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Posts tagged as “Erykah Badu”

Black Lexicon: What “Afrofuturism” Means (LISTEN)

Black Lexicon: What “Afrofuturism” Means (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on May 3, 2022

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

In today’s Daily Drop, we explore the term “Afrofuturism” and its origin. To read about it and see links to sources, read on. To hear about it, press PLAY:

[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 here on the main website. Full transcript below]:

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 Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.

It’s in the category we call “Lemme Break It Down,” where we explore the origins and meanings of words and phrases rooted in the Black Lexicon and Black culture. Today’s word? “Afrofuturism.”

[Excerpt from “Space Is The Place” by Sun Ra]

“Afrofuturism” is a term that was coined in the 1994 essay “Black to the Future” by Mark Dery that describes a movement within Black culture from the 1950s to the present that employs science fiction and fantasy as frameworks to reimagine the African diaspora in music, art, literature, film, and fashion.

Musicians such as Sun Ra, who you are hearing right now, George Clinton, Janelle Monae, Erykah Badu; visual artists such as David Alabo, Ellen Gallagher, Kerry James Marshall, Kaylan F. Michael; and authors such as Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Tananarive Due and N.K. Jemisin all explore Afrofuturism in their work.

To learn more about “Afrofuturism,” read Mark Dery’s 1994 essay, available online in PDF, read Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture by Ytasha L. Womack, Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise fo Astro-Blackness edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones.

 You can also watch the short PBS documentary called Afrofuturism 101 at pbs.org, download the This American Life “We Are The Future” podcast episode on Afrofuturism by Neil Drumming, check out the list of other Afrofuturism-themed podcasts on player.fm, and listen to the awesome “Space is The Place” Afrofuturism playlist curated by Good Black News contributor Marlon West.

Links to these sources and more are provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.

This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, written, produced and hosted by me, Lori Lakin Hutcherson.

Intro and outro beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.

Excerpts from Sun Ra’s “Space is the Place” are included under Fair Use.

If you like these Daily Drops, follow us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com, Amazon,Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review, share links to your favorite episodes, or go old school and tell a friend.

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

Sources:

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MUSIC MONDAY: “Mo’ Better Music” – Spike Lee’s Greatest Hits Playlist in Honor of his 65th (LISTEN)

MUSIC MONDAY: “Mo’ Better Music” – Spike Lee’s Greatest Hits Playlist in Honor of his 65th (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on March 21, 2022
by Jeff Meier (FB: Jeff.Meier.90)

In honor of Academy Award-winning filmmaker Spike Lee‘s 65th birthday yesterday, we’re celebrating the music from his movies in today’s Music Monday playlist, “Mo’ Better Music: Spike Lee’s Greatest Hits“:

Lee first made his mark on the Hollywood scene in the summer of 1986 with his independently-financed debut feature, She’s Gotta Have It.  From that start, it was clear that not only was Lee an original filmmaking voice, but also that he valued the role of music in his movies.

The body of musical work he has enabled through his movies spans the history of Black music, including Blues, Hip Hop, traditional R&B. His early career bloomed in the heyday of new jack swing, but he’s also served us gospel, jazz, and plenty of Stevie Wonder.

Lee’s  usual composer of choice, Terence Blanchard, has earned two Oscar nominations for his work on BlacKkKlansman and Da Five Bloods.

There also have been Number One Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop Hits, E.U.‘s “Da Butt” from School Daze and Teddy Riley & Guy‘s “My Fantasy” from Do the Right Thing.

Working with his father, jazz musician Bill Lee (still alive at age 93) through his first four movies, Spike’s soundtrack choices displayed a musical depth of knowledge from the start.

“Nola” – the song about Nola Darling, the central character in She’s Gotta Have It – was sung on the original soundtrack by legendarily unsung vocalist Ronnie Dyson (the subject of a previous GBN playlist and profile – https://goodblacknews.org/?s=ronnie+dyson).

Though that soundtrack is one of the few Spike Lee soundtracks unavailable on Spotify, we’ve included a fairly faithful rendition of the song from contemporary jazz vocalist Jose James on our playlist.

To celebrate his 65 years, the playlist is comprised of 65 original songs and score selections from all of Spike Lee’s scripted features films with tracks were available for streaming (all the rest of his movies are included except Summer of Sam and the recent made-for-streaming Pass Over).

We’ve focused on titles that were either newly released or recorded for Spike’s movies, not on classic hits that just made their way onto the soundtrack.

