Category: Entertainment

POP SMOKE LIVES AGAIN IN BROOKLYN

Originally published for NYLON Magazine on June 16th, 2020

On the evening of May 30, protesters and police swarmed the streets of Flatbush, a predominantly Black American and West Indian enclave in Brooklyn. It marked one of the most fraught nights of conflict since the uprisings started taking place within the five boroughs. Hundreds of arrests and violent incidents were documented by phone between residents and the police; tear gas spilled in the streets. Late into the evening, after cops successfully kettled protesters between two streets, the atmosphere shifted. Violence escalated, and the gospel that had been blasting in the background changed into the sounds that resonated with the youth. Brooklyn drill hits “Welcome to the Party” and “Dior” filled the air as cop cars burned in the background.

Months after his untimely death — a still unresolved home invasion and murder in a California residence — Pop Smoke (aka Bashar Jackson) lives again. The music of Brooklyn’s beloved drill phenom filling the streets as young people united under their feelings of distress and unrest with a world they’ve been forced to accept.

News of Pop’s death was a tragic loss that is still reverberating across New York City — especially the borough of Brooklyn. Streams of his music skyrocketed soon after his transition out of this world, and for weeks, one would be hard pressed to walk down Flatbush or Flatlands Avenue without hearing the song that broke him into the mainstream, “Welcome to the Party,” or his biggest single, “Dior.” On Flatlands Avenue and E 82nd Street, a mural was created in his honor, the first of three. It stood prominently in the background during the funeral procession, where it felt as if his entire hometown neighborhood of Canarsie spilled out into the streets to honor his life — a majestic display not seen in Kings County since the passing of legendary rapper Notorious B.I.G. As noted by culture critic Ivie Ani for The Fader, their musical trajectories echo one another: two young men of West Indian descent who became the pride of their respective Brooklyn enclaves, robbed of what had the promise of being magnificent careers.

It isn’t altogether surprising that Pop Smoke’s discography has become a posthumous soundtrack of New York in this current moment of protests against police brutality, triggered by the police-inflicted deaths of Black lives such as George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s. Pop’s life, and in turn his music, was highly affected by the trauma of police surveillance and violence and the conditions that those circumstances created, down to the Canarsie neighborhood where he grew up. (The neighborhood was recently shaken by its own viral incident: A young man named Fitzroy Gayle, the same age as Pop Smoke at his death, being violently arrested by eight police officers.)

A melancholy of Pop’s passing was that he never got to have the triumphant homecoming moment in the city that raised him, thanks to the ever-looming shadow of the NYPD. In October 2019, the “Boys in Blue” requested that he be removed from the lineup at Rolling Loud the day before the event in question “due to public safety concerns,” claiming his shows were affiliated with unnamed “recent acts of violence citywide.” Upon his return from Paris Fashion Week, Pop was arrested at John F. Kennedy Airport and charged with interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle mere hours before a scheduled performance at the Barclays Center honoring deceased A$AP Mob founder and collaborator A$AP Yams. (Those charges have since been dismissed.) The Sunday before his passing, Flatbush’s Kings Theater hosted Brooklyn’s first drill concert, BK Drip, with Pop Smoke featured on the bill. Eventgoers were still regrettably greeted with the message “due to unforeseen circumstances, Pop Smoke will not perform at tonight’s show” as they entered the venue, the space saturated by a heavy police and security presence throughout the largely successful evening.

Pop Smoke’s discography has always been a form of protest — defiant, transgressive, and transformative no matter the space in which it’s consumed. Drill wasn’t necessarily made for the club, but with his frequent partner 808Melo, Pop crafted melodies that existed on multiple levels — simultaneously euphoric and ominous, depending on the mood.

Songs like “PTSD,” “Scenario,” and “Better Have Your Gun” from his first project, Meet the Woo, all now hit different, transforming into a perfect encapsulation of the frenetic, rebellious energy now coursing through the veins of every New Yorker marching through its streets. Track after track, Pop litters acknowledgments to treasured friends who are still making their way through the prison industrial complex, using his distinctive gravelly inflection to depict the extent in which police interference has become accepted as part of their day-to-day life and interactions. On “Better Have Your Gun,” Pop references Tupac’s “All Eyez On Me”— the slain California rapper’s first track after being released from prison — and East Flatbush rapper Shyne’s “Commission.” “What the f*ck is you telling me?” he warns. “I got the pedigree/In the hood, I’m fighting felonies.”

When “Dior,” a track about aspirational accomplishment, is juxtaposed with a burning cop car or a melee in Soho or a cascade of faces parading down Eastern Parkway, the coalescence of energy feels nearly elemental. Pop Smoke’s music threaded together the chaos, fury, trauma, hope, and joy in New Yorkers in a way that no one else had done in quite some time. That accomplishment alone is feat enough to unify a sea of now-burgeoning activists who are screaming to be heard in a system that continues to take Black lives for granted. Pop predicted as much on the JACKBOYS and Travis Scott collaboration “Gatti”: “You cannot say Pop and forget the smoke.”

POP SMOKE’S DISCOGRAPHY HAS ALWAYS BEEN A FORM OF PROTEST — DEFIANT, TRANSGRESSIVE, AND TRANSFORMATIVE NO MATTER THE SPACE IN WHICH IT’S CONSUMED.

Pop Smoke’s posthumous debut album, originally slated for June 12, has now been pushed back to July 3; Smoke’s estate shifted in lockstep with the rhythm in Brooklyn. As Steven Victor, CEO of record label Victor Victor Worldwide, explained, though they’ve “seen Pop’s music become the soundtrack of the moment, unifying the masses,” they’ve still “decided to delay the release of his album out of respect for the movement.”

Posthumous adoration inevitably invites speculation of what could have been and what was lost. In the case of Pop, a young man who repped his Panamanian heritage as much as he did his Canarsie hometown, New Yorkers waited for the homecoming track with fellow Brooklynite and Panamanian Bobby Shmurda — his own saga a reflection of the fundamentally broken injustice system. Shmurda is due to be released from prison at the end of the year, but their collaboration is now a reverie that has dissolved into the ether. Pop Smoke, however, still left behind a breadth of work, with rumors of existing collabs from his spiritual forebear 50 Cent, to the “African Giant” Burna Boy himself. A clip of him flipping a sample of Tamia’s “Into You” made the rounds not long after his death to great acclaim, yet another testament to his deceptive versatility across soundscapes. The announcement of his upcoming album allows for endless possibilities in the formation of his legacy, particularly with recent events reframing the context in which his music will now be received. What themes will his project be centered around post-mortem? What boundary will he break next? How will he continue to shake the room from beyond the grave?

When the clock struck midnight on Thursday, fans were gifted the first single off his debut. The gripping “Make It Rain” repurposes lyrics from his appearance on Lil Tjay’s “Zoo York” into a commanding hook, and is coda-ed by an exceptional verse from Bobby Shmurda’s GS9 comrade-in-arms Rowdy Rebel, delivered via a prepaid correctional facility call. “Hello, this is a prepaid call from… Bobby Babayyy!!!” If there was ever a song that tangibly reflects the framework of pain and loss that reverberates around the fringes of New York’s rap scene, it’s this one: Pop Smoke delivering his signature timbre from beyond the grave and Rowdy Rebel getting “the call behind the wall,” triumphantly rising to the challenge, awaiting his moment of redemption as the streets scream “no justice, no peace.” It’s eerily timely, and as defiant as ever. You would expect nothing less.

Two decades ago, Notorious B.I.G.’s final studio project, Life After Death, was released two weeks after his death, already fairly complete. It was a double album replete with mafioso themes and ominous double entendres set to the signature captivating storytelling that made Biggie Smalls an unparalleled talent. On closing track “You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)” he raps, “Sh*t’s official, only the Feds I fear.” Even on a song full of bravado and swagger, the specter of law enforcement looms large enough to make for an uncannily prophetic epilogue. In 2020, that oeuvre remains ever-present in artists like Pop Smoke, who vocalize tension with the police state on songs that portray trauma, bluster, survival, elation, and trying to find revelry amongst it all. That, more than anything, resonates in the youth that take to the streets day after day, fighting for freedom from the oppressive scrutiny that has for so long gripped their lives.

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‘The Breakfast Club’ Calls Itself “The World’s Most Dangerous Morning Show” — Maybe It’s Time We Listen

This was originally published for OkayPlayer on June 16, 2020.

When Power 105.1’s lynchpin morning show The Breakfast Club ⁠— hosted by Charlamagne tha God, DJ Envy, and Angela Yee ⁠— launched in December 2010, Hot 97 was still the Number 1 “urban contemporary” radio station in New York City, standing strong atop the shoulders of legends such as Angie Martinez and Funkmaster Flex. Nine months after its launch, the show had not gained much ground, teetering on the brink of dissolution.

It was a fateful morning call from jack-of-all-industries Willie “Ray J” Norwood Jr breathlessly recounting his distorted perspective of an altercation with Fabolous in Las Vegas the night before that turned their fortunes around. Quotables about “disrespecting the money team” became entrenched in urban radio lore, reaffirming a tried and true lesson that helped build some of the biggest empires in radio, including that of Charlamagne’s longtime mentor Wendy Williams — controversy and sensationalism obtain views, whether they love or hate it. 

Since having Ray J as their first breakout guest, The Breakfast Club‘s Rolodex of guests have expanded in niche and pedigree as they have cemented themselves as the number 1 morning show in urban contemporary media in the greater New York area. Their roster of guests has ranged from artists promoting their latest release to Democratic primary candidates looking to use the iHeartMedia syndicated Breakfast Club as a hip platform to speak to target demographics for voter turnout. The rubric for programming, however, has continued to adhere to a golden rule: information and accessibility may be a benefit of their now-prominent platform, but it is only secondary to entertainment at all costs ⁠— no matter the potential harms of the communities that they purportedly aim to entertain. Donning the moniker “The World’s Most Dangerous Morning Show,” The Breakfast Club continues to maintain cultural currency by trading in this virality and adopting the ethos of “it’s provocative, it gets the people going,” that is embodied in the show’s most polarizing host Charlamagne, infamous for pushing the most lecherous shock jock commentary on guests (particularly women) to the point he has become inextricable from the Breakfast Club brand. 

