Clarissa Brooks

On Monday, Howard University announced that after the longest student protest in the school’s history, the administration had finally reached an agreement with student organizers. The news followed more than a month of student demonstrations against unlivable housing conditions on campus, including a number of students who set up tents in front of the school’s Blackburn student center. Others posted disturbing evidence of their living conditions to social media: footage of mold growing rampan...

“How can we fathom a social life that tends toward death, that enacts a kind of being-toward-death, and which, because of such tendency and enactment, maintains a terribly beautiful vitality?”
— Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness”
What do you do when you are the underdog’s underdog? When you are the last counted and forever erased in a legacy of Black social music that carries your DNA? What do you call yourself in a world that has shown you nothing but strife, gut-wrenching joy and sullen gr...

The ‘curse’ of Friendship Baptist Church is known throughout the city of Atlanta, Georgia. Since the church was removed from its former Mitchell St and Northside Dr locations and relocated, it has been the excuse for lacklustre sports teams and burned interstate bridges. Friendship Baptist, along with Mt. Vernon Baptist, founded in 1862 by former slaves, was the foundation of multiple HBCUs (historically black colleges or universities) in the city. It is where the Mercedes-Benz Stadium is loc...

Last month, Bill Cosby was released from prison after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his 2018 sexual-assault conviction, citing a prosecutorial error. The overwhelming response was one of shock and dismay: Over the past few decades, Cosby has been accused of drugging and assaulting dozens of women. Among those celebrating his release, though, was the actress Phylicia Rashad, who played Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show. In response to the news, Rashad tweeted: “FINALLY!!!! A terribl...

At his leisure, the musician Mavi plays with space and time. The 21-year-old rapper from Charlotte, North Carolina sees storytelling as a way to speak his truth while he’s alive. His latest EP End of the Earth was released to critical praise and marked a significant step towards what could be a major sophomore album from the rising star. The EP’s cover art takes after Shel Silverstein’s Where The Sidewalk Ends, and the metaphor tracks. End of the Earth features Mavi’s sharpest lyrical skill m...

The 20-year-old rising rapper discusses their latest The Leo Sun Sets EP, making music videos with diverse representation, and not wanting to be a role model.
This week, them. is profiling emergent LGBTQ+ musicians whose forward-thinking work has established them as Artists to Watch. Read more from the series here.
Serena Isioma is a self-proclaimed “nonbinary rockstar” with unbridled Leo sun energy to match. True to their sign, the rapper exudes star power so effortlessly it seems like a mus...

"Myth is the threshold of history." Saidiya Hartman stakes this claim in Lose Your Mother, a tale of myth, fiction and the root causes of subjugation. Hartman, like the countless women before her, bridges the gap between fictional worlds of lived trauma and restoration. Hayley Williams, in her second solo album, counts herself among the women who blur the lines of myth and reality. On Flowers for Vases / descansos, she makes a way, but never a destination to reclaim selfhood.
Written and reco...

It’s June 2020 and the world is pulsing something vicious. There, in the thick of freedom chants, sweaty djembe drumming, and muddled footsteps, stands Adreinne Waheed, a multidisciplinary artist who, at this vital moment, is an archivist of what Black ancestry calls “the cry out.” But the native New Yorker and photojournalist for more than 20 years is not here to document what we know is true about the anti-Black world we live in; she is here for something else.

Vanessa Newman can remember exactly where they were when they first saw Emory Douglas’s work. They remember the sound of '60s jazz vinyls playing before heading to the grocery store with their dad—an embodiment of their love for Black people as a Black queer kid navigating the world. Douglas's work was integral to the music and, really, every day of their childhood.
A revolutionary artist and the former minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, Emory Douglas was a formerly incarcerated...

In 2020, there were many ways to understand the year in music; this week, we're considering four. It's been a long journey for women to get their critical and commercial dues in hip-hop, but the past year came replete with glimpses of progress. First, the facts: For a brief period in May, four Black women—Nicki Minaj alongside Doja Cat on "Say So" and Beyoncé alongside Megan Thee Stallion on "Savage" — occupied the top two spots on the Billboard Hot 100. That two-week span marked historic mom...

The question is: how does the world treat Black women? And Rico Nasty answers: ​“like shit.”
This year has been politically, culturally and spiritually difficult for every Black woman, from watching the murder of Breonna Taylor be justified by the state, to the harassment of Megan Thee Stallion by her abuser, via multiple traumatising points in between.
And in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial terror of police violence, Rico Nasty – a fearless punk-rapper who’s adored for her ...

The Wonder Book of the Air The Celestial Jukebox. Her work has appeared in such publications as TriQuarterly, the Missouri Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review.
BY CLARISSA BROOKS
The Heart of Black Disneyland
There is a place in Southwest Atlanta, Georgia, called Black Disneyland. You can only go there one week a year; some call it Spelhouse homecoming. It is the momentous return of more than two hundred thousand alumni of Spelman and Morehouse Colleges to a sacred corner of Atlanta in cele...

We caught up with Hayley Williams to discuss this political moment, Paramore’s Black fanbase, and how a community of loved ones around her made her Petals for Armor album possible.
Healing is not linear. Our ability to move through interpersonal conflict or traumatic events involves a very messy, contrived, and difficult process that requires us to undergo what many call an ego death. Ego death is understood to be a complete loss of subjective self-identity.

At the 1995 Source Awards, André 3000 issued a proclamation, or a prophecy: "The South got something to say." Inspired by his words, this list represents some of the most impactful songs, albums and mixtapes by Southern rappers. It was assembled by a team of Southern critics, scholars and writers representing the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana and Virginia.
We offer this list not as an authoritative canon but as an enthusiastic celebration that...

In 1992, poet and LGBTQ activist Essex Hemphill wrote of being Black and openly gay, “we are a wandering tribe that needs to go home before home is gone….there is no place else to go that will be worth so much effort and love.” Sylvester James Jr., a Virgo with a flair for the dramatic, found that home in music.
Listen to Sylvester on Apple Music and Spotify.
Sylvester grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles during the Civil Rights Era with his grandmother in a strict Pentecostal hou...