READ THIS BOOK - Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward

NOTE: I wrote this review on November 22, 2014, and never published it. Given how powerful the book is, I wanted to at least put this out there.

In a span of four years, five young Black men in Jesmyn Ward's life, including her brother, died. She tells the story of each death, each person, his quirks, beauties, and foibles in heartbreaking detail. The constant, suffocating grief that Ward deals with throughout her life is visceral. Her words hold nothing back.

There are many things that I took for granted as a child without understanding the consequences, both mental and physical, that would have been part and parcel of my youth had I not been provided with so many of those necessities. Reading Ward's account of life in Mississippi as a Black family and community was striking, poignant, brave, and eye-opening.

There are so many worlds that I am so close to yet so removed from that I can't comprehend the gravity, perils, and consequences that are more inherently borne into lives based solely on circumstances, and many times, the color of their skin. This book helps to provide some insight into one of those worlds.

I wanted to share a few of the most powerful passages from Ward's memoir. Many are bleak but provide insight into Ward's psyche and the psyche of those around her coping with so much.

Nonetheless, I think the last passage shows how Ward, after experiencing so much loss, found something to hold onto.  

(These passages provide brief glimpses of the power of the entire book, so please read the entire book to understand where Ward is coming from when saying these things.)

1.  "The land that the community park is built on, I recently learned, is designated to be used as burial sites so the graveyard can expand as we die; one day our graves will swallow up our playground. Where we live becomes where we sleep. Could anything we do make that accretion of graves a little slower? Our waking moments a little longer? The grief we bear, along with all the other burdens of our lives, all our other losses, sinks us, until we find ourselves in a red, sandy grave. In the end, our lives are our deaths. Instinctually C.J. knew this. I have no words."  

2.  "What I did not understand then was that the same pressures were weighing on us all. My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn't trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within. And to blunt it all, some of us turned to drugs."

3.   "After my grandfather left my grandmother for another woman, she raised the seven children they'd had together on her own.  She took what my grandfather left with her, and she built it into something more, and she survived.

"This is a common refrain in my community, and more specifically in my family. I have always thought of my family as something of a matriarchy, since the women of my mother's side have held my nuclear family and my immediate family and my extended family together through so much. But our story is not special. Nor had it always been this way. It used to be that the Catholic Church was a strong presence in my community and divorce unheard of; men did not leave their women and shared children. But in my grandmother's generation, this changed. In the sixties, men and women began to divorce, and women who'd grown up with the expectation that they'd have partners to help them raise their children found themselves with none. They worked like men then, and raised their children the best they could, while their former husbands had relationships with other women and married them and then left them also, perhaps searching for a sense of freedom or a sense of power that being a Black man in the South denied them. If they were not called "sir" in public, at least they could be respected and feared and wanted by the women and children who love them. They were devalued everywhere except in the home, and this is the place where they turned the paradigm on its head and devalued those in their thrall. The result of this, of course, was that the women who were so devalued had to be inhumanly strong and foster a sense of family alone. This is what my grandmother did."

4.   "When I was 12 years old, I looked in the mirror and I saw what I perceived to be my faults and my mother's faults. These coalesced into a dark mark that I would carry through my life, a loathing of what I saw, which came from others' hatred of me, and all this fostered a hatred of myself. I thought being unwanted and abandoned and persecuted was the legacy of the poor southern Black woman. But as an adult, I see my mother's legacy anew. I see how all the burdens she bore, the burdens of her history and identity and of our country's history and identity, enabled her to manifest her greatest gifts. My mother had the courage to look at four hungry children and find a way to fill them. My mother had the strength to work her body to it's breaking point to provide for herself and her children. My mother had the resilience to cobble together a family from the broken bits of another. And my mother's example teaches me other things: this is how a transplanted people survived a holocaust and slavery. This is how Black people in the South organized to vote under the shadow of terrorism and the noose. This is how human beings sleep and wake and fight and survive. In the end, this is how a mother teaches her daughter to have courage, to have strength, to be resilient, to open her eyes to what is, and to make something of it. As the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, and having just borne a daughter, I hope to teach my child these lessons, to pass on my mother's gifts.