One such notable example of that ethos took place in 2016 with the planned appearance of Tomi Lahren ⁠— at the time a quickly rising upstart in conservative media ⁠— on the airwaves of Black urban radio’s preeminent morning show, barely a month after Donald Trump had been elected into office. Despite the booking being canceled by Lahren’s team due to the overwhelming backlash over her appearance on The Daily Show, Charlamagne persisted in engaging a social outing with her, retorting: “Do you want diplomacy or do you want division? I’m talking to Tomi because I care about the rhetoric that comes out of her mouth because she has influence — and the narrative she paints about movements like [Black Lives Matter] is dangerous. The same way people can hit her up on social media and tell her how wrong she is, I can meet with her and tell her the same things.” It’s a curious logic that manipulates the need to embrace the neoliberal need for compromise and continuous discourse, which will always be at odds with the irreconcilable truth of conservative media’s foundational ethos of unshakeable moral conviction. 

The argument fails to hold muster when she was heralded by Charlamagne as a template that other women in media should aspire to, writing in a since-deleted tweet: “would be dope if a young black or Hispanic ‘WOKE’ woman used social media to create a Platform to be a voice like Tomi Lahren did.” Strangely enough, such a declaration operates in the same rhetoric often associated through the conservative right media, wild conjecture with no material basis, in fact, dismissing context that allows for specific circumstances — in Lahren’s case, her backing by Glenn Beck’s network, TheBlaze. When roundly presented with a bevy of women’s voices that already exist, he addressed it on the radio show, asking with bewilderment, “…how do we amplify their voices?”

Another such transgression involved comedian and recording artist Lil Duval. The garish 3-minute sequence detailed violence against trans women to raucous laughter and mild chiding about “political correctness,” barely a week after writer, director, producer, and trans activist Janet Mock appeared on the show. At one point, DJ Envy says, “I love when Duval is up here, he be acting a fool,” mere moments after intentionally presenting Mock’s book in Duval’s field of vision, leading to Mock being forcefully misgendered on live air. As Mock said herself in an essay response, “On a black program that often advocates for the safety and lives of black people, its hosts laughed as their guest advocated for the murder of black trans women who are black people, too!” 

In a self-assessment of their accountability, not only were the malicious messages redistributed, but the collective also refused to accept any complicity in material harms, soliciting viewer feedback to affirm themselves, and only opening the trans community to further derogatory comments to be said on-air. Instead of truly assessing their responsibility to the Black communities they serve, the discussion diverted into whether or not they should be held to the offense over something a guest said and has refused to apologize for, ignoring media’s responsibility in framing, directing, and guiding discussions. Since then, Duval has appeared on the Breakfast Club twice more, unfettered.  

In a repetition of the animus behind Lahren’s presence, a more recent incident involved a highly-publicized interview with Rush Limbaugh amid one of the biggest nationwide fights for transformative accountability of the state-sanctioned death of Black lives lost through police brutality. In an echo of the rationale for inviting Lahren four years prior, grounds were presented on the basis of introducing Limbaugh’s platform to the gravity of the Black community’s plight. The rhetoric hit all of the predictable points: circling around the drain around white privilege; white supremacy; and explaining how individual Black accomplishments don’t dismantle systemic issues — all in the shadow of George Floyd’s memory. While Charlamagne — who would later say the discussion was a “corporate” decision from iHeartMedia  — may have insisted, “I’m not letting nobody politicize black pain,” a pre-taped segment that inevitably devolves into discourse for discourse’s sake does exactly that. The segment forced audiences to endure a tête-à-tête over the “liberal, political constructs” that Limbaugh categorically rejects. As Toni Morrison is famously quoted as saying, “racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” There was no substantive reason to engage in this exercise in masochism. However, for the Black audiences that consume the show and are overwhelmed by the delicate choreography that is just existing at the moment, being confronted by that dismissal in yet another space that is primarily sectioned off for them extends beyond unproductive and into firmly counter-revolutionary.

Most recently, the platform extended a friendly invitation to “godfather of hip-hop” Russell Simmons, currently under scrutiny for multiple allegations of sexual assault and harassment as several of his survivors tell their stories in the documentary On the Record. Warmly greeted with the honorific “Uncle Russ,” he is granted an unfettered and largely unchallenged space to push his counter-narrative on the largest urban platform from his remote enclave in Bali. Safe from any extradition laws, Simmons insisted that his bevy of romantic relationships with women in Hollywood that have transitioned into extended platonic relationships – in addition to his inclusive hiring practices – inoculate him from criticism. When pressed, he parried with “I really don’t think we should be relitigating 30-year-old stories that had never been told,” a statement that is incorrect considering his accusers — Drew Dixon, Sheri Sher, and Sil Lai Abrams — have alluded to the stories in public in various capacities. He alleged that “any investigative reporter would tell you that those stories would have been printed,” dismissing the thorough work of the New York Times and Hollywood Reporter investigative teams. Perhaps most troubling about this interview was that it was allowed to be co-led by Charlamagne tha God, a man with his own documented history of admitted gendered domestic violence of his very own. As of yet, none of the women featured in the documentary have been invited to speak their own truth to power on the platform. (Ed note: Sil Lai Abrams appeared on The Breakfast Club for an interview with Angela Yee the day after this post was published.)

Photo Credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

The Breakfast Club’s contracts are slated to end at the close of the year, rounding out a strong 10-year run. Rumors have persisted that Charlamagne, who has gone on to publish a New York Times bestseller, have a top-rated podcast, several TV shows, and a spinoff interview platform of his own, is unlikely to return, ending the reign of the brand by default. At this moment in time, it may be for the best. The aim of Black media platforms shouldn’t be to replicate the harmful norms and standards of their mainstream counterparts. It should be to set a new one that centers Black issues and content in a meaningful and thoughtful manner. The Breakfast Club has shown that they want to lead the market but not lead the conversation, and when times are more tumultuous than ever, to accept that as an adequate approach to media is a disservice to the increasingly scarce platforms that serve our communities. 

In a 2016 profile for Vulture, Charlamagne said that there were two critical things to have a finger on to stay on top in the social-media era: “How to keep a conversation going and when to change it.” The trio has made skillful mastery of the former in the annals of their Tribeca Studio. However, on the latter, change commonly seems to come after reprisal and not from a place of thought leadership. Heavy may be the head that wears the crown, but the burden of desiring to be the preeminent space for courting heavily trafficked conversations throughout different subsections of the Black community comes with a remit to stay on the vanguard of those conversations with empathy and care. Until that becomes the established priority, they will continue to be challenged on the merits of their programming.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article referred to allegations against Charlamagne tha God. Since we do not have additional reporting to add to this case, and instead linked to a Daily Beast article published on July 26, 2018, we have removed the wording from the piece. 

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Ramy’ Meditates on the Pitfalls of Self-Righteousness

This piece was originally published for The Atlantic on June 11, 2020

In Season 1 of Ramy, audiences are introduced to Ramy Hassan—the character loosely based on the show’s creator, Ramy Youssef—and his Egyptian American family in northern Jersey. With a formidable mix of surrealism and humor, Youssef explores the complexities of being a religious Millennial man, namely through navigating the difficulties that young Muslims face coming of age post-9/11. Season 2 is anchored in Ramy’s wish to find purpose and direction in his spirituality, but his obsessive need to present a righteous version of himself only sabotages his effort at redemption.

The show is preoccupied with the idea that ritual for ritual’s sake—without deeper consideration of context or circumstances and without disposition of the ego—can often reveal one’s truest, ugliest self. Ramy has returned from a sojourn in Cairo more aimless and prurient than ever before. Back in the States, he engages in gluttony and lewdness (through the haze of a porn-filled laptop screen), and isolates himself in shame. He admits, “I feel like I have this hole inside of me, this emptiness, and I’m always trying to fill it with something.” But once he finally musters up the resolve to return to his mosque after a hiatus, his imam (played by Alok Tewari) meets him with reproach: “Read the last three surahs of the Quran every night,” he says. “It will help keep the shaitan away.” (Shaitan, in Islam, are evil spirits that tempt humans into sinful behavior; their commander, Iblis, is known in Christian texts as Lucifer.)Despondent, Ramy finds his way to the local Sufi center, led by the charismatic Sheikh Ali (Mahershala Ali). Enamored by Ali’s presence and steadiness, Ramy convinces himself that his absolution will come under the approval of the sheikh’s watchful eye.

What ensues is an empty religious performance by Ramy.Desperate to prove that he can ascend to the levels of perfection he associates with the sheikh, Ramy adheres to a rigidity that his loved ones find disconcerting, imposing stringent standards not just on himself, but also on the people around him. When Ramy attends the strip-club bachelor party his friends throw for him, he admonishes one of them, Ahmed, about the optics of the occasion. But Ahmed retorts, “Do you know how many times I’ve watched you do crazy things? Slowly waiting, praying that you’d do the right thing? I never judged you! I just prayed for you.”Ramy’s understanding of discipline is misguided, and his overcompensation and ego leave no room for the inevitability of human error, creating a built-in tension in the show.

Similar to Kanye West and his self-righteous Sunday Service performances, Ramy has understood only the trimmings of deliverance and religion, and has done so in the most self-serving ways possible. For instance, when he wants to encourage a new revert’s adoption into the Sufi center, Ramy fails to disclose that the man was a U.S. soldier in Iraq—responsible for the torture and deaths of Arab and Muslim innocents—and that he has crippling PTSD. As a result, the man is involved in a fatal incident at the Sufi center, for which Ramy is indirectly responsible. In another episode, Ramy translates his adoration of Sheikh Ali into a delusion of romantic love for his daughter. He pursues a relationship with her and then sabotages their imminent nuptials by engaging in infidelity under the guise of religiously sanctioned polygamy—a practice reserved for those who have both the resources and mutually agreed-upon consent.

