Category: Mezz Mezzrow

  • Toasts, Signifyin(g), and the Roots of Rap

    Content warning: explicit language and situations. Although the cradle of rap is generally acknowledged to be community-room parties in the South Bronx, the genre draws from multiple threads and locations, from Jamaica to Louisiana to the hobo poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The white Oklahoma-born writer George Milburn, who spent time…

  • What is Hip?

    A playlist/watchlist/reading list to accompany your reading by Scott Saul from his book Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. Oscar Brown, Jr.: “But I Was Cool” Lenny Bruce: Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro,” published in Dissent in 1957. One of the “jazz” excerpts from Jack Kerouac’s beat novel, On the Road: Boom, kick,…

  • Identity and Transformation

    Detail from Synecdoche by Byron Kim, a series of oil paintings that are “portraits” of racial identity. As we all know, Rachel Dolezal was by no means the first white American to take on aspects of African-Americanness in her persona — calling Elvis, is anybody home?. . . But blackness has always been an integral part of…