"While I live will I praise the Lord: I will sing praises unto my God while I have any being." Psalm 146:2

"Nightingales are named so because they frequently sing at night as well as during the day. The name has been used for well over 1,000 years, being highly...

At the dawn of the Black Hollywood Renaissance of the '90s, the sodality of filmmakers like Spike Lee, The Hudlin Brothers, Bill Duke, Stan Lathan, John Singleton, The Hughes Brothers, George Jackson, Doug McHenry, Mario Van Peebles, Robert Townsend, and this writer, to name a few, felt like the pre-Raphaelite...

(This is an essay excerpt from my anthology of investigative journalism and essays titled,
"Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1:New Jack City Eats Its Young.")

"The velocity of history will either break your back or give you wings"

The '80s is dead, y'all, and crack cocaine...

PARIS (REUTERS)- The most controversial rapper and producer in hip hop was found dead this morning, at a five-star hotel in Paris, France

The body was discovered near the balcony in the luxe Coco Chanel suite of the Ritz hotel, sometime...

Courtesy of Citypaper.com 20.October.2009

As Jay-Z brings the traveling road show known as Blueprint III to Baltimore's 1st Mariner Arena Oct. 27, he does so at a time when he is literally carrying both hip-hop and it's hostile kidnapper -- Rap Mu$ick, LLC -- on his back. Shawn Corey...

"My dad, Jimmy, was one of so many young men who went to Vietnam. He was drafted in 1965 and served four or five tours. When I was a kid I'd wake up at night and find my dad walking around the house, patrolling. I'd be on my way to...

"It is a question to bear in mind in our attempts to understand what distinguishes from the past the new fabric of fear that we all seem to wear at this moment."

Chapter One, "A Changing Mask Of Fear", The Climate of Fear: A Quest...

"If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America..."

President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1968, when he learned
that CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite believed that
Vietnam was "unwinnable".

On Friday, 17 July 2009, we lost another chunk of America. Walter Leland Cronkite crossed the finish line of a most...

Prologue to Act II:

"...The black man should no longer be confronted by the dilemma, turn white or disappear...if society makes difficulties for him because of his color, if in his dreams I establish the expression of an unconscious desire to change color, my objective will not...

"...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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...