Music_And_Musings's Amplify Diary

Goodbyes & Hellos

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:30:00 -0500

by L. Michael Gipson

I was having a conversation on Facebook about the Oscars, doing my usual campy commentary on everything from the innumerable Grey Garden Grecian gowns to the bizarre choreo-miming to the “Best Song” nominees, when someone stopped my kitsch cold with a single post. The poster was an FB friend spouting annoyance because Tom Ford’s directorial debut, A Single Man, was not a major nominee (Colin Firth was a lone nominee in the Best Actor category). The “friend” sighed and lamented that last year’s Oscars must have been the designated year for the gays, and this year there appeared to be none in sight. You see, gay-themed movies like Milk and openly gay screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and Sean Penn (who brilliantly played gay for pay) were big award-winners at the 81^st Annual Awards ceremony. Reading his naive sounding post, I released an exasperated sigh before settling into what can only be described as a mild but fitting rebuke. A humorous correction was delivered, but now I was annoyed.
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The No Str8! Movement

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:43:00 -0500

By L. Michael Gipson

So, I’m surfing through my friend’s posts on Facebook and come across a self-penned article posted by one of my heterosexual Black brothers, an uber-secure, gay-friendly and affirming heterosexual in the music biz. The kind of straight whose been hit on by gays, but still knows who he is and what he’s about, so he keeps it cute and respectful about the flattering attention, even as he appropriately declines gay advances. He’s the kind who sees me as his brother and not a tool for proving or measuring his masculinity.

So, I click the link excited, because literate, artsy, and knowledgeable about all things underground his blog is an artist’s sanctuary. In the piece, after complimenting an up and coming male artist, he feels compelled to write “no homo.” Astonished, I did something I rarely do: called him out on it publicly on FB. Apologetic, he said it was an inside joke between him and the artist. Owning his acquiescence to trend, however innocent, he recognized that his remark didn’t contribute to the healthy de-stigmatizing vibe we need between gays and straights, but moreover between straights and straights, he corrected the article and we were quickly made whole. But it got me to thinking: if even our allies feel encouraged to state their sexual proclivities after any same sex expression of affection, compliment, or heaven forbid, platonic same sex love, then what hope do the rest of them or us have?
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A 'Precious' Year for American Violets

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 07:11:00 -0500

This year may go down in history as the banner year for Black women’s stories in mainstream commercial film. Last weekend the first hand-painted Disney film in decades starred the company’s first Black princess (and possibly the most Blacks behind-the-scenes employees in Disney’s 87-year history). This was on the heels of what was deemed one of the first Black Oscar contenders in a generation for Best Director, Best Film, and possibly Best Supporting Actress in Precious: Based on the Book “Push” By Sapphire. In our collective rush to deservedly celebrate hard-working black princesses being romanced by shiftless high yella ~~Negroes~~ princes, and illiterate molestation victims who will miraculously survive both HIV and two inbred children in pre-HAART, Bush I America, there’s a more earth-bound story I hope we won’t forget this awards season.

Early in 2009 a small film, American Violet (now available on DVD), was released to high critical acclaim. Directed by Tim Disney, written and produced by Bill Haney, and starring Alfre Woodard and rapper Xzibit, the film belonged to its lead, an astonishingly good Nicole Behaire as Dee Roberts. Based on the true-life heroics of Regina Kelly, Roberts is a 24-year old Black mother of four in Harmon County, Texas (real-life Hearne, TX in Robertson County) who despite a valiant grind of working-class servitude can only rise to survivalist poverty. Kelly as played by Behaire made some dooming life choices, poorly selected men based on her environments’ limited offerings, and has a slight anger management problem. After a series of systemically racist events involving illegal drug sweeps of innocent citizens on the word of a single, compromised informant, Roberts is asked to be the lead plaintiff in a civil rights case against a corrupt DA in an eerily oppressive town where Jim Crow-era racial hierarchy is still thrives. Even after she no longer has to fight to save herself, Roberts chooses to stay and fight her people and model something different for her daughters, eventually changing the laws for thousands of poor people, not just in her county, but across the state of Texas.

