culture

This week Prince recorded a rap song featuring British artist Rita Ora (yes, the Rita Ora who dated Rob Kardashian). He also released a song titled “This Could Be Us” from his upcoming solo album, which will be released on Warner Bros. Records. The title is inspired by viral memes that depict two people in…

Some MCs give us fun turns of phrases, others rap words that we live by to this day. We use lyrics to get pumped up, to remind ourselves everything is going to be OK or simply to write captions on Instagram. Lyrics, some would say, are not always what makes a song great. Some rappers…

New York City’s recently announced $40 million settlement with the five exonerated defendants in the infamous Central Park Five jogger-rape case appears to close the chapter on a painful historical episode.  But in reality, both the injustice it represents, and the way race and class determine how the accused are treated, are very much open concerns.…

For many years, one of the few African Americans publishing in fantasy and science fiction, and the first genre writer to be awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant, was Octavia E. Butler, a widely popular and highly acclaimed writer who died unexpectedly in 2006. This week, two of her unpublished stories are available in e-book form…

Black power is big in Brazil. In the United States, black power is most associated with raised fists, social revolution and political demands. When Americans think “black power,” they generally think about the movement named and popularized in the 1960s by Southern Christian Leadership Conference founder and Black Panther Stokely Carmichael. The concept of black…

On the occasion of the announcement of the 2015 class of NEA Jazz Masters—the nation’s highest honor for jazz artists—let’s take note of three recently departed NEA jazz masters: trumpeter Joe Wilder, singer Jimmy Scott and pianist-composer Horace Silver. Each of these soft-spoken, graceful men was a musical stylist of originality. Wilder carved a path…

Anyone who follows my work knows I have written about the impact of out-of-wedlock births in the black community, but a new study, which you can read here (pdf), takes a wider look at the impact across racial lines. The analysis raises some interesting points worthy of consideration, namely the role society plays in deterring some…