the world is too hot

the mountain is too high

the president is too black

the system has not changed

the beginning is too near

the song is too loud

the voices are too low

the pain is old

rivers are too deep

the children grow too fast

the past is too close

the present is too far

mouths will not open

legs will not walk

prisons are too full

lungs are too shallow

days are shorter

the truth is arms are not wings

heaven is to high

trust is to meaningful

money owns flesh

fear fuels actions

waking up means knowing

knowing means seeing

the book is too long

the struggle is inside

the war is somewhere else

the beat is too fast

the hand is too close

men are too quiet

the prayers are too selfish

big is better

yours is not mine

crying is too weak

mothers are too lonely

his is not hers

pain is winning

winning is controlling

what was above

is now below

Years Ago a Friend of Mine…

            I can recall growing up in Memphis in the eighties.  There were drug families, not gangs or a number of cliques who professed colors and territories that they didn’t own as their own.  There was a moment when the Vice Lords and Gangsta Disciples pitch forked and starred their way into town, but those didn’t really take root in Memphis as much as they did in places like Chicago, Detroit and other Midwestern cities.  I saw the film “Colors” and although we attempted to mimic the words and actions that were thrown at us from L.A. those things didn’t become Velcro attachments to our conscience.  We had drug families.

            To relay the names of the Families is not the issue.  Why did we have drug ‘families’ and individual hustlers selling crack and weed on South and North Memphis streets?

            The obvious answer would be, the country was in a recession.  Reagan was in the process of creating his Star Wars project, and unemployment was high. Artistically though, Hollywood had rediscovered the gangster.

            The most celebrated image in mainstream America is that of the Italian mobster.  This is evidenced in a show like the “Sopranos” and numerous Hollywood movies starring ‘A’ list talent such as DeNiro and Pacino.  We have a fascination with the thug that began with Cagney, and movies like “Little Ceasar”.  This continues with films such as “Casino” and “Goodfellas” which continue to be held in high esteem by the Academy. America has taken this image and molded it into a profitable medium.  In the seventies and throughout the eighties a number of these gangsta flicks became cult classics to tons of disillusioned Black males.  This created an affinity in the Black community towards the ideals of, live fast and hard, die faster.  In an economy where Blacks struggled to become employed these movies became a form of escapism.

            However, this image of the Hollywood gangsta does not create fear in mainstream America.  Although the crimes committed in these films are just as brutal, or more brutal than any horror film, the image of the macho, business suit killer is not the image America associates with its idea of crime.  Hence, American Psycho is developed into a film but Americans are not afraid of White men in expensive suits who kill over someone having a better business card.  It is the African-American Hip-Hop child, headphones, baggy jeans, jersey with hat or bandana, who receives the brunt of the media’s scrutiny.  What does this have to do with me growing up in Memphis in the eighties and not seeing ‘gangs’, but drug families?

Well, as a child of the Hip-Hop era I know the perception of this culture has been poorly depicted. Unfortunately the major corruption of the Hip-Hop aesthetic has been at the hands of Black entertainers manipulating the masses in the name of capitalism.

I could say that the Black teenager emulates that which is held in high esteem.  However, that would be an obvious lie.  Because it is not only the youth who carry the demeanor of the misguided rap hero, there are adults who follow suit. I have sat and listened to many Black men speak of conquest in the same manner as Too Short in his song “Freaky Tales”.  The grandiose, overblown, stories of sexual accomplishments in rap, probably true, probably not, have always existed in Black music.  Hip-Hop/Rap though has taken a more misogynistic role in establishing bragging rights.  Not to appear righteous, I myself engaged in the pimp/player attitude conveyed in these songs, but many of my stories were made up to fit in with my ‘boys’.  This is all off the subject.

Black people have always wanted what White America has:  White picket fence, white skin, straight hair, 2.5 kids, luxury vehicle in the driveway and the means to go any place without being an outcast.  In the Black community how does one come into these things?  How does a person gain access to a corporate job, pension, and benefits?  Education and patience is the key of course, allow me to go off course again.

