Exploration is an oft-lauded human activity, and one that resonates in the same way that music and good stories do. It's hard-wired into our species (and into many others), no doubt because it has survival value. Exploration occasionally rewards thos...
I had written a tune called 'Shake, Rattle and Roll,' but the white stations refused to play it - they thought it was low-class black music. We thought what we needed was a new name. But a white disc jockey named Alan Freed laid on it, and he thought...
One day in 1984, at the height of his fame, Michael Jackson made a visit to the White House. President and Nancy Reagan may not have dug his music, but they understood the power Mr. Jackson commanded as a common pop-cultural touchstone for just about...
I've gotten a firsthand view at the destruction that black men and black women not being able to stay and build healthy relationships has had on the black family and black children.
That's why for Zakk Wylde's Black Label Society the colors are black and white. There are no gray issues. Life is black and it's white. There's no in-between.
Once upon a time black male “cool” was defined by the ways in which black men confronted hardships of life without allowing their spirits to be ravaged. They took the pain of it and used it alchemically to turn the pain into gold. That burning pr...
All poor people ain't black/ and all black people ain't poor.
I was always the only black in the movie theater, the only black in class, the only black in the library, the only black in the discotheque. I always felt observed and judged.
There's an inherent idea that if a Black executive producer and a Black director are going to do a movie based on a Black writer's book that everybody is going to be Black.
I was brought up in black neighborhoods in South Baltimore. And we really felt like we were very black. We acted black and we spoke black. When I was a kid growing up, where I came from, it was hip to be black. To be white was kind of square.
Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
Being a black artist, the first thing people want to talk about is your blackness, the importance of your blackness, and your black presence.
The United States is not a nation of black and white people. Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.
Nate liked Death. Death was in the clothes that he wore and the music he listened to. He would wrap himself in a black sweater and ask Death to ride along with him in his Honda Civic.
For the most basic assumption that dictated my early attempts to respond to creative music commentary was the mistaken belief that western journalists had some fundamental understanding of black creativity—or even western creativity—but this assu...
I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in m...
So when I got to be about 13 or 14, I started listening - even though my parents music was way cool - to contemporary hard rock at that time, which was Aerosmith, Cheap Trick, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Ted Nugent and all that, and that's just where I cam...
Am I R&B because I'm black? Am I pop because I have a song called 'Milkshake'? Or can I just be who the hell I am? Good Lord, people make it seem like we're doing heart transplants here, but we're just making music!
Dizzee's just my childhood hero. He's definitely the inspiration. He's got himself to a very good place. He's defied the expectations of what British black urban music was like. He was the first person who made the rest of Britain realise it wasn't j...
Half of the modern world goes back as far as Pearl Jam. The real historians go back to U2. But they need to go back further. They have to go back to the '50s and '60s, where things started. That's how you get to be your own personality, by studying t...
Half the time I feel like I'm appealing to the downer freaks out there. We start to play one downer record after another until I begin to get down myself. Give me something from 1960 or something; let me get up again. The music of today is for downer...
