Throwback Thursdays

This is how we do the old to the new…



lady in red
i waz missin something…
… i found god in myself
& loved her/ i loved her fiercely
From Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf

“I wanted Shange’s language to arm me with the awesome power of self-definition. I left realizing this was impossible. As much as I appreciated the artistic, cultural, and historical significance of this moment it wasn’t mine to claim… As a child of the post-Civil Rights, post-feminist, post-soul hip-hop generation, my struggle songs consisted of the same notes but they were infused with distinctly different rhythms. What I wanted was a for colored girls… of my own. The problem was that I was waiting around for someone else to write it… This complacency is typical of my generation…” (21-22)
From Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks it Down

The memory of the first time I ever saw Ntozake Shange’s groundbreaking choreopoem performed is burnt into my memory. I had to be about eleven or twelve when I caught it on PBS one Saturday. I remember sobbing when Beau Willie threw the children out of the window. I had no real understanding of all the things the women in the play were talking about. But I remember being captivated. A lot of what Shange wrote about in 1975 is timeless… "somebody/ anybody/ sing a black girl’s song/ bring her out/ to know herself…" It only seems fitting that girls who grew up in the 70s like hip-hop feminist Joan Morgan and Nuevo-Soul singer Erykah Badu would find ways to re-work and re-mix for colored girls who have considered suicide . Shange ends with the women finding god in themselves, learning to love themselves. Morgan’s entire book is a quest for women of the hip-hop generation to find their power. Morgan’s book is just as provocative and thought provoking as Shange's. And Erykah Badu’s classic song “Bag Lady” seems to take up Morgan’s plea for women in the hip-hop generation to acknowledge the ways they are complicit in their own oppression: “Bag lady, you gonna miss your bus. You can’t hurry up, cause you got too much stuff.” She even takes up Shange’s message of love: “I betcha love can make it better…” And the entire video is a ode to for colored girls… Have you ever seen for colored girls… performed? Do you think the Badu video carried on the tradition nicely? Enjoy…

Erykah Badu – Bag Lady