And there’s plenty of great material to choose from, including multiple tracks from Prince, backup singer turned indie soul darling Judith Hill, Public Enemy, Terence Blanchard, and Stevie Wonder.

The Spike Lee soundtrack for Bamboozled introduced the first major song ever released by India.Arie — “Always In My Head.”

Though the soundtracks to Girl 6 and Get on the Bus are also unavailable on Spotify in album form, we’ve located the original Prince track “She Spoke 2 Me” from Girl 6 as well as a number of songs from the Get on the Bus soundtrack from God’s Property, Stevie Wonder, and Curtis Mayfield.

While Lee has mostly worked with Black composers and musicians, rootsy White rock musician Bruce Hornsby has worked on multiple Spike Lee movies, including songs for Bamboozled and Chi-raq, and a full score for Red Hook Summer.  He was also the composer for the lovely ballad “Love Me Still,” sung by Chaka Khan for the soundtrack to Clockers.

For his soundtrack to Da Sweet Blood Of Jesus, a 2014 horror film that Lee funded through Kickstarter, he issued a social media call for unsigned artists to submit songs and picked through over 800 submissions to find the songs he used – which included “As We May Dream,” another beautiful ballad from singer/songwriter Siedah Garrett of Michael Jackson duet fame.

Spike’s movies have also yielded some smooth new remakes of R&B standards – and we’re happy to include Stevie Wonder’s take on Bob Marley‘s “Redemption Song,” Erykah Badu‘s cover of Rufus featuring Chaka Khan’s “Hollywood,” Marc Dorsey‘s version of The Stylistics‘ “People Make the World Go Round,” and of course, Aretha Franklin‘s beautiful contribution to the Malcolm X soundtrack – her epic 8 minute rendition of Donny Hathaway‘s “Someday We’ll All Be Free.”

Most recently, Spike introduced his BlacKkKlansman‘audiences to a Prince rendition of the gospel classic “Mary Don’t You Weep” that had been originally recorded in 1983, but left in the vaults until its appearance in the closing credits of Lee’s movie.

In addition to all the above, you’re sure to uncover plenty of great but lesser-known material from Spike’s movies. With 24 scripted feature films under his belt, a Spike Lee film festival might take you a week of evenings to complete – but with our GBN playlist, you can cover all the musical memories from Spike’s movies in an afternoon.

Happy 65th birthday to Spike Lee! Though for many that’s retirement age, we hope to be updating this playlist with more great music from many more movies in the years to come.

MUSIC MONDAY: “I’ll Take You There” – A Collection of Live Concert Recordings (LISTEN)

MUSIC MONDAY: “I’ll Take You There” – A Collection of Live Concert Recordings (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on April 5, 2021

by Marlon West (FB: marlon.west1 Twitter: @marlonw IG: stlmarlonwest Spotify: marlonwest)

Happy Music Monday from your friend and selector, Marlon. Hope this playlist and missive finds you safe and well.

For most of this lockdown, I have not been able to listen to crowds enjoying great music. While I’m still months away from attending a live show myself, the vaccine rollout has me seeing light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

To that end, I have made this collection to celebrate great live music performances. Live records aren’t nearly as plentiful as they once were. Though to many old-school music lovers, live albums were ubiquitous especially in the 1970s and ’80s, where live-recorded albums seemed to come out every week.

[spotifyplaybutton play=”spotify:playlist:1xT8UGfzZmyIuwtigJpPhx”]

That being said, there are recent offerings by The Black Pumas, Beyoncé, and Gary Clark Jr. Along with B.B. King at Cook County Jail, Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, and Sam Cooke at The Harlem Square Club, there are “Unplugged” performances by Jill Scott, The Roots, Jay-Z, Erykah Badu, Maxwell, and Lauryn Hill.

At upwards of 12 hours, I am still sure to have missed some gems. Feel free to make suggestions in the comments so I may add them. This is another eclectic journey through hip-hop, R&B, reggae, and rock ‘n roll. I didn’t even touch on jazz.

Next week’s offering will be devoted to live jazz recordings.

Until then, stay safe, sane, and kind.*

Marlon West (photo courtesy Marlon West)

*A note to those listening to Spotify on a desktop or laptop. This is a good one to put your crossfade settings at the 12-second maximum. It will carry the crowd reactions across the tracks, making it feel like one long show. Kinda.

MUSIC: “That’s The Way Love Goes” – End of Summer Celebration of ’90s Slow Jams (LISTEN)

MUSIC: “That’s The Way Love Goes” – End of Summer Celebration of ’90s Slow Jams (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on September 4, 2020

by Jeff Meier (FB: Jeff.Meier.90)

As we head into Labor Day Weekend, the unofficial end of Summer, it’s one more chance to relax a little amidst such a stressful year for so many of us.

