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Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Tip on it!
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Openly Loving Women is Prolly Radical….
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via New Model Minority by admin on 3/30/10
Yesterday I tweeted a thought, and apparently I touched a cord.
I was so moved by the reaction that I did a screen shot to preserve this history.
The quote is:
Openly Loving women, in a society premised on oppressing women,
is prolly one of the most radical thing you can do.
Agreed?
No?
Related posts:
- When we start the evolution all they prolly do is squeal….
- Doom. Grim. Forest Whitaker and Toni Morrison, all in one God Loving Blog Post! I Love America
- Men and women can actually be friends.
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Monday, March 29, 2010
Necessary Fierceness
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via The Crunk Feminist Collective » Necessary Fierceness by moyazb on 3/29/10
Its not my day to post but recent events caused me the catch the spirit and pick up the laptop.
If you haven't heard, Erykah Badu released the video to her second song off her 6th studio Album (Release party @ the crib tomorrow, feel free to roll through) New Amerykah Part II: Return of the Ankh.
*spoiler alert*
In the video, she gets naked. Actually, its not that simple.
A more accurate statement would be that she gets real vulnerable.
We know this not just because of what we see on screen but because of what she has been tweeting about for most of the month. Erykah lets us in to the must private pieces of herself. We witness her thought process, her checking in with friends, family, babies, and their daddies about what she is about to do. She's not asking for permission but letting them know as people are bound to talk and not surprisingly, the web is already filled with people slinging hate her way.
Some folks say she copied Matt and Kim. She says that. She says that the video was inspired by what they did. And frankly what she did seems a lot more intentional and connected to what her relationship with the world is. Additionally, Erykah is reaching a completely different audience than Matt and Kim. One of her tweets led me to this response to the video by someone who is not a part of Matt and Kim's demographic and was able to garner her own meaning from the video. I love that about Erykah. She reaches people where they are while simultaneusly creating a horizontal loving line that pushes them a bit from where they are.
This album and the one before are incantations. She is using her magic to save her people and get folks to wake up and shake that load off that is groupthink and others expectations. She is being brave even when she's petrified and creating the world she wants to see by daring her audience to push just as she has in her own town!
She's f*cking fierce!
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A Southern Gul, Southern Genius Feeding Her Own Meter
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via my best friend gayle by summer of sam on 3/29/10
Though I am ostensibly a U.S. Citizen (some days it feels tenuous as hell), I also have a Crunchy Nation green card, which means my Twitter feed was full of earth mother goddesses, headwraps, and the like drooling over Erykah Badu's new video for "Window Seat," the lead single from her album, New Amerykah Part 2: Return of the Ankh. They think it's genius; they are probably right. Erykah Badu makes the best music videos ever.I had a (non-crunchy) friend tell me that if Erykah Badu started an army she'd enlist. Erykah Badu is, it seems, magical. How many other (black) women in the entertainment industry possess agency and respect enough to publicly disrobe in a way that we, as viewers, would find liberating--and not commodifying? (Magic!) Seeing Ms. Badu in full art mode, I'm inclined to abandon pacifism, and declare war on whatever enemy Ms. Badu deems worthy of some militaristic wrath. How can I not want to be down with someone who seems to be so unequivocally herself in world that relies on stereotypes (name a rapper), caricatures (name a rapper), and recycled product (Gaga, meet Madonna) to sustain itself and titillate us?
I'm sure the blogosphere is bursting with a myriad of responses to the video, analyses especially concerned with the symbolism of Badu removing her clothes and whatnot. What struck me, however, was the scene Badu creates in which to disrobe: she revises the JFK assassination to do it. Badu pulls up to the curb in a Lincoln (another assassinated President) with the suicide doors, foreshadowing her figurative death and implying that what she's about to do is the result of her own hand(s). After walking through part of downtown Dallas, Badu is shot on the Grassy Knoll, the space where witnesses, including Abraham Zapruder, watched the assassination; it's also the foundation for one of the prevailing JFK conspiracy theories.
What does it mean that Badu reinvigorates a popular American myth (of Camelot)--and its subsequent conspiracy-- for this individuality-saving exercise? Especially, if I may take it there, since 2009 reminded folks that the "Age of Obama" was not going to be
What's so dope about Erykah's shows is the motley audience she attracts. I've been to Badu concerts with my mama, my white homegirl, Rachel, and the homie Maegs (a crunchy role model if there ever was one). And we're all there for different reasons. Some are waiting for "Tyrone." Others want Badu the revolutionary. Many more wait for Badu to articulate their heart break with a cappella version of "Green Eyes." Everybody, on some level, fucks with Badu, but how many of us have learned to fuck with all of Badu? We are reluctant to accept her evolution--hence the tattoo. Yes, we love "Window Seat," but don't we hate "Jump up in the Air" just because Weezy was on it, and not because his verse was lightweight disappointing?
Above all, the assassination at the end of "Window Seat" reminds me of Badu's generation of soul singers, their survival, and our roles in their symbolic, public deaths: Maxwell (he didn't disappear for all those years just because he wanted a vacation, I'm sure), D'Angelo, Lauryn. Near that pantheon is Dave Chappelle, and perhaps to a lesser extent Aaron McGruder. What Badu's video harkens, for me at least, is some of her peers' efforts to fully express their artistry, themselves as individuals. That, of course, is an implicit suicide mission, resulting in public assassination and their subsequent disappearance. (What happens if the puppet decides to cut its own strings?) The public, then, is left with nothing to do but masticate on conspiracy theories. We endlessly speculate on the how's and why's of Lauryn's mental state and D'Angelo's junkie status. And in the process we kill them...softly.
Maybe Erykah is magical. She survives. She time travels. She dies; we witness her rebirth. She endures in ways her peers haven't without, in my understanding of her, compromising in the way that others do. (Will the real Common please stand up?) It's fascinating to watch an artist maintain her integrity in public. Makes me want to jump up in the air--and stay there.
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Friday, March 26, 2010
loveyourchaos:tiresome:milktrees:Sapiosexual (n): a person who is sexually a...
Another way to describe myself...
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via guerrilla mama on 3/26/10
tiresome:milktrees:
Sapiosexual (n): a person who is sexually attracted to intelligence in others.
Sapiosexual (adj): of, or relating to, finding intellectual stimulation sexually arousing.
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