blaKbüshe in Tiny Desk Contest & Somebody's Gotta Do It: Kendrick at the Bowl
Full Moon in Leo 🌕♌️ Happy Black History Month ✊🏽✊🏽✊🏽
Greetings All!
Happy Black History Month! ✊🏽 Happy Full Moon in Leo! 🌕♌️
Before we get into it, I want to thank all my new paid and free subscribers. Thank you, Thank You! If you are a free subscriber please consider an upgrade to paid. As these times are swiftly changing your support means more than even. Think if yourself as a patron of the arts! Thank you for your consideration and support! 💜💜💜
At the behest of a good friend I decided to enter my band, Shelley Nicole’s blaKbüshe, into NPR's Tiny Desk Contest this year! We haven’t entered since 2017 and I thought that now would be as good a time as any to try again. Our Tiny Desk video is now on the blaKbüshe YouTube channel. There is no voting required, but I am asking you to please LIKE the video and subscribe to my channel. I’m trying to get my numbers up on that platform so let’s get me to 500 subscribers and beyond! We can do it! It’s quick and easy so push those buttons! Enjoy the video and please spread the word! In my mind we have already won!
The new Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber album is out! If You Can’t Dazzle Them With Your Brilliance, Then Baffle Them With Your Blisluth, Pt. 2 is now available on the Burnt Sugar Bandcamp page. I’ve been with Burnt Sugar for 15 years, but this is the first album project that I’ve been featured on. It’s a project of two live recordings; Burnt Sugar at the Concert of Colors in Detroit and live from Paula's Barn in Ohio. Swing on over the Bandcamp and support live music by actually purchasing a copy of the album. It’s a whole vibe!
This week’s essay, “Somebody’s Gotta Do It” calls upon Kendrick Lamar’s song “TV Off” that closed his halftime show. No, it’s not a recap of his performance because there are enough of those going around, but it’s more my thoughts on how we are potentially being shocked into submission and why Kendrick’s show felt like a defibrillator.
I’m wishing you all Love ❤️, Peace ☮️ & Soul ✊🏽 during this Black History Month. It is surely one of the most important months at this moment as they try to legislate who people are. Happy Full Moon in Leo. 🌕♌️ Let us contemplate what we want/need to let go of so that we can be free.
Somebody’s Gotta Do It
Listen to Shelley Nicole Read “Somebody’s Gotta Do It”
It’s Black History Month and no matter what Google tells us, we will celebrate. We celebrated before corporations recognized it and we will celebrate long after. I’m honestly more concerned about an administration renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America and Google going along with this random executive geographic name change. Think on that a bit.
They are trying to shock us into forgetting. Shock us into submission, into letting whatever is about to go down, go down without a fight. While it is true that most of us haven’t seen anything like this before on our soil in our lifetime; WE have indeed seen THIS before.
In 2007, Naomi Klein released a book called “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” In a nutshell this book discusses how “...political actors exploit the chaos of natural disasters, wars, and other crises to push through unpopular policies such as deregulation and privatization. This economic "shock therapy" favors corporate interests while disadvantaging and disenfranchising citizens when they are too distracted and overwhelmed to respond or resist effectively.” Sound familiar? While her book cites wars, natural disasters, 9/11, etc. as linchpins, it’s fair to say that our last election could also be included in the category of destabilization as the ensuing executive orders are surely sending some of us into a state of shock.
After weeks of confusing and unsettling information being blasted out about government employment, the dissolution of DEI, the absurd executive order that there are only two genders, and other wild notions looping on the 24 hour news cycle; this past Sunday, something happened.
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I’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again, I am a hip-hop baby. It’s one of the many musical genres that raised me. Has hip-hop changed over the years? Of course it has, just as all genres do, but at the end of the day I love hip-hop and I am always willing to give it a chance. As an artist I believe in listening. I’m not going to like everything I hear and when I hear something I don’t like, I turn it off. I choose that over censorship because I saw that happen so much in the early days of hip-hop. I admittedly don’t listen to everything in the genre anymore, but I have folx who stay with their ears to the ground and always hip me to what I must hear that’s new. That is what happened many years ago with me and Kendrick Lamar.
