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      Eboni K. Williams and Her ‘Harlem Jewel Box’

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      The broadcaster and author’s brief to her designer was simple: ‘Imagine if Josephine Baker lived in Harlem today. That’s what I want this apartment to look like.’When Eboni K. Williams moved to New York from Los Angeles in 2014, to take a job as a correspondent at CBS News, she knew exactly where she was going to live.“No disrespect to any other borough or any other part of the city, but being a Black woman from the South, it had to be Harlem U.S.A.,” said Ms. Williams, 39, a native of Charlotte, N.C. “It was important for me to walk out my door every day and feel the spirit and energy of the ancestors who lived there — James Baldwin and Malcolm X and Lorraine Hansberry and Josephine Baker.”Ms. Williams, a lawyer, writer and broadcaster (Fox News, WABC Radio and REVOLT and GRIO cable networks), who is probably best known as the first Black cast member of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” landed at Riverton Square, a large rental development near the F.D.R. Drive, between 135th and 138th Streets.“Looking at it, you would think it was a housing project, but it has a real legacy. Baldwin lived there, and so did David Dinkins,” said Ms. Williams, referring to the former mayor of New York. “If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me.”But life is complicated, and love sometimes requires a change of address. From 2019 to 2021, Ms. Williams, the author of the recently published “Bet on Black: The Good News About Being Black in America Today” and the host of the podcast “Holding Court with Eboni K. Williams,” found herself in TriBeCa, in a three-bedroom sublet at the Four Seasons Private Residences, with her fiancé, a financier. They have since ended their relationship.Eboni K. Williams, an author, lawyer and TV, radio and podcast host, lives in a one-bedroom condo in Harlem with her tricolor Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Carey James.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesEboni K. Williams, 39Occupation: Lawyer, journalist, authorHarlem on my mind: “It meant something to me, as a Black woman, to land in a neighborhood that has meant so much to Black people.”“I’m glad I had that experience,” Ms. Williams said. “Because as gorgeous as the unit was, when I went to buy a place coming out of the lease, I had learned what was really important to me.”For starters, that meant an apartment that was a little more down-to-earth, literally. “We were on the 67th floor, which was not my jam,” she said. “I have a fear of heights.”An open kitchen was also a must. “That was a $7 million apartment, and it had a galley kitchen,” she said. “I love to cook, so I hated the galley kitchen.”And also: Who needs a dining table? “I never used it,” she said. “I ate in front of the TV.”But having three bedrooms was nice. It allowed for a dedicated office, and she realized she “needed a separate work space.”“Oh, honey, aesthetics are very important to me,” Ms. Williams said. “I know what I want my house to look like.”Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAnd she will not soon forget the abundance of storage space at the Four Seasons. “That place introduced me to California Closets,” Ms. Williams said, referring to the company that creates custom organizing systems. “I had them do every closet in my new apartment.”About that new apartment: Ms. Williams went into contract two and a half years ago, based on the model unit, in a building under construction in central Harlem — one bedroom, floor-to-ceiling windows, nine-foot ceilings, high-end finishes — and moved in last June after many delays, with her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Carey James (named for her grandfather).“It was the only place I looked at. I’m very decisive in that way,” she said.“I’m a girl from the South, and I’m a pageant queen, and the finishes were very important to me,” Ms. Williams continued. “It was important for me to have Carrara marble countertops. It was important for me to have the beautiful white-oak herringbone floors throughout. I’m allergic to carpet. Not really, but you know what I mean.”Ms. Williams’s brief to her interior designer, Ty Larkins, was simple and to the point: “Imagine if Josephine Baker lived in Harlem today. That’s what I want this apartment to look like. I want it to be a Harlem jewel box.”Bunches of flowers add pops of color. (Ms. Williams is partial to pink.)Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesIn something of a nod to Ms. Baker’s adopted city, Paris, a 19th-century French mirror leans against the wall in the living room. A French desk of the same vintage anchors the work space. Baccarat candlesticks catch the light on the coffee table.Ms. Baker sometimes performed in head-to-toe pink. For her part, Ms. Williams used to be “pink, pink, pink, pink, like a 12-year-old lives here,” she said. But she has learned moderation. True, the two velvet accent chairs in front of the tall windows in the living room are dusty rose, the side chair has pink-and-gray stripes, and the grasscloth on the walls is a very pale blush, “but there are also some masculine elements,” she said, pointing to the oversized chocolate-brown tufted sofa.If you want to get invited back, don’t touch the earth-toned Hermès blanket that’s neatly folded over an arm of the sofa. “It’s just for show,” she said.Although Ms. Williams chose her apartment quickly and surely — and although her determination to plant roots in Harlem was unswerving — it was an emotionally complicated business.“I was going to buy a million-dollar condo somewhere in New York,” she said. “But because people are paying that and more in my building, it’s displacing many of those who have called Harlem home for years. That’s the truth. It’s like any privilege — what do I do with that privilege? To me, it’s about preserving the culture that came before me, so it still lives beyond me. The moment you walk through the door, there is this explosion of Black-centeredness and Black celebration.”The canopy bed adds a touch of Hollywood glamour.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesBusts of the journalist Ida B. Wells and the abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass are on display in the cozy alcove Ms. Williams uses as her office. The bathroom walls are papered with designer Sheila Bridge’s pattern Harlem Toile de Jouy, which trades France’s classic pastoral motifs for those reflecting an African-American heritage.On one wall of the living room is a print depicting the stowage of a ship carrying enslaved Africans. Almost directly opposite is a painting by the Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai featuring a Black woman in front of a line of microphones. “This is about the amplification of the struggle and liberation,” Ms. Williams said.“This place,” she added, “is dripping with Black identity. That’s me. Literally. It’s my name: Eboni.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      The New Black Canon: Books, Plays and Poems That Everyone Should Know