Ramy’s family members also learn the cruel irony of empty performance. In contrast to Ramy’s capitulations to what he thinks is religious surveillance, his mother, Maysa (Hiam Abbass), capitulates to a literal agent of surveillance—the United States federal government—in the journey to obtain her citizenship. She studiously reviews her notes for her final exam and absorbs American vernacular. But when she incurs an infraction at her job driving for Lyft that could potentially flag her final background check, she collapses into a panic.

In an effort to determine the complainant, Maysa engages in a frenzied review of her recent passengers, ultimately assuming that a nonbinary customer named Sophia (whom she had misgendered) was the culprit. Unraveled and distraught, Maysa confronts them at a bar, and tries to appeal to their common marginalization as members of two different targeted communities. Maysa’s self-serving plea comes amid her own prejudice—in a previous conversation with her daughter about Sophia, Maysa casually asks, “Allah created him as a man, no?” But in order to protect herself,Maysa exhibits a remarkable inversion of power and imposes the same surveillance tactics on Sophia that she herself fears.

Perhaps the most tragic story within Ramy’s family is that of his uncle Naseem (Laith Nakli)—a boorish, bombastic man who revels in uncompromising bigotry and cartoonish toxic masculinity. The show ultimately reveals that his behavior belies his hidden queer identity; Naseem allows himself to indulge in his sexuality in a few furtive moments, only to then again reclaim his external presentation. He struggles with what kind of Muslim he is supposed to be and what kind of man he is expected to be, which amounts to tremendous overcorrection at the expense of himself and everyone around him.

The last three chapters of the Quran, Surah Al-Ikhlas (“Sincerity”), Surah Al-Falaq (“Dawn”), and Surah Al-Naas (“Mankind”), are commonly invoked in Islam as protection against malevolent surveillance—jinns, shaitan, or the evil eye. The ritualistic performance of these invocations reasserts fealty to God’s will. At the beginning of the season, Ramy dismisses the advice from his imam to invoke these rites, noting that he’s “trying to find God, but it’s not there.” But Sheikh Ali informs him, “If someone only gotthe rules and rituals, they might think Islam is tough and bitter … but there’s an inside, a juicy flesh, a divine intimacy, a spiritual experience. The rind without the flesh is bitter and useless.”

Ramy’s Achilles’ heel is his inability to grasp the journey of restitution via non-egotistical means, and he exercises self-imposed discipline without empathy. Just like his uncle and mother, Ramy is crippled by the perception of the absolute binary of haram and halal—what’s forbidden and what’s permitted—applying its maxims without consideration of the impact they may have on others. It’s a contextual failure that absolves a person of the responsibility of care in pursuit of moral righteousness.

Most Abrahamic religions are peppered with tales of the fallibility of human character: the person you want to be versus the person you are. In Season 2, most of Ramy’s characters are going through this journey; not just in front of God, but in front of their own communities. In trying their hardest to present themselves as the people they want to be, they consistently harm those around them—exposing the worst of who they are in dangerous bursts. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then Ramy offers a look into where the road obsessed with perceptions will lead.

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On the Record Attempts to Set the Record Straight for Black Women in Hip-Hop

This was originally published on June 11, 2020 for Pitchfork.

The documentary On the Record opens by asking a question: “What is missing from #MeToo?” In the nearly three years since the hashtag went viral, the phrase has become a de facto movement, a derisive verb, and a platform for high-profile survivors in the entertainment industry and beyond. But despite originating from Tarana Burke, a Black woman, #MeToo has failed to provide a platform for the unique circumstances of Black women who dare to speak truth to power. They are frequently silenced, dismissed, or ignored, either pressured into racial solidarity or stigmatized by a hypersexual jezebel trope that justifies a higher burden of credibility. As Burke herself readily admits in the film, “A lot of Black women felt disconnected from #MeToo initially.”

On the Record attempts to reconcile with that painful truth, honing in on the experiences of Black women in the nascence of the hip-hop industry, and the impresario at the heart of it all, Def Jam’s Russell Simmons. The film centers around some of Simmons’ many survivors—mainly A&R executive Drew Dixon, as well as journalist Sil Lai Abrams and rapper Sheri Sher—and their journeys to come forward with their stories in the press. Every exposé that emerges is the result of an arduous process of reopening painful memories, ceaseless vetting and verification, and devastating fallout for the survivors. Presented side by side with the rise of Def Jam and hip-hop, On the Record shows the emotional toll of Black women’s trauma being perceived as an accepted cost of doing business. While filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s ambitious attempts to address so many critical threads of conversation about sexual assault, hip-hop, and Black women leave some nuances better served than others, the introduction of this film into the zeitgeist is an essential and welcome addition to a long-overdue conversation.

There was a brief period of time when this story almost never made it to the general public. On the Record lost distribution with Apple TV+ just two weeks before its premiere at Sundance Film Festival this past winter, after executive producer Oprah Winfrey pulled her support. It was soon revealed that while Simmons had pressured Winfrey, she had her own apprehensions about the doc and Dixon’s story. The premiere went from a triumphant moment of acknowledgement for Black survivors into a fight to avoid obscurity and erasure. Had HBO—the same network where Simmons once aired his iconic Def Comedy Jam series—not selected On the Record for their recent HBO Max rollout, the documentary could have easily collapsed into an urban legend, sustained by a whisper network of participants and early viewers.

Drew Dixon anchors the film as a former A&R executive who quickly rose in prominence during Def Jam’s early ’90s heyday. She played a fundamental role in amplifying artists and staying on the vanguard of trends at Def Jam, reshaping Method Man’s “All I Need” into a groundbreaking duet with Mary J. Blige. After her alleged 1995 rape at the hands of Simmons, she almost immediately moved over to Arista Records to work under the mentorship of legendary music exec Clive Davis, only to be sexually harassed by his replacement, L.A. Reid. She was trying to sign John Legend and Kanye West to Arista when her relationship with Reid completely deteriorated, after she continually rebuffed his advances.

As Dixon details her rise and fall in the industry, a familiar narrative comes into focus: her seat at the table came with the proviso of a heightened threshold for indecency, an expectation that she compartmentalize and minimize incidents like Simmons repeatedly exposing himself to her. It was an environment where women’s boundaries were not respected, and ultimately Dixon’s assault and harassment caused her to leave the industry altogether. Now it is difficult for her to disentangle music from trauma; she avoids engaging with some of the songs she helped make into hits. In the film, after her story becomes public in The New York Times, she nervously sits with her daughter waiting to hear what the (noticeably measured) response will be on Hot 97. “For 22 years, I took it for the team,” she says, adding, “I loved Russell, too.”

Since On the Record closely follows Dixon’s journey to come forward, Sheri Sher and Sil Lai Abrams don’t receive nearly as much screen time as they should. Sher, a member of the first all-female rap group, the Mercedes Ladies, only has around five minutes of screen time despite her crucial perspective: that of the women artists who fought for respect for their skills, only to be dismissed and treated as sex objects by the industry. Similar to Dixon, there’s an implication in the film that Sher’s alleged 1983 rape by Simmons and subsequent diminishment in the field represented a loss for the music world: Despite being hip-hop pioneers in the South Bronx, the Mercedes Ladies never released any official music or got a record deal.

For her part, journalist and activist Sil Lai Abrams offers a brief but agonizing account of the spiral that followed her 1994 sexual assault, when she was still working as a model and enmeshed in the music industry. Abrams first told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018 that she’d had an intermittent sexual relationship with Simmons that she clearly ended before her alleged rape, but On the Record doesn’t properly delve into the nuances of the situation, or the disorienting nature of sexual assault at the hands of a past intimate partner. Detailing a complicated survivor story is brave in and of itself, but as many Black women implicitly know, the mere allusion to a survivor’s sexual desires is often exploited, used to subtly reinforce a pervasive subconscious notion of the “cultural impossibility for Black women to be raped,” to quote seminal hip-hop feminist Dr. Joan Morgan in the film. Parsing all that out would have brought valuable new depth to the conversation.

The end of On the Record includes brief vignettes of other women’s stories, faces that fade into each other and echo fragments of the previous person’s trauma. The segment effectively highlights the magnitude of Simmons’ reach and harm in his heyday; there are women in fashion publicity, screenwriting, and modeling who detail various degrees of sexual and physical assault at his hands. In merely chronicling the scope of these allegations, the film’s focus shifts away from Black women in hip-hop. There is no easy choice to make here: A documentary that is tasked with accomplishing so much in the way of investigative, emotive, and pedagogical work, that is inherently intertwined with Simmons’ vast legacy, will have more to untangle than can easily be accomplished in just 95 minutes.

Along the way, experts and academics bring context to the overarching issue of misogynoir in hip-hop culture. Though misogyny against Black women is historically tied to the genre, its transition from a subculture to a mainstream market in the ’90s was accompanied by its aesthetic shift—a hypersexualization of Black women that hadn’t been as dominant in rap visuals previously. As the film draws connections to women who’ve dared to accuse Black men in the public eye, from Anita Hill to Desiree Washington, a robust picture emerges of how a white supremacist patriarchal construct is absorbed, echoed, and distilled for entertainment purposes, with the full expectation that Black women in the space stand in lockstep. While a bit didactic, these historical threads serve as an important reminder that the toxic expectation of race loyalty persists in highly visible spaces across movements, industries, and generations. Solidarity with Black men is the name of the game, and yet again Black women are the collateral damage.