American Violet doesn’t depict Roberts as anyone’s angel. She’s an ordinary citizen facing extraordinary circumstances. Her every fault and frailty is thrown in her face with enough snide judgment to crush a lesser mortal. The welfare of her children dangled before her with little regard for their lives, her livelihood stripped from her, and still she stood and fought with little more to gain than dignity for herself and her people. Despite the re-election of the Bull Conner D.A. she defeated, the true plaintiff of Regina Kelly vs. John Paschall stayed in Hearn, Texas until this year, in a town whose power structure hated her guts. If I had a daughter, I’d rather she view Kelly’s chutzpah as something worth emulating rather than the fictional ambitions of a singing frog. The example of a flawed Black woman exposing systemic, institutional racism despite her own socially demeaned stature should at least be as celebrated as the personal holocaust survivor of Grand Guignol parents.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed both Precious and The Princess and The Frog. Both films offer vitally important Black women’s stories and images, but they are end spectrum hyperbolic works of art. America Violet is a reality-based road map for walking with dignity for the living. Appropriately, American Violet closes not with some faux-celebratory scene of Regina Kelly’s David vs. Goliath triumph against an ever-present corrupt system; it knows Kelly’s win is but a ripple in a social justice ocean. Instead, it closes with a sobering, challenging statistic for us all to determine whether to act on with the same justifiable outrage and fight of a young mother in Texas: 90% of all U.S. convictions are made through plea bargain.

Rihanna's Russian Roulette

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:39:00 -0500

The internet is abuzz with shade and conjecture about Rihanna’s latest single, “Russian Roulette,” and what it all means. Written by Ne-Yo, the song has been argued as a metaphor for Rihanna’s abusive relationship with Chris Brown. This argument seems a wee bit of a stretch (are the rounds to represent how many times she went back until she got “shot?”). However, many people, including singer/songwriter Eric “Erro” Roberson, have taken the song for something more sinister, as a playbook for youth suicide.

I can understand hidden or double meanings, but a step-by-step booklet on what to do when you find poppa's handgun in the closet is dumb,” Roberson twittered.

The song is not the only thing about “Russian Roulette” that’s making noise. Several fans commented on Roberson’s page that they found the video offensive as well. The video is obscure in ways that the very direct song is not. On its face, the song presents an introspective, but detailed narrative about a woman playing Russian roulette for the first time with a man whose played it often and survived.

The video on the other hand is artsy, full of Saw imagery, some of which is ripped off from old Maxwell and Janet videos, but I digress. Anthony Mandler, the video’s director, told MTV News that the goal of the video is to be intentionally “not obvious” given the seemingly unending media drama about Rihanna and Brown’s fateful night of intimate partner violence.

Still, the suits ensured that the doomed couple’s media moneymaking drama somehow got tied in, even if the lyric doesn’t fit the situation. So Mandler positions Rihanna as imprisoned, drowning, and, of course, shot. That all of it presented as out of body for Rihanna and self-inflected, if coerced by the man in the video, should provide further fodder for armchair psychologist of the Rihanna situation.

But is the song about suicide? Is she playing footloose and fancy free with a song that glorifies suicide? And as an artist doesn’t she have the right to cover a broad array of subjects, including the controversial?

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The Ugly Truth About Men

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:07:00 -0500

“It’s the Pygmalion,” I say to myself, “an updated Pygmalion with a dash of Cyrano de Bergerac.” That’s all I’m thinking the whole time I’m watching the hyper-sexist The Ugly Truth starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler (newly released on DVD). In playwright George Bernard Shaw’s version of Pygmalion, better known as My Fair Lady among theater buffs, a strong-willed, Cockney gutter snipe is transformed into a proper (read: demure and “precious”) English lady. In the end, through a montage-worthy series of transformative lessons, is determined to be worthy of love by an arrogant, obnoxious middle-age bachelor. How’s Frazier for a grand prize? For all her work to become acceptable for marriage and society, our hard-working lady wins a Viagra-eligible curmudgeon who is verbally abusive and disrespectful at every turn. But, hey, at least he’s paid and can keep his upgrade out of the gutter, right?

