Tag: Jay Z

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Music Music Blog

“Black August” and Black Oppression

Ronald Herd II, Najee Strickland, Jeanelle ‘TBJ’ Jones, and her daughter, Sonnet Rose.

“Black August” will explore the fight against black oppression through music, art, poetry, and dance.

“It’s a show that includes theater with all-original scripts I wrote, dance choreographed by me, and poetry,” says producer Jeanelle ‘TBJ’ Jones.

“Black August,” which will be held at 7 p.m. on August 17th at JamRackBar & Lounge at 630 Madison Avenue, also will feature guest artists.

“There is an actual resistance movement called ‘Black August,’” Jones says. “It’s a combination of freedom fighters and socio-political fighters who are against racial oppression.”

During August, events around the country focus on “different things that have happened, whether freedom fighters’ deaths or their births or different resistances and attacks against the community.”

Events around the country will highlight the Nat Turner Rebellion, the Haitian Rebellion, and anti-apartheid fighter Steve Biko.

Jones took some of those historical events and people and “created productions around them.”

Director and creative founder of Afrotense, Jones produces live shows and films. Her “Black August” will include “scenes about Black Lives Matter and a response to that. And some scenes about Michael Jackson: ‘What happened to the black Michael Jackson?’”

“Black-on-black crime” is one of the topics. “Sometimes we’ll ostracize black celebrities. We’ll put them on a pedestal, but do one thing wrong, and we’re ready to tell them they no longer have a black card.”

Also participating in “Black August” are Najee Strickland, who will feature paintings from his “Black Fist” series, and J. Bu$y, who will perform his cover to the song ‘Be Careful’ by Cardi B. “But it’s not anything that song is about,” Jones says. “It’s about Black Lives Matter and fighting racial oppression.”

Diamond Long will dance to “Neo-Fight,” a poem written by Jones. “A lot of people think because we don’t hear about lynchings and things like that anymore, that they don’t happen. But they happen all the time.”

Ronald Herd II will be the emcee or “elder host” of “Black August,” Jones says. “Some of the things we did not touch on – because it would be a three-hour show – he is going to mention and talk about. Enlighten the audience while he hosts the show.”

Tickets to “Black August” are $15 per person or two for $25 and are available at Eventbrite. For information, visit facebook.com/afrotensepresents.

Ricky Willis, Freddy Ledlips Hodges, and Julius Nathaniel Hunt are in ‘Black August.’

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Film Features Film/TV

Annie

In the beginning of this version of Annie, Quvenzhané Wallis, starring as the famous cartoon orphan, gives a presentation to her class about her favorite president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the Great Depression, lots of people were poor and very few were rich. It was like today, only without the internet, she explains as her classmates beat light hip-hop rhythms on their desks, Stomp style. But then FDR made all the poor people rich, and everybody was happy.

This is not quite how the history books record it, of course, but I guess family entertainment needs an educational aspect to partially justify its existence, or, in the case of Annie, to justify two hours of product placement.

Annie has the feel of a vanity project for Jay-Z. The hip-hop mogul who had one of his biggest hits in 1998’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” which samples one of the two songs everyone knows from the 1977 Broadway musical. But poverty must seem like a distant memory to Jay-Z at this point, since his musical output for the past few years has pretty much been songs about how rich he is, and how he wants to get even richer. So as part of his “getting even richer” program, he enlisted fellow super-rich dad hip-hop star Will Smith to co-executive produce this remake of the class-conscious musical for the mobile phone age.

For Wallis, however, the memory of poverty must be much clearer. At age 5, the child of a teacher and truck driver was found at a cattle-call audition by the director of 2012’s Sundance winner Beasts of the Southern Wild, and subsequently became the youngest person ever nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. She was reportedly paid more to play Annie than was spent in total on her film debut.

Cameron Diaz as Miss Hannigan

You may have noticed that I have been writing about money for this entire review. That’s appropriate, since that’s pretty much what Annie is about. As a little orphan, Annie doesn’t have any. Instead of an orphanage, she lives in a foster home/child services scam run by Miss Hannigan (Cameron Diaz, who at least looks like she’s having fun most of the time) with a bevy of other unfortunates. She pines for her parents until one day, while chasing a stray dog she names Sandy, she is saved from certain death by Mr. Will Stacks (Jamie Foxx, who is usually more able to convincingly look like he’s having fun), a cell phone mogul whose Bloomberg-like mayoral bid is floundering. His two campaign handlers, Grace (Rose Byrne) and Guy (Bobby Cannavale) think he needs to look more human to the voters, so he takes Annie to live in his Tony Stark-like penthouse high above New York City, where she charms him and the rest of the city with her wit and spunk.