I didn’t really get hip to Kendrick until good kid, m.A.A.d. city, but he had been putting out music since 2009. good kid is a great album, but this young man’s artistry lit up my world and that of many others in 2015 with To Pimp a Butterfly. At that time he was 28 years old. Some might think he was too young for me to be listening to and understanding at my ripe age of not 28 (LOL!), but that album touched me in so many ways and I knew this young man was special. I’m not going to give you a K-Dot history lesson, but I am going to say that if you have been paying attention, then you have seen him grow inside and out. With DAMN he won a Pulitzer Prize for Music (2018) and on Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, he bared his whole soul. In 2016 he also kept it super Black with his Grammy performance on the heels of Butterfly ending with a backlit map of Africa with “Compton” emblazoned in the middle of the continent just in case you weren’t sure that we are all connected. So by the time we landed on that Sunday night performance, the stage was set.
I know most folks tuned into the Super Bowl Halftime show just to hear “Not Like Us” and scream “a minooooooor!” at the screen, but those of us who really follow Kendrick were ready for all the pieces of the puzzle to come together, but what we were not ready for was that level of Blackness on the Super Bowl stage. Let the record show that I’m here for it and simultaneously my jaw was on the floor!
I had no dog in the Super Bowl fight, but I was surely rooting for everyone Black that night, no disrespect Mahomes (who is Black-ish #IYKYK), but Hurts is the man and Philly was the city. I only tuned in for the show because I honestly love Kendrick and his music. I’m not going to recap because there are plenty of breakdowns out there that have lots of information in case you missed the nuance or were one of those people who thought it was boring. I will say this though. While short sighted people were just looking for the Drake diss moment, that Halftime show had little or nothing to do with Drake and everything to do with America and white supremacy being called to the carpet. Sure, Kendrick turned straight to the camera on “Say Drake, they say you like ‘em young…” but don’t forget this is still entertainment.
K-Dot is not one of those artists that have a lot of club jams and catchy hooks other rappers might employ for easy likes. He is an artist. He has been known to make you dance or jump up for joy, but oftentimes he’s gonna make you listen and being a lyrics girl, that’s my bag.
Circling back to the “boring” comments, at first I was baffled, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised. We have been lulled to sleep for the last several years and surely the last 5 years have been about escapism. Let me break it down just a bit. What you were looking at on Sunday was performance art. If you know anything about Black culture and the history of America then the symbolism was in your face. The show was the embodiment of Langston Hughes’s, “I, too sing America,” but our American experience is wildly different from yours. Some thought it was boring because he was performing to a track and not with a band, but he never has a band. That’s not his thing. Hip-hop started with two turntables and a microphone so he kept it simple, so to speak. I think the problem was that deep down people just wanted to be mindlessly entertained and that goes for white and black folx watching. But for me, that show was entertaining AF and also impactful AF. We also claim that we want hip-hop to elevate. Folx are out here screaming about young Black women not having any clothes on and young Black men only displaying street life, but when an artist comes through and gives you the art, then you are bored? I guess the question is, were you bored or did you feel left out of the conversation or since you weren’t centered so you shut down? I get that not all of the songs he performed were his big hits, but he was creating a narrative on Sunday night.
Are we so deep in the weeds that we don’t know art when we see it? Don’t know symbolism when we see it (hello Sam Jackson as Uncle Sam). Don’t know the underground railroad when we see it? No Kendrick ain’t Harriet, but he is showing us a way. He ain’t the first, but he also ain’t new to this. Remember the Grammys of 2016. Another Black AF moment in front of a world of whites. Remember, everybody didn’t get free or want to be free even when Harriet was driving the train. We are in a constant state of evolution, of growth and expansion. We are not going to get through this by being stagnant and comfortable. Now more than ever it’s time to lean into the discomfort so we can grow.
