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28 Days of Album Cover Blackness With VSB, Day 8: Guy Warren of Ghana's Afro-Jazz (1969)
I’ll bet if that if I didn’t tell you that this album cover was for an album by a Ghanaian artist in 1969, I’d bet good money that you might assume this was a reference cover for a Kool Moe Dee album in 1989. Or for some gangsta rap artist out of Compton in the…
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28 Days of Album Cover Blackness with VSB, Day 7: Miles Davis' On the Corner (1972)
I mean, I don’t even have to say it, but do you see this cover?? Look at all that animated Blackness permeating that bright yellow background. I like to think that yellow represents the sun, and everybody on the cover is the Black gold of the sun? This cover is for Miles Davis’ 1972 album…
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28 Days of Album Cover Blackness With VSB, Day 6: Queen Latifah's Nature of A Sista' (1991)
The album cover for Queen Latifah’s sophomore album, Nature Of A Sista’, is a much better take on the album cover for her debut, All Hail the Queen. Where All Hail the Queen had her standing in a stately, militaristic-ish fashion with the album’s title surrounding a silhouette of the African continent—it was a little…
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28 Days of Album Cover Blackness With VSB, Day 5: Betty Davis' Nasty Gal (1975)
I love Betty Davis. Her string of albums in the early to mid ’70s—any of which could have easily been included in this series—are a clinic in funk, and in my estimation, were decades ahead of their time. In fact, that’s why I included this particular album, Davis’ 1975 album, Nasty Gal, in this series.…
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28 Days of Album Cover Blackness With VSB, Day 4: Black Ivory's Don't Turn Around (1972)
Black Ivory—the trio of vocalists from Harlem, N.Y.—is a group that had me at hello. Made up of multihyphenate, do-it-all group members Russell Patterson, Stuart Bascombe and Leroy Burgess, I still remember the first time I heard their single “Don’t Turn Around” because I was digital crate digging and saw this album cover and said,…
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Clubhouse Is Worth $1 Billion Off the Backs of Black Folks. Now What?
Clubhouse, the invite-only social audio app, recently announced it has raised another $100 million funding round, led by Ben Horowitz’s a16z fund. The app is now firmly a Silicon Valley Unicorn, a private startup valued at over $1 billion. This is a meteoric rise for an app that launched amidst the pandemic in 2020, with…
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28 Days of Album Cover Blackness with VSB, Day 3: Big Bear Doin Thangs (1998)
Easily doubling as both one of my favorite album covers of all time and one of the worst album covers of all time, Big Bear made sure he’d never be forgotten with the Pen & Pixel gem for his 1998 album, Doin Thangs. He also managed to land a fairly remarkable feat: I have literally…
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So…President Obama Showed Up to the Latest Very Smart Brothas x MahoganyBooks Book Club Meeting. Here's What Happened
Way back yonder—in late 2018—I co-founded a book club with the owners of MahoganyBooks, Derrick and Ramunda Young. This was a no-brainer of a collaboration. For one, all of us are avid readers and they own a physical book store that focuses on books by and for Black people. It was an opportunity to bring…
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28 Days of Album Cover Blackness with VSB, Day 2: A Taste of Honey A Taste of Honey (1978)
If you listen to Black music and disco (or either/or, really) you know A Taste of Honey. They had a monster hit with “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” a song whose hook you can probably sing in your sleep (which I don’t recommend; people freak out over stuff like that). But this album cover for their platinum-selling…
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The Root Presents the 2nd Annual Blackest Awards. Welcome to the 2021 Skippies!
Guess who’s back in the *CENSORED* house with some new awards for the African American crowd!!!?? If you said, it’s gotta be the shoes, then you’re wrong. It’s the Ro-Ro-The Root, bringing back our Blackest Awards for the second time. That makes it official, we can call it an annual award now. We want to…
