Sheldon Taylor's Souls of Black Notes

                                                          I'm God but it seems like I'm locked in hell .                 In 1990, rap deity Rakim's poetic picture of purgatory placed the frailties of Black majesty on full display. The microphone fiend's message from In The Ghetto was both cryptic and clear: Heavy is the head that wears the crown.     Black History Month teeters at a similar brink of fragility's edge.   I'm not caught up in politics, I'm no black activist on a so-called scholar's d---- , I see brothers quote math plus degrees, look at professor ass n----s, can't feed they own seeds.  ---GZA: Swordsman (1995)    Top Five lists are dissected and debated but many of us couldn't analyze DuBois' Talented Tenth ideology if our lives depended on it. The brilliance of Richard Ellison and E. Franklin Frazier is lost to memory but bourgeoise--- that much-maligned term they helped usher into modern Black vernacular --- survives in

                         The cup of content continues to runneth over providing  a welcome respite from pandemic purgatory. Aficionados of a certain age can look past Versuz , Facebook and IG Live and remember the days before binging---agonizing over blink-and-you'll miss moments and anticipating Black entertainment citings that seem to come as often as Haley's Comet. Of course there was Soul Train . Before that was seminal forerunner Soul!   Occasionally there was American Bandstand.  PBS had Soundstage . If you stayed up late you could catch Rick James or the Ohio Players on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert and The Midnight Special. Pre-cable, it was a major event when Black entertainers showed up on Flip Wilson, Ed Sullivan, Sonny and Cher or the Carol Burnett Show (think Michael Jackson's primetime Motown 25 appearance or Beyonce's Netflix Graduation special).   An act with a big hit climbing the charts or a great publicist/manager (or maybe both) might  h