Music
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I often think my taste in music is schizophrenic. It encapsulates everything from Americana (aka American roots music) to the Roots, Rock, Reggae of Jamaica; the punk of Patti Smith to the grunge of Nirvana; from the punk of Bad Brains to the virtuoso of Nina Simone; musical storytellers from Bob Dylan to Wu-Tang Clan.…
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Anyone whom I’ve allowed to truly know me knows I love the Beatles and more specifically, John Ono Lennon. Flashback to December 9, 1980: I was exactly a week shy of my thirteenth birthday when I walked into the classroom to find my teacher crying buckets and pressing rewind on her tape deck. I had no idea…
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I don’t remember the first time I heard him. I was too young, even though he was only 8 years older than me. My mother and I had left the 1st household we lived in this country as a result of my aunt’s Imam husband’s directive that my mother stop seeing my stepfather. We moved…
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Before 16 bars imprisoned words, before rhymes were as predictable as a cop’s nightstick upside your head, my pen positioned itself in the continuum of black words. Shaka Zulu and Uhuru are the main threads of my weave so there’s no need for me to loom larger than sacred life. I’ll leave that to you…
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Several years ago, I, along with fellow members of an online poetry group agreed to participate in a poetry challenge. I don’t remember the exact perimeters of this particular challenge. I remember it had something to do with music. I remember I chose the song below and wrote the poem below that for the challenge.…
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Sometime in the late 1930’s, the government in another of its persistent and futile attempts to suppress African cultural survivals, decided that the colony would more easily be governable if drums and other traditional musical instruments were outlawed. The colonials must have sensed, and correctly, the importance of music in the cultural independence and political…
Tichaona Chinyelu 