DebraDickerson.com - Blogs - Black to the Future

Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere

Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care

Reading Between the Lines: A Literary Smack-Down Spices up the Summer Doldrums
As first reported by the writer Linda Yablonsky on the website Gawker.com, Crouch spotted Peck, rolled up on him, and introduced himself. So far so good. But, after Peck shook his hand, Crouch slapped Peck across the face and said, "If you ever did anything like that again, it'll be much worse."

It's Gangsta Lit: Hip-hop novels are hot, and now mainstream publishers want in. "Drug dealer turned publisher Vickie Stringer addressed a booksellers' conference in Chicago last week, trying to explain the runaway success of her line of what she calls hip-hop novels. Her authors don't appear on the "Today" show. Their gritty tales of easy money, faithless love and betrayal are seldom reviewed. Their protagonists—gangbangers and hustlers—rarely end up in books. Her secret? "The stories," says Stringer, who edits and distributes the books herself, "are sympathetic to people who grew up rough."

The African Maelstrom of War, Corruption, Disease and Death. "Africa is a tough, bittersweet beat. Its long-suffering people are too frequently caught in the crossfire of rampaging wars, afflicted in their millions with AIDS and other desperate diseases, preyed upon by greedy despots and prevented by corrupt leaders and bureaucracies from obtaining basic schooling, medical attention and access to economic opportunity."

Mandela’s white ‘granddaughter’ to co-write one of history’s great memoirs. "“Please don’t phone me – I’ll phone you,” Nelson Mandela told journalists last week as he announced his final retirement from public life to spend more time with his wife, Graça Machel, and complete his memoirs.
As usual, the world’s most loved octogenarian shuffled to and from the press conference at his home in Johannesburg’s upmarket Houghton suburb on the arm of his personal assistant Zelda la Grange, a 33-year-old Afrikaner who for years has been Mandela’s ruthless gatekeeper."

White folks just got to get in the middle of everything, don't they?

Bulletproof Hunk: Fuller and K take a road trip—but does she blaller his skop? "Alexandra Fuller evokes her thirsty love of Africa, brawny men, and the hard life with the parched tongue of the expat. In her new memoir, Scribbling the Cat, verbs erupt, bugs "dash themselves to death," wounds are "wept open," tears "swell and tremble." Her geographical descriptions swoon: Her parents' town is a "low slink of a land on the edge of perpetual malaria," ruined by a drought "that didn't stop gorging until it fell into the sea, bloated with the dust of a good chunk of the lower half of Africa's belly." Her writing crackles, consumed by the memory of war."

Or: Africa is so much more interesting when white people talk about it.

My Life, Bill Clinton. "They cheered Bill Clinton here Thursday night as the keynote speaker at BookExpo America, the annual gathering of members of the American Booksellers Association and the publishing industry.

They screamed for him as the former president. Yes.

And they went Bill-istic for him as the author of the soon-to-be-published "My Life." Yes.

But will the 900-plus-page political memoir, due out June 22 with a first printing of 1.5 million, pull booksellers from the econo-doldrums with "Da Vinci Code"-like sales? Yes, they said, yes it will, yes.

"I have no earthly idea if this is a great book," Clinton told the throng, "but it's a pretty good story."

Since he's the first black president, is this the first full length books written in ebonics?

THE BAD GUYS WON: A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball With Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put On a New York Uniform, and Maybe the Best.
THE TICKET OUT: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw. Buy Me Some Peanuts and Crack. "New York baseball fans, and a great many fans nationwide, had fallen hard for Darryl before ever seeing him play,'' Michael Sokolove writes. ''They fell for the name and the hype and the hope of following a historic career. That's what sports fans do.'' I was one of them, and until he hung up his spikes a couple of years ago, Darryl Strawberry was my favorite player. It wasn't always easy. As exciting as it was to watch his moonshot home runs, it was that much more painful waiting for his next indiscretion -- spousal abuse, substance abuse, need I go on? Talent and temptation were the twin poles of his life, and the result was an antihero in the most literal sense of the word, a guy you wouldn't trade places with for a second -- except maybe in the batter's box. ''I never had a problem hitting,'' Strawberry told Sokolove in a rare moment of reflection. ''I had a problem living.''

