Free - Deniece Williams
Have A Talk With God - Stevie Wonder
Sweet Sixteen - B.B. King
Everybody Ought To Know - Tramaine Hawkins
Can I Kick It (Spirit Mix) - A Tribe Called Quest
I Wanna Be Yo Ho (Remix) - AMG
I Used to Love H.E.R. - Common
At Last - Etta James
Got To Be Real - Cheryl Lynn
Humpty Dump - The Vibrettes
Crown Royal - Jill Scott
Anti Love Song - Betty Davis
The Louisville Lip - Eddie Curtis
God Made Me Funky - The Headhunters
17 Days - Prince
Passions of a Woman Loved - Charles Mingus
Never Knew Love Like This Before - Stephanie Mills
All I Am - Heatwave
I Put A Spell On You - Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Minute By Minute - Michael McDonald
Come Sunday - Cannonball Adderley
I Just Want to Celebrate - Rare Earth
Holy Calamity (Bear Witness II) - Handsome Boy Modeling School

Not the song, just the act of being there.

From Power 99 DJ, Cosmic Kev … (jacked from 215hiphop.com)

215: Mentioning how hip hop has such a huge generation gap now when do you think old school hip hop will have its on dial on FM radio? Now it’s either very young (Power 99) to very old (WDAS.)

Kev: Well it’s already on satellite but as far as Urban AC (Adult Contemporary) stations go they feel like rap is a young audience, which it is. They feel that old school rap is also still for the younger generation. They gotta understand that the average 35-40yr old was brought up on rap. They may have been exposed to the Temptations & Barry White but they were brought up on Kurtis Blow, the Melly Mels, and even the EPMDs. Urban AC’s are afraid to touch it because to them it’s still just rap. Where the problem is that when they hear of old school rap and an audience of 30-40yr olds, they don’t think that exists. They think that age demographic doesn’t want to hear rap anymore. I personally don’t think that’s true. I think it could happen on FM, someday, we’ll see.

That’s pretty much exactly what I think. While I would argue that rap is still a young man’s game, there is a growing body of people who came of age listening to it, who are now in the neighborhood of 40 years old. While I’m not exactly sure whether there could be an FM radio station that plays strictly classic hip-hop, I don’t think that Adult Contemporary stations should stay away from it. But there are whole sounds and movements that, as far as you might know from listening to the radio, never existed. 21 years ago, LL spoke for many of us when he said he couldn’t live without his radio. Seems that if we had to depend on the broadcast stations to hear that song, we’d have to.

This Karl Malone story is outrageous.

Bell is the son of Malone, but the Mailman had no role in Bell’s success except passing along athletic genes.

The two have had very little contact during Bell’s life. His mother, Gloria Bell, reportedly was only 13 years old and Malone a college sophomore at Louisiana Tech when Demetrius was born. Malone might have served jail time had her family asked the district attorney to file criminal charges.

Bell didn’t even know Malone was his father until after graduating from high school. When they finally met, Malone told the 18-year-old Bell it was too late to be his father, and that Bell would have to “earn his money on his own.”

In a 1998 story in the Salt Lake (Utah) Tribune, Gloria Bell said, “Demetrius is ashamed that his dad doesn’t claim him. But I’ve told him it is not his fault.”

Malone also fathered twins while in high school. One of them is WNBA star Cheryl Ford. It took years to claim the twins, and now he and his wife, Kay, fully accept them as part of their family.

But what about Demetrius? Doesn’t he deserve the same measure of love and recognition?

Now granted, the child has now been drafted in the NFL, so I don’t know that there’s anything significant to be said now, but…naw. Nix that. There are some things to be said.

1. Dude got some ath-a-letic genes. One child gets drafted in the NFL, one child played in the WNBA? Wow.

2. “It’s too late for me to be your father. You’re gonna hafta earn your money on your own?” From an NBA player? Really?

Having not met my father until after high school, I can absolutely say that I have zero respect for Karl Malone at this point. I thought he was a whiny basketball player, and that he was a dirty player on the sneak tip, but now? This here? Boo!