It would be a disservice to imply that the problems detailed in On the Record are contained to the early years of hip-hop. Just last month, Chris Stylezz, the host of the Roc Nation-affiliated hip-hop party D’ussé Palooza, was confronted with dozens of accusations of sexual misconduct and assault, resulting in his termination and a new wave of discourse about the industry’s exploitative, gendered power imbalance. Charlamagne tha God, who continues to be the face of “The Breakfast Club,” arguably hip-hop’s biggest syndicated radio show, previously admitted to domestic abuse and faces credible allegations of rape against him. (He was even allowed to help lead the first high-profile interview of Simmons in months.) Despite the collective efforts to #MuteRKelly, not to mention the 22 federal criminal charges against the singer, his musical legacy still looms large in certain spaces, like on the popular Verzuz Instagram Live series. The calculus of acknowledging the pain of Black girls and women is still determined by how much it offsets the accepted threshold for collective sacrifice. As long as a legacy is critical enough to “the culture,” mechanisms are in place to protect abusers—positioning them as the victims, and the victims as living crime scenes.

Currently, Simmons resides in Bali, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States. With the full support of his family, he has been engaging in an exculpatory tour of self-promotion via his unfettered social media presence, flipping #MeToo into #NotMe and posting open letters decrying the willful assassination of his character. Just yesterday morning, he used his “Breakfast Club” appearance to gaslight survivors, call out “toxic femininity,” and namedrop famous Black women who’ve had positive interactions with him, in some veiled attempt to inoculate himself from claims of assault. “I really don’t think we should be relitigating 30-year-old stories that had never been told,” Simmons said. Despite stepping down from his companies and philanthropic endeavors, his presence online as a wellness guru remains more or less unchallenged, while various friends in entertainment have stuck by his side. Is the man who sold rap to the world too big to be canceled? The answer remains to be seen, but hip-hop needs this reckoning—not just for Simmons’ survivors, but for all the Black women who’ve silenced themselves for the greater cause.

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Shamira Explains It All Issue No. 1: New York is Burning

This originally published on June 1st 2020 as part of my Newsletter series on Substack here.

Welcome to Shamira Explains It All/Shamira Explique Tout, a culture newsletter discussing the origins and impact of Black production and exchange, identity, and intellectual property via our digital, social, and archival discussions – and whatever else may be timely and interesting. Part English, Part French (la moitié est écrite en français, ou plus, si le thème du mois le demande). Reach out with feedback, suggestions, tips, and ideas at contact@shamirathefirst.com.

Sistas, how y’all feel? Brothas, y’all alright?

I originally wanted to launch this newsletter on my birthday – for a variety of reasons, that did not come to fruition. So I’m launching this on my mother’s birthday instead – a woman who as born in a country that had that to claw and fight for its independence from its oppressors, and continues to try to find its way. It grounds me in a sobering truth – eradicating the most visible oppressors is only the first step. But as Samuel Beckett wrote, “Ever Tried. Ever Failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Over the past few days, cities across the United States have been rife with clashes between organizers, protesters, and their respective law enforcement forces. Some people are confrontational and others are not; all methods of protest are legitimate (including this amazing form of surveillance disruption by K-pop stans). Ultimately, the concept of a “peaceful” protest is a farce; it presumes opposing forces that do not seek to engage the community as enemy combatants. Corporations and businesses are not people, despite the fact that the Supreme Court opted to give them protections that treated them as such; but when discussing looting, keep in mind that there is record unemployment in a public health crisis with little to no social safety network to keep people afloat. As people have pointed out recently, Martin Luther King, in his advocacy for nonviolence, still expressed that “a riot is the language of the unheard:”

I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

With regards to how people discuss MLK and nonviolence in general, it is frequently misconstrued and decontextualized. I encourage people to listen to this clip from Bomani Jones’ ESPN Radio Show about the impetus behind MLK Day and the clarity of his actual message – that the greatest weapon he employed wasn’t pacifism, but shame.

In Brooklyn, near-unprecedented violence is ongoing in Fort Greene and Flatbush. It should not be lost on spectators that the nexus of brutality going on in Kings Country is happening around the Barclays Center – the source of its own violence on the Black community in Brooklyn. Gentrification and displacement go hand in hand with over policing and stop and frisk. I explored that in my piece for OkayPlayer

Lastly, I will just share my quick (and growing) thread on surveillance practices and ethics with journalism and organizing. It will be an ever expanding discussion as we continue to accept loss of privacy to the state and use of that data in a retaliatory manner, but one that we have to accept is a very present threat in the first place. This is an excerpt from an unpublished essay I wrote some time ago on surveillance and criminalization of Black communities:

Between the patterns of zeros and ones rests a minotaur for the digital age – amalgamating the sophistry of inherent Black criminality within a web of innovation that only serves as an anchor to longstanding pathologies. If we have any hope of a technological age that isn’t inextricably contracted to white supremacy, we would be well-suited to look at the threshold between mythology and history in order to reshape the way we think about applying harm reduction and racial equity. The surest way to get swallowed alive by a monster is to fail to realize that one is even there; and it is only by identifying that framework that we can begin to lay down the thread that will guide the perception of inherent Black criminality from the bowels of a modern digital labyrinth. 

We have a long way to go to understand just how much data we have forfeited to third parties and actors that profit from participation in the prison industrial complex. A calculation can never supersede the inherent biases that it is introduced to and the fact remains that the carceral state was designed out of a pathology to funnel brown bodies into boxes. As Michelle Alexander points out in The New Jim Crow, “whiteness mitigates crime, whereas blackness defines the criminal.”  The superimposition of automation belies this truth, but as Saidiya Hartman spoke to “a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago”, so has the digital model continued to reinforce the punitive history behind bars: it is all it knows, and therefore all it can be.

Playlist for the Month:

This month:

  • If you are uploading pictures of protestors or people organizing – use this tool to scrub metadata and blur peoples faces and other identifying features.
  • Try to contribute to vetted bail funds if you can. Here is a Twitter Thread with links to bail funds throughout the nation. (Important Note: The NYC Chapter has said they are overwhelmed by funds, so you may want to divert funds to local organizations in need of resources instead – like Equality for Flatbush’s mutual aid fund, so that they can continue investing in their police abolition organizing as well as community support)
  • For those who want to get involved but can’t take to the streets for various reasons (like myself, because of my immigration status) , here is a link to various to be in the struggle.
  • If you are interested in additional anti-carceral reading during this quarantine, for those of you who are just starting out – I encourage you to check out Angela Davis’ “Are Prisons Obsolete?”
  • This is a great 5-minute appearance from Cornel West on CNN worth checking out (where he references the Samuel Beckett quote above). Key takeaway: “It looks as if the system cannot reform itself. We’ve tried Black faces in high places – too often our Black politicians, professional class, middle class, become too accommodated to the the capitalist economy…”
  • Here is some legal guidance for those who are arrested in New York City.

Francophone Corner:

  • Découvrez le lancement de SUNU : Journal of African Affairs, Critical Thought + Aesthetics, une création de la brillante Amy Sall. SUNU Journal cherche à interroger, critiquer et célébrer le passé et le présent, tout en contribuant à une riche lignée de production intellectuelle, culturelle artistique africaine et afro-diasporique.
  • Check out the launch of SUNU: Journal of African Affairs, Critical Thought + Aesthetics the brainchild of the brilliant Amy Sall. SUNU Journal seeks to interrogate, critique and celebrate the past and the present, whilst contributing to a rich lineage of African and Afro-diasporic intellectual, cultural + artistic production.
  • Soutenons les médias indépendants ! Avec ce concept de « blingzine » bilingue (français/anglais), 33 Carats propose 106 pages de découvertes hip hop, lifestyle et mode par une équipe de passionnées. C’est le thème de la Déconnexion qui est exploré pour ce numéro avec des interviews d’experts sur les stratégies marketing des rappeurs français, une visite de Négus l’exposition/album de Yassin Bey par la journaliste américaine Ebony Janice.  Mais le récit collaboratif fait de bling et de hip hop « Birkins and Drake » dont Life is Good  le premier épisode est écrit par moi 🙂 En bonus ; une interview exclusive d’Erykah Badu : pas mal pour un média indépendant !Erykah Badu lance son site Badu World Market, Elle y propose des collections limitées hoodies et tee-shirts oversize en collaboration avec l’artiste canadienne Jackie Musial. A l’occasion du lancement de ce nouveau projet de la chanteuse, une interview exclusive par Sanaa Carats, fondatrice et rédactrice en chef du média, est disponible dans le numéro 3. Le rappeur français Cleim Haring en couverture.En attendant la version papier, En vente sur Issuu : 
  • Support independent media! With this bilingual (French/English) “blingzine” concept, 33 Carats offers 106 pages of hip hop, lifestyle and fashion discoveries by a team of passionate people. Interviews with experts on the marketing strategies of French rappers, a visit to Négus exhibition/album by Yassin Bey by the American journalist Ebony Janice.  But the collaborative fictional series of bling and hip hop “Birkins and Drake” of which Life is Good is the first episode is written by me 🙂 As a bonus; an exclusive interview with Erykah Badu!Erykah Badu launches her website Badu World Market, where she offers limited collections of hoodies and oversize tee-shirts in collaboration with Canadian artist Jackie Musial. On the occasion of the launch of this new project of the singer, an exclusive interview by Sanaa Carats, founder and editor-in-chief of the media, is available in this third issue. Buy it here.https://www.33carats.com/Suivre sur Instagram: 33caratswebzineTwitter: https://twitter.com/33caratswebzineFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/33carats/

Alors, c’est tout. Sign up now so you don’t miss the next issue.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CAwxM-vFVzz/

In the meantime, tell your friends!

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#BlackAF Fails to Break New Ground

Originally published for The Atlantic.

What makes good art? This question has dominated entertainment criticism over the past several years—including the deliberation about fairness in evaluating award worthiness at the Emmys, Oscars, and Grammys, and a recent standoff between the director Martin Scorsese and the fandom of the Marvel cinematic universe. In the latter, Scorsese—renowned for his canon of classic films that navigate the fabric of Italian American identity in 20th-century New York—argued that the strongest on-camera stories home in on “the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.”