The tragically flawed Strawberry -- whose drug problems followed him from the Mets to the Los Angeles Dodgers to the Yankees and eventually out of baseball -- is a central character in two very different books. ''The Bad Guys Won,'' by Jeff Pearlman, celebrates the all-conquering 1986 world champion Mets, of whom Strawberry was one of the brightest stars; ''The Ticket Out,'' by Sokolove, is a study of Strawberry's 1979 Crenshaw High School team, called perhaps the greatest schoolboy team ever by the noted baseball scout George Genovese."

Slave Memoirs To Be Republished, Associated Press. "The last time Jeffrey Brace saw his parents was in western Africa as he headed to the river for a swim with friends.

``My mother pressed me to her breast, and warned me of the dangers of the waters, for she knew no other,'' Brace recalled in his memoir.

His father placed his own formal cap on his son's head and told him, ``return before the setting of our great father the sun.'' Brace, 16, never returned home. The danger was not from the waters, but from English slave traders who came across the sea.

``Eleven out of fourteen were made captives, bound instantly,'' Brace later wrote. They ``were hurried to their boat, and within five minutes were on board, gagged, and carried down the stream like a sluice; fastened down in the boat with cramped jaws." On line archive.

Rosie O'Donnell to Start magazine for gays and their families.

"Pushkin and the Queen of Spades: Menace II Russian Society. ALICE RANDALL is a literary meddler. Her previous book, a best-selling remix called ''The Wind Done Gone,'' reframed Margaret Mitchell's classic novel from the point of view of Scarlett O'Hara's invented mulatto half sister. Many critics hated the book; Mitchell's estate sued, claiming that Randall had committed artistic piracy. (The estate lost.) None of that has stopped Randall from writing another novel that makes devious and gleeful use of literary history.

In ''Pushkin and the Queen of Spades,'' Randall uses the life and works of Alexander Pushkin to introduce us to Windsor Armstrong, a black, Harvard-educated professor of Afro-Russian literature at Vanderbilt. Windsor is unhinged by the news that her son, a professional football player named Pushkin X, plans to marry a Russian lap dancer named Tanya."

"Protecting Jackie Robinson. Writers of successful series novels do not lightly shrug off the harness. So you know it's a big deal when Robert B. Parker, who currently has three standing heroes on call, gives them all a pass to write a singular out-of-series novel like DOUBLE PLAY (Putnam, $24.95).

Parker pretty much defies category altogether in this deeply felt and intimately told memory tale, which takes place during the historic baseball season of 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the color bar in major-league baseball by playing first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Fusing this chapter of sports history with a hard-boiled gangster plot and haunting recollections of his own Boston boyhood, Parker fashions a hugely entertaining fiction that also serves as a blueprint for the themes that preoccupy him as a writer and the code of values that sustains his work."

Roots Recovered! the How to Guide for Tracing African-American and West Indian Roots Back to Africa. NEW BOOK SHOWS AFRICAN AMERICANS AND WEST INDIANS HOW TO TRAVEL TO AFRICA FOR FREE OR VERY CHEAPLY AND TRACE THEIR ROOTS TO SPECIFIC AFRICAN TRIBAL GROUPS USING INEXPENSIVE DNA TECHNOLOGY AND TRADITIONAL METHODS.

Thank God we had a Civil Rights Movement so that young black men could be free to focus on making porn mainstream.

"REDMAN PAIRS UP WITH ADULT FILM STAR: Rapper Gets Funky For 'Fish 'N' Grits' Magazine. As hip hop continues its erotic dance with adult entertainment, Fish 'N' Grits Magazine is setting the pace for the beat with its scintillating new presence in the marketplace. Capitalizing on this ever burgeoning niche market, publishers Joe "Fatal" and Camille Burgos are stepping up the game with the release of the second issue of their hybrid magazine."