            We, my mother, sister and I, lived in apartments until I left Memphis and joined the military.  Every apartment we lived in had one bedroom until, (which my sister and I shared a room and my mother slept on the couch), I reached the sixth grade and my mother was moved from a temporary job into a permanent position.  The neighborhoods I lived in were considered the worst in the city, yet I was unaware of these things when I was growing up.  Sirens were so routine that even now I still can’t recall hearing them in a very clear way.  I guess I blocked those things out as a child and continued playing 1,2,3 Red Light, Hide and Seek, Catch a Girl Get a Girl, whatever game we played until the street lights came on.  I never realized the danger of my neighborhoods until I drove back through them as a man with a family and the desperation in the eyes of those sitting on those same porches I sat on as a child, looked through my windshield.  As I said, we lived in one bedroom apartments, this was all we could afford, just like most Black single parent households and two parent households.  My mother told my wife a story about one apartment we stayed in where the bottom of the door was so high, rats used to try to crawl under it.  They would get stuck and the rats would freeze to death.

            I feel that I am rambling here.  Why is it that we had drug families is the issue.  In an effort to attain things, without having to wait until you were 50 years old or too old to enjoy them, we sold drugs.  Crack and any number of random drugs were dropped into the neighborhood, and we sold these things as quickly as possible, became lookouts, and stole cars to drive different paraphernalia across towns and states.  We did any and everything to get that money.  The way everyone saw it, and I include myself in this because in an absurd way I reinforced this lifestyle, if we didn’t get the dough somebody else was eager to ease the suffering of family and friends.

            So, why not gangs in Memphis in the eighties?  (This has changed since).  The media creates the hero.  Who didn’t sit around to see what was in Al Capone’s vault?  The images flashed across the screen in households in the eighties were that of the gangster.  Even the coolest cops on TV dressed like the gangsters.  I remember the NBC Friday night lineup:  Miami Vice and Crime Story.  The two biggest shows on TV presented guns and drugs as the backdrop to America.  The fact that people died while attempting to deal drugs or commit crimes, was presented heroically: theme music, slow-motion shots and no blood.  It didn’t hurt to get shot and I’ll be damned if the person didn’t show up in the next episode as a different person.  What I’m stating is that for Blacks who could not get jobs which would allow them to gain the trappings of the wealthy Whites seen on TV, and in society, drugs seemed a viable option because the laws were not as firm initially.  And for the drug family, the younger brother and sister as transporter and dealer offered a built – in ‘get out of jail free’ card.  Juveniles did not get prosecuted as harshly, the adults reaped all of the benefits and the child suffered all of the consequences.

            The boom of crack in the eighties and the expansion of the prison system created a phenomenon ten times as serious as Jim Crow was.  There has been a reintroduction to slavery in America that will only end in the destruction of this nation.  As David Matlin details in VernooyKill Creek, “African-Americans are condemned at a rate more than seven times that of whites…One out of three young Black men are now under criminal justice supervision…Conviction for drug offenses accounts for 46 percent of the increase in sentencing since 1980.”

            With the Black drug family set-up the way it was the outcome when those drug families fell consisted of hundreds of thousands of teenage boys, being removed from society.  Young Black men who should have been playing high school football, studying physics in school clubs or running for student body positions, instead were used to push drugs in the community.  During the crucial teenage years, these kids were taught to hustle.  They were taught that a man is only a man when he has a fat knot of dead presidents in his pocket.  The value system became skewed.

it has stood here for a million years

with bones believing in only rain

it washes us singing sound into our

measures

it merged us let us pray

when tears came down new faces

it evolved insisted we live met us

on the other side then let us breathe

it was a middle song for a middle

passenger visceral rhythm speaking

lowly into the nap of the sunset

it was here under this sky believers

met mountains for the first time

it was that day far across waters

we pretended to die collapsing into

the other side where crossing over

became crossing paths

it was believers of true crafts work

etched into sage on hillsides

it was harmony in our fore-shadows

carving clay from the sum of us

it was palm wine on lips

white candles lined up like history

images of kneeling elders

pressed deep in accra

its home we die for dissolving into

the under culture

bennie herron 2011

Blacks long to have a leader at the forefront.  This possibly stems from the African edict of honoring the elder member of the family.  Maybe it is a carry over from Whites selecting the person they chose to work with in slavery, and in dealing with Blacks during the post Civil War era and still today.  Then again it may be the nature of Black folks to be docile in any arena outside of entertainment and athletics, therefore we require a leader.

