Remixing the Black Power Mixtape

Remixing the Black Power Mixtape

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

When the Black Power Mixtape premiered at the Sundance Film Festival a year ago with co-producer Danny Glover in tow, it generated a lot of excitement, as much for the promise of bringing the Black Power era in conversation with the hip-hop aesthetic as it was some confirmation of the distance traveled from outhouses to White Houses.  Traveling the indie film route, few have had the chance to see the film, which recently debuted on public television as part of PBS’s long-running series, Independent Lens.

If Black Power could be thought of as a brand, there are few brands that have resonated as powerfully in American culture as it has.  More than a brand and perhaps even more than a movement, Black Power has symbolized the possibilities of Black self-determination in virtually every aspect of the Black experience, which explains why the term has become the lingua franca from everyone from 1960s freedom fighters to 21^stcentury rap artists reflecting on their personal wealth.  

Many have sought to distance the Black Power era from the Civil Rights Movement. Historian and Martin Luther King, Jr. speechwriter Vincent Harding reminds in the book Redefining Black Power: Reflections of the State of Black America (edited by Joanne Griffith), “one of the most important teachings of many of the black power practitioners was their insistence that we stand with the poor, that we identify with the poor and, of course, King, himself, was very clearly saw that.  That is why I don’t accept the “two camps” thing, because that is what he said explicitly.”

Beyond the “Sexy” the Black Power has come to represent in the popular imagination—the leather jackets, the berets, the guns—there were men and women who pushed back mightily against the status quo and the State in pursuit of broad-based social justice. The Black Power Mixtapevaliantly attempts to pay tribute to those people.

The film, directed by Goran Hugo Olsson, primarily consists of archival footage collected by Swedish television journalists between 1967 and 1975.  The footage is simply extraordinary; it highlights the incredible access that the journalists had to the movement, whether interviewing Stokely Carmichael in Stockholm, capturing the early morning song of Black children at the Black Panther Party breakfast program (“guns, pick up the guns, pick up the guns, put the pigs on the run.”) or sitting with legendary Harlem bookstore owner Lewis H. Michaux amidst his book collection, recalling Burgess Meredith in the classic Twilight Zone episode “Enough Time.” It is Michaux, who often hosted rallies in the front of his store featuring Malcolm X (el Hajj Malik el-Shabazz), who perhaps offers the important corrective to our understanding of Black Power arguing, “Black is beautiful, but black isn’t power; knowledge is power.”

Yet the value of that footage is continuously undermined by the inability of Olsson to provide enough context to the very images that prove so alluring to anyone who watches the film.  There’s a telling scene, for example, early in the film, when members of the Swedish press are interviewing Stokely Carmichael’s mother Mabel in Chicago; it’s a touching moment, one where Ms. Carmichael’s son is captured in an unguarded moment, far removed from the fiery figure that mainstream America knew him as.

Yet Carmichael, grabs the microphone to conduct the interview with his mother asking her critical questions about race in America, that the film crew was largely incapable of asking.  It’s a point that Angela Davis, who was on the FBI’s “most wanted list,” also makes even more dramatically in a prison interview, where she chides the interviewer for asking her to repudiate violence, without having a full understanding of the violence that had been historically directed at Black Americans.

In this regard, the film is perfectly suited for the Web 2.0 generation, who have become accustomed to being bombarded with unprecedented amounts of data without the benefit of historical or cultural context.  In that spirit the film features voice-overs by figures like Erykah Badu, Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson and Talib Kweli, that understandably aim to connect the film to younger audiences, but often at the expense of hearing more profound commentary from others such as historian Robin DG Kelley, Sonia Sanchez, Melvin Van Peebles, Angela Davis, Kenneth Gamble, and Harry Belafonte, who suggest in passing, that what really led to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder’s was the leader’s “tampering with the playground of the wealthy” when he linked the war in Vietnam to America military industrial complex.

That said, the commentary of Hip-Hop generation artist John Forte about the realities of incarceration is one of the most compelling segments of the film, particularly when framed against the 1971 uprising at Attica State Prison.  The Attica uprisings serve as a turning point in the Black Power Movement, seemingly marking the last strains of hope in the era, as the very forces that brutally silenced the voices at Attica, were doing the same to organizations like the Black Panther Party.  This turning point has the same effect on The Black Power Mixtape, as the final segments of the film from 1972-1975, capture  some of the aftermath of State repression—when the movement was no longer sexy and the evening news camera had long left the scene.