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      A guide to some of the undervalued 20th-century works that testify to the richness of the Black American literary archive.Fifty years ago, when college courses in Black American literature were rare; when Zora Neale Hurston’s novels were out of print and Toni Morrison was a book editor with one novel to her name, the job of shaping a Black canon was clear: Rediscover, anthologize, define the terms of a tradition. “The act of recovery means something different now,” says Kenton Rambsy, an associate professor of English and digital humanities at the University of Texas at Arlington, whose research uses data analytics to tell new stories about the Black literary past. Sometimes recovery demands peering into the shadows cast by towering canonical figures. “It might mean finding that writer who is just being overlooked because of the canonicity of, say, Toni Morrison,” Rambsy says. Sometimes it’s even simpler than that. “We don’t have to go deep into archives to find undervalued Black authors,” says the poet and U.C.L.A. English professor Harryette Mullen. In a recent essay, I look to such undervalued authors and works as the impetus for shaping a new Black canon.What follows is a list of 20 books — works of fiction, drama and poetry, presented chronologically by category — that testify to the richness of the Black American literary archive. You’ll encounter many of these works as recent reissues; others remain difficult to find or are out of print entirely. All were published last century. Their writers are genre fiction authors and experimentalists, nature poets and satirists, pulp fiction practitioners and trans-nationalists, writers of the weird, the quirky, the unsettled and unsettling. Together, they help to tell a story of Black American literature that reflects the infinite number of ways of being Black in America — and of being in the world.FictionPauline E. Hopkins, “Of One Blood” (1902-3)In Telassar, a thriving city hidden below the Nubian Desert, Hopkins’s protagonist, the biracial Harvard Medical student Reuel Briggs, encounters an advanced civilization with “specimens of the highest attainments the world knew in ancient days.” This sprawling work of speculative fiction resists paraphrase, but what’s important is that it helped spawn a vast contemporary tradition: “I like to say [this book] was ‘Black Panther’ before ‘Black Panther’, ” says Eve Dunbar, a professor of English at Vassar College. “It’s got something for everyone: Black sci-fi, a passing narrative, a back-to-Africa plot, and a plantation ghost story.” Hopkins published “Of One Blood” in serialized form in the pages of the Boston-based Colored American Magazine, which she edited. Embedded in her novel’s title is Hopkins’s rejection of the pseudoscientific conflation of race with blood, a myth used to buttress white supremacy and racial division.Chester Himes, “Lonely Crusade” (1947)A first edition cover of Chester Himes’s 1947 novel, “Lonely Crusade.”A 1946 portrait of Himes by Carl Van Vechten.Carl Van Vechten © Van Vechten Trust, Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale UniversityHimes’s revival in recent years has come on the strength of his noir crime fiction. Starting with 1957’s “A Rage in Harlem,” he wrote eight books that follow detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones through the New York underworld of the 1950s and ’60s. Himes knew something of crime and punishment himself, having served nearly eight years in prison for armed robbery. His body of work, though, defies tidy categorization. After emigrating to France in the mid-50s (he lived in Europe until his death in 1984), Himes wrote perceptively about the Black expatriate experience. He also wrote about Black-white labor movements, same-sex relationships, interracial marriage and racism. “Few African American writers had his sure-handed ability to depict the nitty-gritty of Black life,” Himes’s biographer Lawrence P. Jackson says. Jackson points to “Lonely Crusade” as “his classic text.” For evidence, he cites a passage in which Himes’s protagonist Lee Gordon listens to his father, not knowing it will be for the last time: “You’re just as good as any white person. Don’t let nobody tell you no different. Now all you got to do is prove it.” Himes takes readers into Lee’s mind as he ponders how his father intended those words — “whether sincerely or satirically Lee Gordon never learned.”Fran Ross, “Oreo” (1974)Ross’s only novel was lightly reviewed and largely overlooked. “Perhaps a book like ‘Oreo’ — though I know few — gets ignored or quite purposefully sidelined because it defies the reader, the reviewer, the cultural critic, the scholar and just about anyone else who dares position it,” the novelist Michelle Latiolais recently wrote. “Oreo” is satire and metafiction, a picaresque and a bildungsroman. (Ross herself described it as “cockeyed and nutty.”) The narrative action, such as it is, concerns a young biracial Black and Jewish protagonist’s search for her father. Most remarkable, though, is the novel’s mode of address. In 2015, the novelist Danzy Senna described the book as “a strange, uncanny dream about a future that was really the past.” As the literary critic Scott Saul points out, though, the novel is also very much of its time. “Oreo,” he writes, “is a queer novel, written by a gay woman who, while she traveled in gay circles and revered queer writers like James Baldwin and Djuna Barnes, opted not to disclose that side of her identity when she made her literary debut.”Alison Mills Newman, “Francisco” (1974)Alison Mills Newman began her creative life as an actor. Her credits include a recurring role on the late-’60s NBC sitcom “Julia,” starring Diahann Carroll, a groundbreaking series that portrayed everyday Black life during a time of national tumult. Soon thereafter, in her early 20s, Mills Newman wrote her first novel, “Francisco,” which chronicles a young Black woman’s love affair with an independent filmmaker. In her foreword to a 2023 reissue (the book, long out of print, was originally published in 1974 by R. C. & J., an independent press founded by the writers Ishmael Reed, Steve Cannon and Joe Johnson), the literary scholar Saidiya Hartman describes it as being in the style of a Künstlerroman: “a portrait of the artist as a young black woman trying to find a way back to herself.” The novel blends vernacular riffs with cameos from Reed and Muhammad Ali, Pharoah Sanders and Angela Davis, Melvin Van Peebles and Amiri Baraka. Writing of “Francisco,” the novelist William Demby observed that it’s “the song one would expect Love to be singing these troubled days of the 1970s — a song you cannot have heard before, off-key and haunting, disturbing even in its unfamiliarity.”James Alan McPherson, “Elbow Room” (1977)“There never was a nationwide coalition that looked unwaveringly at Black storytelling,” the cultural historian Wil Haygood tells me. Haygood — who’s written biographies of Sammy Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson and Thurgood Marshall — understands the responsibility of telling Black American stories on the page and onscreen, not only in the United States, but around the globe. “You have a world market from Japan to Australia to France that has access to streaming services and wants to see Black