Clarissa Brooks

On Laughing so Hard, it Hurts, the 23-year-old Charlotte rapper MAVI seeks the strength to sustain. His raps pull salvation from Black spiritual traditions to offset the pernicious influence of fame. "Hope when I get into heaven God hand me a blunt / And it's some Runtz," he raps on "Reason!" later adding, "It's legal for corporal punishment if God your teacher," assigning purpose to the pain. Black folklore has a long history of meeting grief with a prayer and a smile instead of running from...

Stacey Abrams is campaigning to become the first Black, woman governor of Georgia. With the help of her community, it can be done.
Stacey Abrams walks into the small office we’re meeting in dressed in a red blazer, an undershirt, and dark gray slacks. I can tell she is ready for the end of this 12-hour-long press day. Regardless of her tiredness, there’s no slouch in her walk. She moves through the world as someone who has known her purpose since before she took her first steps. Her winning s...

If Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion are seniors in the school of pussy rap, then Flo Milli, Kali, Lakeyah, and Yung Baby Tate are the well-known sophomores. The grandchild of legends like Lil’ Kim, Trina, and Missy Elliott, modern-day pussy rap comes equipped with a sharp eye for sexual prowess, deprioritizing men, and getting to the money, a recipe that’s already elevated stars like Latto, Saucy Santana, and City Girls. Among the later class, Alabama’s Flo Milli has brought cutting bars and k...

For at least the past decade, Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter has been the world’s greatest living entertainer. Who else can annihilate complex dance routines and maintain pristinely powerhouse vocals for packed stadiums the way she does? Who else can so thoroughly dominate news cycles with impeccable and innovative surprise albums?

SZA’s 2017 Top Dawg Entertainment release of her debut album, CTRL, shifted the foreground of contemporary R&B and remains in the lexicon of classic albums that withstands the test of time and context. No matter where you are in life, hearing SZA’s late grandmother, Norma, utter the words, “Also you black heffa, yeah you, you stand your ground/ ‘Cause I feel the same way/ If you don’t like me, you don’t have to fool with me,” cleanses the soul.
It is easy to say that music is a portal through...

From June 9, 2020, until her death four days later, Oluwatoyin Salau was most likely alone and terrified. She was facing the end of her life, but she had met this kind of death before. Her life in its darkest pockets had told her that she was not worth finding. But across town, other Black girls, the ones who had clothed her, housed her, and deep conditioned her hair just a few days before, were looking for her, desperately wanting to remind Toyin that she was somebody worth saving.
Ashley La...

by clarissa brooks
photos by cam kirk
styling by bobby wesley
The measure of a man holds a lot of mythology. From ideas of character to valor and all methods of thinking around purpose, it can mean everything and nothing all at once. For Gunna, a man with the leading rap album in the country, his mythology begins and ends with the promises he has made to himself and the people he holds close.
We meet Gunna, dressed head-to-toe in cream knit cashmere alongside a small entourage, wrapping up a ...

In late 2021, Moses Sumney released Blackalachia, an hour-long concert film and accompanying live album recorded in the midst of the 2020 summer of uprising. Sumney filmed his feature-length directorial debut in two days with a full crew in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, creating an in-depth exploration of intimacy and vibrancy that leaves those watching unable to see where the lines of majestic nature and performance depart. In the film, we initially encounte...

Before their single “Material Girl” became a bonafide TikTok phenomenon, the rising Florida rapper Saucy Santana spent his time as the makeup artist to the Miami rap duo City Girls. Their professional relationship quickly blossomed into a friendship and creative partnership, and it’s not hard to see why. Like the Miami girls that gave us quotable classics like “Pussy Talk,” Saucy Santana is a natural social media star, often appearing in Instagram Live clips and generating micro-trends, like ...

On August 31, 1999, Lawrence Lombardi set off a pipe bomb on the campus of Florida A&M University; less than a month later, on September 22, he set off another and much larger bomb in FAMU’s Perry Paige Hall, causing damage to the historically Black campus, but no fatalities. The fear and anxiety of those attacks are still in the hearts of the students and faculty who live with the terror they endured.
White supremacy is sharpest when it can destroy all sense of safety and autonomy. The lates...

What is disco, if not a call for yearning? What is gospel, if not a call for redemption? What is praise, if not a call back home? It is in Step II’s murky waters of gospel, Blackness, queerness and Black performance that we find Sylvester, a legend of other worlds.
The deepest corners of the late 1970s New York City club scene birthed a new genre of music that would shift the lives of queer people globally, but for a young boy from Crenshaw with an undeniable falsetto, it would be the beginni...

OPINION: Four burgeoning Black women writers tell theGrio how the works of the Black feminist scholar inspire them to be their best selves.
In the wake of the loss of renowned author, Black feminist scholar and activist bell hooks, theGrio gathered four burgeoning Black women writers to ask how her work, life and scholarship affected them in the present. Our question to this collective was simple:
What does bell hooks work ask of you?
Breya Johnson: Reordering myself
bell hooks’ work makes ma...

One writer's personal reflections on what the brilliant author/filmmaker taught her about living wholly in her Blackness, queerness, and womanhood.
The esteemed author, feminist scholar, critic, and activist bell hooks passed away on Wednesday. As the news spread, the world slowed down to collectively mourn the life of a Black woman, a sister of many minds, and a genius who didn't wait for the world to name her as such It is not an overstatement to say that Black feminism in its current form ...

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...