Today’s song of the day comes from Jennifer Hudson, who is prepared to release a remake of “Overjoyed.” Although her voice is strong, I just don’t feel the song. Why do people insist on trying to cover Stevie, Marvin, and Luther?

To hear it for yourself, click here.

Today’s video of the day shows one of the most successful rappers of all time back when he was still a trusty sidekick. In addition to the Fu-Schnickens-like flow, peep the numerous shouts to the Ansaars. Those who know don’t tell…

I know that I’ve posted a lot of Obama pieces lately, but I couldn’t ignore this piece by legal scholar Patricia Williams. As always, Professor Williams’ brillliant analysis adds another layer of complexity to the issues…
L’Etranger
By Patricia J Williams 

Recently the New-York Historical Society and the Studio Museum of Harlem curated “Legacies,” a fascinating show at N-YHS in which contemporary artists reflected on slavery. One of the commissioned pieces that accompanied the display was a short film by artists Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry. It featured McCallum, who is white, and Tarry, who is black, configured as a “twinning doll”–a nineteenth-century toy that has two heads, one at each end of a common torso. At the doll’s waist is attached a long skirt or a cloak. Held vertically, the skirt falls and obscures one head. Flipped one way, it becomes a white doll. Turned upside down, the skirt falls the other way and suddenly it’s a black doll. In the film, McCallum and Tarry, joined at the waist by some feat of pixilated trickery and dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, flip head over head down a long dark marble corridor, first a white head, then a black head, first a white man, then a black woman, first a Thomas Jefferson, then a Sally Hemings. As they describe it, “the races are joined head to toe…continuously revealing and concealing one another.” Such an interesting metaphor for the state of our union.

When I inquired further, McCallum told me that there was an old children’s song about the dolls: “Turn you up/Turn you back./First you’re white/Then you’re black.” I tried Googling those words in hopes of finding a recording. Instead I turned up a satirical piece by rocker Lou Reed, “I Wanna Be Black,” in which a (presumably hypothetical) “I” desires “to be black” as an escape from a neurosis of whiteness. Actually, the word “white” is never used in the song. It’s alluded to in the chorus–obliquely but with crystal clarity nonetheless: “I don’t wanna be a fucked-up middle-class college student any more.” According to these lyrics, whiteness is a dull preserve defined by respectable class status, college education and world-class angst; black people have ever so much more fun, what with having “natural rhythm,” “a big prick,” a “stable of foxy whores” and “get myself shot in the spring” “like Martin Luther King.”

The jolly entertainment of switching identity from white to black and back again is not the exclusive province of frat boys slumming around as pretenders to ghetto life. “Jungle parties” are still good clean fun at country clubs, at Halloween parties down at the precinct and in the unfortunate confusion that is Kevin Federline. The inverse–switching from black to white and black again–is more freighted. Blacks who present themselves as clean and articulate and sober and important risk being viewed as false, elitist or duplicitous. “Acting white” has all these connotations. Whites “acting black,” on the other hand–i.e., any coded masquerade of down and dirty–tend to be read as cool or maybe disaffected or, at worst, stuck in some stage of rebellious adolescence.

For the rest of the article, click here. 

Buchanan, Harding, Nixon, Dubya …? Much more fun than your high school History class, this year’s President’s Day tribute is to the very worst of them.

The Worst President of Them All
By Nichols von Hoffman 

A question that seems to be on everybody’s mind these days turns out to be: Is George Bush the worst President in American history?

But how do you judge? Is he the most morally disgusting? The worst mangler of the English language? Ever since the atom bomb was dropped, we’ve had a whole string of bozos who cannot pronounce the word “nuclear.” How much should that count against them?

Is John Tyler, our tenth President, a candidate for worst President? Some people who have never heard of this guy have heard of the campaign slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Well, Tippecanoe (William Henry Harrison) lasted about a month in office before he died of a cold contracted while making his inaugural address, and the rest is non-history. Tyler is best remembered, if he is remembered at all, as the President whose entire Cabinet, save one, quit on him. Please do not confuse him with Zachary Taylor, the twelfth President, easily Tyler’s equal in forgettability.

Is the most forgettable also the worst? Men like Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and Benjamin Harrison (Tippecanoe’s grandson) were more politically brain-dead than really bad. But not so with James Buchanan, No. 15, who was President from 1857 to 1861. Aside from being a dull, unimaginative, dray horse of a politician, he was the President whose cowardice in handling the South and slavery ended the remotest possibility that the United States would be spared the horrors of the Civil War.

For the rest of the story, click here. 

Today’s song of the day is “Never Leave” by Little Brother… HOT FIRE!!!! I can’t wait for their next album…
To hear it, click here.