Get Even More Visitors To Your Blog, Upgrade To A Business Listing >>

Black America's CNN




Publishing this blog is a lot like rapping.   When Chuck D, leader of Public Enemy, said Hip-Hop is Black America's CNN, he got at how beautiful and overlooked hip-hop can be.  I mean, if hip-hop is CNN, there's a mix of fake news, overstatement and confusion in it.  His comment is hip metaphor.

There's also we don't watch the news.  We don't trust the news.  We make our own news.  We hold together a community.  We exchange important information through the realm of Free Black Space.  Hip Hop is an extension of Free Black Space, but also must meet and manage the corporate world.

Black folks  love hip-hop and so does the world.  We own it.  Hip-Hop is a flowering of who we are; but hip-hop ain't enough.  We can substitute celebrities and black success for the politics of being in charge of our destiny.  We can substitute the fine clothes some of us afford and designers for the thing up underneath us that we always imagine, if we don't move quick enough, if we don't keep moving, will pull us down and submerge us. We can substitute, but we still need news.

News is all about the modern world in real time with little or no delay.  Things get faster.

When nothing else works we go home.  But the truth is, we are a nation of  runaways.  Hip-Hop does better than most.  Hip-hop has to keep it real.  And that real is a form of home.  One that acknowledges the fucked up-moving in with the good, balanced or sometimes imbalanced to funkiness.  Truth is we all want to escape; but still we gotta hold something down.

Validity of information is as important as the information itself.  There's not much contesting the methods for verifying information or the institutions and guardians of that knowledge these days.  Again, if we return to Chuck-D, I would argue he is really getting at how the black audience and black artists exchange information in channels outside of the standard public ones we get most of our news and information from.

Recent black successes, the Obama effect, and the diversity component in institutions that distribute information and content suggests that we don't need our own content distribution platforms.  Internet democracy and public access increase the searchable database dramatically; but then again, all is susceptible to trending and talk about.  Trump is best at this.  See our post on Jay-Z.  A battle, a tweet war, a digital speaking truth to power, can easily spark an inflated sense of important-shit-is-happening-here.  For an hour, for a day, for a minute.

But in the end, the institutions that broker in information remain supreme.  Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of my favorite examples of business infrastructure expanding into  a new age fueled by black radical consciousness.  Though we dream of freedom; we don't really dream of using immensely popular content to create institutions that will outlast us; but the Atlantic does and did.

It's not Coates' fault, which is the way the public will respond to such scholarship.  It is part of the definition of a celebrity to love or hate them, like or dislike them, click or thumbs down them.  The rich and powerful help create them for this reason.  No matter how significant, they are in some ways distractions.  Anonymous wealth, gentrification, and movement in the dark rooms are far more effective for managing the bang and clash of modern society.

The Free Black Space Blog is on/off the grid.  In the underground deep like black folks traumatized by failed rebellion and resistance.  We are pressed against the limits of our expansion.  We have contracted into the deep dark belly of America.  Like hip-hop in its beginnings, we call out to a black audience for verification.  But we are different from Hip-Hop.  For Hip-Hop is musical and sonic.  It is possible to use English and not be confined to the limits of the code of the Nation.  The music, rhythm, and pacing carries the weight.  What we do with the words is another language laid on top of the other language.  We test the boundaries.  We mix it up.  We defy.  We are innovative.

The task may be impossible for the writer.  Hip-Hop is full of the typos and errors that are simply a way of interpreting an alternative system from the vantage of one that is entrenched.  Writing, on the other hand must conform to those standards.  Literature is essential to documenting the consciousness of a people.  It is a documented record/reservoir of a people's knowledge.  Our struggles within the confines are a sign of the strength of the system.

But maybe in the end, in the beginning, Free Black Space can be just a little bit hip, like the hip in hip-hop.

Free Black Space




This post first appeared on Free Black Space, please read the originial post: here

Share the post

Black America's CNN

×

Subscribe to Free Black Space

Get updates delivered right to your inbox!

Thank you for your subscription

×