"Without my mother's legacy, I would never have been able to look at this history of loss, this future where I will surely lose more, and write the narrative that remembers, write the narrative that says: Hello. We are here. Listen.”

---

I can't recommend this book enough and added the Amazon link below. 

Men We Reaped: A Memoir

$12.03

By Jesmyn Ward

Buy on Amazon

The Silent Majority

As with all things, the Internet has helped to flatten hip-hop — more artists and styles are available to more people, obscurity is a relic, subcultural allegiance can quickly become pop fandom.

- Jon Caramanica, "Vince Staples and J. Cole, Outsiders in the Middle of Hip-Hop," New York Times, July 9, 2015.

Years ago, there were severe categorizations of rap that artists rarely overcame - Talib Kweli and Common preached conscious rap, Dilated Peoples' and People Under the Stairs worked the underground, Nas, Biggie, and Jay-Z as the kings of gangsta rap on the East Coast, and Tupac, Dr. Dre, and Snoop sat on their throne out West. No one really veered outside of their lane. But now, Caramanica interestingly argues, the highway of rap has no lanes, and artists take whichever route they want. Drake, for example, is "an omnivore and a chameleon who never met a target demographic he couldn’t appease, or an Instagram post for which a lyric of his wouldn’t make the perfect caption. He’s post-region, post-era, post-ideology, post-genre." It's the post-label era of rap.

In this post-label era, we have a mix of musicians, such as Kendrick Lamar, Vince Staples, and J. Cole, who despite selling a lot of albums "have been largely shut out of hip-hop's celebrity class" because they don't particularly cater to the ostentatious and moneyed. But by creating music their own way, these guys are being rewarded financially and critically for it. "Their staunch commitment to traditionally underground sentiment has turned out to be lucrative," Caramanica writes, "and also necessitates a rethinking of where hip-hop’s current center of power and influence actually resides."

Kendrick Lamar is one of the highest selling artists in rap, selling upwards of 2 million records from his last two albums, yet he has never had a single in the Billboard Top 10. He's come nowhere close to that with any track on his new album. This is a plus for those like me that devalue singles and hits and place more emphasis on the originality and genuineness of an album and artist. Listen to Vince Staples arresting and ominous debut album, Summetime '06, and you will not hear one hit single; instead, you'll hear an album delicately prepared and exquisitely rapped. You'll hear a story and picture life in the eyes of a man expressing himself for himself and not the money or fame.

Although Caramanica's article speaks only of rap, the Internet has helped to flatten all music to provide more artists and styles to more people. Obscurity is a relic across all genres and the underground can become pop within days. The ubiquitous presence of music in our lives is a fortunate byproduct of technology. I can listen to a teenager in Ireland writing somber melodies, an artist from Atlanta creating strange and incomparable rap, a singer/songwriter composing orchestral anomalies, and any other millions of songs, some terrible, some inspiring, all from my couch. If it wasn't for Spotify, I would never have started this blog and certainly could not have listened to 101,976 minutes of music in 2014.

This democratization of music, the ability to hear almost anything in the world with the stroke of a few buttons, has eliminated anonymity. Even more important, the ability to create music is easier than ever. If someone is truly an amazing talent, he or she won't die undiscovered. That's not possible anymore. It's refreshing to know that brilliance will be discovered but also odd that our unknown musical geniuses are fossils buried in plots around the world.

The majority of music is now out there for consumption, silent and undiscovered for hours, days or months, instead of years or lifetimes. Technology, for all its pro and cons, has brought music and artists to our doorstep.

Knock, knock.

AN INTERVENTION for...The Weeknd

I find it hard to believe that The Weeknd is doing as many drugs as he claims. Nobody who does this many drugs needs to constantly reinforce it. He talks as much, if not more, than Kanye talks about Kanye. The first three tracks on his first album, Trilogy (a compilation of his three mixtapes), are “High for This,” “What You Need,” and “Glass Table Girls.”

In all fairness, “What You Need” is about sex being a drug, so partial credit there. But he more than makes up for that on the infectious “Glass Table Girls,” a song taking place sometime around 6:30am amongst clouds of cocaine, pills, and weed, all of which are mainly rolled or consumed on four foot long glass tables. Clearly, glass tables are the most inconspicuous means to get high.

