BLACK IVY: A Revolt in Style by Jason Jules and Graham Marsh is a coffee table book. That’s precisely where it’s been in the year since I received it as a Christmas present. I’d browsed the photographs several times over the year but had yet to stop to read the accompanying words. Until now. I’m mad at myself for not getting to it sooner because it was a delightful and inspiring read and a fitting first book of the new year.
I’d put the book on my list for Santa in the fall of 2021 after reading several articles that used it as a jumping-off point to discuss masculine fashion in broader or more contemporary terms. I’m not a fashionista, but I think about my outfits, the pieces I like, and what goes well together. One of my seldom-used boards on Pinterest is called Sartorial Game. I save hip sweaters and shoes that come across my Instagram feed in a collection. I get dressed for work even when that means taking just a few steps into my home office.
Through BLACK IVY, I can contextualize the clothing that resonates with me and why it feels so cool. I love a short sleeve button-down popover shirt. I prefer a cub collar on my full-length dress shirts if I can find one. Give me a beautiful sweater with a visible tee poking out of a collar. I want to pair these items with fresh sneakers, though the style’s originators would’ve likely preferred a hat as their touch of flare.
I felt both affirmed and encouraged by the stories and clothing of those civil rights-era cats. I wrote notes to learn more about Ted Joans, Noah Purifoy, and Jacob Lawrence. Images of Dignity by Charles White will likely be another read shortly. Thelonius Monk will be my Throwback Thursday music this week. I sought out the A Great Day in Harlem documentary.
I’ll soon be re-injecting Malcolm X (in both book and movie form) into my veins. I’ve got a date with Jazz on a Summers Day this Sunday, which will be a fitting end to my winter break.
And as I return to my routines next week, I’ll be thinking about which pieces go together. If clothes make the man, what is in my closet representing all shades of me?
In Better Than I Imagined, Meshell Ndegeocello fashions her spoken word portion of the song as a voice mail to her lover. Many parts of it stop me in my tracks, but in February of this year, as I waited impatiently for my name to be called in the vaccination lottery, I most appreciated her closing lines:
“I hope you’re okay. Staying inside. I hope you’re not lonely.”
It’s a prayer. It has been my prayer as we continue to navigate the pandemic. In the past, my hope for others was that they were thriving. As we entered month 12 of the pandemic (and now in month 22), my hopefulness had not waned, but it has become more grounded. I hope you’re safe. I hope you’re making good choices. I hope you’re finding joy in small things.
Better Than I Imagined by Robert Glasper and remixed by KAYTRANADA featuring H.E.R. and Meshell Ndegeocello is my song of the year because it represents how I’m feeling as 2021 comes to an end. It’s bold and reflective. There’s a lilt of melancholy, but it feels bursting with possibility in many ways. It’s grateful for even the challenging experiences. They are worthwhile in memory. The present, even as a new variant and rising cases will wreak havoc on our best-laid plans, is better than imagined.
The rest of my 2021 mixtape is like my Spotify music aura for these last 365 days: happy and bold. There are explorations into jazz (classic and modern), Nigerian pop, hip hop that made you want to nod your head and move your feet, and singers whose voices were infectious. It closes with Charlie Parker’s April in Paris: rekindled hope for the new year.
In a time when popular rap is so depressed or grim or vapid, the whole thing is a wake-up. It’s ENERGY! It’s clever. It’s Tyler at his best, most sure, and most whole, and I can’t help but grin while listening.
The other albums that brought me great joy and comfort this year weren’t all released in 2021 but were essential nonetheless:
Apparently, July is for binging The Polyphonic Spree. The last time I decided to pull up the albums I love from the Texas-based psychedelic pop choir was this same month six years ago. I don’t remember what sparked that session, so let’s mark this one.
I bought airplane tickets to Paris, France, this week. The anticipated travel feels both imminent and precarious even though it’s a couple of months away. Trying to live in the age of COVID-19 continues to be like this: having the courage to live life to the fullest in unsettled times.
