The simple pleasures of springtime… #OmowonderTwins #iscream4icecream
VIDEO: Phredley Brown on Fox 2 Detroit
Detroit’s own Phredley Brown, also known as Bruno Mars’ musical director, performed his newest solo material on Fox 2 Detroit in advance of his show-stopping set at the 24th Annual Detroit Music Awards. Phred is feverishly cranking out tunes for his solo project while he has some time off from his hectic touring schedule. The Los Angeles resident returned home to see how Detroit’s brutally honest crowds reacted to his new music, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. What do you think?
Yep. That’s me on bass with Kali Douglas on drums and Onnie Medina on vocals.
Fox 2 News Headlines
Meshell Ndegeocello Breaks Step With Pop
She says she started music late, at 14 or so. (Well, okay, she did play
the clarinet in elementary school.) Her big brother played the guitar.
She figured she’d play the bass. She picked it up, started noodling with
it. It felt good. In high school, she joined up with a go-go band
called Prophecy, and started gigging with them after the bass player
didn’t show up one day. She loved it, adored go-go, the rollicking beat
of D.C.’s “indigenous music,” the primal drum feel of it all. She also
played with Little Bennie and the Masters and Rare Essence. There she
was, pounding on her bass, a rare female presence in testosterone-soaked
go-go, jamming at clubs, some of which have come and gone: Black Hole.
Breeze’s Metro Club. Cherry’s Skating in Southeast.She went to Howard University, mostly because her brother went there
and, at 17, she wasn’t ready to leave home. But Howard wasn’t a good
fit. She says she couldn’t navigate the social terrain, couldn’t make
her way around the profs in the music department. She lasted less than a
year.Paint her academic defection against the backdrop of a lonely girl
trying to come to terms with being bisexual. As she said in a 2000
concert at the 9:30 club, back then she was “giving it to every Tom,
Dick, Harry, Jane and Sue, so … I could feel like I was really
here.” Hers is music as memoir, boasting about stepping out with other
women’s men and crowing about it, as she did in her first single, “If
That Was Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night”), and then cataloguing
the hurt of young love, crushing on girls who didn’t return the favor. [Read More]
Nice…
Why Black History Matters: An Ambassador Roundtable Discussion
Why is there still a need for Black History Month? Our panel of experts listed the continuing removal of black contributions from American history, America’s fear of black men, and the whitewashing of Detroit as just a few reasons.
Originally Published in Ambassador Magazine
Written by J. NadirOmowale
Photos by Andrew Potter
The January/February 2015 Ambassador Magazine Roundtable convened at a pivotal moment in American history – and in the history of Detroit. As we gathered to discuss the importance of African American History Month with an esteemed group of historians and scholars, race occupied the center of our national conversation.
The public erupted into spontaneous protest after a series of high-profile killings of African American men and boys by police, highlighting the longstanding American tradition of police violence against the black community. And instead of ushering in a post-racial era in America, racial tensions were intensified and will forever color the legacy of Barack Obama – the country’s first African American president. Hashtags and slogans like #BlackLivesMatter, #ICantBreathe and #WhitePrivilege peppered social media and the nation’s consciousness.
Closer to home, as a resurgent Detroit emerged from the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history – forever the phoenix shaking off the ashes – questions and accusations surrounded the complexion of the city’s latest renaissance. Was there room in the whiter, more affluent “New Detroit” for the city’s majority population of working-class African Americans?
If there were two things learned in the boardroom at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, one was that history is about more than assorted dates and facts. Understanding the historical context of an event is often as important as the study of the event itself. The second was that, often, the histories that are excluded from our textbooks give a more accurate representation of what really happened. Continue reading