This is the challenge that the Black-ish (and Grown-ish and Mixed-ish) creator, Kenya Barris, is facing in his new Netflix series, #BlackAF. Black-ish, a network TV–friendly caricature of Barris’s own life that debuted in 2014, confronts the realities of being a newly wealthy black family in upper-class white America. The show, helmed by Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross, who play the husband-wife duo of Andre “Dre” and Rainbow “Bow” Johnson, gives a comedic peek into some of their “post-racial” anxieties. The first two seasons, in particular, try to analyze layers of race, class, and generational interactions, replete with didactic cutaways, nonverbal signifiers of accomplishment via hyperconsumption, and hand-wringing identity crises.

#BlackAF aims to reframe and expound on Barris’s personal narrative in a more self-aware, satirical context, but it ends up just repeating all the same notes from Black-ish. Without fresh source material, Barris fails to bring new complexity and depth to the ecosystem he has created. He steps into the titular role himself, with Rashida Jones playing his wife, Joya, and tries to create a hyperbolic version of his reality as the wealthy creator of a TV franchise.The difficulty lies, however, in the fact that Anderson’s original character was already a caricature, making the parallel world that Barris inhabits not nearly as much of a distinction. #BlackAF replicates Black-ish’s affinity for pedagogical missives, such as ones explaining Juneteenth, which Barris was already lauded for the first time around. And the new show doubles down on the running barbs about Barris’s distaste for his nuclear family, particularly for his emotionally expressive eldest son (Junior on Black-ish, Pops on #BlackAF).

Audiences are treated to Barris’s version of a Curb Your Enthusiasm pastiche act, wherein the only takeaway he has implemented from Larry David’s cult-favorite show is meanness. Barris seems to have plenty that he would still like to express, some of which is quite comedically articulated, but very little of what he does have to say advances the issues that he has been publicly ruminating over for the past seven years.On Black-ish, for instance,Bow is regularly marginalized by Dre’s family for being a working mom who grew up on a hippie commune. That same casual dismissal of her personhood morphs into the cruel minimization of Joya’s biracial identity on #BlackAF. Despite a strong comedic performance by Jones, Joya’s role is limited to a search for fulfillment and purpose, and contextual examinations of her race are filtered through frivolous conversations about her dancing skills and sartorial choices.

Satire requires a clear definition of the intended audience and the subject of critique—two elements that remain elusive throughout the first season of #BlackAF. If Barris is attempting to highlight the absurdity of engaging in “black excellence” performance politics, he fails on that accord. It’s not clear whether he’s critiquing the inherently flawed premise of analyzing “blackness” solely in its relationship to white supremacy, or whether he’s just capitulating to the “white gaze” of Hollywood. And without an express motive or a fixed frame of reference, it’s difficult to grasp Barris’s target audience.

Satire requires a clear definition of the intended audience and the subject of critique.
Satire requires a clear definition of the intended audience and the subject of critique.

For instance, in the aforementioned Juneteenth episode, titled “still … because of slavery,” there is awell-executed plotlineabout Barris’s inability to contextualize a mixed-media painting he has just acquired. Made by the artist Knowledge Bennett, Strength in Numbers is an immense black canvas punctuated by luminous white stippling. Barris mutters about gentrification, origin stories, and black boxes. But the episode is punctuated byan appearance from Bennett himself, who elucidates the intention behind the painting, stating, “As black people, there’s so many different things, variations of so many different colors. And it’s the sum total of all of these colors that presents blackness in its purest form—in all of its brilliance, all of its splendor.” It’s a genuine moment that would seem to pull the show into sharp focus, but it is quickly undone by Barris’s insistence that he had made the same point as Bennett. As explained by the TV critic Soraya Nadia McDonald, “#BlackAF isn’t a show about blackness, it’s a show about one person’s near-pathological need to keep up appearances.”

In the most ambitious episode, titled “yo, between you and me … this is because of slavery,” Barris tries to assess black art that gets celebrated by mainstream white audiences. He is asked to hold a panel for a “black film” that, on his initial screening, he deems painfully subpar. Barris is upset that his lower-class family members—introduced in the episode to expose his youngest children to more “blackness”—enjoy a project that he finds pedestrian, one that is also being lauded by white critics. Between Barris’s “very black” family, the amorphous white critics of Rotten Tomatoes, and the “bad” film itself, it is difficult to glean exactly what is being indicted. The segment also seems to entirely ignore the fact that black critics exist.

Later in the episode, after lamenting that he’s never won an Emmy for any of his shows, Barris consults with a high council of other creatives such as Will Packer, Ava DuVernay, Issa Rae, Lena Waithe, and Tim Story. In talking with them, Barris confronts the sentiment that he may be resting on his laurels, riding a current “black wave” with projects that appeal to “the hearts and minds of 55-year-old white women.” Instead of delving into his shows’ thematic redundancy, Barris stops just short of examining how artists may participate in the very systems that they would like to dismantle.

There is nothing wrong with Barris’s work being informed by his particular point of view and experience. In fact, these things can enrich one’s storytelling over the course of one’s creative career. Scorsese has said that “the most personal is the most creative,” words the Parasite director, Bong Joon Ho, honored when accepting the 2020 Oscar for Best Picture. Since the debut of Black-ish, however, Barris has not found new ways to examine himself and his family within the fictive universe he’s created. He seeks to break ground with more contemporary and meaningful discussions in #BlackAF, but they mostly peter out before they have a chance of landing effectively.

The late literary critic Cheryl A. Wall wrote, “Whatever the issues [writers] confront or the questions they puzzle through, they engage, directly or indirectly, the examples of writers before them who used the essay to focus attention on political controversies, to shape aesthetic debates, and to create a space for personal recollection and philosophical reflection.” A show with a title as weighty as #BlackAF should engage in incisive thinking. It’s a difficult exercise, but the payoff would be immeasurable—and that would be the satire I would gladly tune in to.

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Pop Smoke, Brooklyn’s Roaring Voice

Originally published for Complex.

Pop Smoke, née Bashar Barakah Jackson, was born in 1999 and killed five months shy of his 21st birthday. It’s been barely two weeks since his newest project, Meet The Woo 2, was released and landed him his first top 10 debut on the Billboard 200, after he had back-to-back singles that dominated New York, “Welcome to the Party” and “Dior.” Every indicator pointed to him not just as the vanguard of Brooklyn drill, but an artist forging his way into the hip-hop mainstream, collaborating with its current stars, from Travis Scott to Nicki Minaj to Quavo, while staying true to his trademark sound. It was an exponential rise for the young man who made waves with “MPR (Money, Power, Respect)” in just December 2018, rendering the refrain “Treesha! Dirty Diana/go get a breath mint before you come get a session” ubiquitous in the streets of Southern Brooklyn.

With such a dense catalog accumulated in a brief period, it is difficult not to imagine what Pop Smoke had in store for the music world before his murder. There were fans who breathlessly anticipated the release of Flatbush rapper Bobby Shmurda from prison, hoping for a collaboration between the two dynamic artists, whose distinctive voices became just as much of an instrument as the turbulent production that supported their respective tenors. Many people highlighted the significance of Pop Smoke picking East London producer 808Melo as his longstanding collaborator, building a bridge that continues a storied tradition of organic cultural exchange within the black diaspora. He was quickly becoming the face of an emerging drill music scene in Brooklyn that was bringing a sense of excitement to New York rap that had been absent for years. As Alphonse Pierre wrote for Pitchfork, “New York was going to get it right this time, I just knew it.”

Defining the legacy of someone who was just at the nascence of their growth feels nearly impossible. It would be a disservice, however, to think about Pop Smoke as an individual and what he was to New York purely in the sense of his music, as opposed to a young man still evolving, learning, and growing into the person he wanted to be while a borough, city, and eventually an entire world looked on.

When I sat next to him for an interview late last year, one of the many things Pop Smoke told me was that while rapping wasn’t his original dream, his goal was to beat the odds in the rap game on his own merit. “I always knew I was gonna have bread,” he said. “I always was good with knowing how to talk, knowing how to hustle.” I never doubted him in that statement. We talked through alternate paths he’d charted—playing local AAU and prep school basketball, his earlier dreams of going to college—and his fealty to his family, both biological and otherwise. We discussed how his mother and sister instilled in him a sense of how to treat women and why he approached his love life with discretion but looked forward to raising daughters—a statement that, at the time, unsettled his friends, who found young girls to be punishment for less-than-exemplary behavior with their previous partners. He simply replied: “I’m with it. I hate niggas. Why would I want to bring another nigga in this world? The girl’s not the problem!”

Pop Smoke
Photo by David Cabrera

Rapping was never his original plan, nor is it his entire story, but it was his gift to Canarsie. Pop Smoke was one of the preeminent voices of young Brooklyn, and when he chose to commit to music, his aptitude shone through as his promise in sports, public speaking, and natural charm had. He let the world in on a vibe that is nearly impossible to illustrate, much of which gets lost in translation, even with numerous Genius clips attempting to serve as interpreters, sometimes with a willful wink and smile on his part. As he says in “Hawk Em,” “I’m a gentlemen and gangster/Double G, niggas know there’s only one of me.”

Since his death was confirmed, there’s been endless speculation as to the motive, shooter, and cause via home invasion—a largely fruitless endeavor that does more harm than good, forcing a close friend to have to compose himself enough to get on social media to clear his name. Trying to force an explanation out of such an abrupt and brutal act of violence won’t provide solace for Pop Smoke’s loved ones or healing for a community that was primed to reclaim a foothold on the main stage with a homegrown hip-hop sound, as deceptively comforting as the cloak of condemnation may feel. We will likely find out the answer to this morbid saga soon enough, and perhaps we won’t. As he rapped on “MPR,” “Know some niggas that shoot you for nothin.’” 