Whatever the case, Blacks have been searching for the next Dr. King for the last thirty plus years.  This search for leadership has left us in a declining situation that has been deteriorating since the advent of multiculturalism.  We now have a society content with inept leadership and a lack of respect for the foundation of the Black family, women.  The leaders Black people find themselves with are effective mouthpieces and ineffective placeholders.

            If you ask a young brother or sister if there are any problems with society the rhetoric is disturbing. All answers deal with police brutality, the blanket coverall, racism or they say that there isn’t anything wrong.  Why are our kids so unaware of the issues affecting them?  Why are we adults of the Hip-Hop generation unable to create a discourse that teaches the Next Movement about the past?  Why are we not accessing information and learning more?  The fault of the Hip-Hop generation is that we have yet to create a legacy that extends beyond the amount of capital we have created in this country.  But this is not the only issue which currently affects African-Americans of the Hip-Hop society and beyond.

The advent of multicultural ideals or rather the fault of multiculturalism, is that the Black child/teen/adult has never been taught who they are in mainstream America.  This is more important now because the identity of Blacks is based upon the culture of Hip-Hop, which is flawed due to a focus on the negative aspects of the culture by the greater society.

As Blacks accept the melting pot theory they fail to gain any insight into the history of struggle for African-Americans.  The African-American struggle has become unimportant to the African-American.  The public education system teaches the Underground Railroad and the Montgomery Bus Boycott as Black history.  The accomplishments of Blacks are thought to be nil because they are easily ignored.  What is taught to Black youths and Black America is that they should forget about the past to blend into society.  To dwell on history is to bring up those things uncomfortable to this nation.

In Black America there has always been one person in our culture who has been the ‘flag bearer’.  In any situation the success of a people has always come in the movement of the masses, the failure is found in the lack of movement: political and social.  The struggles of the Civil Rights movement spawned, The Last Poets, the Black Panther Party, and a desire to reaffirm a connection to African roots. Another movement should have been taking place in the eighties, but due to Reaganomics and the introduction of crack during this time we were sidetracked.  Hip-Hop did attempt to begin a new movement.  Many will argue that the music was not created to be a political machine.  However, any artform born from struggle is inherently social and political.  There was an initial surge in socio-political thought in early Hip-Hop with songs like “White Horse” and in the late eighties conscious, pro-Black symbols like Africa medallions.  These things have taken a back seat to the financial properties that now dominate the culture.

The goal of this writing is to deliver thoughts of Hip-Hop intellectualism.  The writing is not centered solely on the culture of Hip-Hop.  I am a product of the culture; therefore my words derive from influences ‘considered’ outside of the norm.  The Hip-Hop foundation, individual and improvisational (freestyle) thought, is my norm and influences my interpretation of Blackness.

To further reinforce the ideology of the Hip-Hop intellectual, the essays presented will use a form of sampling.  The support, or reinforcement of ideas presented, will be drawn from a number of mediums often ignored as methods of research.  To be more specific, art(movies) will be used as sociological tools to establish that Black culture has a center that has to be rediscovered and returned to.  Poets will be featured to show the connection to the griot, oral tradition, which created the literary foundation for Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Robert Hayden.  Essays will delve into the problems of Hip-Hop.  The guest appearance will enhance the album, instead of being used as filler or to hide a lack of talent.