One of the figures who rose to national prominence in the aftermath of Attica was Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan, then the head of the Nation’s Temple # 7—formerly Malcolm X’s (el Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) home-base in Harlem.  Minister Farrakhan’s youthfulness is disarming, though his rhetoric and style portends the dramatic impact he would have on national politics a decade after the interview featured in the Black Power Mixtape appears.  As Robin DG Kelley notes, the interview is notable because it finds Minister Farrakhan remaking the role of the Nation of Islam—a year before Elijah Muhammad’s death—fully jettisoning the confrontational politics that his late mentor Malcolm X promoted, to embrace a politics Black Respectability, well before the rise of this generation of Black mega-preachers.

Olsson’s decision to linger longer on the aftermath of the Black Power era, redeems the film in some ways.  As the late Courtney Callender, one-time director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, laments “falling in love with black things for a  short period of time is racist,” perhaps anticipating how thoughtlessly, far too many engage Black culture in our own moment. 

When Erykah Badu’s implores African-Americans to tell their own story in the film’s final segment, The Black Power Mixtapecomes full circle.  Somewhere there’s a young, enterprising filmmaker, who will get access to this remarkable archive and in the spirit of her ancestors, do the necessary work of remixing The Black Power Mixtape.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press) and Professor of African & African-American Studies at Duke University. He is founder and managing editor of NewBlackMan and host of the weekly webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

Angela Davis | from 'The Black Power Mixtape'

Watch A Miscarriage of Justice or Conspiracy to Silence? on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

Trailer: 'Harlem Gang of Four'

The Harlem Gang of Four documentary is being created by Leah Natasha Thomas and will tell the story of 4 of America's most profound leaders - Congressman Charles Rangel, former Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton, former Mayor David Dinkins and former Secretary of State Basil Paterson.

Classic Material: Happy Birthday Angela Davis

Barry Callaghan Interviews Angela Davis in California Prison, 1970.

Book Review | The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World

Daring Then, Daring Now: The John Carlos Story

Book Review by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

Having studied the 1968 Olympic protest, having conducted an interview with Harry Edwards on the revolt of the black athlete, and being someone dedicated to understanding the interface between sports, race and struggles for justice, I was of course excited about the publication of John Carlos’ autobiography, The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment that Changed the World.  Written with Dave Zirin, the book provides an inspiring discussion of the 1968 Olympics without reducing the amazing life of John Carlos to the 1968 Olympics.  More than 1968 or the protests in Mexico City, it chronicles a life of resistance, of refusing to accept the injustices that encompass the African American experience.

John Carlos challenged American racism from an early age.  Readers learn of a young man who “went around Harlem handing out food and clothes like Robin Hood and his merry men in Technicolor” (p. 21).  Recognizing the level of poverty and injustice in Harlem, and refusing to stand idly by, a young Carlos would break into freight trains to steal food with the purpose of giving it to those who had been swallowed up by the system.

The experience of stealing groceries and good and giving the people something for nothing was positive.  Just doing this kind of so-called work opened up my mind and got me to notice what was going on around me.  I couldn’t turn my back when I saw evidence of discrimination in the community.  I captured it in my mind every time I saw anyone in my neighborhood mistreated by the police (p. 27).

These experiences, like his having to give up on the dream of becoming an Olympic swimmer as a result of societal racism, not only politicized Carlos, but also instilled in him a passion and commitment to help others reach their dreams.  It taught about the power and necessity of imagining and fighting for “freedom dreams.”

The John Carlos Story chronicles the ways he has lived a life guided by the philosophy articulated by Fredrick Douglas that “power concedes nothing without demand.”  From his organizing a strike at his high school against “the nasty slop they called ‘food’” (p. 33) to his insistence that the manager at the housing protects where he lived address the problem of caterpillars in the courtyard, John Carlos demanded accountability and justice long before 1968. 

His book illustrates the level of courage he has shown throughout his life.  When the manager refused to address the caterpillar problem, which prevented his mother from joining others in the courtyard because of allergic reactions, Carlos once again lived by the creed: power concedes nothing without demand.  John Carlos has lived a life of demanding justice and in the face of refusal demanding yet again.  He describes his response in this case as follows: 

Then I took the cap off the can and doused the first tree in front of me with gasoline.  Then I reached for a box of long, thick wooden matches.  After that first tree was soaked, I struck one of the stick matches against my zipper and threw it at the tree and watched.  It was a sought: the fire just as that tree like it was a newspaper and turned it into a fireball of fried caterpillars  (p. 41).

