Before I began writing this, I finished eating a makeshift breakfast of two-and-a-half scrambled eggs mixed with shreds of pork pulled from the leftover ribs of last night’s dinner order. It was a slightly disappointing meal—not because of the taste of the food, but the temperature of it. I sat down to eat it at the…

I’ll bet if that if I didn’t tell you that this album cover was for an album by a Ghanaian artist in 1969, I’d bet good money that you might assume this was a reference cover for a Kool Moe Dee album in 1989. Or for some gangsta rap artist out of Compton in the late ’80s. But nope, Guy Warren of Ghana (as he was known…

I mean, I don’t even have to say it, but do you see this cover?? Look at all that animated Blackness permeating that bright yellow background. I like to think that yellow represents the sun, and everybody on the cover is the Black gold of the sun?

The album cover for Queen Latifah’s sophomore album, Nature Of A Sista’, is a much better take on the album cover for her debut, All Hail the Queen. Where All Hail the Queen had her standing in a stately, militaristic-ish fashion with the album’s title surrounding a silhouette of the African continent—it was a little…

I love Betty Davis. Her string of albums in the early to mid ’70s—any of which could have easily been included in this series—are a clinic in funk, and in my estimation, were decades ahead of their time. In fact, that’s why I included this particular album, Davis’ 1975 album, Nasty Gal, in this series. For whatever…

Black Ivory—the trio of vocalists from Harlem, N.Y.—is a group that had me at hello. Made up of multihyphenate, do-it-all group members Russell Patterson, Stuart Bascombe and Leroy Burgess, I still remember the first time I heard their single “Don’t Turn Around” because I was digital crate digging and saw this album…

Clubhouse, the invite-only social audio app, recently announced it has raised another $100 million funding round, led by Ben Horowitz’s a16z fund. The app is now firmly a Silicon Valley Unicorn, a private startup valued at over $1 billion. This is a meteoric rise for an app that launched amidst the pandemic in 2020,…

Easily doubling as both one of my favorite album covers of all time and one of the worst album covers of all time, Big Bear made sure he’d never be forgotten with the Pen & Pixel gem for his 1998 album, Doin Thangs. He also managed to land a fairly remarkable feat: I have literally never heard a single record from…

Way back yonder—in late 2018—I co-founded a book club with the owners of MahoganyBooks, Derrick and Ramunda Young. This was a no-brainer of a collaboration. For one, all of us are avid readers and they own a physical book store that focuses on books by and for Black people. It was an opportunity to bring our two…

If you listen to Black music and disco (or either/or, really) you know A Taste of Honey. They had a monster hit with “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” a song whose hook you can probably sing in your sleep (which I don’t recommend; people freak out over stuff like that).

It’s February again, and you know what that means—it’s Black History Month. Well, here at VSB, we like to celebrate Blackness with various monthlong series. We’ve done 28 Days of Literary Blackness (2019), 30 Days of Musical Blackness (2019) and 30 Days of Music Video Blackness (2020). This year—2021—we’re bringing…

Thank you!

My first experience with the Nike Air Foamposite One, released in 1997—we called them Penny Hardaways or Penny’s, for short—was on the campus of Spelman College during the summer before my freshman year of college. I watched a dude in one of the summer programs we had running (I was in a program for science, math and…

1. No one

On January 8, 2021, powerhouse singer/songwriter Jazmine Sullivan released her fourth project—at a little over 32 minutes in length it’s an extended play that really is a fully realized concept album—Heaux Tales. When I first saw it pop up on my Spotify new releases, I hopped right over it. I like Jazmine Sullivan;…

I’m an HBCU (historically Black college or university) enthusiast. There was a time in my life that whenever I went to a city with an HBCU, I tried to get to the bookstore to buy a t-shirt from the institution. My collection of HBCU shits was top notch. And I’d go out and wear them, too. It was nothing to see me…

I do not remember the first time I went to Red Lobster. Which is fine. I also do not remember the first time I saw Halle Berry. But I know that my reaction was the same: How does something so perfect exist and are there more of these in Cleveland?

Have you ever gotten one of those notices from the IRS that says something like, “You owe us $10,000 but maybe you don’t. Fill out this paperwork and tell us why or why not. Kthxbi.”? I didn’t exactly get one of those—I don’t actually owe the IRS anything, much less $10,000; it’s complicated—but something in that vein…

It’s been 12 years since I last felt how I felt while I begrudgingly watched some of the inauguration yesterday. Whatever relief experienced in ridding of the outgoing president (minimal) or pride in witnessing history (eh), was flattened by anxiety that something terrible was going to happen. And so from the time…

Every person who owns “grails”—shoes somebody REALLY wants enough to spend way over retail just to obtain them—thinks about where they’d rock them if given the opportunity. I mean you can’t just wear them anywhere, right? I realize it’s a pandemic so grocery stores are getting a lot more flyness than in regular years,…