The purpose: To deliver information with the same intent as Grandmaster Flash’s sociopolitical themes, to reaffirm our African roots in the same manner as X-Clan, and to reinforce the conscious ideals of Black Star. Although the ever present ‘bling, bling’, lifestyle of the mainstream’s ideal of Hip-Hop is over run with morons, Hip-Hop intellectualism is not an oxymoron.  This is the ‘Next movement’ ala: Donny Hathaway influencing The Roots.  This is my soapbox, lyric-paddle for the near flat-lined consciousness of Hip-Hop.

Prelude and Track 1

P.S. I may not publish all of the work, but this is just to create a discussion.

Liner Notes

I am not professing to be the savior of Hip Hop by creating this book.  My goal is to discuss several problems that have created a dysfunctional, inactive generation.  The Jim Crow problems, intergenerational conflicts and Black on Black problems that have existed in the African-American community have begun to trickle down into the Hip-Hop generation. These problems will undoubtedly have lasting effects on the Hip-Hop culture, but the people who identify with Hip-Hop find themselves, if they acknowledge it, in a troubling position. I believe those people who are conscious of the possibilities of the genre agree that our generation has fallen way short of creating a meaningful movement.

     The situations affecting the Hip-Hop generation are pretty basic albeit serious as hell:  Promiscuity, illiteracy, lack of a sense of self and a failure to understand our importance in society.  How will this book address these issues?  Through a careful analysis of the culture as it relates to education and social issues, we will attempt to introduce several ideas and enough historical and contemporary references to show how our generation can begin to develop a movement, an individual movement that could have positive results for the culture.  Now these references may not be related to Hip-Hop in a direct way, but we feel that we are of the culture and anything we write or create is Hip-Hop.

The insertion of the word individual may be bothersome for some people.  For Hip-Hop to get right, self examination has to occur.  We have to look at the way we represent ourselves and the way we learn and share to begin to change any part of the greater society.  Deus ex machina doesn’t exist for the Hip Hop generation.  There isn’t a god that will drop down, summarize and clear up the problems of our generation.  The problem of Hip-Hop is the problem of individuals: capitalists willing to manipulate the masses to get paid are thoughtless people willing to pass poison through one bottle of water to ten people stranded in the desert.  The problem of Hip-Hop begins and ends with the individual.

Prelude – Track 1

This is the slow music that fades in right before the bass drops.  This is that brief moment when the music is so good you want it to continue but it stops…

     There are sections in this album that will feel the same way, but my intent is to stimulate not solve in some instances.  Fade

Do you believe a college education should be a privilege to those who can afford it or be a shared societal responsibility to support anyone who wants to earn a college degree?

There were many intriguing responses, but none more than the following:

I do agree that if more people had degrees, the likelihood of crime might decrease, but the reality is our economy needs the crime. I know it sounds weird, but crime creates jobs. Crime creates prisons. Families of prison members are more than likely going to move to surrounding towns and cities where the prison is located, in turn spending money in those particular towns and cities. Granted no one wants crime around them, but it’s a harsh reality of the world. So, let’s say society pitched in and everyone (or a huge majority of the country) got a college education. What happens to minimum paid jobs and the businesses who have minimum paid workers? They disappear causing the business to collapse. McDonalds, for example, would quickly go under, as would most fast food restaurants and other minimum wage paying jobs. Our economy needs the people who don’t have degrees and are willing to work for a lower salary.

This student indicated in her first sentence that earning a college degree will decrease crime, but she contradicted her statement by saying “our economy needs crime…crime creates jobs”.

The inference I derived from my student’s statement would be that crime is more beneficial to our society than pursuing a college degree because the risks of crime outweigh its benefits.

I could probably tell my student that the differences in average education amongst certain ethnic groups can explain as much as a 23% gap in incarceration between those specific groups. I too could tell my student that education significantly reduces the probability of incarceration. Should I tell my student that earning a college degree doubles a person’s earnings in his or her lifetime? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Workers 18 and over sporting bachelors degrees earn an average of $51,206 a year, while those with a high school diploma earn $27,915. But wait, there’s more. Workers with an advanced degree make an average of $74,602, and those without a high school diploma average $18,734.