First up, of course, is the Sean Bell trial.

Police brutality - or suspected police brutality concerns me a lot. Even as somebody who has worked closely with policemen in the past, and as somebody whose longest friendship is with a police officer, I’m still always disconcerted by the death of a civilian at the hands of police. When the civilian in question was not in the commission of a crime, I’m even more disturbed. Nahmeen, I have all the respect in the world for police officers, but I don’t think that respect demands a blind loyalty. I couldn’t care less about the race of the police officers doing the shooting, either. It just worries me. And I’m sayin’ - the days when I’d be at a strip club at 4 AM are long gone, but I still can’t shake the idea that I could be the victim of some type of “accident” at some point.

More bothersome to me than the actions of the police officers in question is the attitude of the police union. While I appreciate the fact that a union exists to support its rank and file, I generally like to feel that police unions are there to protect the citizenry as much as they are there to protect the police officers. Kinda like if the mission of police officers is to protect and serve, the police union should have the same objective. When I look at he statements of the official police unions on this case, I’m not really left with the impression that I’m protected. Not even in a casual, lip-service sense.

Having said that, while I think the judge was probably legally correct, this verdict leaves much to be desired. And borrowing from McWhorter, this is exactly the type of case where name-brand Black conservatives (or conservative Blacks, imo) lose their credibility with lots of Black folks. There’s lots of space between riding intractably hard for the law enforcement and running down the street yelling “eff the police!” A simple, “we applaud the job that the police do, and we appreciate the difficulties of making split-second life-or-death decisions, but the fact that yet another unarmed Black man who was not in the commission of a crime has died at the hands of police is cause for concern” might do wonders for their position. But then again, I’m not even sure I want any of those name brand Black conservatives (cuz a conservative Black, e.g., Massie, Peterson, et. al) to gain any traction in the community.

The Sixers could’ve gone up 3-1 on Detroit. I think game 4 was the key to the series. While I’m pleased that they made it this far, I don’t think they’re gonna win 2 of the next 4 games.

I’m not even sure what to make of the Eagles draft. It would be nice to be headed into the summer thinking that they’re all set and stocked to make one last run for the goodies, but I’m not sold. I know the NFC East is gonna be the best division in the NFL this year. Who knows, the Cowboys might actually make it out of the first round this year.

Your Madden 2009 cover boy? Brett Favre. Not that he’s necessarily crazy about it.

The Flyers are for real, too.

So I’ve been growin my beard in for about a month. The joint’s pretty thick. I really look like I’m from Philly now. But what’s funny is that people who see me on the street are starting to address me with, “As salaam alaikum.” I don’t correct em, but it’s funny. Is there some unwritten that any Black man with a full beard is probably a Muslim?

Speaking of Muslims, ever wondered where the so-called “curse of Ham” as it relates to slavery originated? Well thanks to Jeremy at Parablemania, we have an answer. I can’t wait to use this information.

Not that I support that player’s suspect gamesmanship, but I may hafta get a NY Rangers #16 jersey. For obvious reasons.

So we’re reading Romeo and Juliet and I’m having trouble deciding whether I’m gonna hip the kids to all the double entendre in Shakespeare. I’m sure it would pique their interest and get them to read a lot more carefully, but I’m not sure that’s really the route to go. Iono yet.

Couldn’t make this up on my best day. S.J. cop charged with barnyard sex.

Tagging Cobb back, I see a line that reminds me of an interview I did of my mother back when I was in undergrad. It’s a standard black cliche where I come from: “We didn’t realize how poor we were.” We didn’t feel poor, we didn’t act poor, although we probably should have after a manner of thinking. Only difference is, when my mom was talkin about it, she was talkin about how literally poor they were - they didn’t even have indoor plumbing at that time. What I’m thinkin about, or wondering really, is how much of an impact the consciousness of poverty has, versus poverty itself.

