(ThyBlackMan.com) San Jose is the most populous city in the San Francisco Bay Area, and that scale creates a problem families and adult learners know all too well: a great music teacher might be twenty minutes away, but between school pickups, commuter traffic on 87 and 101, and packed evening ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Ask me which records I’d grab if the house caught fire and I never even have to think. Nineteen seventy two through seventy six. One man at the center of it all, and he flat tore up everything the rest of us figured a record was supposed to be. ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) So the word came down Friday out of Los Angeles, and anybody near a hip hop timeline that afternoon felt the room shift. Lil Durk was cleared in federal court on all five counts. Not guilty straight across the board. The twelve who held his fate sat with it ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) I just came out of my home studio. I wrote a song called Laura Loomer Please Stop, for really complex reasons that had a lot to do with my life as a father to a daughter, Kathryn Cherise. She is a brilliant young woman and she has recently earned ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) For all the talk about Black men and rivalry, about crabs in a barrel and one seat at the table, the most important film partnership of the past decade has spent its whole run quietly arguing the opposite case. I came up in a time when we were taught, ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) The news of Cassandra Wilson’s passing gave me pause before I could find the words to write. One of the most distinctive and influential voices in American music is gone. News of her death broke today, September 2, 2026. She died at home in Jackson, the same Mississippi ground ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Country legend Dolly Parton was known for her powerful voice, bubbly personality, and timeless music. But there was another side of Dolly Parton, a side that she quietly and consistently showed up for the Black community. As a lad, this writer grew up in the “hood” but was fascinated ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) There is a particular kind of foolishness that only pride can buy. Duane Davis, the man the streets came to know as Keffe D, spent close to two decades telling anybody with a microphone or a publishing deal exactly how Tupac Shakur died. He talked to police. He talked ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) A little more than seven months have gone by since Kanye West bought a full-page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal and addressed it to everyone left wounded in his wake. That January statement was, on its surface, everything critics had asked of him for years. It started with ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Most of us learned early that a paycheck was the whole point. You show up, put in your hours, and Friday the direct deposit lands. That money keeps a roof up and food on the table. For a long stretch of my life, that felt like the entire arrangement. ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Darius Rucker turned 60, and something in him finally exhaled. The country singer sat down on The Dan Patrick Show recently and said out loud what plenty of us keep buried. Glancing back at his last calendar, he tallied the concerts. 110 of them. Then came a question that ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Say the words Martha’s Vineyard to somebody who came up when I did, and watch what their mind conjures. Old money. Doctors and lawyers with summer homes handed down like heirlooms. The Obamas strolling near the water. For decades that picture held, and there was truth in it. Oak ...