We’ve had such a great reaction here at Good Black News to so many of our Spotify playlists, including our decade-spanning slow jam playlists that we made for the ‘70s (Ultimate ‘70s Slow Jam Summer) and the ‘80s (Ultimate ‘80s Champagne Slow Jams).

So it only made sense, in time for the long weekend, to unveil our playlist of slow jam faves from the ‘90s – entitled Ultimate ‘90s Sunset Slow Jams, available at this link here, and of course you can listen to or access below. All you ‘90s soul music fans, it’s time to favorite this playlist and represent!

[spotifyplaybutton play=”spotify:playlist:43oaIWo1oj8UlZSqX3Oix1″/]

R&B music in the ‘90s underwent a true sea change that had been slowly building up through the prior decade. If ‘80s slow jams were the sound of lushly-produced, upscale elegance via superstar duets from well-dressed veteran singers, the ‘90s tossed a lot of that in the rearview mirror. 

#AAMAM: “Black Parade” – Celebrating African-American Women Vocalists (LISTEN)

#AAMAM: “Black Parade” – Celebrating African-American Women Vocalists (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on June 29, 2020

by Marlon West (FB: marlon.west1 Twitter: @marlonw IG: stlmarlonwest Spotify: marlonwest)

This is the last week of African-American Music Appreciation Month. And what a month it has been. 2020 is shaping up to be Black History Year.

I am honored to offer one more playlist for this final week of June. I hope you enjoy this freewheeling and eclectic collection of Black woman vocalists.

Here is almost a century of recordings spanning Blues, Gospel, Jazz, Soul, and Hip-Hop. Yes. You’ll find Beyoncé, Missy Elliott, Mahaila Jackson, Tina Turner, Chaka Khan, Erykah Badu, Big Mama Thornton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Brittany Howard and more all on this playlist.

Coming in at over 9 hours, it is barely the tip of the iceberg of the musical offering and impact of African-American women.

We’ve been keeping it American musicians here in June, though next week I plan to sling some reggae music. Sistas and brothas from Jamaica, UK, and Africa have had a thing or two to say about protest and conscious music as well.

Until next time! Stay safe, sane, and kind.

#blacklivesmatter #goodblacknews #musicheals

[spotifyplaybutton play=”spotify:playlist:04eowPiAmwUKenL7IaW5cx”/]

Marlon West (photo courtesy Marlon West)

#AAMAM: “This Land” – A Psychedelic Soul Collection (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on June 8, 2020

From Marlon West:

“Week 2 of African American Music Appreciation Month. I hope you all are safe and well during these trying times. As you know, much of African American music deals with social upheaval, and today’s offerings are no different.

Psychedelic Soul or Psychedelic Funk  is a genre that borrows overtly from the psychedelia of the late ’60s.

Pioneering acts included Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, The Temptations, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield.

Those grooves had a resurgence during the ’90s neo-soul movement, with Jill Scott, D’Angelo, and Erykah Badu, to name a few.

They’ve been creeping back into the musical zeitgeist since around the start of the 2010s with artists like Gary Clark Jr., Leon Bridges, and Black Pumas. This collection celebrates 50 years of Psychedelic Soul music.

Enjoy! Take good care, you all.”

[spotifyplaybutton play=”spotify:playlist:3bmCObjBSfN91Y894Yk1Lv”/]

(FB: marlon.west1 Twitter: @marlonw IG: stlmarlonwest Spotify: marlonwest)

Marlon West (photo courtesy Marlon West)

R.I.P. Grammy Award-Winning Jazz Artist Roy Hargrove, 49

By goodblacknews on November 5, 2018
Roy Hargrove performing at the Marseille Jazz Festival of the Five Continents in July. (Credit: Claude Paris/Associated Press)

by Giovanni Russonello via nytimes.com

Roy Hargrove, a virtuoso trumpeter who became a symbol of jazz’s youthful renewal in the early 1990s, and then established himself as one of the most respected musicians of his generation, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 49.

His death, at Mount Sinai Hospital, was caused by cardiac arrest brought on by kidney disease, according to his manager, Larry Clothier. He said Mr. Hargrove had been on dialysis for 13 years.

Beginning in his high school years Mr. Hargrove expressed a deep affinity for jazz’s classic lexicon and the creative flexibility to place it in a fresh context. He would take the stock phrases of blues and jazz and reinvigorate them while reminding listeners of the long tradition whence he came.