stories,” Haygood says. That storytelling necessarily involves engaging history-shaping social and political movements: the civil rights struggle, the Black Power era, the recent uprisings for racial justice. But Haygood is also drawn to quieter, though no less radical stories, found in the fiction of the Black quotidian. He particularly likes this collection of restrained, elegant stories that find high drama among ordinary people. You should read McPherson’s stories, Haygood says, “because the Black characters do things that the outside world doesn’t think that they’d ordinarily be doing, like listening to and falling in love with country music.”William Demby, “Love Story Black” (1978)“By some unfortunate miscarriage of advertisement,” writes the scholar Nathan A. Scott Jr. in his foreword to the 1991 reissue of Demby’s second novel, “The Catacombs” (1965), “the fiction of William Demby over more than a generation has remained little known and is not today generally accorded the prominence in the canon of Afro-American literature that it deserves.” More than thirty years after Scott wrote those words and nearly ten years after Demby’s death at 90, the canon may finally be catching up to Demby. An international conference in 2018 at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and a recent issue of the literary journal African American Review, both dedicated to his work, provide evidence. His third novel, “Love Story Black,” is at once a satire of the Black Arts Movement and a departure from the narrow dictates of social realist Black protest fiction in favor of a vision that allows for the uncanny, the humorous and the absurd. Asked to describe Demby, the writer Ishmael Reed, his near contemporary and a professor at California College of the Arts, put it plainly: “One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.”J. California Cooper, “The Wake of the Wind” (1998)Cooper’s dedication to “Wake,” her saga of slavery and freedom, says it plain: “I WILL NEVER BE ASHAMED OF MY ANCESTORS. IF YOU ARE … YOU ARE A FOOL.” In scope (it begins, “Once upon a certain year, 1764 or so, 200 years ago”), and in story (the book opens in Texas with two enslaved people falling in love, ignorant of the fact that the Civil War has brought slavery to an end), “Wake” is the perfect book to celebrate Juneteenth finally becoming a federal holiday. Though some critics have called Cooper preachy, many readers find her inspiring and profound. “Cooper always writes about love. This [book] is steeped in the power of family love, one of the things that no one could ever take away from Black folks,” the novelist and screenwriter Attica Locke says.DramaJean Toomer, “Balo” (1922)A circa 1925 portrait of Jean Toomer by Winold Reiss.National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian InstitutionThis year marks the 100th anniversary of “Cane” (1923), Toomer’s generically mutable masterpiece of fiction, poetry and drama. His one-act play “Balo,” written the previous year and staged by the Howard University Repertory Company during its 1923-24 season, is no masterpiece. However, its imperfections (most notably its tortured dialect) show a young writer endeavoring to capture his experience of unfamiliar places and voices. Both works are set in Georgia, where Toomer, who was raised in Washington, D.C., spent several weeks during the fall of 1921, on a trip to visit the birthplace of his estranged father. The play follows a day in the life of a Black sharecropper and his family, living amid the ruins of an old plantation, alongside a poor white family who reside in a decaying slave mansion. Whereas “Cane” often bends toward tragedy, “Balo” chooses reverie: “AUTUMN DAWN,” the opening stage directions read. “Any week day. Outside, it is damp and dewy, and the fog, resting upon the tops of pine trees, looks like fantastic cotton bolls about to be picked by the early morning fingers of the sun.”Eulalie Spence, “The Starter” (1923)Déja Denise Green and SJ Hannah in a scene from Eulalie Spence’s “The Starter” (1923), one of three plays in “She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind,” at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York City through March 12.Kat duPont VecchioForgoing propagandistic “problem plays,” Spence modeled a style of politically and humanly engaged Black theater that paved the way for Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry and their contemporaries. After emigrating as a child from the Caribbean island of Nevis to New York in 1902, Spence absorbed the speech patterns of her adopted community and gave them expression in plays written in one act, to meet the requirements of the contests to which she often submitted her work. In “The Starter,” Spence stages a comic tale of courtship written in an eye dialect that calls out for gifted actors to make stilted symbols into natural speech: “Y’know, kid, I bin thinkin’ — Say, why don’t we get married? Huh?” asks T. J. of his beloved, Georgia. “Ah dunno, ’cept yuh never mentioned it befo’, ” Georgia replies. To appreciate these lines, one must hear them performed onstage. Fortunately, “She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind,” a production of three of Spence’s plays (including “The Starter”), is running through March 12 at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York. The director, Timothy Johnson, says he enjoys how “in this one-act form she’s able to give you a whole life. … There’s such vibrant specificity about these characters that makes ordinary people extraordinary.”Lorraine Hansberry, “Toussaint” (1961)Above: Lorraine Hansberry in a 1961 clip from the series “Playwright at Work” discussing her play-in-progress, “Toussaint.”“A Raisin in the Sun,” which premiered on Broadway in 1959, is a work of such canonical consensus that it risks subsuming its creator. It marked the commercial and critical high point of a career cut short by illness. In her literary afterlife, Hansberry “becomes boxed into ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ in a way, which is both to her benefit and to her detriment,” explains Soyica Diggs Colbert, author of the 2021 Hansberry biography “Radical Vision.” “Raisin” remains an indispensable work; reading beyond it, however, one discovers the politically radical, formally experimental writer that Hansberry was becoming. In “Toussaint,” a completed 1961 scene from her play in progress about the Haitian general and freedom fighter Toussaint L’Ouverture, Hansberry claims her identity as, in Colbert’s words, a “freedom writer.” In critiquing the legacy of colonialism and understanding that this, too, is part of the Black American story, Hansberry offers an animating insight for her time and for ours.Charles Gordone, “No Place to Be Somebody: A Black-Black Comedy” (1969)The playbill from the 1969 Broadway production of Charles Gordone’s “No Place To Be Somebody.”