— Michael Lieberman (@michaelagrammar) July 23, 2021
It is the summer of uncertain vibes! On the night I bought those tickets, I also chose not to go to the gym because I couldn’t find my preferred mask for working out. Those tickets were purchased weeks later than I intended because I struggled to work past my fears that something might derail the adventure before it even got off the ground. Will my passport renewal return in time? Will the variants change border and travel rules? Will the anti-vax fervor in the states continue its expansion across the globe? Will some yet to be known threat grip us anew?
As I fought through those thoughts to click a big blue button to confirm purchase for two on a rocket that will cross the Atlantic, Section 14 (Two Thousand Places) shuffled up into my ears.
“You gotta be good. You gotta be strong. You gotta be two thousand places at once. And I know there’s a lot outside the window. It seems a lot for you and me.”
I’d already been thinking about making a playlist for this summer in which, internally, I am two thousand places at once. Mostly, there’s joy here. There’s sun on my face and in my heart as I get back to all that is outside my window. But, there’s also trepidation and anxiety as we mask up and fires burn, and dudes with too much money go to space while the neediest of us sleep under those same stars hoping to make it through the night. I’ve been bopping around between the latest from Hiatus Kaiyote and Tyler, The Creator sprinkled with productions from Adrian Younge and the mysterious folks behind the artists associated with Sault but it was Tim DeLaughter’s box of oddities that brought it all together.
I bought plane tickets. I bought some new masks. I’m grateful this week for my good fortune and the sun and courage.
And I’m grateful for this music that is soundtracking one weird-ass summer.
As the lyrics begin in the video for Lockdown, Anderson .Paak stands with several other LA-based musicians whose work I admire. Their fists are raised. The names of far too many black people killed by police violence are used to make up the song title’s letters. Paak is wearing a black jersey with the word “riots” presented in the Los Angeles Sparks logo style.
It’s a night in late May or early June of this year. Protests have taken over this city in outrage over the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer thousands of miles away. In this city, people scream out in anguish for the extrajudicial deaths at the hands of those tasked, in theory, to protect and serve us over the years. We’re a little over two months into the pandemic, and it’s too much.
It’s all too much. And so the people rise. Black Lives Matter signs go up in our well-appointed neighborhood, including by store owners with boarded-up windows hoping not to be painted with the same brush as those with the guns and the badge. We’re all complicit, though, aren’t we?
Far too often, we vote blindly or with our pocketbooks in mind. We pay little attention to how the city makes decisions. We’re unaware of how it metes out the spoils of government funding or the processes it employs to do so. In any other time, we’d be more concerned with where we needed to get to next than the death of yet another black person.
Any other year, the city would have a more significant complaint about the inconvenience of civil unrest and anguish than the roots of that pain and the merits of those demands.
It was a lockdown, and yet the people were rising. I wasn’t downtown, but maybe I should’ve been.
“We present our first ‘Untitled’ album to mark a moment in time where we, as Black People and of Black Origin, are fighting for our lives. RIP George Floyd and all those who have suffered from police brutality and systemic racism.
Change is happening…We are focused. ”
— Sault
Sault first came on to my radar last year around this time as I explored Best Of lists. I believe they were included on several KCRW DJ lists for their first two very dance encouraging albums, “5” and “7”.
Sault delivered two more albums in 2020, “Untitled (Black is)” and “Untitled (Rise)”. The former was released on Juneteenth with the statement I quoted above released on Twitter as it’s primary promotional effort.
Any time a song from any of their albums shuffles into my ears, I’m compelled to binge their rapidly expanding and impressive discography.
Not only is their music right for this moment in time, but it also seems to be a time traveler. There is a cosmic funk retro sensibility mixed with a constant push through the boundaries like afrofuturistic music explorers.
It’s how I wanted to feel in 2020: present, thoughtful, wise, and focused on the future.
And Little Dragon, as they have for nearly 15 years, light up my brain and heart and spirit with their sounds. Always in new ways but still the same them.
“Miss me with that bullshit. You ain’t really wild, you a tourist. I be blackin’ out with the purest.”
— Kendrick Lamar
Unapologetically black. That’s how I liked my music this year. Not just black, per se, (though that was where my head was tbh) but unapologetically whatever it was trying to be. That could be unapologetically pop. Unapologetically fun. Unapologetically woke. Whatever. Just make me feel like it’s real, that I’m real, that who I am and what I am is not only okay but brilliant.
