Moses Sumney is finally out with a new album, and hearing him have new thoughts is so worth the wait. græ is about in-betweens, and its single, “Cut Me,” finds friction in the space between struggle and creation. As an artist, Sumney explains, he thrives on adversity, generating heat from pain and using that energy to move forward. Here as everywhere, his pristine falsetto leads the charge, and around it, a piano, a trombone, a guitar and percussion gather to echo his syncopated pops. A synthesizer enters only as an occasional ornament to augment the swells that the rest of the band tumbles through in unison. Ready? Listen here.
If Tik Tok is a presence in your life, you’ve met the Renegade, a mostly-upper-body dance that looks very cool when groups do it in unison. And if you’ve met the Renegade, you’ve probably seen it performed by everyone from Lizzo to batches of stiffly enthusiastic white kids. They all learned it from Charli D’Amelio, one of Tik Tok’s biggest stars, who came to be seen as the dance’s godmother. But the Renegade was choreographed by a 14-year-old dancer named Jalaiah Harmon in Atlanta, and when she asked for credit online, she was effectively laughed off the stage— until Taylor Lorenz over at NYT profiled her, explaining how the Tik Tok machine robs young creators of color of their authorship. Here’s how it went: Jalaiah posted her dance on Dubsmash, where there’s a real community of innovative dancers. Once she-cross posted to instagram for visibility, someone saw it and performed it themselves on Tik Tok, and attribution to Jalaiah got lost. Then it went viral and credit went to the person who popularized it. This appears to happen all the time, and while it’s great that Jalaiah’s now reconnected with her work, not every kid is going to get a NYT profile. Credit each other, kids!
For black history month, OneUnited, America’s largest black-owned bank, issued a limited-edition Harriet Tubman debit card, and twitter was NOT about it. I’ll encourage you to read the thread, which zings over and over, but the gist is, “You REALLY put Harriet Tubman in the Wakanda Forever pose?” The bank later explained that the pose is meant to be the American Sign Language position for “love,” conceived before Black Panther‘s release as a comment on the government’s delay putting Tubman on the $20 bill. The thing is, how many people have seen Black Panther, and how many speak ASL? And which of these signs is associated specifically with the community in question? Can’t forget the user testing phase.
Some better news: Who Killed Malcolm X, released on Netflix this month, calls into question the validity of the convictions around X’s assassination (some potentially guilty figures got off free, while others are said to have been wrongly imprisoned), and it has made such a splash that the case is going to be re-opened by the team who reinvestigated the case of the Central Park Five. Power of the press!
