(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 ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) The measure of a person should never shrink down to their hardest chapters, yet that is exactly the trap the coming days will lay for a woman who spent nearly her entire life performing for the rest of us. By the time you read this, the coverage will have ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Whenever cinephiles argue over the strongest bond between a filmmaker and his favorite leading man, the talk drifts fast toward Scorsese and De Niro, yet any honest reckoning has to save a chair at the table for two brothers who spent thirty five years sharpening each other into something ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Adrien Broner once carried the kind of promise the fight game rarely hands out. For a while, people talked about him like the next Floyd Mayweather. World titles across four weight classes, mouth running faster than his hands, a swagger that made you either love him or want to ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Somebody decided a while back that a serious Black man ought to look as if he is hauling a boulder up a hill. I never agreed to that. My pushback happens right here in the kitchen, volume up, nothing loud about it. Most of what gets published about brothers ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Folks love to file Michael Jackson under pop and keep it moving. The glove, the moonwalk, the spin that stopped a stadium cold. All of it real. None of it the whole man. Anybody raised on a transistor radio and a decent pair of speakers knows the part they ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Somewhere between the streaming numbers and the sponsorship checks, rap forgot how to be dangerous. Not violent, not reckless with a pistol. Dangerous to the people who ought to be afraid of it. I sat with that feeling all through this year, watching another awards season roll past in ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Roc Nation is billing the weekend as history, and for once the label talk holds up. Across three nights in the Bronx this month, Shawn Carter became the first artist to sell out Yankee Stadium three shows running, each with its own setlist and its own staging. More than ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) We asked a child to be a miracle. Not a good performer, understand me. A miracle. Every night, in every arena, under lights hot enough to sweat the paint off his face, thousands of grown people decided before the first note dropped that Michael Jackson owed them something close ...