Ras Baraka (reading his father’s poem “Digging Max”):
(At Seventy Five, All The Way Live!) Max is the highest The outest the Largest, the greatest The fastest, the hippest, The all the way past which There cannot be
When we say MAX, that’s what We mean, hip always Clean. That’s our word For Artist, Djali, Nzuri Ngoma, Senor Congero, Leader, Mwalimu, Scientist of Sound, Sonic Designer, Trappist Definer, Composer, Revolutionary Democrat, Bird’s Black Injun Engine, Brownie’s Other Half, Abbey’s Djeli-ya-Graph Who bakes the Western industrial singing machine Into temperatures of syncopated beyondness
Out Sharp Mean
Papa Joe’s Successor Philly Joe’s Confessor AT’s mentor, Roy Haynes’ Inventor, Steve McCall’s Trainer, Ask Buhainia. Jimmy Cobb, Elvin or Klook Or even Sunny Murray, when he aint in a hurry. Milford is down and Roy Brooks Is one of his cooks. Tony Williams, Jack DeJohnette, Andrew Cyrille can tell you or youngish Pheeroan Beaver and Blackwell and my man, Dennis Charles. They’ll run it down, ask them the next time they in town.
Ask any or all of the rhythm’n. Shadow cd tell you, so could Shelly Manne, Chico Hamilton. Rashid knows, Billy Hart. Eddie Crawford From Newark has split, but he and Eddie Gladden could speak on it. Mtume, if he will. Big Black can speak. Let Tito Puente run it down, He and Max were tight since they were babies in this town.
Frankie Dunlop cd tell you and he speak a long time. Pretty Purdy is hip. Max hit with Duke at Eighteen He played with Benny Carter when he first made the scene. Dig the heavy learning that went with that. Newk knows, And McCoy. CT would agree. Hey, ask me or Archie or Michael Carvin Percy Heath, Jackie Mc are all hip to the Max Attack.
Barry Harris can tell you. You in touch with Monk or Bird? Ask Bud if you see him, You know he know, even after the cops Beat him Un Poco Loco. I mean you can ask Pharaoh or David Or Dizzy, when he come out of hiding, its a trick Diz just outta sight. I heard Con Alma and Diz and Max In Paris, just the other night.
But ask anybody conscious, who Max Roach be. Miles certainly knew And Coltrane too. All the cats who know the science of Drum, know where our Last dispensation come from. That’s why we call him, MAX, the ultimate, The Furthest Star. The eternal internal, the visible invisible, the message From afar.
All Hail, MAX, from On to Dignataria to Serious and even beyond! He is the mighty SCARAB, Roach the SCARAB, immortal as our music, world without end. Great artist Universal Teacher, and for any Digger One of our deepest friends! Hey MAX! MAX! MAX!
Me (after an hour): Oh, that’s Cassandra Wilson!
Saul Williams:The music carries memory
Me: Yaas……
Sonia Sanchez:Keep that beat
Williams: We run on different fuels
Sanchez (reading one of many haikus for Max): your sounds exploding in the universe return to earth in prayer
Sanchez: I teach my students how to write haiku because it is one long prayer
The small clips of Sista Souljah and Afeni Shakur, the examination of Afeni’s son Tupac, hiphop’s sexism and Danyel Smith’s and Ice-T’s discussion comparing New York to L.A. in Episode 3 almost save this, but if executive producer Chuck D can’t connect the historical-cultural dots for us, then all is lost. 😦
No discussion of COINTELPRO. No connecting national police brutality to the edicts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s J. Edgar Hoover.
No connecting the history of L.A. police brutality to the SWAT teams, units created to destroy the Oakland, California-based Black Panther Party and other Black revolutionary groups.
Nothing on the obvious African cultural roots of hip-hop.
Nothing about South African apartheid or the anti-apartheid movement!!!! (Okay, those super-brief clips of Winnie Mandela in Queen Latifah’s “Ladies First” are in here.)
Nothing on *why* the early 1970s hiphop artists *publicly* ignore artists shown (Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, etc.)–the aftermath of the brutal, public repression of New York groups like The Panther 21, the Black Liberation Army, etc.
Nothing about early white corporate ownership and the shaping of hiphop. But Episode 3, however, at least starts the later discussion, at least, and it gives some justice to C. Delores Tucker.
Nothing on the more radical/Muslim/nationalist hiphop artists of the ’80s–X-Clan, Poor Righteous Teachers, etc.
Gee….. 😦
FEBRUARY 21TH UPDATE: It’s kinda sad on Malcolm X Assassination Commemoration Day to see such a light touch on hip-hop’s contradictions. (Where was the “dick-riding Obama” clip from “The Boondocks?” 🙂 ) Episode 4 should have been called “How Hiphop Didn’t Change The World.” This story, which somehow turns Eminem into (Black/hiphop) America’s hero (?), would have worked much better as two episodes.
