To respond to the Do Now, you can comment below or tweet your response. Be sure to begin your tweet with @KQEDEdspace and end it with #DoNowSong
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Do Now
Is there a contemporary artist or song that you think celebrates or honors Black History Month? Share your thinking.
Introduction
On Sunday night, America watched Common and John Legend win an Academy Award for their song “Glory,” which was part of the film about Dr. Martin Luther King, Selma. As Pitchfork described, Common and Legend accepted the award with a speech “connecting the struggles of the film with modern conflicts of police brutality, mass incarceration, and voting rights,” and both the performance of the song and the artists’ speech moved the audience to tears.
Throughout history, music has served as a language to express emotions and experiences and has often acted as a catalyst or inspiration for social change. Music has provided the beat to which countless activists and revolutionaries have marched to. For Black Americans, this history can even be traced back to spirituals sung by slaves. In his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass wrote of these songs:
They breathed the prayer and complaint of souls overflowing with the bitterest anguish. They depressed my spirits and filled my heart with ineffable sadness… The songs of the slaves represented their sorrows, rather than their joys. Like tears, they were a relief to aching hearts.
Slave spirituals not only served as a means of expression but also held a deep significance — to share coded information about planned rebellions or escapes on the underground railroad. Not only are the musical structures of slave spirituals antecedents to the blues, Gospel music, jazz, rock, R&B, reggae and hip-hop, but their revolutionary significance is as relevant today as it has ever been.
As the Black Lives Matter movement has expanded, musicians have continued to lend their talents as fuel. Some artists have chosen to pay homage to those that came before them, such as Beyonce, who performed the gospel-standard “Take My Hand Precious Lord” at the Grammys on February 8th. On his song Blood on the Leaves, Kanye West blended his own lyrics with a sample of Nina Simone’s version of Strange Fruit, originally published in 1937 as a poem protesting the lynchings of young Black men. Other artists still are responding by releasing entirely new tracks.
TIME magazine recently published an article entitled The Return of the Protest Song which references Be Free by J. Cole, released after the artist’s visit to Ferguson, MO, Lauryn Hill’s Black Rage and This Ends Today, a song produced by the daughter of Eric Garner. Just last week, Kendrick Lamar released The Blacker the Berry which surpassed one million plays in less than 24 hours. Last year, Lamar graced the February cover of Jet magazine, stating in his interview, “Hip-hop plays a huge part in Black history. It’s bigger than music. Entertainers are actually leading a generation today as role models, whether they want to or not.” Do you agree or disagree? Is there a contemporary artist or song that you think celebrates or honors Black History month?
Resource
MUSIC VIDEO: Limitations (Bay Area Video Coalition)
This is the official music video for BUMP Records artist Moria Moore’s song, “Limitations.” The video follows Moria through Oakland and intercuts with historical footage of the same locations during the civil rights movement. Directed by Lily Yu.
To respond to the Do Now, you can comment below or tweet your response. Be sure to begin your tweet with @KQEDedspace and end it with #DoNowSong
For more info on how to use Twitter, click here.
We encourage students to reply to other people’s tweets to foster more of a conversation. Also, if students tweet their personal opinions, ask them to support their ideas with links to interesting/credible articles online (adding a nice research component) or retweet other people’s ideas that they agree/disagree/find amusing. We also value student-produced media linked to their tweets. You can visit our video tutorials that showcase how to use several web-based production tools. Of course, do as you can… and any contribution is most welcomed.
More Resources
VIDEO: Young Gifted and Black Teaches Oakland Students History With Music (KQED News)
Young Gifted and Black, or YGB, is a youth performance ensemble based in Oakland. More than 50 performers — ranging in age from 6 to 18 — learn and memorize compilations of historical black poems and contemporary raps, which they perform around the Bay Area.
ARTICLE: Jeff Chang: It’s Bigger Than Politics, the Real Shift is Cultural (COLORLINES)
Scholar and ColorLines co-founder Jeff Chang talks about how culture impacts, and often precedes, political change. Here, he sheds some much needed light on what’s happening politically, and where we’re headed in the future.
VIDEO: Common, John Legend evoke Civil Rights era at Oscars (CNN)
John Legend and Common won an Oscar for their song “Glory” featured in the movie “Selma.” Here are two clips from that evening. The first half of the video is a clip from their acceptance speech. The second half features an interview with John Legend where he discusses how the song came together.
MUSIC VIDEO: Common, John Legend – Glory (CommonVEVO)
John Legend and Common perform Glory, the featured song from the motion picture Selma. This video contains clips from the Oscar-nominated film.