The literal closing message of the Pygmalion and its offspring, The Ugly Truth, is that a strong, independent, working woman should be grateful an oaf could love her—as worthless as she is with all her neuroses—but only after being smoothed out by that jerk’s sanding hands. This has been the message women have fallen in love with since the Pygmalion myth was first created centuries ago by the story’s primary beneficiaries, men.

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Are You Living for 'Symbols'?

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:18:00 -0500

I’m living for a symbol/The way I live my life/Symbol/the way I choose my wife/Symbol/the way I raise my kids/Symbol/to the way I live.

As a cultural critic, I spend a lot of time mining issues of race, class, gender and sexuality in the musical arts. My bread and butter is inking challenges to artists to go deeper than commercially appealing but soulfully destructive tales of exploitation and objectification of people, male and female, that has become our international booty shaking standard. Asking artists and listeners alike to consider how they contribute to pervasive, impressionable messages confusing sex for love, beauty for depth, finance for romance and cars for manhood. Asking us to reflect how our messages to each other, and even more devastatingly, to ourselves feed decisions that fail to fulfill us, fail to uplift us, fail to make us whole. So, it’s exciting to share a song that lifts a mirror to us, asking us is this really how we want to live, to be?
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True Blood: Race, Sex, and Notes to Alan Ball

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:57:00 -0500

There is a HBO show set in a redneck version of the gothic South peopled with vampires, telepaths, maenads, shape-shifters, and another set of rare mythical creatures in scripted television: a bevy of attractive Black characters with significant storylines. The show is True Blood, loosely based on novels by Charlaine Harris, where the sizable Black cast gives authenticity to the show’s Bayou setting. In some key ways, producer/creator Alan Ball (Six Feet Under) has modeled how to credibly give attractive Black actors screen time and how to buck Northern stereotypes about Southern segregation by having Black people interact with white people as equals (and more disturbingly in situations with supernatural whites, as subordinates). In other ways, Ball consistently also models disturbing ways to mine antebellum histories, American iconography, and unspoken racial beliefs for visceral shock and emotional disturbance, and making you love it.

To date, the dynamic show has offered us a drunkard mother; an unemployable angry daughter; a sexually enticing drifter; and a funny gender-bending/gay/ruffneck/drug dealer with a heart of gold, all as major characters. In addition to the Black extras regularly sprinkling various group scenes, at least two other Black actors have had recurring minor roles, including a con artist store clerk who moonlighted as a faux-witchdoctor and the only local cop with common sense. On any other scripted TV show, six recurring Black characters would make True Blood a BET comedy instead of a demographically appropriate casting for a Southern drama. So, Ball is to be commended for his commitment to representative diversity, even in places where the books have none. Where it gets a bit dicey is in what he does with all that diverse talent.

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Aunt Esther's Daughters: Black Comediennes and the Trap of Sexual Comedy

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:46:00 -0500

Good black girls aren’t supposed to be funny. Bad, sassy, preternaturally sexual black girls are. Of course, this is a false dichotomy, but it’s one that has dictated black women’s narrow entrance into comedy for more than a century. This limiting cultural expectation might be why so many Black women comics until Whoopi Goldberg had to create acts and personas implicitly and sometimes explicitly associated with the three Ps (pu**y, promiscuity, and prostitutes) to achieve success. Highly successful entertainers such as Gladys Bentley and Moms Mabley created nightclub acts that were as much erotic blues as they were comedy routines. As raucously sexual as each of these comediennes performances were for their time, with Bentley being sexually suggestive toward the women in her audience and Mabley regularly extolling the sexual virtues of younger men over older men, none have come close to the foul mouth sexual antics of Aunt Esther or the daughters who’ve succeeded her.