© PlaybillIn 1969, Amiri Baraka (publishing as LeRoi Jones) released “Four Black Revolutionary Plays,” a series of one-acts obsessively, at times brilliantly, circling Black-white racial conflict. That same year, Gordone’s “No Place” debuted Off Broadway. The two works embody a fundamental tension: Baraka’s favors confrontation while Gordone’s displays a humanistic impulse to see dignity even in seeming degradation. Gordone peoples his play with pimps, prostitutes and hustlers, both Black and white. As Phyl Garland wrote in Ebony, Gordone “came equipped with a loaded pistol and a whole barrel of ‘MF’s’. ” Debuting at the Public Theater, founded by the towering New York theater figure Joseph Papp (a student of Eulalie Spence at Brooklyn’s Eastern District High School in the 1930s), “No Place” earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1970, becoming the first work by a Black playwright to do so. “No Place” blends comedy, tragedy and melodrama. In doing so, it shares with then-emergent Blaxploitation cinema a revolutionary sensibility that seeks not to counter Black stereotypes but rather to annex them, revealing the complexity beneath their distorting masks.Adrienne Kennedy, “An Evening with Dead Essex” (1973)The cast of “Ohio State Murders,” which was first published in 1991 and debuted on Broadway just last year, pays tribute to its playwright, Adrienne Kennedy, in December 2022.Michael Loccisano/Getty ImagesKennedy’s “The Ohio State Murders” (1991), which made its belated Broadway debut last December, closed early, on Jan. 15, after just 44 performances. In a video posted to Instagram, the play’s star, six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, paid tribute to Kennedy. “More of her work deserves to be produced commercially,” the actor said, “and hopefully this will be the beginning of more and more awareness about … how incredible and poetic and profound and raw and revolutionary her work is.” Kennedy’s career spans seven decades, beginning with “Funnyhouse of the Negro” in 1964. Her style is often described as surrealist — a central quality, but only a part of her varied aesthetic. Among the most striking of her early plays is “An Evening with Dead Essex,” first performed in 1973 at the American Place Theatre in New York. The play joins documentary with imagination: It concerns the factual account of a Black Vietnam vet named Mark Essex who returns from war and commits a mass shooting, killing nine and injuring more before being shot by police. The play takes place in a film production studio, with Kennedy insisting that “actors use their real names and the director should get the actors to play themselves.” The action consists of the actors and filmmakers, all but one of whom are Black, reconstruing Essex’s life so as to make some sense of the violence of his death — and of the violence that surrounds us all.Andrea Hairston, “Lonely Stardust” (1998)In the stage directions to “Lonely Stardust,” Hairston describes how she wants her audience to relate to her play. “The Audience,” she writes, “should be embedded in a corner of this galactic wonder. … Occasionally comets whiz by. Periodic showers of Stardust should be arranged. The Traveler has journeyed billions of miles and landed in Springfield, MA, USA. …” Through this asymmetry of scale — the cosmos and a town in western Massachusetts — Hairston opens up points of entry into the everyday and the ineffable. A nameless traveler, searching for life at the end of his own, speaks in a hip vernacular: “When you spiral down that image of lonely, there’s the beginning. Or the end, actually. Buggin’ out.” Sheree Renée Thomas, author of numerous works of speculative fiction, including the short-story collection “Nine Bar Blues” (2020), sees Hairston as the too-often overlooked link between her generation and that of Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany. “Andrea Hairston has had her pulse on the science fiction community since the 1970s,” Thomas says. “She was always in that liminal space with her work: too Black for the science fiction community, and too science fiction for the Black drama community.”POETRYEsther Popel, “Flag Salute” (1934)Esther Popel’s poem “Flag Salute” on the cover of the November 1940 issue of The Crisis.Dickinson College Archives & Special CollectionsIn November 1940, a little more than a year before the United States entered World War II, The Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, reprinted Popel’s “Flag Salute” on its cover. Popel’s poem intersperses phrases from the Pledge of Allegiance with an account of a Black man’s lynching. When it first appeared six years earlier, the poem was responding directly to the Oct. 18, 1933, murder of George Armwood, a 27-year-old Black farm laborer from Princess Anne on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, who had been arrested for “grabbing the arm” of a white woman on a public road. “Flag Salute” was newly relevant in 1940, The Crisis editors noted, because of the fact “that the federal anti-lynching bill had been killed in the Senate and that Negro Americans would be segregated and discriminated against in the U. S. armed forces.” Embodying the ambivalence of being both Black and American, Popel’s poem communicated across decades with Harryette Mullen, whose poems “Waving the Flag” and “Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name” bear its influence. “Popel was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,” Mullen says, “where she lived near my great-grandmother, although I can’t be certain they were acquainted.” Reading Mullen’s poems beside Popel’s is a form of acquaintance, too.Bob Kaufman, “The Collected Poems” (1965-78)“When I die, / I won’t stay / Dead.” These three lines conclude Kaufman’s 19-line poem “Dolorous Echo,” first published in his book “Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness” (1965) and now included in the remarkable 2019 edition of Kaufman’s collected poems. The lines have proved prophetic. Kaufman died in 1986 at 60, in his adoptive city of San Francisco (he was born and raised in New Orleans), after struggling for decades with mental illness, addiction, arrests and housing precarity. A careful poetic craftsman, he could nonetheless be a reckless steward of his own work, scrawling poems in the narrow margins of newspapers, reciting words in coffee shops and at house parties. A founding member of Beatitude, the seminal Beat periodical, alongside Allen Ginsberg, John Kelly and others, Kaufman is sometimes shorthanded as the “Black Beat.” While he helped define the Beat aesthetic, Kaufman was also a surrealist, a poet of blues and jazz and a spiritualist (he practiced Buddhism). “Kaufman’s poems use the most far out and surreal tools to render frighteningly honest, terrifying and delicious portraits of people and the world,” the poet Danez Smith tells me.Gwendolyn Brooks, “In the Mecca” (1968)A 1960 portrait of Gwendolyn Brooks on the back steps of her home in Chicago.Slim Aarons/Getty ImagesBy some measures, Brooks is about as canonical as it gets. Her poem “We Real Cool” (1960) is a high school staple, likely because its brevity lends itself to classroom reading and because its sharp enjambments invite close analysis of form. “Most young people know me only by that poem,” Brooks once told an audience. “I would prefer it if the textbook compilers and the anthologists would assume that I had written a few other poems.” Among Brooks’s many other poems, her long sequence “In the Mecca,” featured in a collection of the same name, is among her finest. Released in 1968, after a nearly decade-long publishing hiatus and just months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., “In the Mecca” is both intimately focused on domestic life and urgently engaged in the politics of the moment. The poet Major Jackson, who this year will publish a collection spanning his own two-decade career, says that the poem “reads like a contemporary ballad, where one discerns Brooks’s gift for incisive and stark language as well as a sweeping social vision married to modernist sensibilities.”Ishmael Reed, “A Secretary to the Spirits” (1978)A first edition cover of Ishmael Reed’s 1978 poetry collection “A Secretary to the Spirits,” illustrated by the artist Betye Saar.Betye Saar’s original cover illustration “A Secretary to the Spirits (from the series ‘A Secretary to the Spirits [for Ishmael Reed]’)” (1975).