Barakah, Pop Smoke’s middle name, means blessing in Arabic. In Islam, the concept of Barakah can be transmitted through vessels—namely, people—as so ordained by God, disbursing blessings and grace to those in their proximity. We won’t get to see Bashar Jackson, father to daughters, and it’s an unspeakable horror that his mother will have to fly across the country to recover her son’s body. Nonetheless, as we’re all trying to find respite in the chaos of grief, it’s important to remember that in his short time in the spotlight, he brought a light and playful energy to the youth culture of New York, returning the voice and sound of Brooklyn to the streets where they belonged. That’s a blessing of its own, and one seen in real time, from the thousands of concertgoers across NYC taking pains to acknowledge his loss to the high school boys I saw at the Atlantic Av-Barclays Station in Brooklyn somberly listening to “Christopher Walking” on their Bluetooth speaker and the community in Canarsie gathering on his family’s block to celebrate him the best way they know how: by screaming his music into the heavens.

Just this past Sunday, Brooklyn had its first major local drill concert, called BK Drip, featuring beloved artists like Sheff G and Fivio Foreign. But it was also supposed to be Pop Smoke’s long-overdue homecoming performance, an informal coronation in his borough after a well-documented record of law enforcement denying his fans the triumphant moment he deserved, both at Rolling Loud and Powerhouse Live. When we had dinner, he had joked that “the radio knows not to say my name no more.” In his absence at BK Drip, fans chanted for him in frustration, despite ultimately understanding the suspected sceptre of the NYPD likely obstructing the appearance. They wanted their hometown royalty to bask in his latest big moment. They wanted to celebrate the man who made it out of the Flossy but still proudly carried it on his back, along with his Panamanian flag. Now, they’ll never have that chance.

While touring in London, Pop Smoke took some time to speak on his voice and what made it spread like wildfire, from Canarsie to Uptown to the rest of the world.

“I make music for that kid in the hood that’s gotta share a bedroom with, like, four kids—the young kids growing up in poverty. I make music for that kid who got beef, thinking about how, when they go to school, these people might try to kill me but I still gotta get my diploma for my mom. I make music for kids like that, who know they just gotta keep going, that there’s a better way. That’s who I really make it for. Obviously it got bigger and it’s for everybody now—people all across the world fuck with it now—but I really make it for them.”

Rest in peace to Pop Smoke, Canarsie’s homegrown royalty.

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Pop Smoke’s very New York rise

Originally published for Fader Magazine. Photos taken by Ibrahem Hasan.

On October 12, Rolling Loud — the self-identified “largest hip-hop festival in the world” — was scheduled to make a triumphant debut in rap mecca New York City. That Saturday morning, however, there was a change of plans: five acts had been removed from the lineup at the behest of the NYPD, who cited “public safety concerns” and local rappers’ alleged affiliations with “recent acts of violence citywide.”

The artists in question — 22Gz, Casanova, Sheff G, Don Q, and Pop Smoke — are at the forefront of New York’s bustling drill scene. With roots in Chicago, New York drill is an aggressive, youth-driven rap sound that frequently juxtaposes somber, refracted trap instrumentation with intense, live-wire lyricism, buoyed by the heaviness of the patented New York accent. Drill has been on the rise in the five boroughs for years, and dominated the city this summer.

No song better exemplifies the raw grit, energy, and reckless potential of a New York summer than Pop Smoke’s “Welcome to the Party,” a street track that quickly shot to several million views on YouTube. Veering between taut, pithy phraseology and panoramic storytelling, the ominous opening melody made any occasion five times more lively regardless of the venue; to date, I’ve heard it played at a house party, brunch, the club, an Afrobeats concert, and on my block in East Flatbush. Once the track was supplemented by official remixes from people like Nicki Minaj, French Montana, and Skepta, it was indisputable: The summer belonged to an upstart who came onto the scene only about a year ago.

Despite his rapid ubiquity, Pop Smoke only found out the day before the festival that he wasn’t going to be able to perform at Rolling Loud. (Rolling Loud declined to comment, although they have publicly stated that they paid the banned artists their full booking fees and offered them spots at other iterations of Rolling Loud across the country.) “That was a bummer,” Pop Smoke tells me when we first meet. It’s ten days after Rolling Loud debacle; he was supposed to perform this evening at Powerhouse Live, the pre-party for local hip-hop station Power 105.1’s annual Powerhouse concert — but his set was again cancelled the day before, seemingly because of the NYPD’s intervention into Rolling Loud. “The radio knows not to say my name no more,” he says.

Pop Smoke’s very New York rise

This kind of censorship due to police interference isn’t a newfound phenomenon, even as it pertains to drill. In Chicago and London, the music has become another source of tension between law enforcement and the communities they are expected to serve, creating moral panics that are frequently debated in the public sphere. Chicago artists have consistently fought being linked to spikes in violence in the city’s South Side; in London, Metropolitan police commissioner Cressida Dick said in a radio interview that “We have gangs who make drill videos and in those videos, they taunt each other. They say what they’re going to do to each other and specifically what they are going to do to who.”

British authorities went so far as to charge two artists for performing their own songs; years before drill’s current mainstream moment in New York, Flatbush’s own Bobby Shmurda was arrested in 2014 and eventually accepted a plea deal. At one press conference, NYPD Assistant Chief James Essig described the music of Shmurda and his friends as “almost like a real-life document of what they were doing on the street.” Casanova went on Instagram the morning the Rolling Loud cancellations were announced to express his frustration, typing, “I JUST WANNA LIVE. My last felony conviction was 2007. I lost everything I ever loved and I’m STILL losing.”

Pop Smoke’s life story is one of resilience, and not even the NYPD will deter him from claiming his title as King of the Summer. When we meet at St. Bartholomew’s Church after a photoshoot, I’m warned that he’s dealing with some “rough personal news” he isn’t willing to disclose, and that he may not be in the best of spirits. But by the time he approaches me, he possesses a cocksure demeanor and charm that matches nicely with his signature diamond-encrusted nameplate chain. With his Power 105.1 performance nixed, we go to dinner at Philippe Chow’s, his longtime friends Trav and Ace tagging along. “What’s your name? You like Starburst gummies?” he asks, smiling and hugging me before putting me into a cab.

Born Bashar Jackson, the 20-year-old Pop Smoke was raised in Brooklyn’s Canarsie neighborhood, a southern corner of the borough with a predominantly West Indian presence. He grew up in a Panamanian household with a strong female presence and had an early love of sports, playing baseball, football and basketball. This natural aptitude for sports enabled Pop Smoke to go to prep school in Philadelphia at the age of 15 on a full scholarship — but trouble found him after about a year, and he returned back to his home turf.

“You can take the kid out the hood, but you can’t take the hood out the kid,” he says. “I went to go get some food [in Philly]… these guys were in front of the corner store, I walk in to the spot, they said some crazy shit to me, and we just end up rumbling.” Returning to New York, his hoop dreams ended. “I thought I was gonna go to Howard, go over there and join a fraternity,” he says. “It wasn’t always rapping. Who would have thought I would be a rapper?”

Pop Smoke’s very New York rise

In just under a year, Smoke has had a career boom that many artists have never come close to accomplishing. He picked up a microphone for the first time while arranging the track “MPR” over a beat he discovered online by East London-based producer 808Melo, beginning a close collaborative relationship between the two. “I knew it hit because it got leaked, and when it leaked, everybody was jacking the song,” he says. “And when it hit I was like, Yo, we got something here, and I kept going.”

Since then, he has continued to set in motion a cadence of new music releases that have rippled throughout the New York street scene. Songs such as “Meet the Woo” and “Flexin’” all buzzed online, but it was “Welcome to the Party” that crested over and into the mainstream, bringing New York drill into the limelight.

Pop Smoke now finds himself at the cutting edge of a local rap movement largely composed of young men from outer-borough neighborhoods overwhelmingly populated by various parts of the Black diaspora: East Flatbush, Canarsie, Jamaica, Brownsville. This environment has deeply informed their soundscape and aesthetic, building from a base that goes back to 2milly and GS9 with the “Milly Rock” and the “Shmoney Dance.”; lyrics by New York’s drill rappers reference not just the sets and neighborhoods they proudly represent, but the parlance affixed to the households they grew up in.

On “Meet the Woo,” Pop Smoke raps, “I turn that boy to a duppy” — a patois word for a malevolent spirit or ghost, whipping the phrase around with his distinct gravelly timbre. Even the moniker Pop Smoke is partially borne of his familial heritage; his grandfather gave him the nickname Poppa, and it stuck. The assumed surname Smoke came from the streets, where he was called “Smoke Oh Guap.” In his eyes, he says, there isn’t a distinction between one family and another.

When I ask him how his immediate family feels about his sudden fame, he looks around the table at our corner booth in the modern, bustling Beijing-style restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, pointing at his two boys. As we pick from platters of satay, lobster, prawns, and bok choy, they’ve been comfortably interjecting into our conversation and bantering about everything from music to parties to debates about eating ass. “This is my immediate family,” Pop Smoke says.

Pop Smoke’s very New York rise
Pop Smoke’s very New York rise

Having reciprocal experiences rooted in being part of an emerging class of predominantly first-generation, third culture children, it’s understandable — if not expected — that the through line to New York’s drill runs strongest not from Chicago, despite having deep respect for their musical forebears, but the UK. Like their peers in London, New York drill rappers are generating a musical output that owes to their cultural lineage, while also holding a magnifying glass up to the streets where they grew up. But for Pop Smoke, associations with drill, while itself a diverse soundbase, overly simplify what he considers his art to be. “I make gangsta music,” he clarifies. “Bitch I’m a thot, get me lit. That’s not drill. Y’all know what it is, but that’s not drill. When you think of drill it’s like, Pull up we airing it out.”