These people in power are trying to shock you into stopping, into forgetting your history, forgetting the struggle, forgetting the work that was done so that you could even have an open opinion of your own, but Kendrick and many, many, many others above and underground in this art world are saying NO! I Am Awake!
Instead of writing off hip-hop because you don’t like all of it or you’ve taken to calling yourself “old” or “out of touch.” How about trying getting in touch? I think we like to hold the “old” line or the “it’s their time” (speaking of the youth) line so you don’t have to do any work. Do you think James Baldwin understood everything about Nikki Giovanni’s generation? Probably not, but they still sat down and had a conversation in love. This is not the time to push each other away, it’s time to call each other in and listen so that we can thrive. There is wisdom on both sides. There is wisdom to be mined from the past, but there is equally wisdom to be cultivated from those who are not chained to the past. “Old” people did not change this country and I say that as an older person. LOL! But older people were on the front lines with the young folx, hello Bayard Rustin. So let’s stop this talk about it being “their time” and realize that it’s OUR time! Let us use the movement of memory combined with fresh perspectives to create a pathway forward. We are not going to make it to the other side of this by being ageist on either side.
This past Sunday you saw art in action! It was performance art on the biggest stage at the highest level. That performance was not about a rap battle or petty beef. It wasn’t about hate for another artist, it was about love for our people and hate of our treatment on this soil. It was much bigger than Drake. Way Bigger! Kendrick is doing his job as an artist. So many artists, including myself, have never stopped doing the work of the people. Nina Simone said it best, “An artist's duty…is to reflect the times,” and K-Dot is doing just that.
Y'all wanted him to do “Alright” on Sunday because you wanted to party and/or someone to soothe and coddle you in these challenging times. And while it is true that we will be alright, Sunday was not about that type of direct messaging. By doing what he did, he told us that “we gon be alright” without singing it. We gon be alright, but we can’t move forward without confronting the past and that is what this administration and those who support it are trying their level best not to do. If we don’t stand on what we’ve done and dare I say what we’ve overcome, they can act like it never happened and gaslight us into thinking that our pain and struggle is a myth. As Zora Neal Hurston said, “If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it.” Erasure is real in this country. The whole founding of this country is based on myths. Myths of happy slaves, land of opportunity, Columbus discovering an already inhabited land and Washington chopping down cherry trees. Myths of Black men not being good fathers, of Black women being loose, of Black people being violent when this whole place was built on bondage and extreme violence at the hands of Europeans. Myths of black on black crime, Black folx not being intelligent, myths of same gender loving people being an abomination and the biggest myth of them all; white supremacy.
I honestly don’t know how this year’s Super Bowl performance passed inspection in this climate. This was the Blackity Black Bowl with performances by Jon Batiste singing the National Anthem, Ledisi singing the Black National Anthem only to be followed by Kendrick Lamar with his own anthems!!
In order to get free we are going to have to get uncomfortable. It might be uncomfortable for you to align yourself with your LGBTQ+ family and/or neighbors, but Somebody’s Gotta Do It. It might be uncomfortable to not order from Amazon for a month or two or 10 but Somebody’s Gotta Do It. It might be uncomfortable to listen to music or go see some art that you don’t think will move you or don’t feel super connected to in order to receive a message that may set you free, but Somebody’s Gotta Do It. It might be uncomfortable to speak out loud about Palestine, the Congo, the Sudan, the United States, but Somebody’s Gotta Do it. It might be uncomfortable to call out your racist or sexist family members and/or friends, but Somebody’s Gotta Do It. I have been waiting for the tide to turn in music and it looks like we are finally seeing a swing. Rough times birth great art. We have seen it before and I feel it in the air again. Protect those artists who dare to reflect the times. Somebody’s Gotta Do It!
Turn the TV Off!
I loved that piece and I loved that I listened to it. Your voice held me! I so agree with all you said. I got so excited when I saw that show...it felt like a call to action!