Mark Anthony Neal

Critical Noir

Soul and Prose: Chrisette Michele and Michael Eric Dyson

Posted 07/23/2007 at 3:39 PM | Comment?

This past week I was in New York City for joint signing event with R&B vocalist Chrisette Michele and author and scholar Michael Eric Dyson. Michele and Dyson were at the Borders Store in the Time Warner Center signing copies of I Am and Know What I Mean: Reflections on Hip-Hop, respectively. In many ways both are cutting against the grain.

Chrisette Michele's I Am defies all the logic of how one breaks an R&B artist in today's marketplace. To their credit Island Def Jam--Jay and L.A.--are allowing the 24-year-old to build an audience by drawing on her strengths as a youthful (and beautiful) repository for a generation of long-gone chanteuses. I am a fan. Dyson is arguably the preeminent public intellectual of his generation, engaging the pubic on the multi-tiered platforms that contemporary media culture demands we all be literate with (where's the blog, Michael?). As such he has been the target of scorn from both academics and lay people for pandering to his audience and being little more than Ivy-League trained ambulance chaser, as if somehow writing 14 books in 14 years addressing the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and culture is simply a hustle. I for one defend that hustle and that of all others who can function critically in the marketplace of ideas.

That said, the event promised to bring together a unique cadre of folks--teen shorties looking to get a glimpse of Chrisette, hip-hop heads, knowledge hungry grad students, members of the socialist workers party (lol), folk who just love some good music and some good talk and a bunch of other folk, who just happened to be passing through. But the already hyped energy went to another level when five minutes before Chrisette Michele began her four-song set, in walked Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, CNN's Roland S. Martin--and a few minutes later, Essence Magazine's Susan L. Taylor and her husband Khephra Burns. After Michele's set, which didn't disappoint, Dyson passed the mic to Smiley, West, Martin (who spotted Taylor in the crowd), Taylor, the Rev. Marcia Dyson and his humbled homeboy from the Bronx, to give some love and get our own spit on. And Dyson's generosity was reciprocated, when Cornel West, served as Dyson's ultimate hype man, as they both recalled a trip to NYC (from Princeton) 20 years earlier to catch Sarah Vaughn (who Michele cites as an influence) at The Blue Note and they peeped Gordon Parks, Sr. at the bar with a women 50 years his junior. As Roland Martin later described the Border's event--it was HOT!

There was a time where one could roll into a meeting in a library up in Harlem and it would not be unusual to see Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Jesse Redmond Fauset, and Wallace Thurman--the critical and artistic black intelligentsia of the 1920s--sitting there. The event at Borders on Tuesday, might be the closest that we can get to that kind of moment again. And as Roland Martin and Susan Taylor reminded folk that night, the gathering was smaller in the one that congregated at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to form the foundation of the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in December of 1955.