Big Freedia - "Y'all Get Back Now" from stereogum on Vimeo.

Big Freedia, "Y'all Get Back Now"

this is super dope. marginalized bodies doing marginalized shit reinserting themselves back into the cityscape in ways that can’t be ignored. y’all better werq.

Legendary dancer Carmen de Lavallade on the cover of the June 30, 1954 issue of Hue magazine, a Johnson publication.

(via Vintage Black Glamour)

Zion I, "Geek to the Beat"

i like this video for several reasons.:

1. his hair. im having a bit of an obsession with thick locs right now.
2. i can respect any hip hop track that incorporate djembes/African drums.
3. the first words out of his mouth is “you’re over-civilized.” instant win.
4. he’s so bouncy!
5. i dig the concept and the execution.
6., and the is most important, i ESPECIALLY dig how they filmed the dance sequences. not a bunch of quick cuts attempting to generate artificial excitement, the dancing is allowed to speak for itself. i don’t know why editors have insisted on butchering dance on film for so long. look at Michael Jackson's videos and how dance was framed, versus how it's treated today. (and, i realize that might not be the fairest comparison. Michael and Usher were/are operating from vastly different places in terms of how the music industry worked and how music videos were made. MJ was able to do what he did w/ music videos because at the time - the 80s - the music video was still an experimental form. and Usher is coming from a post-90s, post-Hype Williams, post moment of codification of what music videos "have" to look like. and he's also coming from an era that has effectively collapsed the boundaries between rap and R&B - R&B (contemporary anyway) is basically rap's little brother now. but at the same time i think there's something there worth investigating in terms of the increasing marginalization of dance and dancing bodies in rap/pop/R&B music videos since the 80s, where it goes from this really central thing to this more ornamental thing....and maybe the gendered dynamics of this process?)
7. i also like how they’re doing hip hop dance in fancy dresses.

But what if you are ‘normal’ – sound of mind and hale of heart, standing there on your own two feet looking at this page with your naked eye, independent and sovereign over skin and meat and bone – and what if everyone important in your life is normal too? How do these power-knowledge networks affect you? The answer this book suggests is that the power-knowledge networks that produce and regulate disability also produce and regulate ability, ableness, normality. The practices and institutions that divide, for example, the ‘able-bodied’, ‘sane’, and ‘whole’ from the ‘mentally ill’ and ‘deficient’ create the conditions under which all of us live; they structure the situation within which each one of us comes to terms with ourselves and creates a way of life. Normality has a history, a set of investments, an entire array of supports and assumptions that bring it into being, sustain it, and alter it when conditions so demand.”

- Ladelle McWhorter’s Foreword to Foucault and the Government of Disability.