King’s Dead did that for me from its very first notes. Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock, James Blake, and Future with my favorite of all the songs on the epic Black Panther Album (Music from and Inspired by the Movie) is ultimately a villain’s anthem but one that reeks of authenticity. It sounds like California. Black California from the bay to the South of LA. When Jay Rock says, “My name gon’ hold up. My team gon’ hold up,” I feel that shit.
My last.fm charts will say that All the Starz from the same album is my top track, but it’s treating King’s Dead from the Black Panther album and Jay Rock’s Redemption as two separate tracks. Combined, it’s close to 100 spins.
The 2018 Mixtape
My methodology this year for figuring out my faves was to look at each month separately rather than focus on my listens in aggregate though those numbers were a secondary factor. My mixtape reflects my favorite song of each month from January through November as well as my favorite discovery.
I like this approach better because it acknowledges the rhythms of time more than the inertia of routine and the impact of the Spotify algorithms on my listening behavior. So instead of seeing a playlist dominated by a few albums and artists, you’ll hear some tracks that I forgot I loved right next to the records that I played the hell out of for a few weeks at a time. There’s a little symmetry here as well with a song featuring Sza—artist of my favorite track of 2017—and ends with a song by Janet Jackson who I have admired since I was knee-high and who just got nominated for the Rock & Roll hall of fame. She’s still got it.
The Albums
I haven’t looked at many of the end-of-year lists yet, so I don’t know what the consensus is around the top releases though I’m guessing some of my faves like Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer and Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy are on them. I know they are both GRAMMY nominated for Album of the Year. They weren’t my very top albums this year despite trying hard to convince myself otherwise.
Black Panther—both the compilation mentioned above and the Ludwig Göransson score—set the tone for everything I would listen to for the rest of the year. It primed me for Jay Rock’s full length, an artist I wasn’t checking for before King’s Dead and his instant anthem WIN which was the theme for the LA Sparks season well before it was played at nearly every sporting event the rest of the year. The score re-ignited my interest in film compositions which led to an April filled with the soundtracks to Arrival and Annihilation and Westworld and many a Black Mirror episode. Combined, Kendrick Lamar’s curated playlist for the best black popcorn movie ever released and that score was the best thing going all year. Full stop.
Beyond that, I enjoyed grown folks hip hop from Beyoncé and her husband and Phonte. I liked expansive sounds from The Midnight Hour and Abstract Orchestra, clever reworks from Kelela, and a pretty perfect pop album from Ariana Grande who is, perhaps, an even more interesting artist than she is a celebrity. She, too, is figuring out how to be unapologetically herself with each release.
“America, I just checked my followers list, and you motherfuckers owe me.”
— Young Thug
I intended to write this last Sunday just 12 hours after Childish Gambino’s This is America entered the public consciousness as song and video. I’d watched the visuals several times by that point. I’d seen the SNL performance. I’d listened to the music alone on Spotify. I’d read the many Twitter reactions and overreactions.
This week, I’m grateful for art and artists that defy definition. This is America is dense and complex and complicated. It’s bold and obtuse. My brain hasn’t entirely been able to wrap around it and hold it with any certainty. Donald Glover has chosen not to explain it’s intentions or meaning. I appreciate that.
It is somewhat tricky, I imagine, to create art in 2018 that can survive the hot take unblemished. On David Letterman’s Netflix show, Tina Fey discusses the impact of the social media reaction to her SNL Weekend Update bit from last August. She’s not even on Twitter, and the hot takes bruised her bit—a segment that I still think is pretty good—and her perception of it.
This is America, though, remains a thing to be unpacked and considered and reconsidered. Even as the remixes and memes began yesterday, I found it undiminished. What I most appreciate about Glover’s recent works—with this song, with Atlanta, hell, even his acceptance speeches at awards ceremonies—is that he isn’t overly precious with Black American popular culture. For him, it is a thing that exists and to be treated the same as any other aspect of the American experience. He respects it on it’s face. He does not feel the need to explain or defend it. He recognizes that it is a thing to be played with, challenged, deconstructed and reconstructed.