Back when I first started blogging, I was always quick to point out the difference between what we call poverty in America and absolute poverty. It’s kinda like looking at 0 on the centigrade scale and 0 on the Kelvin scale. What we call “poverty” is really just “brokeness,” in an absolute sense. American poverty is the inability to have the niceties we expect and are accustomed to having as Americans. For instance, I usedta have a friend back in the day that always said that if he ever got elected to some political position, he’d try to make it so nobody on welfare could have cable. Even back 15 years ago, cable television had ceased to be viewed as a luxury. I mean, given that I live a 99% tv-free lifestyle (okay, 97.67%. I do watch sports.) cable is still a luxury for me, but most people can’t even imagine watching TV without cable. If I watched all the time, I’d probably be the same.

All that’s just to say that for some people, the expectation is to have cable, so the lack of cable would indicate some level of poverty. It’s really not, but some folks might think so. Which kinda gets at the heart of my question. What is it that poor-but-don’t-know-it people do that ain’t-poor-but-think-so people don’t do? Working off my favorite model, I think this question is small enough to yield some workable results. What I don’t have is a complete answer. What I think, though, is that ignorance of poverty lends itself well to a sense of agency. I think the sense of lack can be quite debilitating. For some folks, it can be a motivating factor, but I think that there are many more who see it as a reason NOT to do a thing. I know that I thought we were poor for most of high school, so I almost never invited people from school to the crib. Then I saw some of their houses and realized that we weren’t as bad off as I thought. My guess, though, is that it can be a lot more significant than that.

In the Bible it says, “As a man thinks, so is he.” I think that definitely applies here.

My man, Chuck’s good for pushing my buttons and makin me write hard. So when he writes, I think what a lot of Conservatives unfairly, ignorantly dismiss is the idea that people rarely do things in a vacuum. There IS often enough a lot of luck in who you are born to, where you’re raised and the people who influence you (peers, etc). You can’t tell me, Ave, that if you were born into the households of some of your old friends that you’d still have wound up the educated, non-record-having writer you are today.

There IS some luck in getting the right kinds of encouragement and the right kinds of support along the way. Not sayin you need a whole village, but the vast majority of us need at least one Gandalf here and there at the right time/place to help inspire, encourage and point the right way. The completely self-made man is a unicorn-rare individual., I hafta pay attention. Or at least address it.

I don’t think there’s any question that luck, good fortune, blessings, providence, or whatever term you wanna use plays a significant role in what happens to a given person. I’m quick to tell people that I’m not sure what would have become of me if I had been born to another mother. Yahmeen, would I be as quick to pick up a book if I had grown up in a house where reading was uncommon, or not valued? Probably not. Would I necessarily have been a hardhead, out there on the street? (Cuz I’m still hardheaded.) Not necessarily. But suggesting that it’s all, or even mostly about good fortune means that the individual person has absolutely no agency. If everything is the result of a certain roll of the dice, for lack of a better term, then the individual has neither control, nor responsibility for what happens in his life. Even I know better than that.

I’ve been pretty forthright about the fact that I usedta hang out with some rough customers a few years ago. Again, my own personal belief is that if you put anybody else in my place, he’s gonna get similar results. Not exactly the same, because we all have different temperaments, and we all have different triggers for our actions, so a person who’s more Type-A than me might have achieved more - or he might have gotten caught up in some nonsense that my laid-backness kept me out of. Still, I’m thinking that in general, it’s reasonable to expect somebody who started where I started to be where I am right now. But see, it’s the conservative in me that makes that argument.

While I readily concede that good fortune plays a significant role in what a person does, and I agree that the American “self-made man” narrative doesn’t leave nearly enough room for the consideration of good fortune, I would still say that the majority of a person’s life is made up of the choices that he or she makes. After all, it’s not like people don’t have choices. They may not recognize the choices that are available, or they may not choose to accept the advice of their counselor (whether they chose the counsel or not), but that doesn’t mean the choice wasn’t presented.

