Afropunk
AFROPUNK is an influential community of young, gifted people of all backgrounds who speak through music, art, film, comedy, fashion and more.
THIS PHOTOGRAPHER EXPLORES ALTERNATIVE IDENTITIES. We asked our talented creative AFROPUNK community to submit their work to our platform during these turbulent times.
(EMAIL US: contribute@afropunkworldwide.com) We’ve received an influx of amazing visual art, writing, spoken word, music, fashion and more so far! My gender is Black. “Why can’t they be normal boys?”
He asked, stopping and staring at me as my head lay upon my boyfriend’s shoulder while we rode the train back to Harlem. At first, I wasn’t quite sure I’d heard him correctly. Just moments earlier I’d been watching as he and what looked like three of his siblings turned the train cart into their jungle gym, and reveling in the sight of their Black joy, so the abrupt change in tone threw me.
He couldn’t have been more than seven, by the looks of it––although looks can be deceiving, especially when it comes to Black folk. According to him, I didn’t “look” like a “normal boy,” a deception he seemed to take as a terrible transgression. FENDER’S BEGINNER HUB SEEKS TO REMOVE BARRIERS TO ENTRY FOR THE 16 MILLION NEW GUITARISTS.
There are a lot of new guitar players in the world.
Many attribute that to people picking up the guitar during Covid, but the guitar industry was in the middle of a boom before that. Regardless of the reason, the guitar family has grown and guitar manufacturer Fender, interested in this new influx of musicians, put a plan in place to learn about them and launched a service to guide and support these new guitarists on their musical journey. Fender’s “New Guitar Player Landscape Analysis” revealed that 7% of the US population between 13-64 ( approx. 16 Million people) took up the guitar in the last 2 years. 62% sighted Covid was a primary reason, along with 77% saying the extra free time gave them the freedom to play and practice. AFROPUNK 10: JIMI HENDRIX’S GREATEST PERFORMANCES. On November 27th, we celebrate the birthday of the man widely considered the greatest of all rock and roll guitarists, James Marshall Hendrix.
In a career that lasted a mere six years, he exploded music, making a hyper leap from playing what was hard-fought and ragged, chitlin’-circuit R&B with Little Richard and the Isley Brothers, to inventing psychedelic metal-blues music with the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Band of Gypsys. Hendrix did not play many boring notes — or at least we’ve never heard any — and any list of his greatest recordings and performances is purely subjective. MEGHAN TO THE QUEEN: “YOU MUST NOT KNOW ‘BOUT ME”
Meghan Markle is a beautiful, classy, successful woman who seemed to bring much-needed new energy to the business that is the British royal family.
All families are a business at some level: you’ve got to work together to bring in money, manage it, and, if possible, to grow the wealth. But if your family is a bodega in the hood, the House of Windsor is Apple. We pay taxes to live in our country, while they are paid via England’s taxes to live in theirs. Queen Elizabeth II’s clan is a globally watched, generations-old drama that fuels a massive tourism industry which brings loads of revenue into England, more than the country pays to the family.
People travel from far away just to see Buckingham Palace, which is kind of like traveling to see the set of a favorite movie, while doing a Hollywood Maps star tour, and seeing the gated mansion of your favorite movie star. A REMINDER TO QUESTION FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY. As face recognition technology becomes more and more a part of society, the higher at risk Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) become.
As a result, the ACLU encourages us to look into society’s normalization of capturing biometric data by law enforcement and corporations as it is “known to produce biased and inaccurate results, especially when applied to people of color.” We need to think about who we are giving information to. Amazon is widely used around the world and has partnerships with over 400 police departments around the nation, so the ACLU is closely monitoring their use of biometric data.
MEET THE BLACK WOMAN MAKING SURE WE NEVER FORGET SLAVERY. I grew up hearing that America’s birthday is on the 4th of July, 1776.
But as any Black person knows, that date never really made much sense for us. To celebrate and commemorate America’s independence overlooks the fact that Black folks were enslaved. Now, a groundbreaking new project from The New York Times Magazines’ Nikole Hannah Jones argues that August 1619, the day the first slave ships landed in America, is a much more defining date than 1776. It’s easy to think of the American slave trade as a thing of the past that is no longer worth talking about today. But Jones argues that the ripple effects of slavery have had an impact on almost every aspect of American identity. HOUSING IN THE TIME OF VIRUS: SHELTER IS A RIGHT. Quarantined at home, we are all living in a new reality.
And one especially frightening element of this reality to the non-employed/unemployed/under-employed amongst us, is how to hold onto the homes we are quarantined in — whether those be domiciles we’re renting, or have a mortgage on. (Mazel Tov to all you MFs who’ve paid yours off, have a significant other who owns, or are bunkered down in mom and dad’s basement.) In fact, among the many previously unthinkable conversations that the ‘Rona reality has brought to the fore in America’s no-social-net society, regards the meaning of “home.” Much like the word “socialist” spent the 20th and early 21st centuries as a kind of curse to the get-money free-marketeers all around us, but has suddenly began making some sense, the conversation about affordable shelter being a right, and which previously involved ideas deemed “impossible” and actions considered radical, don’t seem it anymore.
MAGICAL BLACK GIRLS REIMAGINE DISNEY PRINCESSES. Even though #29DaysofBlackCosplay is coming to an end, y’all already know celebrating Black cosplayers is a year-round thing for us.
So what better way to close out the month than with this Disney-inspired cosplay series by Hairstylist LaChanda Gatson and Atlanta-based duo CreativeSoul Photography (aka Kahran and Regis Bethencourt)? Featuring 14 magical, majestic Black girls, each of whom embodies the spirit of a Disney princesses or protagonist, the photo series is nothing short of mesmerizing. Teaming up with numerous designers, costume-makers, make-up and hair artists, the Bethencourts re-imagine the world and aesthetic of characters like Snow White, Rapunzel, Elsa, Nala, Jasmine, Ariel, and more. But it’s the young women portraying these characters with an ethereal coolness that brings it all together. Black Girl Magic knows no bounds. 90 DAYS! WHY I QUIT SMOKING WEED. I can’t believe it — I passed the 90-day mark. 90 days without smoking weed, after 20-plus years of smoking every day.
I’m finally free. I say free because now I’m out of the golden cage. Atlanta 2021. MAGICAL BLACK GIRLS REIMAGINE DISNEY PRINCESSES. AFROPUNK ... the other Black experience.