Sheldon Taylor's Souls of Black Notes

 Music is our greatest quality of life. It marks time during our happiest moments and provides us with the adrenaline we need to power through a killer workout. It can also perform double duty as a natural enhancement and aphrodisiac during a night of passion. It comes through all mediums from space saving compact home systems to functional computer speakers that make multi-tasking a joy. The current medium of choice are high end headphones-- the unofficial sponsor of Spotify and iTunes.  Hip hop producer Dr. Dre's line of  Beats  headphones   have cornered the market, enduring more sightings than  twenty UFOs, Elvis and Tupac combined. While it hasn't fallen on deaf ears that music consumption is now pretty much a private affair,  I long for the days when LL showed us all how bass was best served: shakin' and not heard ( by j...

The public response to Richard Sherman's outbursts at the end of Sunday's NFC Championship game reveal the conflicted perceptions and complicated history of African American athletes in the national media and within sports. Attacks directed at Sherman on social media have run the gamut from racist to reprehensive as words like “thug” have been used to describe the philanthropic South Central LA native who graduated from Stanford with a master's degree. Accusations of poor sportsmanship and “lack of grace” during victory are worlds away from our country’s infatuation with the gladiator culture that defined professional sports when coach Vince Lombardi’s mantra of “winning is everything” was synonymous with greatness instead of a major character flaw. The second episode of director Ken Burns’ excellent documentary, Baseball , entitled Something like a War, examines player Ty Cobb’s personal account of his mental and physical appro...

                               The success of Beyoncé's eponymous album confirms her status as the premiere artist of her generation. The album's visual format and initial single purchase point via iTunes expands alternate distribution possibilities beyond conventional record label support.   Husband Jay-Z's Samsung  download strategy was the sign of things to come, Magna Carta: Holy Grail's  revolutionary delivery to consumers resulted in another platinum seller in the Jay-Z catalog, becoming the 13th straight number one album of his career. If Magna Carta was a home run, Beyonce'  is a grand slam. With Columbia Records backed physical product on the way, Mrs. Knowles-Carter will probably have the distinction of having 2014's first number one album. While it is clear s...

This weekend marks the 31st anniversary of the release of  Make It Last Forever, the debut album from R&B crooner Keith Sweat. Equal parts classic soul and hip hop courtesy of fellow Harlem native and album producer Teddy Riley, the seminal long player changed  R&B music. Younger audiences weaned on their parents' record collections were coming of age and required a soundtrack of their own. Three million copies later-- they had one. By the end of '87 R&B was at a crossroads. Prince's Minneapolis Sound was the hottest ticket in town and the success of urban  superstars from the previous era had peaked and its soulful elements were toned down by the mid-Eighties. Albums like Thriller, Whitney Houston, Can't Slow Down, Purple Rain , Rapture, Control and Sign O' The Times  reflected a new creative bar and commercial appeal.   In his autobiography Howling At The Moon: The O...

Hip Hop fans under the age of forty may not recognize the name but they know the game. Too young to witness DJ Hollywood holding court at '70's nightspots such as Charles Gallery and Club 371, there is no doubt they remember Kurtis Blow's booming baritone on  Christmas Rappin' and The Breaks or Big Bank Hank waxing poetic on The Sugar Hill Gang's " Rapper's Delight " to being mesmerized by party rocker Doug E. Fresh and Busta Rhymes' 1997 smash Whoo-Ha (Got You All In Check). Style. Delivery. Showmanship. No matter what flavor that they savored, all points lead back to DJ Hollywood. Each of those artists took a page from the legendary dj/emcee whose autobiography,  It's Star Time captures a critical yet overlooked era in hip hop history. Written in collaboration with Lucio Dutch, prolific author of several books under his  Hip Hop Memoirs imprint, Time is the latest in a series chronicling untold st...

                                                              Huge in stature yet humble and accessible, the late Heavy D transformed four square miles of a neighborhood just outside the Bronx into Money Earnin' Mount Vernon ---a musical mecca from which Al B. Sure, Pete Rock and CL Smooth and Diddy and many others would spring from. Rotund rappers have been around forever. Back in the 70s, seminal star DJ Hollywood ruled the rap roost before hip hop records. Constant fixtures on the first barnstorming rap tours in the mid 80s, the Fat Boys parlayed their popularity into a string of gold and platinum albums, movies and commercial endorsements. There were short-lived West Coast act...

Ask Heaven – Heavy D featuring Chico DeBarge ( Heavy, 1999 ) “ Thanksgiving Day will forever be hard/cause that’s the day we gave my brother to God” On October 30th, TV-One’s popular UNSUNG series kicks off a new season with an episode celebrating the life and career of the late great Heavy D. In a rare departure from his signature ladies anthems and party jams, Hev reworks Led Zeppelin’s iconic Stairway to Heaven into a somber reflection of love, life and the tragedy of addiction.