“Break It Down” is an HBW Literary Blog initiative that strives to offer critical interpretations of song lyrics, excerpts from novels, and poems. This week, Blog Contributor Alysha Griffin has analyzed an excerpt from Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. She continues her conversation from yesterday as she looks at an excerpt from “Horn of Plenty.” “Hesitation Blues” 8 bars. I MOVED […]
[By Alysha Griffin] My best friends and I used to be fond of playing the dozens—particularly, exchanging “yo’ mama” jokes. Too young to realize how problematic this was from a historical angle, we realized that this was probably something we should avoid only when the battles ended with a fist fight and/or punishment from someone’s angry mother- my best friends were also my first cousins. […]
Please leave your thoughts in the comment section [By Kenton Rambsy] Tony Bolden, author of Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture, proposes “vernacular cultures are always dialogic relative to dominant cultures, so they are never static but rather always in flux…writers (artists) who appropriate the vernacular must confront the constant risk of erasure” (26). Bolden’s concept of the ever-changing vernacular culture helps to […]
James Haile is a doctoral student in philosophy at Duquesne University. His research centers on the relation of philosophy to literature and sociology. His edited collection, PhilosophicalMeditations on Richard Wright (Lexington Books) is forthcoming this fall. What are the aesthetic, social and political messages of hip-hop music? Although much has been written—and continues to be written—on the “tremendous potential” of this musical art-form […]
By HBW Contributor: Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Professor of English at Dillard University. Baraka, Amiri. Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. “Man is capable of doing what he is incapable of imagining. His head tills the galaxy of the absurd.” René Char, Leaves of Hypnos, Note 227 1963. I discover Leroi Jones and “The End of […]
James Haile is a doctoral student in philosophy at Duquesne University. His research focuses on the relation of philosophy to literature and sociology. His edited collection, Philosophical Meditations on Richard Wright (Lexington Books) is forthcoming this fall. One of the trenchant criticisms of the hip-hop generation—generally, those born after the Civil Rights Era, coming of age between 1970 and 1980—and post hip-hop generation—those born after […]
Guest Blogger Earl Brooks is a 2010 graduate of the University of Kansas. Currently, he is a graduate student of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Much of his current research involves musical performance and theory along with historical and literary studies. There are few jazz artists that have been written about as much as John Coltrane. On […]