If you’d like to take a break from all the alternative facts and political drama, then let’s take a few moments to go back in time and bow our heads in gratitude.
Music industry insider Naima Cochrane delivers what she calls “music sermons” on her Twitter feed, which take her followers on curated journeys into music culture and history. She is a national treasure.
Her latest #MusicSermon devotional was a tribute to the Arsenio Hall Show which debuted thirty years ago this month. And as promised, sister Naima took us all to church.
For those of you who missed his reign, Hall is a stand-up comedian and actor who had a late-night talk show, which ran from 1989 to 1994. It was an instant hit and a significant departure from the established late-night fare.
Hall is often remembered as the person who first changed the way the public expected to see political candidates.
When he invited then still-unknown candidate Bill Clinton on his show, Hall spontaneously asked him to play the saxophone along with the band. Clinton, who had played the instrument in high school, gamely gave it a go. “I (got) a little bit of credit for showing him to a younger demo(graphic) and I got a little credit for changing how people run for the highest office in the land,” Hall recently told the Courier Post.
But Cochrane’s devotional explained that Hall had a much bigger, and largely unacknowledged influence on global culture.
Hall used his “unapologetically black late-night party,” as a platform to showcase talented musicians of color, including hip-hop artists, who were then mostly unknown to white audiences. East coast, West coast, new jack, crossover pop—they were all there. “This was only about a year after Yo! MTV Raps hit the scene, and a year before In Living Color and Fox’s hip-hop centric line-up,” she tweeted. “[S]o there weren’t many spaces to see our artists and our culture on mainstream TV.”
More evidence that diversity in entertainment matters.
Cochrane posted short clips of notable segments that will take you all the way back. Hall wasn’t playing around. “[T]he bookers for the other late night shows probably ain’t even know what a Das Efx or a Fu-Schnicken was,” she says. “Arsenio did, though.”
I ain’t even know this Will Smith, but that’s none of my business.
Then she shared this clip of the late Luther Vandross, who was a guest on Hall’s very first show (along with Brooke Shields and Leslie Nielsen) and it took my breath away. Vandross dropped a quick a cappella version of “Let Me Take You Home”, a song that remains indelible on my hippocampus and my heart, and it was like he never left us.
The song, which is about the longing for another person, was in rotation at the time when I was still young enough to believe that all song lyrics spoke to my own tragic condition. But listening to it again, I realized that Vandross’s own longing had been much different than mine.
Let me hold you tight, if only for one night. Let me keep you near, to ease away your fear, it would be so nice, if only one night. I won’t tell a soul, no one has to know. If you want to be totally discreet. I’ll be at your side, if only for one night.
Vandross, a closeted gay man, died in 2005, so he didn’t live long enough to see LGBTQ+ people publicly accepted and affirmed. According to this 2017 interview with his friend Patti LaBelle, it was partly to not to alienate his legions of female fans, but mainly not to upset his mother. “Basically, he did not want his mother to be [upset], although she might have known, but he wasn’t going to come out and say this to the world,” she told Andy Cohen on the Bravo Show Watch What Happens Live.
I’d like to believe that if Arsenio had stuck around a little longer, he would have helped the world get there sooner.
The show was eventually canceled for flagging ratings. Queen Latifah gathered all of Hall’s people for a surprise segment to say good-bye. Vandross was the first to make a tribute. “People love this man so unconditionally, and he’s been part of our lives and done so much for us,” Vandross told the audience on Hall’s final show. “I’m sad to see you go because America is going to have a big chunk missing.”
On Point
| Jemele Hill launches a new podcast series on Spotify |
| The show, called Unbothered, will publish new episodes twice-weekly, and promise to deliver Hill’s legendary candor and insightful analysis. Hill and her co-hosts will be welcoming high profile guests and will be discussing the news of the week. "Spotify and I are very like-minded. We both believe in being bold and authentic,” she said in a statement. Hill spent 12 years at ESPN as a writer, sideline reporter and SportsCenter host. Hill famously made headlines in 2017 for calling President Trump a white supremacist on Twitter. That was a time, right? |
| Hollywood Reporter |
| The officer convicted in the shooting death of Walter Scott loses his appeal |
| Michael Slager is the former South Carolina policeman who shot and killed Walter Scott during a traffic stop in 2015. Yesterday, an appellate court upheld his conviction and 20-year sentence. A bystander captured the stop and shooting on video, which sparked outrage across the country. Slager’s attorneys argued that he shot Scott in self-defense after the two fought; they also said that Slager had never shown any racial animus toward black people. |
| AP News |
| Previously incarcerated people get their voting rights restored in Florida |
| Some 1.4 million Floridians with felony records were newly eligible to register to vote yesterday thanks to the wisdom of the voters themselves. The passage of Amendment 4 in the November elections restored voting rights to Floridians with felony convictions, with the exceptions of people convicted of murder or a sexual offense, and who have served their sentences. Fortune alum Chauncey Alcorn has the story. "It was just overwhelming," said tearful and newly registered voter Desmond Meade, who had served time in prison for a drug offense. "This is a moment that seemed so far away at one point, but now it’s here.” |
| NBC News |
The Woke Leader
| Black parents are turning to Afrocentric schools in New York City |
| NYC schools are profoundly segregated, and all efforts at a remedy have largely failed. So, instead of participating in integration schemes, some frustrated parents are turning to private and charter schools that have been designed specifically for black children. “Even if integrated education worked perfectly — and our society spent the past 60-plus years trying — it’s still not giving black children the kind of education necessary to create the solutions our communities need,” says a member of Parenting While Black, a new group of Brooklyn-based parents. Children of any race may apply to an Afrocentric school, there are some 2,300 students currently being served in six different schools in Brooklyn. |
| New York Times |
| The pain of black women |
| I will warn you now: This essay is rough. It is an excerpt from THICK: And Other Essays, a new book by Tressie McMillan Cottom, an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University. It begins with a horrific story about her treatment by medical professionals during a suddenly troubled pregnancy and ends in tragedy. Her subsequent analysis is brutal for different reasons. “When the medical profession systematically denies the existence of black women’s pain, underdiagnoses our pain, refuses to alleviate or treat our pain, healthcare marks us as incompetent bureaucratic subjects,” she writes. “Then it serves us accordingly.” |
| Time |
| Yellowface in the arts is part of a long, disgusting tradition |
| Writer Jenny Zhang pulls back the curtain on race envy in the white, literary world. She was writing in response to the then-shocking news that writer Michael Derrick Hudson had pretended to be Chinese American to get a poem that had been rejected under his own name into print. But it was also about her experience as one of two grad students of color in a prestigious, mostly white program. She became uncomfortable as her white classmates quizzed her about life, her otherness, her seemingly effortless ability to write authentically about race. “White people have always slipped in and out of the experiences of people of color and been praised extravagantly for it,” she writes. And yet, reduced to the sum of her traumas, her model minority status and her “luck” at being a cultural outlier, she demands something more. “Where are my carefree writers of color at? Seriously, where?” |
| Buzzfeed |
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| from the New York Times obituary for Luther Vandross |
