(ThyBlackMan.com) I think I speak for a lot of normal black people when I say that I sometimes grow tired of the rapper Rick Ross. Ross has always been a creative, yet relatively useless public figure in the past, but his recent disrespect for the legacy of Trayvon Martin might be ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) You may speak and ponder what you will about Kanye West, but it’s unbearable to refute his cultural impact as a rapper, songwriter, and producer/beat maker in music period. Ten years ago today, Kanye West released his groundbreaking debut, The College Dropout, to critical appraise and rap fans who ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) When the police said they were looking for Hoffman’s drug dealer laughed because they know damm he was the drug dealer. He bought, used, gave and sold to all his high profile friends. That’s why they found a sh*tload of drugs around him. Then they drudge up four of his ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Historically speaking, the Grammy’s have always leaned toward presenting the more prevalent act in any particular category. While it may have come as astonishment to many that Macklemore beat Kendrick Lamar head to head in each category they were featured in, it was common knowledge that Macklemore had the ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Many will argue that because George Zimmerman was in fact acquitted by a jury of his peers, he should no longer be looked upon as a murderer. However, in a justice system where what you can prove often outweighs what actually happened, it is more than understandable why many ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Ever since I have written about America’s Pursuit of Unattainable Beauty, I have been keenly alert to issues within current feminism. On a fundamental level, feminism is supposed to be about women’s equality. As simple as that definition is, it’s also effortless to see what feminism is not. And what Beyonce did ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) After Sunday’s Grammy catastrophe which mainly included Seattle rapper Macklemore sweeping the rap categories (excluding the Best Rap/Sung collaboration in which Jay-Z’s Holy Grail won,) many fans of the hip hop and overall music world have been appalled at the nonexistence of attention that Kendrick Lamar received at the ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) ”I don’t know what this means. I don’t think it means anything.” – Singer Eddie Vedder after winning a Grammy for “Best Hard Rock Performance” with his group Pearl Jam in 1996. “I think the Grammys are nothing more than some gigantic promotional machine for the music industry. They ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Have you ever wondered how jazz, and then later rock ‘n’ roll, developed out of the blues? How Black music came to be America’s music? Whether or not people who are not Black can really play Black music? Amiri Baraka speaks on these things in his 1963 classic, Blues ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) The nominations for the 2014 Academy Awards were announced last week. To be honest, although I wasn’t surprised by the list, I was still disappointed in some aspects. First off let me say, I am extremely happy for Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o and Steve McQueen. Their nominations were much ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) In 1942, NAACP Executive Director, Walter White, worked with politicians and studio executives to establish an ad hoc committee with the major studios to monitor the image and portrayal of African Americans on the screen. In 1955, the Mississippi Branch of the NAACP, led by Medgar Evers, filed a ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Some think that because I critique modern commercialized hip-hop (which is not the same as real hip-hop), that I don’t understand it. They also might assume that I don’t listen to it or wish to censor artists who might be defined as “ratchet.” Actually, the opposite is true: I ...