...Growing up in a black household, one would most certainly be familiar with the phrase “ you have to be twice as good to get half of what they have”. This is a proverb of black culture that has embedded itself into every corner of the black experience, especially the music industry. The United States and black Americans have had a tumultuous history, with entanglements that have withered into trauma lasting for generations. The very livelihood that blacks were able to retain from their homelands, the music, chants, dancing and entertaining has been whitewashed into a form more suitable for mass media. Icons such as Prince and Michael jackson, two iconic performers, represent much more than themselves or their music, but instead they symbolize...
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...completely at odds with the movie I saw was the one she--and those critics--had seen. The more I thought about it, the more I could see that these were no idiosyncratic subjective responses. Rather, our differences were bound up with Spike Lee's mix of styles of representation, which my sister and I responded to selectively and from very different perspectives. While Lee's representation of the Italians was moving and meaningful to her, she could find nothing in his portrayal of the black community that would provide for the same feelings. For, I came to see, while Lee uses to elaborate his white characters methods and narrative and cinematic techniques that have been broadly popularized by Hollywood and are familiar to just about every American, he uses traditionally black methods to generate his black scene--broader than just "characterization" because it extends to a representation of a diverse totality of a black community, with importance lying more in complex relationships and the material conditions that...
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