VANGUARDE SELLS THE LAST OF ITS TITLES: Honey is purchased for about $650,000.

Quoting Rappers Out of Context: How Chevrolet Did Snoop Dogg
by John Schwade

A Chevrolet advertisement appearing on the inside back cover of the June 2003 issue of Essence magazine shows a 1960's model Chevrolet Impala fitted as a "low rider," tail lifted in "high-rider" mode. The Impala is in a parking space in front of a church. Worshippers are exiting the church, and three women, one black, one white, and one Asian seem to be admiring the Chevy.

Any critic of hip-hop can count on being accused of quoting the bad stuff out of context. Usually the criticism takes this form. "You always complain about that artist saying [select one] women are bitches / black people are niggas / white people are devils / Jews should be killed. But you never mention that artist saying [select one] he goes to church and loves the Lord / he loves Allah / he says we should take care of our children and teach them well so that when they grow up they will kill all the bitches, niggas, white devils, and Jews." Having endured such criticism often, I am properly sensitized to the injustice of quoting rappers out of context. Never again shall I quote a rapper out of context, or allow others to do so.

Thus, I was outraged when I found that Chevrolet had not just quoted Snoop Dogg out of context, but altered the poet's lyrics. The altered verse from which the advertiser extracted Snoop Dogg's lyrics was actually, "Another day, another dolla, for the top dogg with the gold flea colla." No where in Snoop Dogg's opus do the words Impala, Chevy, or Chevrolet appear. Of course, Snoop Dogg is a "playa," so surely got the compensation properly due for the right to alter his lyrics. I'm down with that.

Still, no amount of money could adequately compensate Snoop Dogg for the harm done to his image by quoting his lyrics out of context. Regarding the advertisement in its totality, it conveys the impression that the low-riding, Snoop-listening Chevy driver is a God-fearing person who attends church on Sunday morning and whose taste in 1960's cars has earned the admiration of the congregation. The advertiser might just as well have printed lyrics by the Beach Boys! If the advertiser who quoted Snoop Dogg out of context had only included the next word after "gold flea colla," they would not have distorted the image Snoop Dogg has worked so hard to cultivate.

"Nigga" is the next word in Snoop Dogg's opus "My Heat Goes Boom." For those unfamiliar with modern poetry, "heat" is a handgun, and "boom" is the sound it makes when you shoot "niggaz," "hoes," "bitches," and "snitches." It is not for selfish reasons, but for the common good that Snoop Dogg and his puppies:

try to rid the streets of creeps and freaks like you
For all y'all snitches and bitches
We gonna do the world a big favor
'cause niggaz like y'all be fuckin' up the gangsta flavor.

The poet gives fair warning to be "careful who you fuckin' wit, nigga," repeating ten times, "And my heat goes boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom." The title of the opus provides like warning. The poet subtly conveys the impression that one "fool" who did not heed his warning was ordered to "eat a dick, bitch," and led "upstairs to a room with 37 niggaz that was strapped up, hatin', waitin' on you, nigga. You the victim." Note the nuance. Snoop boasts of employing 37 niggaz to create a victim. Has any poet ever used a prime number (37 is divisible by only 37 and 1) so boldly in his or her work?

The Snoop Dogg lyrics parked alongside the Impala in a church parking lot, quoted out of context, do not portray the "gangsta flavor" of the artist. Indeed, those unfamiliar with the work of the poet could not imagine, upon reading the lyrics in the Chevy ad, the depth and breadth of the sesquipedalian Dogg's command of offensive language. Consider his creative use of the nouns "niggaz" (10 times),"nigga" (9)," "bitch(es)" (3), "shit" (3), and "hoe(s) (2)." But that's not all. Future generations of scholars will surely come to appreciate his creative use of verbs such as "fuckin'," as well as the adjectival "motherfuckin'." Surely, these are not the lyrics of the Beach Boys, or even the Beach Boyz, nor the lyrics associated with worshippers exiting a church admiring a car in their parking lot.