The compelling life that Carlos and Zirin document extends beyond his youth further reveals a life dedicated to justice.  His refusal to accept the racism and the mistreatment experienced while living in Texas encapsulates how America’s racism and systematic efforts to deny both the humanity and citizenship of African Americans compelled Carlos’ activism as a young man and ultimately as an Olympian.

The protest at the 1968 Olympics should not be a surprise given the racial violence experienced by Carlos and his brothers and sisters throughout United States (and the world at large).  His involvement was in many ways an organic outgrowth of his life:

I remember the moment when I was locked in on the medial stand protest and I knew in my gut that it wasn’t just about 1968.  It wasn’t just about Vietnam, Dr. King’s assassination, the murders of the Mexican students, or the media tag about some Age of Aquarius ‘Revolts of the Black Athlete.’  It was about everything that led up to 1968.  It was about the stories my father told me about fighting in the First World War.  It was about the terrible things he was asked to do for a freedom he was denied when he returned home.

              

It was about him being told where he could live, where his kids could go to school, and how low the ceiling would be on his very life.  I thought about how long ago the First World War seemed to me.  It felt, on the other hand, like a time and place beyond my understanding.  But on the other, I thought about how similar things were in 1968 compared to those long ago days.  I thought about a world where I was encouraged to run but not to speak (p. 111)

The power and beauty of the book rests with its efforts to contextualize or explain who John Carlos is rather than simply chronicle what he did in 1968.  John Carlos is not an athlete who protested at the 1968 Olympics, but a man, an activist, a freedom fighter who challenged racism and equality throughout his life.  The Olympics was one stop in his journey to “Let America be America again.”

Yet the power of the book extends beyond telling his life’s story but with its efforts to challenge the ways that the 1968 Olympic protest is used in contemporary media discourse.  So often used to demonize contemporary athletes or to reflect on the purported conflicts that plagued Carlos and the other participants, The John Carlos Story pushes back against the continued exploitation of this history to advance contemporary arguments.  It challenges the sensationalism that has become commonplace within our historic memory.  For example, while much of the historiography juxtaposes Smith and Carlos with George Foreman, who at the Mexico City games carried an American flag in the ring, The John Carlos Story takes a different tone, focusing instead on the shared experiences (and Foreman helping him during a time of need), elucidating the ways in which their constructed identities as good and bad black athletes are used to control, silence, and stifle protest.

The power of the book is made clear in the afterword, where Dave Zirin brilliantly celebrates John Carlos in relationship to the courage and fighting spirit of today’s athletes:

As a new generation of athletes and activists raise its fist, they can rest in the confidence that it’s been done before, John Carlos dared and continues to dare to more than just a brand.  He has dared to live by a set of principles of great personal and professional costs.  It’s a standard we should all aspire toward . . . if we dare(p. 184)

Carlos continues to dare and inspire athletes and activists alike, traversing the country with Dave Zirin, often joining the Occupy movements in various cities.  This is fitting since the struggle for justice and equality didn’t begin or end in 1968 for John Carlos.  The fight continues.

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.

Watch the Throne: A Meditation on Black Power

Watch the Throne: A Meditation on Black Power

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

“Power to the people | when you see me, see you”—Jay Z, “Murder to Excellence”

Arguably, two artists in the prime of the careers, have never decided to come together in the ways that Shawn Carter and Kanye West do on their new recording Watch the Throne.  When Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross paired for 1974’s Diana and Marvin, Ms. Ross was hoping to revive a solo career that had stalled.  The same could be said when Aerosmith, signed on to a one-track deal with Run-DMC on “Walk This Way” (Raising Hell, 1986). Michael Jackson was just hoping for the validation of Rock critics with their unwavering devotion to the White Rock god, when Mick Jagger shared lead vocals with him on The Jackson’s “State of Shock” (1984) in what was likely just another payday for “Jagger the Dagger.” 

