More...
 

Barry Michael Cooper
Barry Michael Cooper
Get Barry Michael Cooper's RSS Feed RSS
Become a Fan Get Email Alerts from this Blogger
Barry Michael Cooper is a writer, journalist, and filmmaker living in Baltimore, Md.

A native of Harlem, N.Y. Cooper began his writing career as a music critic, and then an investigative reporter for The Village Voice, from 1980-1989. In 1987, he won several journalism awards: Best Magazine Feature, from Ball State University and The National Association of Black Journalists, on a 1986 feature story in Spin Magazine titled "In Cold Blood: The Baltimore Teen Murders". His 1987 cover story in the Village Voice on the drug gang violence in Detroit titled "New Jack City Eats Its Young" was adapted into a screenplay for the smash 1991 Warner Brothers film of the same name, which launched the careers of Wesley Snipes, Chris Rock, Ice-T, Allen Payne, and the director Mario Van Peebles. Cooper also wrote the screenplays for the films "Sugar Hill", and "Above
The Rim". In October 2008, Barry Michael Cooper produced the Larry Davis episode for the Season Three of BET's hit crime documentary, "American Gangster". Thus far, the Larry Davis episode has been the highest-rated Original Series telecast in BET Network history. His new blog, Hooked On The American Dream, can be accessed with this link: http://hookedontheamericandream.blogspot.com/

Blog Entries by Barry Michael Cooper

Michael Jackson Agonistes: An American Pop'era In Three Acts

Posted July 6, 2009 | 09:23 AM (EST)

"...human beings are still human beings and not piano keys, which, though played upon with their own hands by the laws of nature themselves, are in danger of being played so much that outside the calendar it will be impossible to want anything."

Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Notes From Underground

Act...

Read Post

Requiem For The Zooted

2 Comments | Posted May 15, 2009 | 10:30 AM (EST)

On a cab ride to Harlem last May I thought I was having an authentic angel dust flashback as I passed 123rd and Lenox Avenue. Looking down the vista of renovated million dollar brownstones and condos, I remembered something Marshall McLuhan once said: "We look at the present through a...

Read Post

Terrorist Without a Cause

Posted April 5, 2009 | 05:32 PM (EST)

Sandwiched between the 1999 Columbine massacre and 9/11/2001, America was getting its first taste of stateside terrorism. Though the frightening violence seems to have resurfaced with the Virgina Tech slaughter two years ago, the carnage at a retirement home in North Carolina last week, the mass murders at an immigrant-outreach...

Read Post

Diddy Gets Political: The Birth of "Vote or Die"

Posted March 18, 2009 | 03:10 PM (EST)

Finding Obamica, Vol. 4

Read Post

Once Upon a Time in America: My Interview with Sean John Combs

Posted March 9, 2009 | 12:59 PM (EST)

FINDING OBAMICA, VOL. 3

"Remember what we talked about so much?" Bigger asked in a flat neutral tone.
"Naw."
"Old Blum."...Bigger took a deep breath and looked from face to face. It seemed to him that he should not have to explain.
"Look, it'll be easy. There...

Read Post

The Economy, 2009: Brother Can You Spare A Dime?

Posted January 5, 2009 | 09:56 AM (EST)

A Blessed and joyous New Year to one and all.

Hopefully, you woke last Thursday -- New Years Day, 2009 -- in your right mind.

Hopefully, you woke on New Years Day in a warm house, in a comfy bed, under a ton of quilts and comforters, wiping the residue...

Read Post

Kenneth Coles & Grassy Knolls: The Sole Assasination of a Bush Legacy

Posted December 23, 2008 | 01:23 PM (EST)

FINDING OBAMICA, VOL I.

"Shoe program, nigga! Twenty-three hour lockdown!"

Denzel Washington as Det. Alonzo Harris in the
2001 Warner Bros. film, Training Day .

I'm sorry. I was laughing. I was lol last week, when that shoe came flying at George Walker Bush in Iraq. This was the...

Read Post

The Final Days Of An American Gangsta

Posted October 24, 2008 | 08:57 PM (EST)

When Politics Became The New Hip Hop, Vol. 3

I wasn't even going to post today, but I was a little disturbed by some comments I read on a bulletin board on HipHopDx.com, the Huffington Post of Hip Hop (shout out to one of the great editors over at...

Read Post

Sarah Palin and The GOP's Charli Baltimore Plan

Posted October 22, 2008 | 11:00 AM (EST)

When Politics Became The New Hip Hop, Vol. 2.

We found out two things the night of October 18th, 2008:
1. Republican V.P. nominee Sarah Palin is a good sport.
2. She is down with the GOP (the Gangsta Opportunist Party).

Last weekend, a record...

Read Post

When Politics Became The New Hip Hop

Posted October 15, 2008 | 11:15 AM (EST)

The definition of Hip Hop has always been a political one: at the heart of democracy lies the aorta of free speech. Be it George Orwell, V.I. Lenin, Karl Marx, or Donald Oliver Soper shooting the gift (of gab) in London at Speaker's Corner of Hyde Park, or KRS-One and...

Read Post

When the Levees Broke: Spike Lee's Sonogram of an American Stillbirth

Posted September 2, 2008 | 10:27 AM (EST)

Both Truman Capote and Saint Teresa of Avila made copious notes on the tearful taxes that come with the cosmic payoff of answered prayers. I don't know if the Rt. Rev. James Dobson and his Pharisees-On-The-Family minion Stuart Shepard are aware of the havoc they might have caused by asking...

Read Post

The Real Meaning and Real Talk of a Real Life '08 Bonnie and Clyde

Posted August 26, 2008 | 09:15 PM (EST)

That Woosh! in your ears is the sound of Sen. John McCain's old man dreams and Bush-league (Cheney, too) New World Order wishes being flushed down the G.O.P.'s toilet of dirty politics. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Monday night in Denver, Colorado was at least the first...

Read Post