Think about Menace II Society. Caine had options. He didn’t hafta die like he did. Obviously, him playing the girl out and then stomping out her cousin proved to be his ultimate undoing, but some might argue that he was headed towards that type of ending regardless. That just happened to be the incident that got him done in. No, the choices and guardians I’m referring to are his grandparents. Now obviously, he wasn’t feelin the way his grandparents were comin’ at him, lecturing him with the Bible and all. but did that make it any less relevant? Not at all. See the question of whether a person makes a given choice doesn’t change the legitimacy of that choice. In the same way that Caine wound up being a drug-dealing murderer just like his father, he could have chosen to be the church-going choirboy antithesis of his father. Same kid, same circumstances growing up, different choices, different results.

But Caine’s an easy case. What about the dude, Shareef? He, I would say, was the unfortunate victim of bad luck. He had turned his life around. He was a good dude. He got killed while a dude like O-Dog came through unharmed. How’s that work? Beats me. Stuff happens. But see, even in his case, although we wanna let the redemption narrative play itself out and have him live happily ever after, since he actively made the choice to turn his life around, it’s still not inaccurate to say that his choices led to his demise. I mean, we only know the “good” Shareef, but given that he was hanging around Caine and O-Dog ‘nem in the first place, it’s not unreasonable to think that he was doin some of the same stuff they did.

See ultimately, I think — no, I know — life is a combination of choice and chance. Some choices are activated by “luck.” But at the same time, some “luck” is brought from the potential to the kinetic by the active choices people make. I really don’t think it’s possible to parse it down further than that without actually being able to see peoples’ timestreams. However, the part of me that believes in people thinks that they have a great deal of control over their ultimate destination, regardless of the circumstances into which they were born, or even the ones they navigated themselves into. Yeah, a sundry word here and a pick-me-up there can make a huge difference. But it’s also the fact that the person allowed the pick-me-up to actually BE a pick-me-up as opposed to just some platitude somebody who don’t really know what I’m goin through was spittin at me. Or even better, when things DON’T go my way, is it time for lamenting my luck or changing my behavior, so if the same set of circumstances presents itself, I won’t fall for the okey doke again? That, I would argue, ain’t really about luck.

And for real, I don’t know that there’s really any explicitly political label that belongs to this train of thought, but I do think that depending on the set of circumstances, those on the left are more likely to mention the things that are out of a person’s control — except when it came to them. And that’s what gets me. If you really came from the hard-luck side of town, shouldn’t part of your “giving back” be stressing the methods that helped you to get to where you are? That’s all I’m sayin. Cuz the minute somebody who has made it somewhere starts explainin why everybody can’t, I start thinkin they really ain’t a person of the people. Don’t tell me why I can’t, or shouldn’t expect to, tell me how I can and what obstacles I’ll hafta avoid. Chances are, I won’t get the exact same results, but with any luck, my results will be better than they would’ve been otherwise.

Here’s a video of the rap battle that’s been burnin up the internet all weekend. I…man, I ain’t even gon’ comment on it. It speaks for itself.

I’m thoroughly intrigued by what Ta-Nehisi Coates describes as the “organic Black conservative” tradition. He points it out both in his blog and in his article on Bill Cosby in the Atlantic Monthly. In looking to bridge the not-as-big-as-we-act-like-it-really-is gap between Black liberals conservatives, Coates identifies himself as a “left-libertarian.”

I do believe that black folks are ultimately responsible for their own fate. I do believe that the greatest problem we face, right now, is putting black fathers back in the home. I am wholly uninterested in the grieve-a-thon between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters which seeks to determine whether it’s harder for a white woman or black man in America. I just really don’t care, and think it’s utterly counterproductive to sit around and try to figure it out. Ditto for “coalition building.” I’m not interested in building bridges to Latino or to Jewish communities. Beyond attending a few panels populated by professional talkers (like yours truly), I don’t even know what that tangibly means, nor do I know what relevance it has to the average brother here in Harlem. I support the rights of virtually anyone to come to this country and work the crappy jobs that Americans won’t work, and the better ones that most of us are too stupid to work. I support tangible things which I can feel, touch and see, and broach no quarter for intangibles like “patriarchy,” and “white supremacy.” I don’t really care if Don Imus is on the air or not.