LaWanda Page, better known as Sanford and Son’s comically pious “Aunt Esther,” was a fire-blowing stripper when comedian Redd Foxx discovered and recruited her into comedy in the late 60s. While Foxx’s dirty comedy albums were rightfully stamped “for adults only” long before the parental warning labels were an industry standard, Page’s dominating 1970s albums easily eclipsed Foxx in detail, grime and salaciousness, besting the nastiest mouth in comedy. In vast contradiction to the church woman she played on TV, Page sung dirty limericks about anal intercourse, provided step-by-step instructions on cunnilingus and fingering (of males!), and told XXX versions of the set-up/punchline jokes that ruled before Richard Pryor’s storytelling comedic approach forever changed the game. From telling titles like Pipe Layin’ Dan, Mutha is Half A Word, and the gold-selling Watch It Sucker, with sistah girl sass Page carried the comedienne torch further than Bentley and Mabley into a male dominated realm of sexual empowerment and subsequent financial success that other black comediennes have since used as a blueprint for success. From Millie Jackson to the Queens of Comedy (Mo’Nique, Sommore, Ms. Laura Hayes, and Adele Givens), being a successful comedienne meant being something no white female comic ever had to be: sassier, rougher, and more sexually provocative than any man could muster.

But, at what cost?

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E. Lynn Harris: Before & After

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 08:37:00 -0500

On July 24, 2009, E. Lynn Harris went into cardiac arrest and died at the age of 54 years old. Lynn, as he was known to friends and associates, was a 10 time New York Times bestselling author with over 4 million books in print. This distinction made E. Lynn Harris the first commercially successful, openly Black gay writer in America since James Baldwin. While he stood on the shoulders of a spare number of pioneering Black gay writers who came before him, including: Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, Assoto Saint, Yulisa Amadu Maddy, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, Samuel R. Delaney and other members of this exclusive club, Lynn would go further than any of them in cultural impact and financial reward. Like Harris, all of these writers described the lives of closeted and openly gay Black men, some long before Harris was even born, but Harris fortuitously arrived at a time when the culture was hungry for different, more sophisticated stories about Black people. The public proved eager for operatic tales of Black affluence, celebrity success, and salacious sexual diversities, not the previously dominating stories of poverty, racial animus or traditional sexual and family relations. For them, Lynn delivered, changing the national dialogue about Black gay men forever.

The debut of Invisible Life and its numerous sequels benefited as much from the times as it did from the earnestness of Harris’s fresh, confessional tales of closeted Black male life on the down low. In 1991, when Harris arrived on the scene, America was in the middle of its fourth Black literary renaissance, only this one was better known for its commercial achievement rather than its literary cred. In the late 80s, early 90s, mainstream publishers (again) discovered that Black people do indeed read books and were a considerably large portion of the untapped literary market. The stratospheric success of Terry McMillan’s Waiting To Exhale proved prescient, shepherding in an explosion of Black writers delivering what some derisively be termed “sistah girl fiction” and the vaguely dismissive “urban lit” by others. Simultaneously, Hollywood realized (again) there was an untapped market for urban romantic comedies starring post-Civil Rights buppies in situations parallel to their professional white counterparts. Popular music was just experiencing its split between b-boy rappers and thug crooners and those “queer-oriented” dance music artists like RuPaul, C.C. Penniston, C&C Music Factory, and Crystal Waters whose tribal beats were fostering a revival of the sexually diverse discotheque. In these anything goes nightclubs, straights and gays and everything in between together partied like it was 1999 and tried to live out try-sexual movies like Threesome. The organized gay rights movements were becoming more vocal and visible, but thanks in part to queer racism, was largely a white identified movement. Black gay life was limited to bars, gyms, clubs, parks, bathhouses, fraternities and telephone chatlines—there was no Internet and you could count the national number of Black gay organizations on your hands.[More]

