pop culture
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Dudes Read "Mean Tweets" About Women To Their Faces and My Feelings Got Hurt.
When Damon, Liz, and I started VSB back in March of 2008, we only had one real strategy (that morphed into three): respond to people’s comments. At the outset, we posted three times a week and quickly went to posting one new piece per day (strategy two) and very soon after decided to always post at…
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Where "Becky" Comes From, And Why It's Not Racist, Explained
Who is Beyonce? Beyonce is a Creole surfborting maven who, if she was an athlete, would be tested for PEDs (performance enhancing drugs) right now. Why’s that? Because the difference between 2005 Beyonce and Beyonce today is like the difference between pre-steroid Barry Bonds and post-steroid, head the size of a Toyota Prius on 26-inch…
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Love & Hip Hop Atlanta Season 5, Episode 4 Recap
As Elton John once crooned, the bitch is back. He must have known that 30-some years later, Joseline (or Shenellica Bettencourt, as she was known back when she popped on a headstand for Luke and them) would return to Atlanta to continue her reign of improper subject-verb agreement and unsavory weaves. This week’s installment Love…
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10 Thoughts About Beyoncé and Her “Lemonade”
Unless you literally live under a rock – there’s a good chance that those who live in caves are up on game, MetroPCS is out here winning – you are either aware, have seen, or have had at least two lengthy conversations about Beyonce’s visual album, Lemonade, that debuted on HBO on Saturday night, complete…
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Dear White People Who Write Things: Here's How To Write About Beyonce's Lemonade
Yesterday, to culminate one of the two or three Blackest weeks of my lifetime, Beyonce debuted Lemonade, a beautiful, haunting, brilliant, and Black as all the fucks hour-long visual rendering of her new album. The album, also titled Lemonade, was made available on Tidal (sigh) when the film concluded. Naturally, this film and the album dominated pop culture last…
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Prince Was Unapologetically Black Before It Was Cool To Be So
Thursday night, I attended a screening of the Roots reboot at the Tribeca Film Festival. While in the van on the way to the post-screening reception, I met Alondra Nelson — Dean of Social Sciences at Columbia University — and a conversation about Roots segued into a conversation about her work in genealogy, which then…
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RIP Prince.
There are three times when I find myself truly concerned into fear. One of those times is super early morning phone calls from home. Those are almost never good news. The last time I got a super early phone call from a 256 area code, I found out my brother had passed away. The two…
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Love & Hip Hop Atlanta Season 5, Episode 3 Recap
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. And even our favorite bogus “reality” show accidentally touches the truth once in a while, as Love and Hip Hop Atlanta Season 5 proved Monday night with an episode brought to us by the letter #frfr. This week’s journey into black shame shed light on some…
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Why Erykah Badu Won't Just Stop Tweeting About Short Skirts, Explained
Who is Erykah Badu? Erykah Badu is an iconic neo soul artist who single-handedly forced tens of thousands of Black men to delete men named “Tyrone” from their address books, which subsequently ruined the name Tyrone for tens of thousands of Black men. RIP the name Tyrone. Also, on a more superficial level, she’s become…