“Mr. Weeknd,” Reporter A asks, “why is there a glass table in the middle of your hot tub?”

It only took until the ninth track for The Weeknd not to allude to or outright state that he is in fact using drugs in some shape or form. He’s like that stoner in high school who was always high just because he wanted people to know he was always high. He’s probably miserable on all these things, but to hell with how he’s feeling, he’s got a rep to maintain!

“Good morning fans of all ages,” I envision The Weeknd tweeting, “I’m doing drugs…again! :)” He pretty much says that in the aptly titled, “The Morning.”

His drug use was a bit more understated on his second album, Kiss Land. Though saying The Weeknd’s drug use references are understated means that he is stating that he is doing drugs, it just isn’t stated as often.

But very recently, there has been a new, more concerning, development in his life. If you haven’t heard, The Weeknd CAN’T FEEL HIS FACE. I know this because he just released a song called, “Can’t Feel My Face.”

Said track - which is a Michael Jackson-sounding pop tune (so yeah, it’s awesome) - is an ode to what appears to be his drug of choice: cocaine. (Other candidates included codeine and soda, oxycontin and ecstasy, “pills” of many variations, joints, blunts, ecstasy on its own, and soda on its own.)

The lyrics deviate from the upbeat sound, and he howls numerous cries for help, such as “I can’t feel my face,” (I think this is just to clarify to the listener that it is in fact he who is suffering from the title’s ailment), “the worst is yet to come,” “we both know we can’t go without it,” and obviously the most concerning, “and I know she’ll be the death of me, at least we’ll both be numb.”

The song is like a bizarro “Semi-Charmed Life,” so there may be a large percentage of people who just think it’s a really catchy, fun song!

We’ve all had friends who have gotten into one drug or another, and you let it slide for awhile as you hope they're just experimenting and growing up. But there’s always a breaking point when you need to intervene.

We’ve heard cries for help or an artist’s visions of his/her own death before, but it’s not as often that a mainstream artist states that I will die of [insert drug here] on a pop song. Maybe it’s an embellishment, maybe it sells, but it could also be a plea for someone somewhere to try to help this guy out.

I can’t imagine drug addiction is a good thing, and as Louis C.K. said, “Part of the reason people do drugs is because they can’t access their feelings, or there are certain feelings that are too much for them to access, so they do drugs to shut them down. When I was younger, before I did drugs, I wanted to do creative things, write and stuff like that. I had a lot I enjoyed about life, then it all became about getting high. It was so empty."

I at first thought it was comical that the first sentence of The Weeknd’s Wikipedia page spelled out the way to pronounce his name, but now after years of all this drug talk by him, it might soon be pronounced “the weakened.”

Here’s hoping his friends, family, and ultimately, his own choices can turn it around and start living for the other pronunciation decades in the future.

READ THIS BOOK - Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Americanah is a story about wealth and privilege, war and peace, love and the shields that deflect its arrows, whites and blacks, African-Americans and Non-American Blacks, poverty and riches, the United States and the world, and finally, Ifemelu and Obinze. It's a story of many competing themes that never seem to trip over each other; instead, they weave together seamlessly.

Ifemelu is a Nigerian girl who emigrates to the United States after high school to attend college. She begins to blog about her experiences in America, and the blog posts alone are worth the price of admission for this novel. Obinze, Ifemelu's boyfriend and love from high school, has his own travails as he grows into a man. The novel follows both of them with an amazing depiction and vantage point of the lives and countries they see and live.

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who is also a Nigerian, captures these characters in all of their humanity. All of them are flawed, and the ones that mask their flaws behind their pride prove to be the most insecure and miserable. The many characters that briefly pass through Ifmelu and Obinze's life are also incredibly well drawn. For example, one description of a corrupt politician, "Ferdinand, a stocky acquaintance of Chief’s who had run for governor in the last elections, had lost, and, as all losing politicians did, had gone to court to challenge the results. Ferdinand had a steely, amoral face; if one examined his hands, the blood of his enemies might be found crusted under his fingernails."

