u know how the time flies —

only yesterday / was the time of our lives

Thank you for being here. I know you probably had to check out early from the Hotel California, and then hitchhike over from Funkytown — so, Welcome. I have a cold 🤧 so there’s no More Like Wrestling audio today. I do appreciate the buoyant MLW feedback though, and if you want to hear to first two audio drops, click here, and here. I’ll return with audio in the next paid version of Shine Bright HQ. And on that note: a special 👋🏽 to my paid SBHQ subscribers! And FYI — the issue that moved the largest number of folks to subscribe (and to upgrade to paid) is this one, featuring a look at the Disco Sucks era as well as Donna Summer and her 1978 film, Thank God It’s Friday.

---

hieroglyph.

[a series in which I resurface and annotate the nonfiction work of my life]

June 26 1993 | Billboard

Butts¹ Needs To Branch Out; Janet Readies For Fall Tour

BYLINE²: by Danyel Smith

SECTION: Artists & Music; The Rhythm And The Blues; Pg. 27 LENGTH: 693 words

³IF WE’RE TALKING about working within the system, then my question is this: Why isn't the Reverend Dr. Calvin O. Butts organizing a devastating, successful phone tree like this country's religious right has? A phone tree that responds like dynamite to any little thing that affects African-American people by calling and faxing elected officials in Washington over and over again so that they are aware of and feel extremely pressured by their constituencies. Why not set up a fund at the church that pays the phone fees of people who call and harass senators and congresspeople? Imagine if folks really “woke up” like that. Imagine if Butts' enemy was not some nebulously defined "negative" rap music, but actual people who actually decide what money goes to what places in his home state of New York.

Some hip-hop is unlistenable and ridiculous, silly, and offensive. Some artists curse, call girls “bitches,” and sound mad, only because it shocks and it sells, and some labels promote this. But -- and imagine this -- what if life for black people in this country lent itself to hip-hoppers writing about the wonderfulness of it all: trees and books, tranquil ponds, and such. Songs that celebrate the arrival of social and economic justice for all. I have no idea what Naughty By Nature's Treach’s politics are, but when he said “positive ain’t where I live” in “Uptown Anthem,” he said a whole lot more than five words.

The so-called “exploitive” nature of hip-hop and the influence it has on young people’s minds is minuscule compared with how their lives are sculpted by the social policies that the powers-that-be continue to use as whitling sticks. And, as always in these situations, one has to wonder who is to be the judge in all this. And who is going to judge them? When are new-jack R&B tracks going to be designated “negative”? When Silk harmonizes through “I wanna lick you up and down / ‘Til you say stop / Let me play with our body baby/ Make you real hot,” is that too much? Is it just bad when people relegate each other to "niggaz" and "hoes"? Or is it just as “negative” when gender stereotypes are perpetrated more subliminally, when they are sung lovingly over super-smooth R&B beats.

I’m sure Rev. Butts is an intelligent, energetic, well-intentioned man. He is probably sincerely desperate to make changes in the African-Americann community. But destroying CDs and tapes on the street corner makes for soundbites, not change. Being radical is not about publicity. It's about gnawing hard, on the root of the matter.

⁴SO YOU KNOW: Janet Jackson has chosen Patrice Rushen⁵ as the musical director for her upcoming janet. tour, to start in the U.S. sometime during mid-October.