Wallis remains a compelling screen presence, but for any actor, it’s one thing to do indie realism and quite another thing to do musical theater. She’s game, even when she’s being out danced and out sung by her fellow orphans, and she at least doesn’t embarrass herself like Foxx, who will likely go to his grave remembering the time a director told him to stand still and hold the Purell bottle so the camera can get a nice long shot of the label. Product placement has long been a scourge of Hollywood filmmaking, but Annie is the most egregious offender in recent memory. When a character takes a moment to read off the model number of the Bell helicopter he’s piling into for the big chase scene, it’s clear the balance has tipped from escapist movie musical to extended infomercial. It’s so egregious that the film finds itself compelled to comment on it, with Grace wisecracking to Annie at the clumsy film-within-a-film Twilight parody they attend, “Product placement is the only thing keeping the film industry afloat these days.” Annie is an argument that it’s time to let that kind of filmmaking sink.

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Music Record Reviews

A rap CEO and publisher’s poet on two very different musical memoirs

Dig, if you will, a picture: Rapper Dennis “Ghostface Killah” Coles skips out of his girl’s crib just ahead of a police raid, seeking refuge at the home of his friend and colleague Method Man. Busting in at Meth’s place unannounced, he finds his friend in mid-fuck. At the sound of someone coming through the door, Method Man tumbles out of bed, reaching for his gun on the nightstand, but stubs his toe in the process. The woman, who is asthmatic, grabs at the sheets, screaming and struggling to breathe. The previously rattled Ghost cracks up at this sight; Meth is pissed, his mood made worse because his dick keeps slipping through the slit in his boxers.

This happens on “Yolanda’s House,” one of the best tracks on Ghostface Killah’s new album, The Big Doe Rehab, and it’s typical Ghostface: vulgar, funny, so vivid and in-the-moment you can practically smell the residue of pot smoke and sex in the room.

Lots of rappers — most of them these days — work the same terrain, spinning tales of drug deals, gun violence, casual sex, and conspicuous consumption. But few of them are great artists. Ghostface is the best since the late Notorious B.I.G. at turning underworld/underclass vignettes into gripping and witty musical cinema and at giving these stories moral gravity without speechifying. If any modern rapper should have been a scenarist for The Wire, it’s Ghostface.

You can hear it again on Big Doe Rehab‘s “Walk Around,” a first-person account of shooting someone that goes places contemporary so-called gangsta rap rarely does: The protagonist, so rattled by what he’s done that he vomits in the getaway car, freaks out at the blood and tissue on his clothing. (“Y’all niggas would bug out too if you had somebody’s flesh on you.”)

The Big Doe Rehab is Ghostface Killah’s third full album of new material since March 2006, following his masterpiece Fishscale and the better-than-anyone-could-expect extras disc More Fish. It’s a run that marks him as one of pop music’s most productive artists though one who’s a particularly specialized, even rarefied taste.

On The Big Doe Rehab, Ghostface surrounds his sharp storytelling with the deep-soul samples and off-kilter humor that are his trademarks. The single “We Celebrate” is a blaring paean to the good life, gangsta-style: “Like my baby’s first steps, ya heard!” or “Like one of my goons just came home!” “Supa GFK” is stream-of-consciousness rap over Johnny Watson’s “Superman Lover.”

Still, The Big Doe Rebab is a lot closer to More Fish than Fishscale — a little too heavy on guest stars and posse members and not as coherent. Fishscale came at you in what felt like orchestrated movements; More Fish was, by definition, just a bunch of songs. The Big Doe Rehab is more the latter. Still, Ghostface’s minor work bests a thematically similar major work from his Def Jam benefactor Jay-Z.

With his mature CEO’s album Kingdom Come falling on deaf ears, Jay-Z’s American Gangster feels less driven by personal expression than by a desire to give the people what they want. It’s an album of Jay-Z reminding everyone that he used to deal drugs. And, like the overblown movie that inspired it, American Gangster isn’t thoughtful enough to be great.

There are defensive childhood remembrances (“No Hook”: “I’m so fo sho, it’s no facade/’Stay out of trouble,’ mama said as mama sighed/Her fear, her youngest son bein’ victim of homicide/But I gotta get you outta here, mama, or I’ma die, inside”) and thrilling evocations of the amoral indulgences of drug-trade triumph (the “black superhero music” of “Roc Boys”). But, for the most part, Jay-Z is not a storyteller of Ghostface’s caliber. His primary gift isn’t conceptual or even lyrical, but vocal: the illusion of effortlessness in his honeyed flow. He’s the purer MC — the best since Biggie in his own way — and American Gangster peaks when Jay-Z sounds most relaxed, as on “Success,” where he raps over a spare track of vampy organ and scattered beat, rewriting an old Eminem lyric before discarding his crime-boss persona: “I used to give shit/Now I don’t give a shit more/Truth be told I had more fun when I was piss poor.”

