Featured Blog Posts – February 2012 Archive (8)

Shanaze Reade is an amazing 23-year-old Black BMX chick from Great Britain. Shanaze (of Jamaican and Irish descent) is a triple UCI World Champion in BMX and Track and Field Cycling. She is now dedicating her full time to BMX as she prepares to compete in the 2012 Olympics, despite a prior shoulder injury making her unable to compete in the 2008 Olympics. Like many athletes who attribute overcoming personal issues through sports, Reade believes that BMX can be used as "way out"…

Samarria Brevard was just signed to the infamous Hoopla Skateboards out of CA. Samarria is now teamed up with some of the veterans in the industry such as, Cara-Beth Burnside and Mimi Knoop. A native to Riverside, CA, the teen had been ripping for about four years now. She recently won the Supergirl Am-Jam in August an event that recognizes street skills and solid techniques. As Samarria says "yolo," you do only live once, so let's get out there ladies and start cruising!…

We talk a lot about the artists behind the microphone. But for every word written about the artists working on one side of the recording studio, tragically few words are written about the artists on the other side of the sound-proof glass. In his 40 year career, Nile Rodgers has worked with everyone from Bowie to Madonna, from Sister Sledge to Master Chief. His music unwittingly formed the backbone of hip-hop with the Sugar Hill Gang basing their breakthrough Rapper's…

From West Side Story to The Prince of Persia, there has been a long tradition in Hollywood of casting white actors in roles intended for people of color. In an industry where minorities don’t get enough good roles as it is, it’s always a little disconcerting for me to watch California-born Natalie Wood play a Puerto Rican immigrant, or peep Mickey Rooney with taped back eye-lids hamming it up in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It would be nice to think that…

Did any of you read the feature in the New York Times or even on The Root where they interview…

Nearly 40 years before George Clinton claimed his cosmic heritage and before Crass declared that if no-one else would release their anarchic noise then they'd just do it themselves, a pianist from Birmingham (or Saturn, depending on who you ask) named Herman Poole Blount (again, depending on who you ask) set out to redefine the possibilities of music on his own terms. Although there are many many origin stories out there for the great Sun Ra, here's the version of the story that…

What makes an artist part of the Afro-punk community should be pretty self-explanatory; it's right there in the portmanteau. But the complicated truth is that there as many different ways to define racial identity as there are ways to define genres of music. The roots of Afro-punk predate the first slave to sing in defiance and continue through modern artists who may not have ever heard a note of Bad Brains. That is to say; what makes an artist Afro-punk exists in how they look…

It's pretty muck Black History Month all-year long around here, but today we'd like to talk about the suggestion that Malcolm X deserves the recognition of having a federal holiday in his name. Time Magazine recently published a piece by Touré, in which the writer states:

"We should seriously consider a national holiday celebrating the life of a man who…