The “air it out” aesthetic, as he refers to it, can nonetheless be heard in songs of his like “Flexin’,” where he pushes air out of his chest in a rapid, aggressive cadence that can feel like the lyrical analog of a rapid-fire weapon. But he easily weaves from that approach to talking about fashion, women, and money in a manner that comfortably creates a linkage between him and New York’s most infamous antagonist of the early aughts, 50 Cent – his song “PTSD” sounds, at points, almost eerily akin to the cadence of the South Jamaica, Queens, bred rapper.

The life cycle for each new Pop Smoke song starts with him stepping in the booth and defining the vibe; he laid the foundation for “Welcome to the Party” in around 30 minutes. It’s a skill that has emerged from his natural banter; at dinner, before discussing a recent sexual encounter with a woman at a local party, he leans back into his seat and, with a tenderness in his voice, simply says, “Yo, different, bro. Different.”

“Everything I make just be like, vibes,” he explains. “Yesterday I made a song called ‘Drive the Boat.’ I just made it cuz I seen a girl go like that” – mimicking the motion made popular by Houston-based rapper Megan the Stallion – “talking about ‘Drive the boat.’ About to drive the boat with the liquor. So I’m like, hey, I just made a song called ‘Drive the Boat.’ I gotta have some inspiration. That’s when the best music comes up for me.” Regarding the track “Dior,” he simply states, “When I made that I had just got on Dior.” I teasingly reply that he was decked out in Gucci earlier today, to which he quickly replies, “Double G, niggas know there’s only one of me,” lyrics from his brief album cut “Hawk Em.”

As Pop Smoke gets bigger, and with the NYPD already deeming him a danger, he may find himself juxtaposed against the rise and spectacular fall of Tekashi69, the most recent superstar come out of Brooklyn. But there’s a world of difference between them: Tekashi offered a curated narrative, accelerating quickly into cultural relevance by performing the allure of a lifestyle that he only ever participated in by proxy, while Pop Smoke is parsing apart a lived experience highly relevant to a homegrown fan base that’s invested in protecting him from the authorities’ obstructive power.

Pop Smoke’s life — from his songs down to his every interaction — is an exercise in discerning what can be safely shared under constantly surveilling eyes, even as he engages in the many indulgences of a young cis adult male with minimal impulse control (despite it being 2019, him and his friends haven’t received the memo on the abundant use of “no homo” and “pause” in casual speech). Take the title of his album, Meet the Woo: Over the past year, he has replied slyly when asked what “The Woo” stands for. One day it’s about being flossy, the other it’s purely a dance move, akin to 22Gz’ Blixky Twirl (a quick glance at the Youtube comments section from lifelong New Yorkers will make it plain that there’s more to the dance than just a sequence of steps). Over the course of our conversation, when I begin to mention how most born-and-bred New Yorkers (especially from the outer boroughs) know that such references are to real things, he looks on with a slight twinkle in his eye and simply replies, “That’s a real thing?”

Pop Smoke says that he’s relatively unconcerned about his threshold for exposure, but still talks cryptically about the lifestyle that he and his friends grew into. “We ain’t have nothing else to do,” he says. “What’s already understood don’t gotta be explained. We been there done that already.” He points out that he’s getting money now: “Beef — talking to people that don’t really have anything going for themselves — doesn’t really help you get any money. It’s just potential bail that you have to pay. Know what I’m saying? We’ve been there already, we not trying to go back to that.”

Still, that hasn’t eliminated their interactions with the authorities. He points out the vast swath of luxury cars that he and his crew have acquired, recalling some extreme measures that he and his crew took to make it to a performance with French Montana in the Bronx: “That nigga did some shit, bro,” Smoke says. “We got there on time though,” Trav responds. “We got there before French!” Pop readily confirms, putting on his best French Montana impersonation. “He said, Pop! What y’all up to, bruh?’ I said, Nigga, if you wanna know what we just did just to get here? He said, Hey man, y’all niggas crazy, man. Y’all niggas just crazy. Park that shit up, get in the car.” Pop chuckles, adding, “I love French.”

Pop Smoke’s very New York rise

The respect seems mutual. French, who says he’s always watching for new talent coming out of his hometown, has been one of the major cosigns as Pop Smoke has risen. “He was buzzing out of Brooklyn and it sparked my radar, same way it did with the whole GS9 movement,” French tells me. “I just remember how I felt when Jadakiss heard my song and jumped on it. I always want to be able to do that for other up and coming rappers like he did for me.” He adds: “When you make it out of New York, you can make it out of anywhere. When you make it out before anyone really knows you, that says a lot about you.”

Earlier, over our crustacean-filled dinner, French graced the table with his virtual presence, FaceTiming with Pop to briefly discuss a potential track with “Welcome to the Party” producer and frequent Pop collaborator 808MeloBeats. After promising to send him a pack of beats, Pop asks French about a far more pressing concern. “You told Drake about me? What he said? He said he jacking it?” he asks. “Hell yeah!” French replies from Los Angeles, where he was attending Drakes 33rd birthday party. (French gifted Drake a $175,000 diamond-encrusted bracelet). “That’s love,” Smoke says back. “You already kicked it off. If you and Drake get on some shit…”

A feature from someone like Drake would put Pop Smoke on a different path moving forward. He exploded on the scene without much more than the range of his vocal inflections and the army of friends behind him in every video. “That was my goal — do it by yourself, beat the odds,” he says. “Cuz when you do it by yourself, it hit different. I always knew, Imma be a millionaire. I always knew I was gonna have bread. I always was good with knowing how to talk, knowing how to hustle.”

Pop Smoke takes out his phone and shows me a video clip of his performance in Albany on Instagram. “The love that I’m getting…where we come from, I never really felt love like that.” The remainder of his Instagram, though, is surprisingly sparse for a Gen Z artist, primarily serving as a promotional vehicle for his work. Having previously said that the internet is “federale shit,” he clarifies, “I’m not into what comes with it. The internet is fire.”

Part of this reticence may be influenced by his first brush with online notoriety, which came in the form of an infamous video that went viral on WorldStarHipHop in 2012. Titled “Young Crip Gets Slapped by NY Bloods After Taking Out Beads,” the video shows a baby-faced, 13-year-old Pop Smoke being taken advantage of by people in East Flatbush who used the power of public humiliation against him. Almost seven years later, the first upload on his official YouTube channel remains eight seconds long, and is simply titled “POP SMOKE SMACKS OPP SHAPOW!!!!” In part of the description, it states, “Now tables turned and Pop Smoke shows the Blood member how you really shapow somebody.”

As the evening comes to a close, we’re approached by our server with a modest request; the man’s son, who also works at the restaurant, wants to take a photo with Pop Smoke. Rattling off “PTSD,” “Scenario,” and “Dior,” as his favorite songs, he earnestly proclaims that his day doesn’t start until he has a chance to ride his bicycle while listening to Meet the Woo.

That Saturday night, Meek Mill stepped out onto the Powerhouse stage at New Jersey’s Prudential Center; during his set, he brings out Young M.A, one recent New York rapper to enjoy freedom from the NYPD. But the energy completely changes when Meek manages to sneak Pop Smoke to perform both “Dior” and “Welcome to the Party.” With the entire stadium in lockstep, Pop Smoke and his crew perform his summer smash for the greater New York area’s last major festival for the rest of the year. The message is clear: the NYPD can do what they want, but New York City isn’t leaving Pop Smoke’s side.

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Kanye West and the Cult of Personality

Originally published for the New York Times.

When Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks” was released in 2004, the song was praised for boldly bringing discussions of faith into hip-hop. Fifteen years later, Mr. West’s contemporaries continue to speak of its impact. In the first episode of “Hip-Hop: The Songs That Shook America,” an AMC docu-series that premiered Sunday, the singer-songwriter John Legend said, “Kanye made it O.K. to talk about your faith in songs that weren’t Christian songs.”

It is this persistent reverie and good will for “Jesus Walks” that Mr. West has banked on since starting Sunday Service, a series of obliquely religious pop-up gatherings featuring a gospel choir (usually wearing attire from the rapper’s clothing line Yeezy) this year.

The set lists fluctuate from week to week. But the linchpin of the productions, which segue from traditional songs of mercy and salvation to bolder reconfigurations of modern secular hits, is in that subversive single from his debut album, “The College Dropout” — the artist jubilantly recites the final verse of the song, flexing his cadence in lock step with the choir.

On an invitation-only basis (or in the case of Coachella last April, the price of a steep festival ticket), the select few present at these gatherings get to rub shoulders with the likes of ASAP Rocky, Chance the Rapper, Brad Pitt and other high-profile entertainers while partaking of the “exclusive” experience. The events serve as a transparent attempt of Mr. West to fundamentally regroup himself within the context of religion after an extended run of willfully courting salacious controversy, whether it be for an unsolicited dressing down of Taylor Swift, his wearing of a MAGA hat or a contentious TMZ appearance in which he claimed that slavery was a “choice.”

But the endeavor reads like a blatantly self-serving appropriation of black faith traditions, and the Sunday Service performances are in fact little more than concerts trading in aimless aphorisms and the cult of Mr. West’s personality — so much so that it has become a running joke that he’s running an actual cult. Black Christians have expressed skepticism about his intentions, and the rapper’s past comments about how he views the relationship between hip-hop and church provide reason for their concern.

“Hip-hop is a religion to a certain extent, and the rappers are the preachers, the music is the scriptures, you know?” Mr. West says in an archival clip resurfaced in the docu-series. “It’s just like church, because you go to a concert, you raise your hands in the air, you sing songs and you definitely pay some money. It’s just like church.”

Choir members performing with Kanye West in Indio, Calif.
Choir members performing with Kanye West in Indio, Calif.Credit…Rich Fury/Getty Images

The description of Sunday Service provided by his wife, Kim Kardashian West, during an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” doesn’t help: “There’s no praying, there’s no sermon. There’s no word. It’s just music, and it’s just a feeling.”