“He rarely sounds as if he stepped out of a time machine,” the critic Nate Chinen wrote in 2008, reviewing Mr. Hargrove’s album “Earfood” for The New York Times. “At brisk tempos he summons a terrific clarity and tension, leaning against the current of his rhythm section. At a slower crawl, playing fluegelhorn, he gives each melody the equivalent of a spa treatment.”

In the late 1990s, already established as a jazz star, Mr. Hargrove became affiliated with the Soulquarians, a loose confederation of musicians from the worlds of hip-hop and neo-soul that included Questlove, Erykah Badu, Common and D’Angelo. For several years the collective convened semi-regularly at Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan, recording albums now seen as classics. Mr. Hargrove’s sly horn overdubs can be heard, guttering like a low flame, on records like “Voodoo,” by D’Angelo, and “Mama’s Gun,” by Ms. Badu.

“He is literally the one-man horn section I hear in my head when I think about music,” Questlove wrote on Instagram after Mr. Hargrove’s death.

Even as he explored an ever-expanding musical terrain, Mr. Hargrove did not lose sight of jazz traditions. “To get a thorough knowledge of anything you have to go to its history,” he told the writer Tom Piazza in 1990 for an article about young jazz musicians in The New York Times Magazine. “I’m just trying to study the history, learn it, understand it, so that maybe I’ll be able to develop something that hasn’t been done yet.”

In 1997 he recorded the album “Habana,” an electrified, rumba-inflected parley between American and Cuban musicians united under the band name Crisol. The album, featuring Hargrove originals and compositions by jazz musicians past and present, earned him his first of two Grammy Awards.

His second was for the 2002 album “Directions in Music,” a live recording on which he was a co-leader with the pianist Herbie Hancock and the tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker. That album became a favorite of jazz devotees and music students trying to envision a future for acoustic-jazz innovation.

In the 2000s, Mr. Hargrove released three records with RH Factor, a large ensemble that built a style of its own out of cool, electrified hip-hop grooves and greasy funk from the 1970s.

He held onto the spirit that guided those inquiries — one of creative fervor, tempered by cool poise — in the more traditionally formatted Roy Hargrove Quintet, a dependable group he maintained for most of his career. On “Earfood,” a late-career highlight, the quintet capers from savvy updates of jazz standards to original ballads and new tunes that mix Southern warmth and hip-hop swagger.

"Betty: They Say I’m Different" Documentary About Funk Music Pioneer Betty Davis to Premiere at Red Bull Music Festival in NY

By goodblacknews on May 22, 2018
The trailblazing funk singer, bandleader and producer Betty Davis dropped out of public for decades. A new documentary, “Betty: They Say I’m Different,” tells her story. (Credit: Robert Brenner)

by Jon Pareles via nytimes.com

For a few short years in the 1970s, no one made funk as raw as Betty Davis did. She sang bluntly about sex on her own terms, demanding satisfaction with feral yowls and rasps, her voice slicing across the grooves that she wrote and honed as her own bandleader and producer. Her stage clothes were shiny, skimpy, futuristic fantasies; her Afro was formidable.

A major label, Island, geared up a big national push for her third album, “Nasty Gal,” in 1975. But mainstream radio didn’t embrace her, and Island rejected her follow-up recordings. Not long afterward, she completely dropped out of public view for decades.

Ms. Davis’s voice now — speaking, not singing — resurfaces in “Betty: They Say I’m Different,” an impressionistic documentary that will have its United States theatrical premiere on Wednesday at the Billie Holiday Theater in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, as part of the Red Bull Music Festival. The film includes glimpses of virtually the only known concert footage of Ms. Davis in her lascivious, head-turning prime, performing at a 1976 French rock festival. The present-day Ms. Davis is shown mostly from behind and heard in voice-over, though there is one poignant close-up of her face.

This month Ms. Davis, 72, gave a rare interview by telephone from her home near Pittsburgh to talk about the film and her music. After years of entreaties from and conversations with its director, Phil Cox, and producer, Damon Smith, she agreed to cooperate on “Betty: They Say I’m Different” because, she said, “I figured it would be better to have them cover me when I was alive than when I was dead.”

Mr. Cox said, via Skype from England, “Betty doesn’t want sympathy, and she’s found her own space now. To me, that is just as interesting as that woman she was in the 1970s. It’s the antithesis of the age we live in, where everybody wants to be on social media all the time.”

