What’s good, Medium?
10/21/2016
James T. Green charts his love affair with podcasts in The Voices that Shaped my World:
As I got older, so did cell networks. 4G was introduced and smartphones got smarter. Twitter became a bigger part of my life, and my art and design career began to expand. So did my listening list. I got my first corporate design job and started my second artist residency at the same time. The 2 hour commute in and out of Chicago was a regular dance in my early 20s. Between getting to know Chicago’s culture, design meetups, going to exhibitions, attending residency meetings, and studio visits, commuting became the escape from my small town. Podcasts absorbed the microaggressions and homogeneity I experienced at work, and the conversations that envigorated me on the shimmy between I–80, I–57, and I–90. It was no wonder that in this point of my life, I began to crave voices in my podcasts that were not the cis white males that I saw enough of at work.
This Week in Blackness and The Black Guy Who Tips were the first time I heard people like me on a podcast. Their voices were the comfort that got me through 8 hour work days as I looked across my all white open office, and the laughter that decompressed me on the ride home. I laughed with them through celebrity gossip, and cried with them as police shootings got caught on camera phones and Twitter. They felt like the friends I didn’t have in my isolating environment.
On the 20th anniversary of Roc-A-Fella Records, Biba Adams reminds us why Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt will always be the GOAT:
This Roc-A-Fella 20th Anniversary celebration is one of the most important things to have happened to my life in 20 years. It’s one of the most important things that has happened since prom, when I got dressed up, and slow danced to Dru Hill with a nigga that I had been caking up with on the house phone, and ended up making a daughter with.
It’s been 20 years since the empire that is known as Roc-A-Fella was launched. Since Dame, Biggs, and Jay- Z (when he had the hyphen still) got together and made what is one of the three most significant hip-hop albums of all time (Ready to Die and Illmatic are the other two.) This is not up for debate. I’m not here to go back and forth with you. Reasonable Doubt shifted the fucking Earth… period.
Aaminah Shakur takes on the reclaiming of “nasty” and the implications for women of color:
Nasty
Like y’all wasn’t just deploying that
to talk about Nicki Minaj’s ass
or Kim K’s tits (she’s not actually white, you know)
Now it’s cool to be nasty
if you’re white, not too poor,
and especially if you’re cute, right?
Not like when you called me nasty
for acknowledging I have an STI
or when you called my friends nasty
because they had to correct your -isms
Nasty is what you call those
“fresh” and “too grown”
little Black and Brown girls
your man has been eyeing
Nasty is why Indigenous women are raped
at three times the rate of white women