The reduction of the black faith tradition to “just music” is precisely what has become of a similar profit-making endeavor for some black places of worship. For nearly 30 years there have been Sunday church service tours of Harlem landmarks such as Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (New York City’s oldest black church) and Abyssinian Baptist Church, with foot traffic accelerating at the turn of the century. Tourists pay concert ticket prices to enter into a hallowed spiritual ground for a glimpse of a famed choir, as opposed to consuming a spiritual service and grasping the significance of the churches’ histories. Gospel is reduced to a commodity, as opposed to a legacy.

That tension was said to be evident in Mr. West’s grandstanding performance at the Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral church last month, which occurred during a confusing promotion for what is supposed to be his forthcoming album, “Jesus Is King.” (The album was slated for release Sept. 27, but has yet to be made commercially available — although a complementary documentary of the same name is to open in IMAX theaters Oct. 25.)

The early, more conventional musical invocations of praise and faith from the choir gave way to a freestyle performance, as Mr. West claimed to be a rapper “with a purpose, not just for surface.” The choir, filling in the first few pews of the church as opposed to the traditional positioning on the stage platforms, reacted exuberantly, dancing, jumping and engaging in unison while the churchgoers — several of whom reportedly walked out — looked on.

Kanye West is mining black faith traditions for his music.
Kanye West is mining black faith traditions for his music.Credit…Getty Images

These performances have helped grant Mr. West a certain grace that, it should be noted, has not been afforded to artists who have been maligned for similar sins of a smaller scale, such as Chrisette Michele, a singer with gospel roots who in 2017 was widely criticized for performing at President Trump’s inauguration. Clips of Sunday Service have been circulated online with enthusiasm and proclamations as though he were breaking new ground in music.

But a mash-up of a gospel song with an R&B song — Ginuwine’s romantic slow-jam “So Anxious,” for one — is hardly novel. (Kirk Franklin and other gospel artists have been remixing secular songs in church for years.) Likewise, with “Jesus Walks,” Mr. West was just one of several rappers — including M.C. Hammer, Diddy and DMX before him — to usher in a cycle of faith exploration in mainstream hip-hop, as Billboard’s Naima Cochrane and others have pointed out.

Even if “Jesus Walks” isn’t as wholly original as his peers would have you believe, there remains a power in the song’s origins that seems to have been lost today. The Addicts Rehabilitation Center Choir, led by its founder, James Allen, recorded “Walk With Me,” an arrangement of a gospel hymn, in 1997. In “The Songs That Shook America,” a choir member says that they were singing for their lives as they originally performed the song.

It’s a distinct call of faith and conviction, the essence of which Mr. West, at his best, distilled into the hook of “Jesus Walks” in 2004, which samples “Walk With Me”: “God show me the way, because the Devil’s trying to break me down.”

When viewing clips of Mr. West’s performance of the song during Sunday Service halls, however, it registers as a facsimile of the sentiment and legacy it once represented, a mere interlude for conveying nondescript “God is love” statements or defensive, egotistic rants. During his recent service in Salt Lake City, he railed against those who have criticized him for his friendly relationship with President Trump and the Republican Party: “I ain’t never made a decision only based off my color. That’s a form of slavery, mental slavery.”

Iconoclasm, even at its most crude execution, typically runs afoul of the conventions of religion. If “Jesus Walks” is a song that he created to focus on the sins of man, as his co-writer Rhymefest (born Che Smith) has stated, his first reckoning should be with the paradox of spreading the farce of original thought as dictated through the filter of the church of Kanye West.

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Is Tyler Perry’s Historic Studio More Than A Representational Facade?

Originally written for OkayPlayer.

In June 2019, Tyler Perry received BET’s Ultimate Icon award for his substantive work in a notoriously walled-off film and TV industry. While accepting this honor, Tyler shared a few words, proselytizing about the need to pay it forward via the self-coined maxim “help them cross” — his most momentous instance of such an act being the then-forthcoming establishment of Tyler Perry Studios at what was once called Fort McPherson in Atlanta, Georgia. The studio had its grand opening on Saturday.

“That studio was once a confederate army base,” he said during his speech. “Which means that there was [sic] Confederate soldiers on that base plotting and planning on how to keep 3.9 million Negroes enslaved. Now that land is owned by one Negro.”

Spanning 330 acres — it can reportedly fit the lots of Disney, Warner Bros, Paramount, Fox, and Sony with room to spare — it’s hard not to be awed at the scale. Headline after headline reiterated the apocryphal narrative of Perry opening the “first ever Black-owned studio” — a title actually reserved for Black film director and independent producer Oscar Micheaux in the early 20th century (who Perry himself has been in talks to portray), although Perry is now the only Black-owned production facility in America. Throughout the grand opening, a caravan of Black Hollywood’s finest descended on the red carpet and paid their dues accordingly. The celebration was the manifestation of the final words Perry offered in his Ultimate Icon speech: “While everybody was fighting for a seat at the table talking about #OscarsSoWhite, #OscarsSoWhite, I said, ‘Y’all go ahead and do that, but while you’re fighting for a seat at the table I’ll go ahead and build my own.’”

There’s a dangerous line, however, between conflating individual attainment with largesse, and it’s a common failure with using Black Capitalism as a panacea for social ills. The proverbial rising tide that lifts all boats only works when everyone has a boat or is on the same one. But there are a variety of institutions across the board that work to maintain systemic inequities in all cross-sections of Black populations, and simply having Black visibility doesn’t eradicate the concern. If you look at the singular issue of “providing a vast space for current Black actors who are struggling to get work to have a higher potential for film roles,” then that’s certainly an obstacle that Perry has probably reduced. In other parts of the entertainment industry, however, questions remain. Perry remains on the national “Do Not Work” list of the Actors Equity Association for consistently hiring non-union stage actors. In 2008, there was a public incident in his previous series, House of Payne, where several of his writers were fired while trying to negotiate new Writers Guild of America (WGA) union contracts prior to the show’s syndication. The Writers Guild and Perry ended up coming to an agreement that same year.

“I feel like I was slapped in the face, like we were used,” Teri Brown-Jackson, one of the writer’s fired, said at the time. “We were good enough to create over a hundred episodes, but now when it comes to reaping the benefits of the show being syndicated and having other spin-offs from it, he decides to let us go unless we accept a horrible offer.” (An attorney for Perry said that the writers were fired for “the quality of their work” at the time.)

This is doubly injurious when you consider Black America’s long history of fighting and organizing for unions as a civil rights issue. In 2018, Perry was in headlines after a phone conversation between him, Mo’Nique and her husband surfaced. During their conversation, Perry acknowledged that she had been treated unfairly by the industry (she was called “difficult” after declining to travel to the Cannes film festival to promote Precious for free ahead of the 2009-10 awards season), and said that he would try to send the actress money earned from the movie too. This year, Mo’Nique revealed in an interview with Vulture that Perry had yet to do that.

“We had given Tyler Perry a year to keep his word. Brother, you said you were going to come out and say something. Well, you never came out and said anything,” she said. “And what was disheartening was people who were saying, ‘How could you tape him?’ But, they weren’t saying, ‘Oh my God, did you hear what he said? He said she wasn’t wrong.’”

And while many in Hollywood have disavowed filming in Georgia due to the recent  “heartbeat” abortion laws — despite the generous 30% filming tax credit — Perry has declined, noting the investment he has made into the community superseding his disagreement with the legislation.

Given his disavowal, it was disappointing — but not surprising — to see Georgia Governor Brian Kemp (who signed the legislation into law) as one of the guests of honor at the studio’s grand opening as a “welcoming gesture.” A municipal undertaking of this magnitude is certainly not obtained without developing the skill to ingratiate oneself with politicians. As it currently stands, the perception remains within Georgia politics that Perry was able to obtain the acreage for the significantly discounted market price of $30 million, because of a strong working relationship with former Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed, as opposed to having the most robust case for revitalizing a district that has been impacted by the base closure. The film industry may create many opportunities for employment but that doesn’t inherently guarantee a spike in local jobs in a network as insular as entertainment — especially one that is heavily predicated on temporary work, as critics argued while the land contract was being bid on. When the majority of your pipeline is presumed to be positioned in New York and Los Angeles, the question of how much community can be served with the remainder of your available resources is a valid one.

Parallel to the lot opening came the announcement of a lofty aim to open “a compound for trafficked women, girls, homeless women, [and] LGBTQ youth” — replete with daycares and apartments, and the ultimate goal of teaching the entertainment business and self-sufficiency. It is an admirable dream that is hard to substantively parse through without access to any finer points. In a fashion it feels like a silent mea culpa for all of the open criticism he has received over portrayals of all of these archetypes in his productions. That said, one wonders if a prerequisite or expectation of shelter is an interest in film or entertainment, and if he has the proper individual resources to support whatever approach he ultimately takes in building a philanthropic effort from the ground up. 

The framework of Black excellence is such that it begets obligatory deference to the gilded class that have managed to successfully work their way through the labyrinth of racist systems and present them as not merely just celebrities to revere, but also pattern lives after. It’s for this reason that critique — which many have defensively viewed as reactionary — is an essential tool in pushing past the sentiment and the optics to examine the entire playing field. The technique has been used by great Black essayists throughout the last two centuries. As literary critic Cheryl Wall writes in her book On Freedom and the Will to Adorn, “the dialogic form of the essay which strives to produce the effect of the spontaneous, the tentative, and the open-ended lends itself to exploring complex and contentious issues.”

Tyler Perry is nothing if not complex and contentious. His legacy is one that will inevitably be acclaimed for his accumulation of immense capital. But nuance in the narrative lies in defining which Black community he is beholden to serving in his next era as an indisputable media mogul. The Black community in Hollywood and Atlanta/Fort McPherson, and the marginalized women and LGBTQ youth represent different thresholds and expectations for accountability and growth — some interests which may very well run counter to each other. And it is incumbent on Perry to decide which ones he will prioritize first.

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