, and it was history itself. Airing on ABC in January 1977, this generational saga of slavery was a kind of answer song to the 1976 Bicentennial celebration of the (white, often slave-owning) founding fathers. It reopened the books and wrote slaves and their descendants into the national narrative.

But as an event, it was also a chapter in that story. It shaped and was shaped by the racial consciousness of its era. It was a prime-time national reckoning for more than 100 million viewers. As a television drama, it was excellent. But as a television broadcast, it was epochal.

The four-night, eight-hour remake of “Roots,” beginning Memorial Day on History, A&E and Lifetime, is largely the same story, compressed in some places and expanded in others, with a lavish production and strong performances. It is every bit as worthy of attention and conversation. But it is also landing, inevitably, in a very different time.

Viewers who watched “Roots” four decades ago have since lived with racial narratives of moving forward and stepping back. They’ve seen America’s first black president elected and a presidential candidate hesitate to disavow the Ku Klux Klan.

So in timing and spirit, this is a Black Lives Matter “Roots,” optimistic in focusing on its characters’ strength, sober in recognizing that we may never stop needing reminders of whose lives matter.

The first new episode, much of it shot in South Africa, looks stunning, another sign of the cultural times. Kunta Kinte (Malachi Kirby, in the role made famous by LeVar Burton) is now not a humble villager but the scion of an important clan, and his home — Juffure, in Gambia — a prosperous settlement. Kunta is captured by a rival family and sold into slavery to a Virginian (James Purefoy), by way of a harrowing Middle Passage.

Mr. Kirby’s Kunta is a more regal and immediately defiant character than Mr. Burton’s. But his tragedy is the same: He rebels but fails and is beaten into accepting his slave name, Toby. The name — the loss of identity — is as much a weapon as the whip. As the overseer who beats him puts it: “You can’t buy a slave. You have to make a slave.”

Kunta stops running, but he preserves his traditions, including the practice of presenting a newborn baby to the night sky with the words, “Behold, the only thing that is greater than you.”

That theme of belonging to something larger, of the ancestral family as a character in itself, is essential to “Roots.” Although Alex Haley fictionalized the events of his novel on which the mini-series is based, his story offered black Americans what slavery was machine-tooled to erase: places, dates, names, memories. And that focus keeps the ugliness — the racial slurs, the gruesome violence — from rendering this series without hope. A person may live and die in this system, but a people can survive it.

Still, the individual stories remain heartbreaking, even in small moments, as when the slave musician Fiddler (a soulful Forest Whitaker) recognizes a Mandinka tune he overhears Kunta singing. He’s moved — and, it seems, a little frightened by what the recognition stirs in him. As much as he’s worked to efface his heritage as a survival strategy, it lingers, a few notes haunting the outskirts of his memory.

Kunta’s daughter, Kizzy (E’myri Lee Crutchfield as a child, Anika Noni Rose as an adult), is teased with the possibility of a better life; she grows up friends with the master’s daughter and learns to read. But she’s sold to Tom Lea (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a struggling farmer who rapes and impregnates her. Rape — there are several assaults in this series — is another weapon against identity, another way you make a slave. Ms. Rose burns with Kizzy’s determination to hang on to her sense of self.

LeVar Burton, Will Packer Produce "Roots" Remake to Air on History, A&E and Lifetime Next Year

By goodblacknews on April 30, 2015

rootscover“Roots” is returning to TV next year as a big-ticket event series production to air across History, A&E Network and Lifetime next year.
Producer Will Packer and LeVar Burton, an original “Roots” cast member, are shepherding the project with Mark Wolper, son of the original producer of the 1977 ABC miniseries, David L. Wolper.
Lawrence Konner, Mark Rosenthal, Alison McDonald and Charles Murray are on board to write the new rendition of the saga of Kunta Kinte, which follows his capture in Africa as a young man through his enslavement in colonial America. “Roots” is based on Alex Haley’s landmark novel of the same name.

Actor/Producer LeVar Burton
Actor/Producer LeVar Burton

“My career began with ‘Roots’ and I am proud to be a part of this new adaptation,” said Burton. “There is a huge audience of contemporary young Americans who do not know the story of ‘Roots’ or its importance. I believe now is the right time to tell this story so that we can all be reminded of its impact on our culture and identity.”
The original eight-part miniseries was a sleeper megahit for ABC that aired over consecutive nights in January 1977. There’s no word yet on how many hours the new “Roots” will run.
A&E Networks execs said producers will work closely with historians and other experts to incorporate new information about the historical period uncovered since the original book and mini were released.
“Kunta Kinte began telling his story over 200 years ago and that story went through his family lineage, to Alex Haley, to my father, and now the mantle rests with me,” said Wolper. “Like Kunta Kinte fought to tell his story over and over again, so must we.”
Said Packer: “The opportunity to present one of America’s most powerful stories to a generation that hasn’t seen it is tremendously exciting. Contemporary society needs this story and I’m proud to be a part of it.”
article by Cynthia Littleton via Variety.com