Women, Hip Hop, and Music: An Interview with Dr. Tammy Kernodle Part I

[By Alysha Griffin]

For “Raising the Roof: Black Women’s Voices in Hip Hop” series, I interviewed Tammy Kernodle. Kernolde, an Associate Professor of Musicology at Miami University, Oxford, has served as the Scholar in Residence for the Women in Jazz Initiative at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Missouri and has lectured extensively on the operas of William Grant Still, the life and religious compositions of jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams.

Given Kernodle’s background, her perspective on black women in hip-hop culture is informed by a larger historical and social tradition of black women and music culture in general.

Construction Workers: Black Women Building Community

[By Alysha Griffin]

Hip Hop has become notorious for its treatment of women. Whether through misogynistic images or the large exclusion of women in rap music, Hip Hop has become “Public Enemy #1” in the women’s fight for progress. With all this critique of Hip Hop, however, I think it is important to acknowledge those women who have navigated the tight spaces in Hip Hop culture. By comparing tropes in works of literature written by black women with those works of female Hip Hop artists, it may be possible to reclaim agency that is lost in the mainstream interpretations of Hip Hop. For this reason, HBW launches the series “Raising the Roof: Black Women’s Voices in Hip Hop.”

Realism as Fantasy: From Jonathan Franzen to Colson Whitehead

By Emily A. Phillips

In his 1996 article,  “I’ll be Doing More of the Same,” Jonathan Franzen defends his use of realism as a novelist. He claims “When the times get really, really awful, you retrench; you reexamine old content in next contexts; you try to preserve; you seem obsolete…The day comes when the truly subversive literature is in some measure conservative. Maybe it’s time for us to ask ourselves whether apocalypse might be self-indulgence” (38).

April poetry blog for HBW

If you are post-weary of post-human discourses about contemporary African American poetry, you will find reading

Jahannes, Ja  A. WordSong Poets: A Memoir Anthology. Savannah: Turner Mayfield Publishing, 2011

to be refreshing.

WordSong Poets is a pre-future book.

Jahannes, a scholar and accomplished poet, speaks to people not to promotion and tenure committees or to the prison guards of deconstructed intelligence. His language is not besmirched by the jargon of post-reason.  He invites us to live with poetry.

His memoir anthology is a thoughtful and original genre, and we can profit from his selection of works by Langston Hughes, Larry Neal, Ron Welburn, Everett Hoagland, Keorapetse William Kgositsile, Gil Scott-Heron, and himself.  We can profit most, however, from his insights about seven word song poets and how their lives and works are interrelated by their experiences at Lincoln University (Pennsylvania).

Jahannes honors his alma mater as a site for acquiring and using literacy to affirm humanity and to triumph over a hostile world.  His book encourages us to meditate on an oral/print/aural/visual lineage extending from the cultural articulations of Langston Hughes to the cultural recuperations of Gil Scott-Heron.

WordSong Poets is a crucial contribution to our study of poetry as an act of human necessity. As Tony Medina has aptly noted, the book “is bridge and foundation  ---  an aggregated Black fist of love and fury.”

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

April 3, 2012