© Betye Saar. The Morgan Library & Museum, courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los AngelesThe richness of the 85-year-old Reed’s ever-expanding catalog (from his 1967 debut novel “The Free-Lance Pallbearers” to his play “The Conductor,” which premieres at New York’s Theater for the New City on March 9) is such that one might overlook the slender 17-poem, 42-page volume he published 45 years ago with NOK, a Nigerian publisher. Julian Lucas, who has written often about Reed, considers “A Secretary to the Spirits” to be “criminally underrated.” The book is long out of print and difficult to find; all of the poems, however, are available in Reed’s “New and Collected Poems” (2007). But if you’re lucky enough to find a copy of the 1978 original, you’ll experience them as Reed intended, in call-and-response with illustrations by the Black Arts Movement assemblage artist Betye Saar. Saar’s full-page panels depict Egyptian motifs juxtaposed with the Cream of Wheat chef, dancing Jazz Age silhouettes beside the Eye of Providence. Reed’s poems are sly and confrontational. In “The Reactionary Poet,” he claims that title in opposition to self-styled revolutionaries whose orthodoxy chokes out creativity and joy. He writes: “In your world of / Tomorrow Humor / Will be locked up and / the key thrown away / The public address system / Will pound out headaches / All day.”Dolores Kendrick, “The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women” (1989)“The Women of Plums” is theater living inside poetry. Kendrick understood as much, adapting her collection for the stage, where it won the New York New Playwrights Award in 1997. She writes in dialect, but not in the caricatured deez and doze of the minstrel stage; instead, much as Toni Morrison did two years earlier in “Beloved,” she employs shifts in syntax, rhythm and diction to render speech that lives beyond the page. Kendrick wrote the poems as a kind of alternative history of the United States, from the Middle Passage to the Civil War, in the voices of 34 enslaved Black women. These voices are so strong that they have even been adapted as an opera, which opened in New York in the spring of 1995. “Soon I’ll go for a stroll / in my blue silk dress, / go into town / and buy myself a plum, / the blackest from the bush,” one of her speakers proclaims.Melvin Dixon, “Love’s Instruments” (1995)Dixon, a novelist, poet and scholar, published only one poetry collection in his lifetime, “Change of Territory” (1983). A posthumous collection, “Love’s Instruments,” released three years after his death at 42, is a playful and poignant tribute to the lives of gay Black men. In “Heartbeats,” Dixon uses line breaks to generate a syncopated rhythm that unfolds a narrative of regularity and revelation. This is how it begins:Work out. Ten laps.Chin ups. Look good.Steam room. Dress warm.Call home. Fresh air.Eat right. Rest well.Sweetheart. Safe sex.Sore throat. Long flu.Hard nodes. Beware.Test blood. Count cells.Reds thin. Whites low.Just months before Dixon died of complications related to AIDS, in 1992, he addressed the Third National Lesbian and Gay Writers Conference in Boston. He warned his fellow writers to “guard against the erasure of our experience and our lives” and to claim responsibility for the future of literature. “I come to you bearing witness of a broken heart,” Dixon said. “I come to you bearing witness to a broken body — but a witness to an unbroken spirit.”Ai, “Vice: New and Selected Poems” (1999)Born Florence Anthony in Albany, Texas in 1947, Ai chose a name that means “love” in Japanese, one of several lineages that the mixed-race poet could claim. Ai was part of a generation of post-Black Arts Movement figures who now occupy canonical places: Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Nathaniel Mackey and Harryette Mullen chief among them. Though Ai, who died in 2010, achieved distinction during her lifetime — she was the first Black recipient of the National Book Award for Poetry, for “Vice” in 1999 — she is less well-known today. None of her poems appear in the major anthologies of African American and American literature. Perhaps that should change: Ai is among the pre-eminent practitioners of the dramatic monologue — a persona-driven mode of poetic address exemplified in the work of Victorian poet Robert Browning. “I want to take the narrative ‘persona’ poem as far as I can,” Ai said. “All the way or nothing.” In “Vice,” she does just that, inhabiting the persona of a Black woman in love and trouble, writing past respectability to the hard truths of lived experience. More

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      in Theater

      Why Some Black Playwrights Are Saying Their Shows Must Not Go On

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      Several Black playwrights have canceled productions of their works, in some cases after performances started, because of concerns about conditions at the theaters presenting them.In Ohio, the playwright Charly Evon Simpson scuttled last month’s planned Cleveland Play House production of her latest work, “I’m Back Now,” after the director said that the theater had mishandled an actor’s report that she was sexually assaulted at the building where the theater housed artists.In Chicago, Erika Dickerson-Despenza forced Victory Gardens Theater to stop its production of “cullud wattah,” her Flint water crisis-prompted family drama, in the middle of its run last summer to protest actions that included the ouster of the theater’s artistic director.And in Los Angeles, Dominique Morisseau shut down a Geffen Playhouse production of her play “Paradise Blue” a week after its opening in late 2021, saying that Black women who worked on the show had been “verbally abused and diminished.”The steps by playwrights to halt productions of their own work reflects concerns by Black artists frustrated by what they see as a failure of theater administrators to live up to the lofty promises made during and after the spring of 2020, when George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police prompted nationwide protests and calls for change in many corners of American society, including the arts. In theater, an anonymously-led coalition of artists, known by the title of its first statement, “We See You, White American Theater,” circulated a widely read set of demands for change.