Jay-Z rarely sounds so free on American Gangster, and that’s part of the problem. Ghostface Killah’s lower profile and more modest expectations may be what allow him to be the better artist. The superstar Jay-Z has no choice but to reach for significance, while Ghostface digs deeper by just telling stories and cracking jokes.

— Chris Herrington

Grades: The Big Doe Rehab: A-; American Gangster: B+

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Music Record Reviews

Hip-hop needs help, but not by aging scolds with sparkling resumes and mediocre new albums.

I suppose it was inevitable in the finance-minded world of hip-hop that “CEO-ing” would join such money-making gerunds as “pimping” and “hustling” in the rap lexicon. It also seems preordained that it came from Jay-Z, who, these days, seems more comfortable helming corporations in boardrooms than he does actually treading the boards.

Returning from his half-assed retirement only three years after his last legitimate solo album, the artist born Shawn Carter hopes to save hip-hop from its present-day malaise. He even takes the album’s title, Kingdom Come, from a comic book in which Superman returns to save the world from a new generation of reckless, irresponsible superheroes. He is right about one thing: Hip-hop needs some help. It’s been a down year in every way. There’ve been no multiplatinum releases and very few standouts. Even artists such as the Game will be lucky to do half the numbers they did in 2005.

Kingdom Come debuted at #1 but has been in free-fall ever since. It will eventually creep into platinum status, but it is hardly the genre resuscitator that Jay-Z claims it is. The title track is, by far, the best on record. Over a backward sample of Rick James’ “Super Freak,” Jay-Z triumphs his own return and drops more names from the capes-and-tights set than the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. The song has energy to spare, though, and is catchy as hell. It’s a shame that the rest of the record is so boring and uninspired. On “Hollywood,” his duet with girlfriend Beyoncé, he raps of his incredibly dull jet-set life. And look, there’s Coldplay’s Chris Martin, collaborating on the snoozer closing track, “Beach Chair.” It’s understandable in this US Weekly world that Jay-Z would think that the public cares about every nuance of his privileged life, but even the starlets have to make a sex tape or have messy divorces to get a whole lot of ink. There is so much self-absorption that his Hurricane Katrina song, “Minority Report,” seems perfunctory and hollow. The only things more predictable than his “socially conscious” lyrics are the thunderstorm sound effects.

Jay-Z’s mature approach is appealing and irritating, sometimes in the same song. On “30 Something,” he plays a grumpy Mr. Wilson to a generation of Dennis the Menaces, chiding the young’uns for their sagging pants and their blunts. Of course, it is nice to see him bragging about his credit score (“Now I got black cards”).

Another nice side effect of Jay’s aging is the fact that he’s letting beefs slide. Nas used to be the Hova’s primary target. Entertainment Weekly once ran a two-page spread chronicling the pair’s bilious barbs. But now, Jay-Z’s company, Def Jam, is releasing Hip Hop Is Dead, the latest album from his former nemesis.

The entertaining title track features Nas’ quick history and analysis of hip-hop over a stirring sample of Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” and, for old school’s sake, the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache.” As good as that is, the best song is the Jay-Z collaboration “Black Republicans,” which is every bit as impressive as their combined cred and skills suggested it’d be. Over a stately sample from the The Godfather II soundtrack, Jay-Z and Nas spit lyrics about the flipside of monetary success, “Then you mix things/Like cars, jewelry, and miss things/Jealousy, ego, and pride, and this brings/It all to a head like coin, cha-ching/The rule of evil strikes again, this could sting.”

Other highlights include “Play on Playa,” his laid-back duet with Snoop Dogg, and, surprisingly, the somber “Blunt Ashes,” produced by Sixers forward Chris Webber. Hey David Stern, the mere fact that Nas kicks this joint off by asking, “Yo, I wonder if Langston Hughes and Alex Haley got blazed before they told stories” should earn Webber a five-game suspension, right? There are also several missteps, most noticeably the maudlin “Let There Be Light” and the milquetoast “Not Going Back.” The biggest embarrassment is “Who Killed It?,” where Nas misguidedly imitates Edward G. Robinson. It’s the funniest ’30s gangster accent since Johnny Dangerously. “Carry On Tradition” and “Where Are They Now?” are both humorless history lessons that directly or indirectly scold the youngsters for a lack of hip-hop knowledge.

Maybe Jay-Z and Nas bonded while bitching about all the meddlin’ kids in the game. Hip-hop isn’t dead and it doesn’t need Supes to save it. Hip-hop is just walking wounded, but it will need better albums than this pair to be healed.

— David Dunlap Jr.

Grades: Jay-Z: B-; Nas: B