Hostile Allegiance: The "Outing" of Terrell Carter

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:06:00 -0500

Black radio and the blogosphere has been awash with Perez Hilton level gossip over 6’5 singer heartthrob, Terrell Carter, allegedly being “outed” by a spurned lover, 22 year-old model/singer Alex Cortez. Cortez has posted pictures on his MySpace and Twitter pages that appear to present the two engaged in a full-on kiss, shots of a sleeping naked Carter being spooned and nuzzled by Cortez, and Brazilian vacation shots of Carter in Speedos surrounded by men at what looks like a gay pride.

For those who never heard of Terrell Carter before the infamous pictures made their way across the internet and became debate fodder for gay men and straight women across Facebook, he is a minor celebrity with major celebrity cache. In the 90s, he chilled with Puffy as a Bad Boy session player with childhood friend, Stevie J, wrote for Quincy Jone’s Qwest Records, and sung with gospel icon Fred Hammond’s choir for several years before branching out on his own. Carter hangs out with Brandy and India Arie for fun. The featured star of four Tyler Perry musicals, the singing pastor in the movie version of Tyler Perry’s Diary of A Mad Black Woman, and a recording artist of three independent projects, including the critically acclaimed Carlela’s Reign, Carter is perhaps best known for a frequent performance schtick of disrobing to a form-fitting tank and falling to his knees during his Christian music performances. Needless to say, the upright Christian ladies who made Carter a celeb go wild.

A childless, perennial bachelor in his thirties whose presentation is that of a masculine gentleman, the Buffalo-born and bred Carter has literally been the poster child for single Christian women’s desire since he first appeared on the scene nearly ten years ago. In a velvet baritone, he’s sung to them, telling them how he’ll treat them “Better Than” the abusive men he witnessed in his family and how he loves “Thick Girls.” In turn, these women have proven Carter’s most stalwart defenders, with postings that accuse Cortez of doctoring photos or of Carter playacting with Cortez for a mysterious forthcoming movie role. Despite some naysayers who believed outing Carter would finish him, Carter for now is Teflon in his women’s affections.

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America is "Hung"

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:00:00 -0500

The always cutting-edge cable network, HBO, recently debuted their latest salacious summer series, “Hung” starring Thomas Jane. The show delivers the woeful tale of a middle-age, middle-class high school coach whose undistinguished life unravels after a fire decimates his uninsured family home shortly after the loss of his wife and children to the affections of a more disciplined, accomplished man. Using Jane’s character Donnie and the decimated city of Detroit as proxies, the show seeks to offer multiple metaphors for what’s happening in the nation and even the world: the perceived loss of white male privilege, the decline of patriarchy to a feminized world, the erosion of the working class nuclear family to larger social forces, the cultural elevation of capital attainment over all other values, and the clichéd fall of the American empire.

Other than a fading masculine beauty, echoes of an earlier athletic might, Donnie has only one thing going for him, at least to hear him—and also his ex-wife—tell it: Donnie is incredibly hung. Donnie is a bankrupt, disenchanted America whose remaining claim to fame is old athletic glory and its lingering physical might. The show willfully ignores the remaining privileges, attributes, and dare I say the choices Donnie and America made to end up in their unenviable circumstances.

Our ironically well-endowed, yet castrated hero eventually decides to take up prostitution to be exploited by the wealthier women in the community. Too inept to attain the necessary capital to maintain the fragile life he inherited from sounder stock (his old world parents) and poorly managed on his own, he allows himself to be pimped by a woman he previously screwed and disdained—someone he once used to prop up his pride. To maintain the illusion of stoic power, an undeservingly arrogant Donnie now must depend on those he believed weaker than him because they deigned to be impressed by his more obvious attributes. Broken, Donnie must knowingly allow someone else to use, exploit, and chip away bit by bit at the only money generating resources he feels he has left, unable to see, appreciate or foster what precious resources he has, those unrelated to his physicality, until they too slip away.

