Say what you will about Yasiin Bey (and many do), but his 1999 track “Mathematics” was nothing if not prescient. While much of the track was railing against the lasting effects of Bill Clinton’s 1994 Omnibus Crime bill, one lineRead more…
Performance//Art
After the death of their “First Friday” events in 2014, the MCA adopted a new style of event called Prime Time which would occur a few times a year and be more expansive and high profile than their monthly events.Read more…
The Work of Contemporalaties (Or, say contemporaneity 5 times fast)
One would think answering a question as simple as “what does contemporary mean” could be answered in a few words. It is now, it is of the moment, it is the zeitgeist. Right? Well, sort of. Some, like Claire Bishop,Read more…
On Witnessing and Reportage
Witnessing is a devious thing. On the one hand it serves to better the public understanding to an act, whether joyous or reprehensible, but on the other it may damage the witnesser. The fulcrum of this balance beam isRead more…
On Being Within and Without
Adolescence is marked with the seeking of identity. There is a simultaneous desire for an identity that is collective and individual. Of course if one lives in America, the sense of individualism is drilled in early, yet everyone seeks toRead more…
The Spaceship as Metaphor, White Flight versus Black Freedom
2016 was a strange year for hip-hop. It was at once the pinnacle of the slurred, codeine-soaked trap music that rose in popularity around 2011 as well as a huge resurgence of boom-bap. Boom-bap is essentially the polar opposite of theRead more…
The Downward Spiral: Untangling Danny Brown’s Depraved Masterpiece
It takes a little elbow grease to polish the layers of grit and grime off of Atrocity Exhibition before one realizes they’re holding gold. Danny Brown’s fourth studio album is dense. This exhibits itself not only in Brown’s lyricism,Read more…
It is impossible to divorce your politics from cultural criticism – paraphrase of Joey Orr at the MCA “No more today than in Manet’s time can aesthetic judgments be anything but contentious. And no more today than in Manet’s timeRead more…