Blackness can handle it. The people it represents can handle it. In fact, we’re better for it when we neither apologize nor overly celebrate what we make and who we are. He centers blackness. Full stop.
I’m not sure I ever found a flow on the mat over these 30 days. I have one more session tomorrow, so maybe it will come then. Perhaps it won’t. It’s okay either way. What I have found with this practice is a sense of control and awareness of my body that I hadn’t had since college when I was playing basketball four or five days a week.
My shoulders have strengthened a lot during this process. My trainer has noticed and is now regularly increasing how much I lift during our full body workouts. I’m holding much less tension in my neck. My balance is better. My left hip is working hard at loosening. It’s still the tightest area of my body, but it doesn’t want to be.
If you stayed on track for the full month, the journey was supposed to end today on the 31st. Mine continues as I took this most recent Sunday off to give that hard-working hip some recovery time. I’m looking forward to tomorrow morning’s time. And to the next day on the mat.
And the next.
“The first time your name was used, it was beauty, and I knew.”
Come September, Tiffany and I will have been together for a decade. It feels both not that long—she is still a beautiful mystery to me in many ways—and like we have always been this way, comfortable in our connection.
This month, I love her for meals made, and appointments kept. For grocery store runs and shared TV time. After the first of the year, we didn’t leave the house together much but we found time to delight at Grown-ish, guffaw at Desus + Mero and Alone Together, and binge One Day at a Time.
I dipped into her viewings of Disjointed and always enjoyed a weekend day where we both spent time in the home office, the sun beaming through our windows, the neighborhood alive.
My heart still swells at her smile and when her eyes light up with accomplishment. I ask about her day knowing she will get overly technical as I like hearing her talk passionately about the work of solving problems.
I loved her despite her destroying my time in the mini-crossword more days than not. I loved her even though every time I turned on a TV in the house it was tuned to MSNBC.
“We ain’t looking at the time, don’t nobody got a phone.”
That lyric sounds like heaven right now. I’ve been thinking a lot this month about what I’m not doing with my time when I’m spending too much of it with my devices. How lovely it would be to not always feel like I’m fighting for the attention of others with their much more compelling smartphones.
I stopped bringing my laptop and tablet to meetings, and I leave my phone in my pocket unless I need to reference something in service of that meeting.
Once I finish “Bored and Brilliant,” I may swear off reading via the Kindle app on my phone so that I can put it away during my commutes. I ordered a work phone in part for privacy concerns but also because it will allow me not to be available 24/7. To put my phone in my bag at the end of the day and not get any work messages until I check again in the morning?! I don’t even remember what that is like, but I’m looking forward to getting back to that.
“Feelin’ Inspired cuz the tables have turned.”
I do. I feel energized creatively. I wrote more this month. I spoke up more at work. Digital media is in this uncertain place that has many people feeling unsure about the path forward. Not me.
If you’re smart, you take the opportunity to check in with the purpose of what you do. Give up on quick fixes and hacks and tricks and do what’s right.
Let’s just get back to basics and make good shit every day. Let’s do right by our audiences. Let’s build the audiences we want by giving them real value. Why does our content exist? What do we hope they do with it? What conversations do we want to start and participate? How do we show appreciation for people spending time with us in a cluttered space? Do we think of those clicking our stuff as data points or people?
My favorite quote from a Spike Lee Joint is from Shadow Henderson in Mo’ Better Blues:
“If you play the shit that they like, then the people will come.”
Still true, y’all. Make good shit. Put it in a pretty box. Be grateful. Be humble. Learn something.
In August, my mom stated that she wanted to take a family trip this year. We were actively considering Puerto Rico, but then there was Maria and my mother’s broken leg (now healed), and so contiguous options seemed the best choice. Tiffany and I had visited NOLA over the holidays before and enjoyed what had, at the time, been a relatively sleepy week in the city.
Sleepy is not the way I would describe Crescent City this time. There was Christmas Fest and the Sugar Bowl. The Pelicans and Xscape. And a more substantial international tourist body than in 2009. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. First, we went to Greensboro, North Carolina to visit with and my mother-in-law.