I could share this with my student, but does it get to the core of discussing whether earning a college is a societal privilege or human right.

It is said that education positively impacts a society’s standard of living; and yet there is a widening in our country for people within certain socioeconomic groups that will earn a college degree as opposed to those that will not. Current educational and economic policies have contributed to this widening; and it is evident that more people will be delayed in pursuing a college degree because institutions are significantly slashing enrollment and state and local governments are cutting monies in the form of grants and waivers. Earning a college degree in the United States is becoming less of an option to improve one’s standard of living. The societal implications could lead to higher rates of unemployment, crime, homelessness, intolerance, and etcetera. If education is becoming more of a privilege, then do we compromise our Nation’s resolve of liberty and justice for all? In fact, the United Nations enacted the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966) in which Article 13, section 2(c) states:

Higher education shall be made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education.

Higher education has been deemed a social right by the international community because it promotes an understanding towards the needs of others and it builds a collective community; however, a college education is becoming more expensive and exclusive. Higher education is a great equalizer to economic, social, and cultural dissension for the communities being served resulting in the acknowledgement that earning a college degree is nothing short of a shared societal responsibility in which we all reap the benefits. One significant benefit would be that there will be more people enrolled in the institution of higher education as opposed to the institution of corrections.

bend metal
act steel
be still

trust only
your legs
use them

stand firm
breath deep
walk free

exist inward
cross waters
restructure
disembody
reassemble

organize
disengage

insist
be birth
engender
unearth

dissolve

deliver

let go
go back

divide
detour
impress
impeach
then
be

Pick up Stages today! Also available on Kindle

Yes and no. It is unfortunate that in other for a new era of writers to begin creating, they have to tear down the preceding authors. What is interesting is that it seems this occurs in every generation of Blacks in writing and also in life. Instead of the new generation of writers admiring and recognizing the importance of the previous era it seems that in order to be accepted by the mainstream, the Black writer has to diminish the importance of writers before them.

What do I mean by this? Richard Wright is often accepted as the major writer of this period. In multiple essays by Wright he states that many of the works created by writers of the Harlem Renaissance lacked realism. Wright’s greatest works, however, lacked realism. Richard Wright could be considered the first person to take the caricature of Black men and reinforce through a repetitious refrain of lost, angry and dangerous male characters the stock idea that Black men are simply emotional creatures who only know how to react with no ability to process their thoughts in a way that established that they could put 1 and 1 together to form 2. In a sense, Richard Wright often devolved the character of the Black male into what White’s perceived Black men to be. Consider his own biography Black Boy, and his most famous novel: Native Son, or even one of his most anthologized short stories, Almos A Man and you get the same character over, and over again. Well not exactly original… His image of the Black male is a direct descendent of Sykes, Zora Neale Hurston’s antagonist in Sweat: A brute who lacks the mental capacity to make decisions based in logic.

How has this discussion of the 40s to 60s gotten stuck on Richard Wright? Well, it’s simple Wrigh’ts art so thoroughly dominates the discussion of this era that Bigger Thomas becomes the character that is primarily identified with the 40s to the 60s. Lorraine Hansberry’s Walter Younger, was created here, Baldwin’s protagonist in Go Tell It On The Mountain was created here and Ralph Ellison’s unnamed narrator of Invisible Man was created here, but all of these very complex, thoughtfully crafted characters are all overshadowed by the menacing presence of Bigger Thomas.

*Instead of continuing and expressing why I feel that Richard Wright lacked realism, I would like to initiate the conversation by posing this question which was raised in the text: How can Lutie, from the Street, be considered, the anti-Bigger? Can Ann Petry and Lorraine Hansberry be considered the foremothers of the novels written by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker in the 70s and 80s? If so why? Final question: If life imitates art was Richard Wright’s creation of Bigger Thomas a gateway drug that generated the current stereotypes and actual actions of Black men today or has Bigger Thomas become a fulfilled prophecy?