I suspect “Hung” will not allow Donnie’s relationship to women and his underestimation of his children and other inherent privileges to follow to their natural conclusion, to mirror so completely America’s relationship to its debt-holder, China. That wouldn’t make must-see TV, as much as tragic Masterpiece Theater. I don’t begrudge the show for trying to make a comedy of such tragic circumstances, but I find their choice of hero a curious one.

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Granny Gettin' Paid

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:28:00 -0500

As 78 million Americans enter their silver and golden years, it appears the baby boomers and their parents plan to be game changers right to the very end. Maybe it’s those round-the-clock AARP commercials hawking various insurance companies; the craggy-face, ball-capped geezer ironically spouting liberal think tank spiels in Americana diners; or the news bits about tasered seniors’ smack-talking to cops, but today’s seniors seem to be a far cry from previous generations of Grandmas. They’re demanding respect in every arena and “bogarting” a place on the national stage, refusing to sit quietly rocking, crocheting and offering humble homilies of sepia tone times—“nah, son, you got this Gran twisted!” Films, music, TV, advertising, and even guerilla fight clips—all the media industries are taking notice. Long overdue and fiscally smart considering elders' buying power, Hollywood and Madison Avenue are engaged in some serious 11^th hour genuflecting. But is an America reared on the young and sexy now really revering its elders as entertainment? Are seniors revolutionizing what it means to be culturally and commercially viable?

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Double Speak: The Unspoken Tax on Married Soul Men

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:58:00 -0500

Married young men in rap and R&B should not sing or rap too much about their marriage or it could spell doom for their career. After Usher married Tameka Foster, then the mother-to-be of his children, both were lambasted in the media and by fans rejecting what used to be considered the most chivalrous and responsible of male acts. Here I Stand, Usher’s “marriage” album, while one of the biggest R&B sellers of 2008, was also a worst seller for his catalog. It was the reverse of what happened for the diamond selling Confessions, where Usher sung of cheating and mistreating his women. Dave Hollister, the big boy of R&B, got plenty of kaching when he sang about cheating on his wife on his debut, but when he started singing about loving and staying true to his wife, fans turned off—helping to steer Hollister’s career to gospel, where songs about his divorce, oddly enough, received a warm reception. From Nas to Anthony Hamilton, there are other career reversals following publicly sung marital lives.

Many rap and soul artists are married and fans are usually aware of their spouses, but male artists have learned to keep their marriages out of their music and in the background. For years most of the public didn’t know rapper/actor Method Man was married, and while Tank has been married for years to a beautiful black woman, she doesn’t show up in his videos or explicitly in his lyrics. Married women artists like Kelis, Mary J. Blige, and soon Beyonce have not been equally constrained, and their partners have been prominently featured in their videos and career. Is it because rap and soul men must be sex objects for their audience to be successful? It seems like an unspoken double standard is at work, one where men are penalized for not playing into women’s sexual fantasies. Hmmm, better not get hitched, Flo ‘Rida!

These increasingly over-developed muscleheads also cannot depend on those promoting young relationship commitments for explicit support either. Advocates for civility (censorship?) in urban music argue often against male artists rapping and singing demeaning lyrics against women of color, lyrics that characterize Black women as little more than trophies and disposable sex objects. Yet, rarely do we see these advocates extolling the virtues of artists supporting positive depictions of women and relationship commitment. It seems it is easier to disparage what is negative with Black music, rather than praise what is aligned with conservative marriage advocates professed goals; bringing into question whether the attack is actually about eliminating these Black music genres all together.

While the issues and remedies of marital decline in urban communities are more complex than a song, the cultural impact of having influential young men sing about the trials and benefits of committing to a partner cannot be underestimated for the young Black men who have few models or male-centered messages encouraging them to do otherwise. Nearly half of young Black people today can expect never to marry, and it isn’t because the sistahs aren’t trying! Civility advocates financial and marketing support of artists who make marriage sexy or better yet, real and accessible, could be inspiring and influential in how the urban community views relationships that are now more celebrated for their dysfunction than their love.

