The Top 100 started as a hobby; a fan adoring his musical heroes and paying tribute by making portraits of them. The hobby became obsession and the project went from the boy’s room into the art world. But I'm still that fan, it's about them in the end, their music, and not about me.
Sunday, August 15, 2021
Black is a color
2020 was a horrible year. A political nightmare here
in the States, a pandemic of epic proportions, and the killing of several
African-Americans by police forces in several cities in the US. The killing of George
Floyd in May of 2020, the next one in a series of high-profile instances of
police brutality, took things to a boiling point. The country, and the world at
that time, were on hold, in quarantine at the higth of the first wave of
COVID-19 pandemic, but the racially motivated killings could not keep hundreds
of thousands of people to take to the streets. I was not one of them, I'm not
one to take to the streets, but I very much felt the pain and I have been a
vocal sympathizer to the cause, to the Black Lives Matter movement. Naturally
the music selected to listen to in those days reflected these sentiments and I
found myself listening to the soundtrack of various Civil Rights movements.
Somewhere around that time a documentary was aired (I think it might have been
on VH1) about the Black Panther movement of the 60s and 70s. I was highly
impressed by the soundtrack of that documentary and by the artwork of Emery
Douglas, who provided the graphics for Black Panther publications. One of the
anthems for the civil rights/black liberation movements of the 1970s was The
Revolution Will Not Be Televised by the soul and jazz poet Gil-Scott Heron.
The inclusion in the documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
made the song re-apear in my Top 100.
Another one that entered the Top 100 2020 in the
same week in the early Summer of 2020 was Black Is... by the Last Poets. I've
been a long time fan of the Last Poets and by chance I happened to meet Umar Bin
Hassan (who wrote and recorded Black Is...). This was in 2005 after a
concert by the legendary Reggae group Culture, at Alrosa Village in Columbus,
Ohio. The person in charge of the programming, a huge Reggae fan who had been
visiting my Top 100 shows around that time, had invited me back stage. This is
when I ended up smoking some joints with Umar Bin Hassan. Good times! The focus
on civil rights themed music then also brought Nina Simone back on my radar (not
that she was ever far off) and I listened to a good many records I own of
hers. She's twice in the Top 100 2020. My all time favorite of hers is Black is
the Color of My True Love's Hair and after a high ranking in 2020 it reappeared
in the 2021 version. The provisional #36 spot in the Top 100 2021 of that song
neatly coincided (in terms of painting the entries according to their positions on the lists) with
numbers 98 and 99 of the Top 100 2020: The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron.
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