“We don’t want to be pulling our plays — we are playwrights, we want our plays to be done, we are walking away from money, and we are walking away from seeing our work onstage,” Morisseau said. “But this is not an ego act and it is not a diva act. What we are doing is standing up when no one else will.”The cancellations have come just as theaters have been trying to reopen and rebuild following the lengthy pandemic shutdown.There has been notable change to address concerns about diversity and representation: An increase in the number of plays by Black writers staged on Broadway and beyond; a wave of appointments of administrators of color to high-level theater industry positions; the renaming of two Broadway houses after Black performers (James Earl Jones and Lena Horne).More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.But the cancellations reflect recurrent concern about conditions in the industry. There is pain all around — although actors are often still paid, the playwrights can lose fees and the theaters lose box office revenue and sunk production costs. And there are reputational risks: Will theaters still want to hire these artists? Will artists still want to work at these theaters?“It’s damaging to the theaters, it’s damaging to the playwrights, and it’s damaging to all the artists involved, but it puts a spotlight on issues that need a spotlight, and I hope it’s catching the field’s attention and reminding us that we haven’t solved all the problems,” said Sheldon Epps, a senior artistic adviser at Ford’s Theater in Washington, the former artistic director of the Pasadena Playhouse, and the author of a new memoir, “My Own Directions: A Black Man’s Journey in the American Theater.” “We had all those conversations and all those conference calls, and the talk was valuable but clearly a lot more action is needed.”The playwright Jeremy O. Harris threatened to pull “Slave Play” from the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles to protest its dearth of works by women. After they agreed to stage more, the play, starring Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and Paul Alexander Nolan, went on.Craig SchwartzThese cancellations began in October of 2021, when Jeremy O. Harris posted on Twitter an email he had sent to the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles, saying he wanted to “begin the process” of canceling that theater’s production of “Slave Play,” his acclaimed drama about interracial relationships. The Los Angeles production was to be the first since a pair of buzzy Broadway runs, but Harris was upset that the theater had announced a season with just one work by a woman.The reaction was immediate. The company apologized publicly, and within a week had pledged that the following season at its Mark Taper Forum would feature only work by women or nonbinary playwrights. Harris then allowed “Slave Play” to proceed; the production became the best-selling show at the Taper since the pandemic shutdown.“We have nothing to lose by telling a theater that we don’t want to be their mascots any longer,” Harris said.“Here’s the thing: writing a play is an act of community service, and even in pulling the play you are doing an act of community service — that is theater as well, because the conversation that gets sparked is similar to the conversation sparked by doing the play,” he added. “The only cost is to the ego of theater administrators who have dropped the ball in upholding the politics of the playwrights they’ve programmed.”Harris ultimately praised the Center Theater Group for its responsiveness, and Meghan Pressman, the theater’s managing director and chief executive, said she was “grateful” for Harris’s confrontation, even though it was difficult.“We’re being called to task, and we learned a lot,” she said. Morisseau was next, pulling the rights for “Paradise Blue” from the Geffen. The precipitating incident has never been made public, but Morisseau said at the time that “Harm happened internally within the creative team, when fellow artists were allowed to behave disrespectfully.” The Geffen apologized, saying, “an incident between members of the production was brought to our attention and we did not respond decisively in addressing it.”In an interview, Morisseau said she considered pulling her play a last resort.“I felt there was nothing else for me to do,” she said.And why have there been several cancellations in recent months? “I think what you’re seeing is a failure of institutions and institutional leadership to take seriously the harms against Black women,” Morisseau said. “It’s nothing new to us, but it is very disappointing to experience it in a theater ecosystem that we all seek to be better. You can’t welcome us and our stories, and not welcome the people who tell our stories and the bodies on whom our stories are told.”Playwrights, unlike screenwriters, have enormous power over the use of their work, sometimes by virtue of their contracts, and sometimes by virtue of the nature of their relationships with regional theaters.Prepandemic, there were occasional instances of playwrights exercising such rights for a variety of reasons. In 2016, Penelope Skinner withdrew a Chicago theater’s right to stage her dark comedy, “The Village Bike,” after a news report detailed allegations that the theater’s leader had mistreated performers; in 2012, Bruce Norris withdrew a German theater’s right to stage his Pulitzer Prize-winning race-relations satire, “Clybourne Park,” because he was angry about plans to cast a white actor to play a Black character; and in the 1980s, several playwrights canceled productions because of a union dispute.“We encourage authors to exercise all of their contractual rights to the extent possible,” said Ralph Sevush, the executive director of business affairs at the Dramatists Guild of America, an association representing playwrights.For the affected theaters, the cancellations have been disruptive — in each case, tickets had already been sold. Victory Gardens, which was already imploding when “cullud wattah” was pulled, has since stopped producing shows; the Cleveland Play House and Geffen Playhouse both issued apologies.“Cleveland Play House acknowledges there were missteps in efforts to respond to a sexual assault,” that organization said in a statement last month.The financial implications vary from case to case. Morisseau said that, when “Paradise Blue” was canceled, “Every artist got paid through their contracts. I, as the writer, and the Geffen, as the institution, are the only ones who took any financial hit.” David Levy, a spokesman for the labor union Actors’ Equity Association, said that “Every Equity agreement anticipates worst case scenarios in which a production is canceled before the full run of the show is completed. When that happens, the union does our part to enforce the contract so that actors and stage managers are taken care of.” In Cleveland, the union filed grievances that led to payment to its members for the canceled show there.The current round of cancellations is directly tied to the racial reckoning that has roiled theaters over the last three years; there have been a wide array of calls for change, from term limits for industry leaders and more diverse creative teams sought by the We See You petitions, to the renaming of theaters and the use of racial sensitivity