I’m dancing inside a Black music renaissance, as it is both pulsing in my eardrums and chest and new rhythms bouncing across the world.
I sit and write about this after I read again this archived retrospective and some backstory of the tv ad for the “drinking a Bud” quartet better known as Whassup?!? The timing is comical as a recent conversation at home went something like:
– What’s up, Dad?
– Did you say what’s up? Where did you learn that phrase?
– A book, of course.
What is notable in this 2021 MEL article is how Vinny Warren, a Irish-born, White (no, that isn’t redundant as there are some Irishmen and Irishwomen of color, FWIW) guy working at an advertising multinational corporation in Chicago, names how a bunch of his White coworkers — remember this was 1999, a different era of racial diversity, access, population sizes, growth, job interviews, benefits packages, etc. — were smitten by the short film’s portrayal of Black men’s fond, joyful camaraderie with a catchy verbal ditty that they repeated ad naseum. When I see the parentheses surrounding the word white, I read that as “White understood” like the (You) understood from elementary school grammar.
Fast forward a quarter century and I’m still noting how Black music and Black culture set the trends that others emulate, adopt, and certain pockets shamelessly appropriate.
And, I’ve imbibed that there’s no controlling what others will do with an idea, there are no givens nor guarantees that people will do the right thing of attributing or citing or acknowledging who and where they’ve learned choreography, lyrics, vernacular. Rather than attempting to limit and regulate how others speak and behave, another option is to continue to iterate and play with the endless sources of creativity that surround us in this multi-textured Earth.
What I’m listening to this season:
Gonna Love Me, by Teyana Taylor, remixed with Ghostface Killah
Two Worlds Apart, by Little Simz
Chief Don’t Run, by Jidenna
Shades of Blue, by Vic Mensa
Under the Magnolia Tree, by Pale Jay
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 