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Current Issue Cover Story
- July 2008
Have you ever
listened to a song and it seemed as though you could have penned the words? The
words so eloquently described exactly how you felt? More than just words, music
is a remedy to the soul. Music has the power to lift you up. Music is medicine
to a broken heart. The right melody can turn a frown into a smile, make you
laugh or make you cry. Music holds the words you’d say to the lover that
bruised your soul, like Keisha Cole’s anthem to strong women, “Let Him Go”. The
song you would sing outside your lover’s door as you beg for another chance,
like James Brown’s smash record, “Please Don’t Go”. A song you think of when
you reminisce about the person that you miss the most, like oldies tune, “Sadie”,
or Puffy’s rendition of “Missing You”, the tribute to the Notorious B.I.G.
Music infiltrates our minds and has a direct impact upon us history has shown. Far
beyond entertainment, music is an outlet known to evoke emotion. Music speaks about
life, and without a doubt, insidiously impacts future generations as it talks
about love and pain, circumstances, hardships, and successes. As our music evolves,
so does the next generation, depending upon what the media projects to our
society that particular moment in time. What’s most interesting is how we as a
society have changed and music’s role in this evolution. Jazz exploded onto the
scene with the onset of the Harlem Renaissance. One step out of slavery, the
1920’s consisted of social unrest, vast changes, and conservative viewpoints,
according to today’s standards. An element of fear plagued the black community,
still growing accustomed to being free, particularly among the parents, many of
which viewed this new “music” and lifestyle as evil, primarily because they had
never been exposed to it before. Yet, for the first time, the youth felt
empowered.
The fair sex; the weaker sex. Too delicate to perform manual labor, women had to
be helped into carriages and over mud puddles for centuries. They were expected
not to work, to faint over depressing or alarming news, and had to be protected
for their own good. In the early 1800’s, women sought to break out of this
stifling cocoon that kept them trapped in perpetual childhood either as their
fathers’ daughters… unable to own property, make their own living, or leave the
house without a chaperone…or as their husbands’ wives…unable to own property,
make their own living, or leave the house without a chaperone. Voting, of
course, was out of the question; women simply lacked the intellect to make an
informed decision. In 1848, the first Convention for Women’s Rights was held in
Seneca Falls, New York, and in subsequent years, women came together to promote
the ideal of equal rights regardless of sex. Then, in 1851 in Akron, Ohio, a
woman stood up to deliver an unprepared yet dynamic speech that knocked the wind
out of the sails of innate male superiority. Standing at almost six feet tall,
thin but powerful…an imposing figure…she took the best arguments of the
opponents who heckled her from the audience and turned them around with her
simple, commonsensical observations. How could men insist that women were
delicate creatures incapable of doing what a man could do when she, herself, had
“…ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me? Read Story
May
2008 Issue
April
2008 Issue
Why Do Blacks Excel Disproportionately In Sports And Music?
If You Could Only See the World Through My Eyes
March 2008
Issue
February
2008 Issue
What is the History of the Black Voters in America?
History or
"His"-Story? Whose Story Will You Believe?
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