Chet Hanks, son of Tom Hanks, has become one of the most polarizing culture vultures across the World Wide Web. And honestly, it was kind of funny at first. You might’ve been able to laugh through dude’s cringe — dubbing himself Chet Haze and White Chocolate, roaring his best renditions of Jamaican patois. But things became much less amusing a couple weeks ago, when he declared the months following the Covid-19 vaccine rollout in the United States as “White Boy Summer,” followed by the release of a music video for a song of the same name.
Upgrade to Medium membership to directly support independent writers and get unlimited access to everything on Medium.
We fuck with Steve Buscemi as much as the next guy, but the blandness of this season is ultimately tied to his character, Tony Soprano’s cousin Tony Blundetto. As much as he seemed like a habitual line-stepper — in the mafia world, that means killing folk he probably shouldn’t — dude seemed more like an embarrassment of a relative than a true threat to Tony’s place in the mob.
This felt like an Italian homicidal acid trip. Focusing on character development rather than plot, it looked so deeply into its own navel it got lost in the lint it found…
Along the course of writing this essay on Amazon’s new series Them: Covenant — in which I intended to recount my deep history with horror films and how Jaws ruined me for life — Duante Wright was killed by police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. Shortly thereafter, body cam footage from the March 29 shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago hit the internet.
As I write this, Black America is reeling, the bodies of our people shoved through a systemic machine that churns out stacks of Black victims. We hadn’t even gotten to the hashtag part of one killing before…
Consider this hypothetical scenario: You’ve got a box full of apples. The majority of them, say 65, are ripe. But there’s also another 35 that are rotten. Unfortunately for you, there’s only one box and you’re transporting them on a very long road trip, so you have to keep all of the apples together.
You’re so happy that you have more ripe apples in the box; you don’t even think about the rotten ones.
Somewhere along the way, though, you notice a pungent odor coming from the decaying fruit.
You take a moment to check the box and see that…
It’s spring again, and with the opening of businesses after a year of Covid-19, it’s apparently become necessary to once more consider one’s personal fashion before stepping outside. You’d think that after a year of pandemic couch-surfing this would be a low priority, but as it turns out, if you’re a Black man, you still can’t wear just any old thing. Somehow, in light of all of the problems we face in the most racist country in the world, it is still ungenteel to wear dresses.
Last week, Kid Cudi appeared on Saturday Night Live in a dress. The decision…
On Monday, mere minutes into my second pandemic birthday, we were all painfully reminded that turning a year older in America is a luxury that no Black man is guaranteed.
As former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s trial moved through its third week, another Black man’s life was stolen by law enforcement just 10 miles north of the city. His name was Daunte Wright. He was shot on Sunday night by Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter — a reported 26-year veteran of the department — during a traffic stop. He was only 20 years old.
In a news conference…
When I first heard “Get at Me Dog” in 1998, I thought, Def Jam is back.
The Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons-founded label, then home base to LL Cool J, Public Enemy, and the Beastie Boys, ran in the hip-hop wars. Yet it had been outpaced, first by West Coast gangsta rap, then by the luxurious lifestyle rhymes of Diddy’s Bad Boy and the rise of Southern juggernauts like No Limit. Akin to Cold Chillin’, Uptown, and Tommy Boy, Def Jam seemed ready to be another once-important New York rap music enterprise slated for irrelevance.
DMX’s aforementioned debut single sounded…
Drop-off at my son’s daycare follows a familiar script: We leave home in my quickly aging Kia with its speakers throbbing, as I match the lyrical flows of the ’90s rappers who raised me. Upon approaching the nursery, I slowly reduce the volume and compose myself before parking alongside Audis and Teslas owned by consultants, marketers, lawyers, and the like. Before stepping out of the car, I silently remind myself that my family deserves to experience the same privileges that they do — even if we’ve shaved our budget bare-bones to afford the cost of preschool enrollment.
The largest angels rarely live the longest. For centuries, intellects and clergymen from the Eastern Hemisphere have spoken on existence being dictated by purpose. It’s been said throughout a myriad of cultures that once a person has completed his or her education, as student and teacher, their time in human form expires. Wherever your spiritual philosophies lie, Earl “Dark Man X” Simmons being a gift not only to music, but, more importantly, to the society of music lovers should be universal comprehension. Yes, the present was DMX’s presence. Moreover, the gift was a sum of his God-given gifts. …
Tonia Colon-Seals wasn’t sure what to expect when a guy named Earl showed up at her door in Lithonia, Georgia, in the winter of 1997 wearing a red flight jacket, jeans, and a pair of Timbs. All she knew was that he was a rapper, and her friends Joaquin and Darrin Dean (Waah and Dee), brothers who ran a management company in New York, had sent him down south to stay out of trouble while he finished his debut album.
The album, of course, would be a multiplatinum behemoth; It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot snatched hip-hop out of the…