The pairing between Carter and West, begs the question, what’s in it for each?  When Bobby “Blue” Bland and B.B. King paired for two live albums in the mid-1970s, it was clear that the two had genuine affection for each other after years of sharing top-billing on the Chitlin’ Circuit.  In contrast, Carter and R. Kelly seemed to barely like each other through two recordings and an aborted tour.  The disconnect was borne out in the music, which was often recorded in separate studios over tracks that neither artist had any real relationship with, let alone each with other; Best of Both Worlds (2002) and Unfinished Business (2004) were pure calculated and cynical money grabs. 

And indeed when word of Watch the Throne began to surface, it was audiences and fans that reacted with cynicism, despite that fact that Carter and West have often expressed real affection and respect for each other—the big brother and the petulant little brother—and have generally produced memorable tracks when they have collaborated such as “Diamonds From Sierra Leone” (2005), “Never Let Me Down,” (2003), “Run this Town” (2009), last year’s “Monster,” and of course West’s production on The Dynasty Roc la Familia (2000), The Blueprint (2001), The Blueprint 2 (2002) and The Black Album (2003). 

Such cynicism was likely the product of collective fears that Carter and West’s pairing would not only not produce great art, but would confirm their unwillingness—or more scarily—their inability to say anything of consequence at a moment when many desire their artists to—in the words of Bill Clinton—at “feel their pain.”  This was part of Chuck D’s point when he too invoked the spirit of Otis Redding (as Carter and West did on the leaked single “Otis”) to challenge Carter and West to pay more attention to the music’s “heart, rather than swag,” even as he co-signed the duo’s talents and influence.

Yet part of what possibly made Watch the Throne attractive for Carter and West is the fact that they are all too aware of their disconnect from the working-class worlds that produced them—and the unique and isolated positions that each holds at the pinnacle of their craft and celebrity, and the relative power associated with those positions.  Their ambivalence is evidenced in the oh-so casual way that the recording was rolled out, minus the usual shock and awe that one would expect from artists of their stature.  As such Watch the Throne serves as a meditation on Black Power; not in the sense of the social movement that challenged America in the 1960s and beyond, to live up to its radical democratic tenets, but rather in the will of so many generations of Black folk to imagine the highest quality of life for themselves.

In his now classic essay “Homeboy Cosmopolitanism,” Malian film scholar Manthia Diawara says of this impulse towards individual success, that the “search for the good life is not only in keeping with the nationalist struggle for citizenship and belonging, but also reveals the need to go beyond such struggles and celebrate the redemption of the black individual through tradition.” What has always made hip-hop matter to the masses, even in the days of “party and bullshit,”—which if we’re honest, have always significantly outnumbered the moments of political militancy—is its ability to be aspirational. 

This is a point that branding expert Steve Stoute argues in his forthcoming book The Tanning of America: How Hip-Hop Created a Culture that Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy, where he writes that the “force of aspiration,” is the “power that turns nothing into something, that creates worlds and paves destinies, and changes the have-nots into the have-somes and occasionally have-it-alls.”  In a country marked by rich immigrant cultures, Black Americans may represent the most aspirational of peoples—willing themselves off of plantations and into some semblance of a (still unrealized?) full citizenship—long before Shawn Carter and Kanye West ever picked up a mic. Black aspiration is Black Power,  dating to the time, per the late poet Sekou Sundiata, some “slave” dreamed in her head, a freedom that she would never fully experience.

Yet even this long tradition of aspirational power, falls flat at a moment when there exist and unprecedented wealth gap between the poor and the so-called super-rich and the United States faces a double-dip recession, that Black America could have predicted—and indeed  that well-known economist Young Jeezy did four years ago.   To be sure this is not the first recession that Black America has bore the brunt of, yet it might be the first in which Black artists are burdened with an expectation to speak to its palpable presence in the lives of their fans and supporters.

In the midst of a recession in the mid-1970s, when New York City was on the brink of defaulting on its loans and then President Gerald Ford threatened to veto any legislation aimed at bailing out the municipality, William DeVaughn could wistfully sing about the “diamond in the back/sun-roof top/digging the scene with the gangster lean,” on his aspirational classic “Be Thankful for What You Got.” The song was as  much a cautionary tale about the trappings of materialism (as Black flight was becoming a reality), as it was a reminder that the culture already embodied a sense of wealth where a gangsta-lean—yet another precursor to ghetto fabulousness—was a hard earned commodity, as valuable as the pimp car rolling down the avenue.