P.S: Tupac Shakur has been dead for almost 30 years now.
P.P.S. We really need a big, full bio of Jesse Jackson Sr.
1) In your opinion, what is the importance of continuing the legacy of Black Panther in cinema, as it was one of the rare positive representations in Hollywood of a Black king, seen here at the head of an African nation among the most powerful countries in the world?
I struggle over “importance” being the right word. The comicbook geek and the Africana scholar forever warring inside me go back and forth on it. This is a white corporate product starring characters originally created by white Americans with some later help from African-Americans, and now it’s a film produced by a white conglomerate, one written and directed by African-Americans starring both African-Americans and the children of continental Africans. This is not an authentic, organic African cultural product–which shows our powerlessness to do one ourselves. Remember: America was comfortable having a Black president serve two terms but there is still no Black American that can greenlight a Hollywood film. The great writer Haki Madhubuti has called the first film “dangerous.” And if you are committed to African liberation, how can you not call it that? The first Black Panther is an exciting and powerful movie, one that made me tear up with joy, but it’s also a film whose climax shows a white male CIA agent shooting down African revolutionaries. I have known about T’Challa since I began reading Marvel Comics as a pre-teen, but I have only loved him since I first read, while in grad school in the late 1990s, a groundbreaking, satirical Black Panther comic series written by Christopher Priest, its first Black writer. Reginald Hudlin, its second Black writer, did his best to make T’Challa a decolonized character fighting European imperialism. But what about real, decolonized African heroes and Black/African films? Black Panther only shows that the billion-dollar Disney/Marvel Cinematic Universe can make popular any kind of story starring anyone, that it can make anybody in the world into a popular superhero, but it is not an advance for Black, African and African Diasporic filmmaking. I’m excited as any fantasy-loving Marvel Zombie about this sequel–I got my ticket for the November 10 Thursday afternoon sneak preview weeks ago–but the African reality always is in the back of my mind. At the same time, I quietly agonize, I do acknowledge what this franchise means: African children–and some adults–around the world get to see themselves as the most powerful people on Earth. I think that’s where any importance really lies. So it’s complicated for me, internally and externally, intellectually and emotionally.
2) How much do you think the success of the original film is due to the ferocity and brilliance with which Chadwick Boseman embraced the role of King? Can a sequel be as successful without him? He was the heart of the movie, in a way, right?
I have in my living room a mounted, framed poster of Chadwick Boseman on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, so I don’t want my next sentence misinterpreted. I don’t think it’s an insult to say that Boseman’s channeling of Nelson Mandela–even using similar speech patterns–made him the most boring character in the film! LOL! In my view, the success of Black Panther was the dramatic balance between T’Challa (Boseman), the amazing Dora Milaje and other female characters (Gurira, Nyong’o, Wright, Bassett) and Killmonger (Jordan). This may sound strange, but as I mourned Boseman I did not worry about the sequel at all because I knew director/screenwriter Ryan Coogler and Marvel mastermind Kevin Feige could and would compensate and recalibrate well. That first teaser trailer–one that caused tears to flow on YouTube, including my own–showed they were still in command of this world they made–Wakandan characters in particular and the MCU as a whole. The film is already on track to make $1 billion worldwide, so all is well.
3) Since we have now some distance from the first film, do you see any positive impact of Black Panther on the way Hollywood mainstream films portray Black people these days?
Well, here’s what I wrote one year in. I don’t think it’s changed Hollywood at all, with one obvious exception: it’s clear that without Marvel’s Black Panther, there would not exist The Woman King. (Look at the chronology of the greenlighting of that film here.) And I definitely don’t think The Woman King‘s familiar-feeling vibes, non-sophisticated story and Hollywood filmmaking style, along with a wide release date right in front of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, is in any way coincidental. As I wrote, The Woman King is Black Panther 1.5. 🙂
It’s clear that if the great writer Ta-Nehisi Coates is right in that the first Panther was Black people’s Star Wars,Wakanda Forever is positioning to be the trying-to-be-bigger, trying-to-be-even-better sequel, a Black Empire Strikes Back.
But here’s what I’m most fascinated with as 2023 approaches: will Angela Bassett, an Academy Award nominee, be nominated and win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her anchoring Wakanda Forever and Oscar winner Viola Davis be nominated for and win Best Actress for her film, too? Can Black American women sweep the female Oscar contests for portraying African royalty? As they say in the comics that inspired all this Panthermania, to be continued!
Drums in the Global Village 