coaches won in a pact negotiated by the organization Black Theater United.Black artists have cited the issues that propelled those movements in describing their current concerns. In Chicago, Dickerson-Despenza pulled the rights to her play after the dismissal of the theater’s artistic director, Ken-Matt Martin, who was one of three Black leaders in top positions at Victory Gardens. At the time Dickerson-Despenza decried the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values” of the board. On Wednesday, the board issued a statement saying, “Victory Gardens Theater vehemently disagrees with the characterization,” noting that it had had a diverse staff and board, and adding that “it is our hope that, rather than jumping to conclusions and casting aspersions, we can all move forward with a shared goal of having a vibrant and inclusive theater community for all.”Stori Ayers, who directed both the canceled production of “I’m Back Now” in Cleveland and the canceled production of “Paradise Blue” in Los Angeles, used similar language in an Instagram post about the two experiences, citing “white supremacy theater making culture.” Both of those theaters declined to comment beyond their written statements.Simpson, the playwright who pulled the rights for “I’m Back Now” from the Cleveland Play House, said she had decided to take that step after Ayers withdrew from the production over the theater’s response to an actor who said she had been sexually assaulted in an elevator at the theater’s artist housing.“To put it simply: if the health, safety and well-being of people working on my play is in question, then there’s no reason for the play to happen,” Simpson said. “I could no longer trust that the theater was going to take care of the people putting on my show.”Simpson said she’s not sure what will happen next with “I’m Back Now,” because it was commissioned by the Cleveland Play House, and this was to be its first production. The play is about three generations of Cleveland residents, including a historical figure named Sara Lucy Bagby, who was the last person forced to return to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act.“You want the production, and you want to make it possible, and many of us are taught to be so grateful for that and to ignore things that may bother us,” Simpson said. “I didn’t ever imagine having to pull the rights.” More

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      in Music

      A Dave Brubeck Cantata Boasts Star Soloists: His Sons

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      “The Gates of Justice,” a large-scale 1969 choral work about relations between Black and Jewish Americans, is being performed in Los Angeles.LOS ANGELES — “Want to give us a blast?” the bassist Chris Brubeck asked the young woman in a music studio at the University of California, Los Angeles, on Wednesday morning.Remy Ohara lifted a long, corkscrewing shofar to her lips and blew a resonant call. Brubeck had brought a few other shofars with him as options, but it was clear from the moment Ohara, a sophomore trumpet student, started playing that this one had what he was looking for.The call of a shofar, the ancient instrument usually made from a ram’s horn and best known for its use in Jewish worship, opens “The Gates of Justice,” a grand 1969 choral cantata by the eminent jazz musician Dave Brubeck, Chris’s father.On Sunday and Tuesday, U.C.L.A. will present the work — with Chris and two of his brothers, Darius and Dan, forming the central jazz trio — as the main offering of a series of events devoted to the intersection of music and social justice, and to finding common cause between Black and Jewish communities in America.“It’s something that Dave really believed in,” said Mark Kligman, a professor of Jewish music at U.C.L.A. and an organizer of the program. “He really believed in this type of communal opportunity for unity and conversation.”Searching for — and galvanizing — that common cause between Black and Jewish Americans was the motivation behind “The Gates of Justice.” Brubeck, famous for numbers like “Take Five” and for his pioneering use of unconventional rhythms in jazz, also wrote concert music that reflected his social conscience, particularly on issues of race.During the days of Jim Crow he refused to play tour dates if they were contingent on replacing Black players. His 1961 musical “The Real Ambassadors,” with lyrics by Iola Brubeck, his wife, starred Louis Armstrong and Carmen McRae in a story about jazz, racism and the music business.As the 1960s progressed, Dave Brubeck — who was raised Protestant but joined the Catholic Church after writing a Mass setting in the late 1970s — was pained to see the unity among racial and religious groups earlier in the civil rights movement give way to tensions and suspicion. The assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 was the direct inspiration for “The Gates of Justice,” which quotes the Bible and liturgical texts alongside King’s writings.The shofar that was chosen to open “The Gates of Justice.”Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThe music is also an amalgam, taking in the influence of Jewish cantillation, traditional choral styles, gospel, mariachi, pop, blues and 12-tone music. (It shares its eclecticism with the 1971 “Mass” by Leonard Bernstein, who had collaborated with Brubeck on jazz-classical experiments.)In 2001, the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, founded by the businessman Lowell Milken, recorded the work for Naxos. And the U.C.L.A. performances — on Sunday at Royce Hall on campus and on Tuesday at Holman United Methodist Church, a Black congregation in the city — will take place under the auspices of the school’s recently opened Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience.Neal Stulberg will conduct a chorus consisting of the ensemble Tonality and members of Los Angeles church and synagogue choirs; a brass and percussion orchestra; and two vocal soloists. The keening tenor part will be sung by Azi Schwartz, a cantor at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York; and Phillip Bullock will take the baritone part, influenced by traditional Black styles.As the core jazz trio, which has improvising interludes, Chris Brubeck, on bass and trombone, will be joined by his brothers Darius, on piano, and Dan, on drums. (Another of Brubeck’s sons, Matthew, is a cellist; they had a sister, Catherine, who died last year, and a brother, Michael, who died in 2009.) Chris, Darius and Dan have played together often, but this is the first time they will collaborate on “The Gates of Justice” — and the first time they have been united since before the pandemic lockdown.Dave Brubeck’s roots were in swing, but he had classical chops. In an interview, Darius said that his father had a shelf full of music theory books, and kept the scores of Bach and Shostakovich preludes and fugues next to his piano for reference. After World War II, Dave studied at Mills College in California with the jazz-loving French composer Darius Milhaud, who had fled Europe during the war. Brubeck came to admire Milhaud so deeply that he named his first son after him.Dave Brubeck (at the piano in 1965 with, from left, Paul Desmond, Joe Morello