Hip-Hop’s genius move from outset  was to make the trinkets of everyday life the stuff of hyper-consumption—a story at least as old as Pig Feet Mary selling chitlins’, hog maws, and of course pig feet out of a baby carriage in Harlem in the early 20^th century, later becoming a real estate tycoon or White folk dragging the Fisk Jubilee Singers around the globe for a taste of those good old Negro spirituals in the late 19^th century, or Henry Box Brown recreating his escape act for European audiences years before the Emancipation Proclamation—I mean, I could go on.

Perhaps no commodity was as valuable to hip-hop as the conceit, the lyrical boast, itself intimately related to the traditions of Black expressive culture whether visualized by the Dandy on Chicago’s Stroll in the 1920s or Nikki Giovanni’s 1969 poem “Ego Tripping” (“I sat on the throne | drinking nectar with Allah | I got hot and sent an ice age to Europe to cool my thirst | My oldest daughter is Nefertiti | the tears from my birth pains | created the Nile | I am a beautiful woman”).  When Biggie opined “fuck a dollar and a dream,”—putting into to context the way that hood-controlled numbers running (s/o to Casper Holstein) had been appropriated by the State (with a capital S)—he did so knowing that he was of a generation of young Blacks who were part of a commercial culture that no longer simply had to dream.

There’s no denying that the music changed; the conceits that were once simply metaphors—yes, the dream of Black Power—are now quantifiable assets.  What’s a rich rapper to do?  Who is there to talk to (especially one who looks like you) when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are no longer in the room?  Watch the Throne is compelling because it allows us to eavesdrop on what a particular segment of the Black elite thinks.  The trafficking in the toys of the Hip-Hop elite is a given—count the references to Maybachs, but, also Basquiat—and no doubt the gratuitous flaunting of Carter and West’s possessions and status is downright offensive, particularly in this moment—but significantly less so than a “political industrial complex” that funnels billions of dollars into a political process that only 1% of the population that controls 90% of the nation’s wealth benefits from. Give Hip-hop credit; It has built its wealth well beyond and despite of the forces of the State.

Equally important as you listen to Carter and West throughout Watch the Throne is the recognition that this is not your parents’ Black elite; Carter, West and a host of other Hip-Hop generation Black elites were not products of blue vein enclaves, summers at Oak Bluffs, Jack & Jill programs, and Boule meetings. This is a point that Bakari Kitwana makes in his essay “Zen and the Art of Transcending the Status Quo: The  Reach from the Hood to the Suburbs” (Jay Z: Essays on Hip-Hop’s Philosopher King ed. Julius Bailey), where he notes, “Jay Z is making sexy the notion of elite class blacks who identify more with the black masses,” adding that Carter is a “bridge between the black poor and black elite in way that current activists in the tradition of Malcolm X can never realize.” 

As two of the most accomplished trickster figures—shape-shifters—working in contemporary culture, Carter and West’s seeming thoughtless celebration of their wealth and status, must also be read as potentially signifying on the very elite culture(s) that still deny them full access.  As with the controversial “Monster” video and the self portraits of Carter and West that accompany Watch the Throne’s digital booklet, the duo are all too aware—West in particular—of how they are perceived within mainstream American culture; they are still relatively young Black men whose success—if not their aspiration—is framed by the realities of race. 

Carter and West are also not wholly oblivious to the kinds criticism that their work might generate in terms of gender; Carter has often gone to great lengths to explain his discursive deployment of the term “bitch,” much the way O’Shea Jackson (Ice Cube) did nearly twenty years ago, notably in a rather stunning critical exchange with bell hooks—an exchange Carter arguably replayed eight years ago with journalist Elizabeth Mendez Berry. When West appropriates Big Pun’s line from “It’s So Hard” in his verse on “It’s My Bitch,” (“I paid for them titties | get your own”), with the song’s late 1980s throwback rhythm track (replete with Charlie Wilson vocals and a nod the PE’s “Brothers Gonna Work It Out”), and given the now well known violence that the late Christopher Rios visited upon the body and spirit of his wife, perhaps the expectation is that audiences will read such a song as a commentary on how far hip-hop’s gender politics have progressed in some quarters.

In a rather persuasive reading of Watch the Throne, critic Hua Hsu argues that the recording “captures two artists who no longer need dreams; art cannot possibly prophesy a better future for either of them.” Yet, I would argue that Watch the Throne is, at it best, mostly about the dreams of Carter and West’s fans, supporters and even detractors—and their collective wills to live the best lives possible for themselves and their families.