Sound conservative? Meh, I don’t know. I’m green as all get-out. I believe that government needs to–specifically–look at ways to help black men. Let’s start by expanding the EITC to noncustodial fathers, ending the drug war, and reinventing the criminal justice system. Let’s look at the creeping epidemic of obesity and get government involved in convincing people to eat right and get off off thier asses. Know why? Because government is gonna get the bill anyway when they’re laying up in the public hospital–only then it’ll be with interest.

I’m probably right in there with him, or at most, maybe a block over. Because I’ve spent so much time in school, I can’t help but acknowledge the impact of structural forces on the Black community. I would hafta be downright ignorant to act like white supremacy hasn’t been a factor in the way things have happened throughout American (and world, but I tend to focus more on America, cuz this is the here and now that can be impacted) history. Likewise, I’d hafta be blind and dumb to believe that racism has somehow been magically ameliorated because a Black man finally [insert action here]. At the same time, to act like white supremacy as an ideology or racism as an action or set of structures based on that ideology is the biggest factor determining Black folks’ fates seems to me to be robbing us of any sense of agency. Has racism been an obstacle? Yes. Has it been insurmountable? Rarely. That means that, as I’m wont to say, the onus is on us.

Where I tend to veer rightward (to the extent that I actually do, which is another question for another day), it’s in my belief that the government is not the cure for what ails us. (Not in every instance. I agree with Coates that the EITC should be extended to non-custodial parents and that the drug war has been a miserable failure, both in terms of its intended objective and its externalities.) One time I wrote,

This is pretty much where I draw the line and why I stand on the side I do. I can’t really watch movies like Rosewood because they make me want to put on a black leather glove and start smacking people upside the head, but when I read about what happened in places like Rosewood or Black Wall Street in Tulsa, I’m reminded that those people were about getting it done. Forget about the governments refusal to grant them reparations, even though many of them had actually lived during physical slavery, the government was openly hostile to them and actively denying them justice. So what did they do? They got out there and did. I’m right with the activist on some things, but I step to the right when it comes to the solutions. The government is not going to do it; most things, the government couldln’t do, even if the willingness was there. I mean, I can understand the thought process that says “since the government was complicit in doing things to the detriment of Blackfolk, the government should put forth the same effort in redressing those wrongs.” For some folks, affirmative action and welfare (?!) represent that government redress. (Being that Blackfolk aren’t the majority beneficiaries of either one of those, I don’t see how that can be the case.) Whatever. Whether you think it’s owed us or not, we ain’t gettin’ it. And this is not an ideological capitulation, it’s just being pragmatic. Look, racism isn’t going anywhere. Hate to say it, but that’s just a part of our national fabric. And even at that, it’s certainly not what it used to be, but as long as there is material gain to be had by using race as a factor in some decision-making process, racism and all those other -isms will remain. So if Black folks are supposed to wait for the last vestiges of racism, individual or structural, before we make a major move, we might as well quit now. Of course that’s not the solution, and my activist friends know that too. It’s the brothers and sisters with the PhD’s that give the worst reports. What kills me is, they do one thing but say something else, dismissing their own accomplishments as atypical; “I’ve been more fortunate than the average Black person.” Yeah, and you made some better decisions, too. Racism and the legacy of slavery and jim crow and whatever other historical events we’d like to point to can’t explain away everything. My kids didn’t not-know 12*12 because of some unseen link to their ancestors, they just didn’t study. Instead of running off a list of why “the rest of us” can’t, maybe it’s time for us Black folks who have achieved something to focus more on why “we” did and try to break down the barriers between the two.

(are you supposed to blockquote yourself?

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. I’m thinking that Coates is also right about there being some middle ground between Black liberals and conservatives. Actually, I don’t think there’s really a middle ground, because I don’t know that, for most of us, there’s actually any chasm. I think there’s a continuum, but because until recently there has been no overtly political expression for emphasis-on-Black conservative ideology, folks tend to react viscerally to the term “conservative” because of its association with certain white folks. And that’s a tragedy, because I think there’s a whole lot more we can do working together than we can do sitting on our “sides” and pontificating about who’s way is better. (I think this problem is particularly egregious on the internet, but again, that’s a whole nother post.)