Anyway, here's the down 'n' dirty as I see it:

• Tonex. Nothing alternative about a brotha singing about Jesus.  Reaally long odds here.
• India.Arie. A weak remake of a Sade song?  This shouldn't win, but the know-nothings in the Academy are star-fuckers, and it may turn out that they were lazy and went with a recognizable name.
• Eric Roberson.  Gotta give it to him: This is one hard-workin' brotha.   He might be in contention simply because he didn't make it into the Male R&B category, in which the contenders look like Maxwell, Anthony Hamilton and Charlie Wilson.  But, at the end of the day, he's an R&B singer.  Hardly alternative.
• Robert Glasper & Bilal. I guess in the current environment of mostly whack commercial R&B, jazz looks alternative.  Another consolation nomination, as Glasper would be up against heavyweights in the various jazz categories such as Joe Zawinal, Chick Corea, John Pattucci and, I'm happy to say, Allen Toussaint.
• The Foreign Exchange.  This is who SHOULD win.  "Daykeeper" is refreshingly introspective.  It's a odd-metered gem that achieves a serious, yet understated headnod.  The album it's on Leave It All Behind, is somewhat hit or miss for my tastes, but this song is clearly the standout.

Anyway, guess we'll find out soon.

BTW, if you want a list of some real alternatives to tonight's nominees, check out these lists.

Additional link:

• Official site for The Grammy Awards

This was powerful for several reasons. 

• First, it provides a concrete—and in her case, personal—example of the narrow-mindedness that still has a strong hold in our community.  Don’t get me wrong: I’m not blaming her brother.  The issue is larger than him.  It’s about the narrow frame that set up around Black life, one that most people accept without question. 
• Secondly, something that we’ve known for a long time: That commercial hip hop is not giving people what they need musically, spiritually or emotionally.  I’d also add intellectually, but you get the idea.
• Finally, it underscores the reality that like rock, seeking treatment for mental health issues is seen as something that white people do.  We tend to say things like that like it’s some kind of badge of honor.  But it’s not.  If you need help, you gotta get it.  If you think about the staggering costs to productivity, as well as the negative impact on families as a whole, not just the person suffering, then you’ve got to seek treatment.  And another part of what needs to happen is that we need to talk about it.  The more we talk about it, then more we take this subject out of the shadows.  If we can normalize the use of the N-word, then we can certainly normalize the topic of mental health, which is so vital to our future.

Bravo to Josetta Adams for being brave enough to talk about this.  The fight continues.

Additional links:

• WNYC—Josetta Adams, “I’m not emo” (download transcript and MP3)

So, yes, I had to tune into the Republican convention to see what hymns and songbook they’d be singing from.  Not surprisingly, it was a night of negativity, the likes of which I don’t think I’d ever seen.  I mean, really: It’s one thing when–as was the case in 2004–it’s two white guys going at each other.  However, because there’s an African American in contention this year, the dynamics of race and class are working on multiple and, yes, nasty levels.

As one pundit on CNN put it, we’re back to the culture wars.  The Republicans want their constituents to believe that it’s the urban centers vs. the rural enclaves.  It’s a simplistic world view.  And by that I mean that we’ve really got to be comfortable dealing with more nuance.  The world is a highly complicated place and to continue looking backwards does none of us any good: Jobs will continue to flee overseas, we’ll still lag the world in science and math, and the environment will continue to be ravaged, and Bin Laden will continue to drop mixtapes.

Last night was disheartening.  I didn’t see Huckabee or Romney speak.  What I saw was Guiliani and Palin.  And instead of addressing real issues that impact us all–the economy, the war–both of these attack dogs spent their time onstage condescending, ridiculing and blatantly distorting Obama’s positions.  The mostly white crowd lapped it up.  By their whooping, jeering and cheering for attacks on Obama, community organizers and all who would get involved in the political process at a grassroots level, they made it clear that they embrace only represent an isolationist, backwards-looking approach to being a 21st century member of the world community.  I mean, here’s who the Republican party chose to represent them in a complex world: A "hockey mom" who seriously considered banning books, someone who believes that teaching abstinence is a good idea even in the face of her teenage daughter turning up pregnant (VivirLatino nicely points out the double standards here); who brings a "frontier mentality" from the third least populous state in the Union; and who just got her passport about a 1.5 years ago.  Is this the type of person we really need to be second in command of the United States?  Isn’t Bush a similar "rural champion"?

Now, I’m not trying to disrespect hockey moms or people who live in small towns.  More to the point of yesterday’s show: When 10,000 people jeer and catcall Obama without giving serious arguments that speak to the issues at hand, I feel an incredible level of venom and disrespect.  Not just for Obama and his family, but for me and mine.  In some ways, I felt like I was watching a Klan rally because I didn’t feel like there was anyone in that hall that would’ve been empathetic to me.  What we saw was the resistance that Obama faces daily made visible and real.  And if there’s such an outright rejection of Obama–who I believe represents the best of us as African Americans and as Americans– then what does that mean for how they see me?  What does that mean for the rest of us? 

