Writer and Culture Worker from M.E.M.P.H.I.S.
He--Prince--didn't exactly come to me in a cloud of purple divinity and command me to do so, mind you. I had been on Tumblr, largely out of pedagogical dedication, sporadically reblogging things and scrolling and refreshing pages for hours on end, … [Continue reading]
Art is always already personal and political. Memphis native Marco Pavé’s recently released mixtape, Obscure Reality, and his community work in and beyond his neighborhood, exemplify this dual function of art, as well as the possibilities of art to … [Continue reading]
May 21, 2014 Awnaw, hell naw, mane, y'all done up and done it/...them country boys on the rise - Nappy Roots, "Awnaw" Stop being rapper racists/region haters/...This is southern face it/if we too simple/then y'all don't get the basics - Lil' Wayne, … [Continue reading]
24 Feb 2014 “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…” -Thoreau, 1854 “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” -Faulkner, 1950 “And I can feel it for sure/I been here before.” -Teena Marie, 1979 “I guess I’ll see you next … [Continue reading]
December 31, 2013 http://vimeo.com/79018443 "Down South" is a ubiquitous trope in the black American imagination, used to conjure actual and fictive remembrances of a space and time removed from and outside of modernity, the anti-present. It's an … [Continue reading]
November 15, 2013 Review of Susanna Vapnek's Mabon Teenie Hodges: A Portrait of a Memphis Soul Original and Jonathan Isom's I AM SOUL Memphis Soul is a globally popular and widely recognizable brand of music and being-in-the-world. Created … [Continue reading]
My mother grew up at Midland and Boston in the Belt Line, a small working class subdivision in Orange Mound, in the 1950s and 1960s. Orange Mound is widely recognized as the nation's first black neighborhood, and came into being when … [Continue reading]
On the night of the 2012 election, when Barack Obama was elected to a second term, some students at the University of Mississippi burned Obama campaign signs. They had procured these signs as they tore through the halls of dorms ripping … [Continue reading]
An early and relatively comprehensive review of Electric Lady essentially praised the album and the artist for gumption but criticized what might be called the album’s sonic “extraness” and the supposed disconnect between the album’s sounds … [Continue reading]