Most impressive was Adhichie's ability to succinctly describe the ease that wealth and privilege enable while the burdens of poverty and "choicelessness" (as she puts it) disable so much. I wanted to provide some of my favorite passages in regards to this in the hopes that a few of you would read this book! (I included a link at the bottom if you have a Kindle and/or want to buy from Amazon).

1.  "There was a certain luxury to charity that she could not identify with and did not have.  To take 'charity' for granted, to revel in this charity towards people whom one did not know - perhaps it came from having had yesterday and having today and expecting to have tomorrow. She envied them this…Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received.  To be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given, to be among those who could afford copious pity and empathy."

2.  "She liked, most of all, that in this place of affluent ease, she could pretend to be someone else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed American club, someone adorned with certainty."

3.  "The stories of his wealth made her assume he had changed more than he possibly could have.  People often told him how humble he was, but they did not mean real humility, it was merely that he did not flaunt his membership in the wealthy club, did not exercise the rights it brought – to be rude, to be inconsiderate, to be greeted rather than to greet - and because so many others like him exercised those rights, his choices were interpreted as humility.  He did not boast, either, or speak about things he owned, which made people assume he owned much more than he did.  Even his closest friend, Okwudiba, told him how humble he was, and it irked him slightly, because he wished Okwudiba would see that to call him humble was to make rudeness normal.  Besides, humility had always seemed to him specious thing, invented for the comfort of others; you were praised for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did.  It was honesty that he valued; he had always wished himself to be truly honest, and always feared that he was not."

4.  "His friends were like him, sunny and wealthy people who existed on the glimmering surface of things… He was always thinking of what else to do and she told him that it was rare for her, because she had grown up not doing, but being."

5.  "Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor."

6.  "Alexa, and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness.  They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty."

Americanah

$10.00

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Buy on Amazon

30 Seconds to Mars Documentary

I recently watched a documentary, Artifact, that followed the band 30 Seconds to Mars as they tried to make an album, This Is War, while its record label, EMI, sued the band for $30 million for a breach of its contract after the band was pissed at EMI for failing to pay them their royalties. I thought the documentary was an incredibly enlightening depiction of the record industry, and a big label trying to wrap its grubby paws around as many bands as possible, sucking all life and creative energy out of these individuals while taking any and all money in its path in the name of legalese. There's a great part where Jared Leto gets legal advice for about one minute on his cell phone, hangs up, then forgets to ask how much it cost, wondering if the band even has the money to pay the lawyer for that one minute.  

Despite what my initial impressions were of Jared Leto (and more accurately: the celebrity machine that follows him), he comes off as incredibly likable and driven by his passion for music and art. After watching this, I really have a lot of respect for the guy. He is a very talented and blessed individual to be able to provide so many people a degree of happiness in music, TV, and film. I can also say from experience that he flies coach! 

This documentary got me thinking about the long lost idea of bands "selling out." Once people started stealing all of these artist's music, selling out was no longer called out because it was hypocritical to call someone out for wanting money as people picked their pockets. So bands turned to different forms of music that may have a broader appeal with the masses. Then advertising began to take advantage of this movement as bands' songs began to be featured in commercials, movies, TV, and so forth. The people in these bands have to make a living somehow and as evidenced in the 30 Seconds to Mars documentary, it's clearly not in album sales (save for the Katy Perry's and Taylor Swift's of the world). This is their livelihood. I read an interesting take from an advertising executive who had previously been in a rock band who bluntly stated that artists' distrust of record labels has brought a transparency to brands. While the brand plays their songs in their ads, the hope is the artist at least understands how these brands are using their songs. As I watched Artifact, this quote (TANGENT: which I came across because I was reading a bunch of David Carr's articles after his death - this article is hilarious and seems to encapsulate Carr as he goes to SXSW and is amazed at the degree music and brands have become somewhat of a packaged product), although somewhat depressing, spoke volumes to the state of music right now (and that being said - please go support bands at live venues!!):    

"The willingness of artists to partner with brands happened because revenues dried up from physical discs,” Peter Gannon from an advertising agency said. “The labels are not going to get a lot of sympathy because they were not very good to artists. At least when a brand is involved, there is an understanding that we are borrowing the cachet that the artist has built and we try to make high-quality projects that give value to both the client and the artist.”