As it stands, male artists who sing of bootie calls, hitting and quitting it, stealing or stalking another man’s girl, or even more quaint single man tales about sexually romancing their “boo,” have a distinct advantage over their publicly married counterparts in the commercial sphere, reaping loyal female fans, platinum plaques and magazine covers - while the opposite continues to happen for R&B and rap artists who sing or rap about the joys and struggles of commitment and married life with their wife (unless they’re singing about infidelity). Pop and country boys don’t seem to nearly have this problem as the recent win of Kris Allen on American Idol or even the highly successful careers of blue-eyed soulster Robin Thicke or country beefcakes like Tim McGraw demonstrate. So why can’t a sexy soul man be a married one? Is it because we don’t really expect or want our Black men to be married or committed? Do we really believe Black men are only good for sex? Yeah, betta not get hitched Flo’ Rida!

Tonex RIP?

Thu, 28 May 2009 15:46:00 -0500

Gospel artist Tonex has a new album out, Unspoken, but no one seems to notice. The Alternative Prince of Gospel has his first major label release in years (he’s released several independently), and it does less than 5,000 copies in sales during its first few weeks. Radio has not broadly picked up his music, many megachurches have closed their doors to him, and the press on this release has been limited.

The significance of these disappointing early sales and virtual blacklisting of a major talent with nine releases and who’d accrued ten years of fans, speaks to other artists watching from the sidelines wondering how far they can reasonably push gospel boundaries to include more real life experiences, struggles and language without receiving a commercial backlash for their artistic candor.

It certainly will make those gospel singers who have struggled with sexual identity and gender presentation to take note, as Tonex has radically been the only gospel artist to ever play with his gender appearance and discuss personal sexual issues from adultery to child molestation and even same sex feelings with the complex moral conflicts these concerns warrant. His very public demise as an artist could also mean the demise of artists striving to present Christianity as a faith large and compassionate enough to embrace believers who are not perfected, but who engage in lifelong struggle, periods of failure and questioning, and experience tension, confusion, anger and even rebellion with the faith that most speaks to their hearts, but whose most esteemed faithful too often fail to heed its tenets. Tonex’s the artist who reveals himself in the midst of the storm, not the artist who sings about how he got over once the clouds have passed by.[More]

Blame It On The A-a-a-a-a-alcohol

Fri, 15 May 2009 08:30:00 -0500

Jamie Foxx’s “Blame It” has been the no #1 Billboard R&B/Hip Hop song in the country for the last 14 weeks, beating out records by Mariah Carey, Deborah Cox and R. Kelly for longest reign at that spot in Billboard history. So far, only Mary J. Blige’s “Be Without You” has had a longer run, and current momentum has Foxx beating out the Queen of Hip Hop Soul for those honors next week. The club banger is also the number #2 pop song in America, jumping two spots in one week.

I thought I’d take a peek behind this musical sensation sweeping our land and major shows like American Idol, Jimmy Kimmel and—rather curiously un-critiqued on—the Tyra Banks Show. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that recession-weary Americans are groovin’ to much more than the idea of escaping their hard knocks life through the bottle, but we are in fact bouncin’ to a one man’s stealth plot to take advantage of a woman he purposely gets drunk for sex. Have you actually read the lyrics to “Blame It”?

Now, I’m no prude, but what appears to be a simple ode to the joys of different alcohol brands and juvenile irresponsibility (in behavior, not age), essentially depicts women as prey to get drunk and take sexual advantage of. This idea is not new or novel, its reasoning is in fact the reason many perpetrators (gay and straight) are in jail. Some 66% of female victims and 58.5% of male victims of rape say their perpetrator was using alcohol or drugs when they raped them, and almost 20% of women and 38% of male victims were also under the influence.

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