Clearly, the Republicans are about maintaining the status quo.  Their vision for a 21st century America is not one that is inclusive.  Their harping on "experience," "patriotism," "average Americans" and the like are all distractions.  As Connie Schultz of the Cleveland Plain Dealer pointed out, it’s "all code for race."  So, it’s sad to say, but as I watched the audience at the RNC convention last night, all I saw was scary white people.

Do I think my candidate is above reproach?  Hardly.  But this election–no, this country–cannot and must not turn on who’s more patriotic, who’s got more homespun values.  It can’t be about "Country First", which sounds suspiciously reminiscent of the first line of Das Lied der Deutschen, the German national anthem that was propagandized by the Nazis: "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles/Über alles in der Welt" (Germany, Germany above everything,/Above everything in the world).  Why can’t the McCain-Palin return the honor, integrity and focus on the issues that Obama-Biden offered them?  While I expected Republican hypocrisy (Eisa Ulen writes about this here), it’s dispiriting to think that there’s even a remote possibility that the country will–and in some cases, gladly–endure a continuation of the past 8 years.

It’s got to be about the future, not the past.  About participating in the global community versus being an isolationist and a bully.  About real inclusion and diversity.  About creating an environment in which we can all respectfully disagree and not be personally ridiculed, have our positions reduced to the absurd and called "un-American" simply because we have a different point of view. 

One idea from hip hop that Republicans should take to heart: No bitchass-ness.

Related link (highly recommended):

• Jay Smooth on the Republican Hater’s Ball
• Jack & Jill Politics on Why GOP Attacks on Community Organizers Won’t Work

Here’s what else caught my attention:

. . .I am an African American young lady from the south side of Chicago . I grew up listening to Brandy, Aaliyah and TLC, so it was not like I was recording rock music! I was recording good music, with great beats, with good positive lyrics, my music is what all kids want to hear no matter where they live.

We have so much work to do, y’all.  Let’s keep this Black rock/afropunk thing moving forward so that young Black teenagers on the South Side of Chicago—and everywhere, for that matter—know that rock is Black music, too.

This is also cross-posted at MarketingPopCulture.com.

The fight is not only for creative freedom, but also for healing.  The problems that plague the African-American community are deep, to say the least.  And the responses need to be more nuanced.  Broad strokes won’t work anymore.  I wonder if anyone outside the Black community is listening?

Hat tip to The Couch Sessions for the heads-up.

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson wrote a searing op-ed piece this past Sunday in the New York Times wherein he connects the injustice in Jena, Louisiana, the prison system, and the Anucha Browne Sanders-Isiah Thomas case.  Citing the Browne Sanders-Thomas case, Patterson writes:

What is done with words is merely the verbal end of a continuum of
abuse that too often ends with beatings and spousal homicide. Black
relationships and families fail at high rates because women
increasingly refuse to put up with this abuse. The resulting absence of
fathers — some 70 percent of black babies are born to single mothers —
is undoubtedly a major cause of youth delinquency.

He goes on to say:

The circumstances that far too many African-Americans face — the lack
of paternal support and discipline; the requirement that single mothers
work regardless of the effect on their children’s care; the
hypocritical refusal of conservative politicians to put their money
where their mouths are on family values; the recourse by male youths to
gangs as parental substitutes; the ghetto-fabulous culture of the
streets; the lack of skills among black men for the jobs and pay they
want; the hypersegregation of blacks into impoverished inner-city
neighborhoods — all interact perversely with the prison system that
simply makes hardened criminals of nonviolent drug offenders and spits
out angry men who are unemployable, unreformable and unmarriageable,
closing the vicious circle.

Now, I’m not going to claim that Black rock can solve all of this.  But, it does have the ability to inspire us and to spark the imagination in new ways.  New imagination will be critical if we are to confront the demons–in the form of tired assumptions and accepted behaviors–that hold us back.

Patterson’s article is available here and it’s well worth the read.  Yet another reason that the fight must continue.

The appropriation of the song "Dixie," likely based on the childhood
reminiscences of Mother Ellen Snowden, and now the saddling of the
Afropunk milieu with the spurious slang term "blipster," meant to
cheapen the very real impact and velocity of overlapping progressive
black movements currently afoot, prove that there are no safe havens
for colored cultural producers, not even in alternative spaces. In
other words: a black artist has no utopias the dominant culture’s bound
to respect.

The Black rock movement is not just about creative freedom.  It’s about respect, which translates into the ability of such artists to sustain their creative output and, thus, their careers.  Kandia further writes:

Yet such interest, genuine or not, doesn’t alter the salient fact that
white audiences take umbrage at these kids’ presence in their midst
and, moreover, have not sustained any kind of aesthetic and commercial
acceptance of "black rock" acts since the long ago heyday of Jimi
Hendrix and Sly & the Family Stone — and (on a different scale)
Bad Brains and Living Colour in the 1980s.

No matter what anyone says, there’s still lots of work to be done.

Read the full article here.