Birds love it here
Greensboro has a very fancy Whole Foods with an excellent hot bar. We went there the first night. A couple of days later, I made biscuits from scratch to my MIL’s delight. Mostly, though, I sat in her sunroom and caught up on my media consumption. Hulu has all the non-Netflix Marvel shows so I binged Legion and caught up on Runaways and continued to sample The Gifted. I feel a kind of way about Bryan Singer‘s attachment to two of the three but Legion, in particular, was worth the time.
I read Goldie Vance, Volume 1 (very fun!) and A Wrinkle in Time. I stopped reading Wrinkle just before the final action occurs. I didn’t love it. Many elements feel very of the 50s, and I’m curious to see how Ava Duvernay will translate them in her film. I like the bones of the story, though, and think it will likely make a much better movie.
I went through the best end-of-year music lists I could find to see what I was missing. Complex. NPR. NY Times. Pitchfork. KCRW.
KCRW’s DJ lists were the plug in this excursion. Jeremy Sole had the most similar chart to my best-of, and several of the albums from his list fit right in with my sensibilities.
We did leave the house to take in a G-League basketball game. The game was mostly trash until late in the fourth quarter, as were the concessions, but we had great seats.
Then, on Christmas Day, we got on a plane and headed to N’awlins, baby.
I rather enjoyed music this year. As I spent time re-listening to albums and songs in preparation for this post, I realized how much music I heard that I thought was genuinely good and interesting. In the midst of all the cotton candy confection on terrestrial radio and vine—a place that increasingly became where I discovered new to me sounds and artists and songs, some of which I actually liked—there were a lot of artists releasing confident and risk-taking songs and albums.
It almost seems anachronistic for artists to attempt to put out complete and connected albums with strong thematic ties or storytelling flourishes today. We live in the age of the eternally shuffled on streaming services like Spotify and Pandora and Rdio (my personal fave). The music video (even if it’s just lyrics or a static image) and soundcloud dominate the young ear. So why put together an album whose songs work better together? Especially with the standard being about 10 songs and 45 minutes these days? I don’t know but I’m glad folks did.
Some notes: D’Angelo did me dirty like Beyoncé did last December and put out an album that’s impossible to deny but that I haven’t had the time to sit with like I have with other albums. In fact, Black Messiah’s inclusion bumped Mary J. Blige’s The London Sessions—another late in the year entry—out of my top ten but you should really cop that one too. You’ll also have to forgive the nepotism but my sister’s album is good y’all.
Little Dragon, Prince, and Freddie Gibbs with Madlib on the production produced the albums I kept coming back to this year, though. Every time I hear just one song from their releases I want to hear the whole collection. Art Official Cage is a revelation. I haven’t enjoyed the purple one this much since the Batman soundtrack.
Like Pusha T’s album last year, Piñata was the get hyped soundtrack for 2014. I bumped that in the car on road trips, in the morning on the ride to work, on the way home to take the edge off (or get it up). I was Thuggin’.
Ultimately, though, there’s a certain sound and sensibility that gets to me (gets me) more than everything else. Little Dragon is one of those bands and Nabuma Rubberband is one of those albums. Love it.
Two important musical notes for me at the end of 2014 came out 22 and 25 years ago but seemed especially relevant for the complex ways I was/am feeling about the world. The hope and clarity of Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 and the anger and obstinance of Ice Cube’s The Predator were what my soul needed as America in the Fall of this year felt more like Los Angeles in the Spring of ’92. Rage and sadness and uprising and the knowledge and power to the people.
We are a part of a rhythm nation and 20 years after Rodney King we’re still asking “when will they shoot?” and so we’re going to make it rough.
The song I listened to most this year was the one quoted above. It’s off of The 20/20 Experience (part 1. Part 2 should probably die in a fire), the album I had listened to the most this year until this past week when Beyoncé’s BEYONCÉ sucked all the air out of the room leaving only room for her.
I don’t even know how to explain my listening habits this year. There was less hip hop and more pop. I had a soft spot good teeny bopper records. Hudson Mohawke.
Anyway, here are the rest of the records I recommend from this year:
