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AllUrbanGossip.com – All the latest black gossip!/

Dear Black people,

Yes, that's me. I didn't tell you I grew my eyebrows out?

I have some things I need to get off of my chest. We have been together for a long time. Almost 25 years, plus ancestral memory and such. This is the silver anniversary! You know most Black folks don't make it much further than wood! Shoot, a lot of us didn't make it past cotton, if you think about it.

Ahem. Anyway, I need you to do something for me. Something big. Consider it a birthday gift. Or hell, let's just call it reciprocity for 25 years of loyal service.

Black people: STOP EMBARRASSING ME!

Seriously, this is getting old! Lord knows I have made some mistakes in my day, but for the most part, I have fallen short of any sort of behaviors that reflect on the collective in a bad way. And yet, I have the unfortunate luck of being bound by race to so many....miscreants! Ne'erdo'wells!


I'm sick of your homophobia, I'm sick of folks thumping the King James version of the Bible (when they've hardly even read it, let alone challenged the notion of a political figure deciding that he can rewrite such a text), I'm sick of the Tyler Perry industrial complex, I am sick of auto-tune, I'm sick of gold teeth, I'm sick of award shows, I'm sick of name brand clothes.

It's not that I care so much about what other folks think of us. Especially now when we have the big trump card that is our President. It's just that folks like the goon who came up with "My president is Black/my Lambo's blue" have a lot of sway over how young Black folks perceive Blackness and what it means to be us. Furthermore, it just blows my mind how some of us disregard the work our elders did in order to gain basic human dignity by making an effort to go out and be as niggerish as possible. There is not a day that goes by that I don't want to grab one of our folks on the street and shake them and say "WE DESCEND FROM GREATNESS! AND I DON'T JUST MEAN THE KINGS AND QUEENS FROM THE DAMN BUDWEISER CALENDAR FROM THE 90'S! WE HAD DIGNITY JUST DECADES AGO! PULL UP YOUR PANTS! TURN YOUR 'SWAG' OFF AND YOUR BRAIN ON!"

When it comes to Negritude, I'll teach you how to stunt, my people. Angela Davis will teach you. Michela Angela Davis will. Jill Nelson. Jill Scott. Kevin Powell. Mark Anthony Neal. Barack and Michelle Obama. And from the ancestral cabinet, George Jackson, El-Haji Malik and Betty Shabazz, John Henrik Clarke and so many others will. And you can go forward and do us proud, okay? Just please stop cooning and clowning and making us shame.

Now, since I am trying to be in the business of walking the talk...lately, I have been feeling sad about the lack of exposure most Black folks have to Jazz. And no, not that smooth B.S. that made Kenny G a millionaire many times over. I'm talking about REAL Jazz. While I was raised on Jazz, particularly by my father's influence, even I am very short of being a true expert or afficianado. I own albums by folks including Nina Simone, Coltrane, Miles, Mingus and my great-uncle by marriage Thelonious Monk, but there is so much for me to learn. Sadly, most of the folks who are interested in Jazz these days aren't Black. I can't blame them, that'd be like throwing a filled fridge away and being mad when your neighbor decides to make a good meal with your trash. But I don't want us to completely let other folks take ownership over that which our people created.

That said, I will be adding "Jazz Messenger" to my list of self-appropriated titles. No less than thrice a week, I will be including a video or a link to something Jazz related at the close of the post. Some of these songs will be familiar to me and others will be new discoveries. Let's learn and grow together, folks. We come from Charlie Parker and Alice Coltrane, let's not only limit ourselves to Little Wayne and Rihanna, mmkay?

The first clip is one of my favorite tunes of all time, Miles Davis' "Blue In Green". It appears on the seminal Kind Of Blue album, which is believed to be the greatest selling and most influential Jazz record of all time. "Blue In Green" is a ballad and embodies the modal* sound of the album.


Ya dig?
Sister Toldja

*I'm still trying to figure out how to totally process the difference between the different sub-genres of Jazz (modal, cool, hard bop, bebop, etc)beyond the obvious distinctions. If anyone has any suggestions on how to do so without knowing how to read music, please drop me a line!

** Shout out to Polly Pocket, who I met at the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival! I love meeting readers! If you ever see me in the streets, holler at your girl!