Ms. Davis has longtime fans from the ’70s and newer ones who have discovered her in reissues and through hip-hop samples. They have clung to a catalog and a persona that were musically bold, verbally shocking and entirely self-created. Long before the current era of explicit lyrics, Ms. Davis was cackling through songs like “Nasty Gal” — “You said I love you every way but your way/And my way was too dirty for you” — and “He Was a Big Freak,” which boasts, “I used to whip him/I used to beat him/Oh, he used to dig it.” She still won’t reveal who was, or whether there was, a real-life model for songs like those.

https://youtu.be/EtInpDRchM0

“I wrote about love, really, and all the levels of love,” she said. That emphatically included sexuality. “When I was writing about it, nobody was writing about it. But now everybody’s writing about it. It’s like a cliché.”

Ms. Davis was born Betty Mabry in Durham, North Carolina, in 1945, and she grew up there and in Pittsburgh. She headed to New York City in the early 1960s, when she was 17, and enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She supported herself as a model and a club manager; she reveled in the city’s night life, meeting figures like Andy Warhol, Sly Stone, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

President Barack Obama Signs Rape Survivor’s Bill of Rights Into Law

By goodblacknews on October 8, 2016
President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House June 13, 2012, in Washington, D.C.
President Barack Obama(MARTIN H. SIMON-POOL/GETTY IMAGES)

article by Angela Bronner Helm via theroot.com

President Barack Obama signed the Survivors Bill of Rights Act into law on Friday, after being passed by Congress on Wednesday night. The Senate passed the bill in May.

The law was drafted in support of sexual assault survivors and provides specific rights to those who are survivors of rape in relation to law enforcement, counseling and how rape kits are handled.
Mother Jones reports that as of 2014 more than 100,000 rape kits have languished for years in police warehouses and crime labs, going untested.
Erykah Badu actually did a July concert in Detroit to raise money so that the more than 10,000 rape kits found in a warehouse in 2009 could be tested.
Fusion reports that the new legislation means that survivors will have access to sexual assault counselors, more information about their rights and will be able to track when and where their rape kit is tested by law enforcement, if they choose to submit one.
According to Mother Jones, survivors can no longer be charged fees or prevented from getting a rape kit examination, even if they have not yet decided to file a police report. The kits must be preserved, at no cost to the survivor, until the applicable statute of limitations runs out. Also, survivors will now be able to request that authorities notify them before destroying their rape kits, and if they choose to keep the evidence, it has to be preserved. Survivors will also have the right to be notified of DNA profile matches if a hit comes up on the kit.
The bill was partly drafted by 24-year-old Amanda Nguyen, a rape survivor who currently is a White House deputy liaison at the State Department. Nguyen is also founder of the sexual assault survivor advocacy organization, Rise.
Read more at Mother Jones and Fusion.

Ava DuVernay, Melissa Harris-Perry, Black Lives Matter & More to be Honored at Revolution Awards for Black History Month

By goodblacknews on January 27, 2016

2015-02-03-06-24-27.jpgHarlem-based cinema foundation ImageNation will honor the brightest entertainers and advocates who exude “Black Excellence” during the annual Revolution Awards, set to take place in New York next month.
The awards’ theme, eloquently titled Cocktails, Cinema & Revolution, will honor famed director Ava DuVernay, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Black Lives Matter, and actor Hill Harper on Feb. 10.
ImageNation founder Moikgantsi Kgama shared her thoughts about how this year’s show will tie into Black History Month.
The Revolution Awards came to fruition in 2003, honoring the accomplishments of activists, actors, and artists who step outside the box to help improve Black and Latino communities. Past honorees and participants include Spike Lee, Congressman John Lewis, Erykah Badu, Lee Daniels, Talib Kweli, and the late Ruby Dee.
“History is being made everyday. This event celebrates Black History Month by recognizing our most inspiring change agents while highlighting ImageNation’s newest monthly film program Cocktails & Cinema. I am looking forward to the Revolution Awards returning to an epic evening of honoring those who make a difference,” said Kgama.
In addition to the awards, the film 1982, starring Hill Harper, Sharon Leal, Wayne Brady, Troi Zee, La La Anthony and Ruby Dee, will be screened. The movie stars Harper as a father protecting his daughter from his wife’s battle with drug addiction.  Harper will also engage in a discussion of the film with director Tommy Oliver, image activist Michaela Angela Davis, and noted psychologist Dr. Jeff Gardere.
The event is open to the public. To find out how you can be part of the magic during Black History Month, get a ticket here and find out more about ImageNation’s 20-year legacy here.
article by Desire Thompson via newsone.com