and Gene Wright) turned toward classical forms and social themes at the end of the 1960s.Brubeck Collection, Wilton Library/Pictorial Press LtdIn the 1950s, Brubeck became a celebrated figure in jazz, featured on the cover of Time magazine — exposure that led to criticism, which dogged him, that he owed his fame, at least in part, to being a white man who appealed to a broader audience. His era-defining recording “Time Out” (1959) was the first jazz album to sell a million copies. But in the late ’60s, after his classic quartet disbanded, his work shifted, turning more toward classical forms and social issues.Brubeck’s first major choral work, “The Light in the Wilderness” (1968), adapted biblical texts to spread a message of hope amid that decade’s widespread questioning of faith and the lingering horrors of World War II. A few years after “The Gates of Justice,” he wrote another cantata, “Truth Is Fallen” (1972), in response to the killing of student protesters at Kent State University in 1970. He kept composing in this social-religious vein over the next decades, even as he returned to touring with small jazz groups almost until his death, in 2012, at 91.“The essential message of ‘The Gates of Justice’ is the brotherhood of man,” he wrote in the liner notes for Decca’s recording of the work, now out of print. Brubeck wasn’t an expert in Jewish music, but he had open ears and curiosity; the shofars Chris Brubeck brought to U.C.L.A. as alternatives were ones he had found in his father’s house and presumed were research materials for the cantata.“He seemed to have an affinity for the right cantorial, modal stuff to do,” Chris said.Playing through those modal, klezmer-style scales on the piano during the interview, Darius said, “Those traditional scales fit everywhere in the piece, in different movements, in different moods.” Darius then added a missing note to the scale to form, like magic, a classic blues scale. Even on a fundamental musical level, then, Black and Jewish styles blend into each other in the score.Remy Ohara, left, with Jens Lindemann, center, and Chris Brubeck.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“They were both enslaved, uprooted from their homelands and wandered in the diaspora,” Dave Brubeck said in 1997 of the similarities between the Black and Jewish experiences. “When I began exploring the music, I was thrilled to hear the similarities among Hebraic chant and spirituals and blues.”The work has its raucous moments, as in a climactic section, “The Lord Is Good,” in which grandeur melts into a smoothly integrated succession of references to mariachi melodies, pop songs and Chopin. But even when the piece swings, it has a solemn, even melancholy cast — prayerful more than hopeful.The tenor and baritone solos are impassioned and soulful, with a shining duet on King’s word’s “Free at last”; the choruses are sometimes serene and sometimes emphatic, with stentorian demands to “open the gates” and “clear the way.” The sober prayer of “Lord, Lord” is punctuated in the score by shouted racial slurs that will be rendered at U.C.L.A. as a cacophony.Like Dave Brubeck’s other large-scale pieces, “The Gates of Justice” is not unknown, but it’s hardly a standard, either. As with many artists who ranged between pop and classical styles — Bernstein, Gershwin and André Previn among them — Brubeck had trouble maintaining an audience for the full scope of his output.“He could not really, totally break through and have people understand that he did both things,” Chris said. “As far as I’m concerned, the most important thing is this piece not be forgotten, and that it still speak to people in some way.”As part of the effort to show the work’s continuing relevance, it will be performed on the U.C.L.A. programs alongside newer pieces, including premieres by Arturo O’Farrill and Diane White-Clayton. And the brothers spent the rehearsal tinkering with the score and its possibilities, seeking to heighten its rally-like forcefulness and its harmonic contrasts.“It’s a living piece,” Darius said. More

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      in Movies

      How the Oscars and Grammys Thrive on the Lie of Meritocracy

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      Despite all the markers of excellence, contenders like Danielle Deadwyler, Viola Davis and Beyoncé weren’t recognized for the highest honors. Niche awards don’t suffice.I didn’t see it coming, but maybe I should have.That refrain has been popping into my head repeatedly since learning that neither Viola Davis (“The Woman King”) nor Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”) was nominated for the best actress Oscar and that Andrea Riseborough and Ana de Armas had emerged as this year’s spoilers.It came to mind again on Sunday night when the Grammys awarded Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” album of the year, not Beyoncé’s “Renaissance.” Though she made history that night as the most Grammy-winning artist of all time, this was Beyoncé’s fourth shutout from the industry’s most coveted category and another stark reminder that the last Black woman to take home that award was Lauryn Hill — 24 years ago. This time the message was loud and clear: Beyoncé, one of the most prolific and transformative artists of the 21st century, can win only in niche categories. Her music — a continually evolving and genre-defying sound — still can’t be seen as the standard-bearer for the universal.The music and movie industries differ in many ways, but their prizes are similarly determined by the predominantly older white male members of the movie and recording academies. Though both organizations have made concerted efforts in recent years to diversify their voting bodies in terms of age, race and gender, Black women artists, despite their ingenuity, influence and, in Beyoncé’s case, unparalleled innovation, continue to be denied their highest honors.This trend is no indication of the quality of their work but rather a reflection of something else: the false myth of meritocracy upon which these institutions, their ceremonies and their gatekeepers thrive.It is true that Black women, dating to Hattie McDaniel for “Gone With the Wind” (1939), have won the Academy Award for best supporting actress. And while it took a half-century for Whoopi Goldberg to receive an Oscar in the same category (for “Ghost”), over the past 20 years, seven Black women have won in this category, including Davis, and this year, Angela Bassett is a front-runner as well.Viola Davis in “The Woman King.” Because of the film’s critical and commercial reception, Oscar watchers thought she would be nominated. Instead, she was snubbed. Sony PicturesBut, in a way, this is an example of rewarding the niche. What’s being honored is a character whose function is in service to a film’s plot and protagonist. She is neither a movie’s emotional center nor primarily responsible for propelling its narrative. Such heavy lifting is why I think it made sense for Michelle Williams, whom many considered a lock for an Oscar for best supporting actress for “The Fabelmans,” to campaign as a lead instead. “Although I haven’t seen the movie,” she told The New York Times, “the scenes that I read, the scenes that I prepped, the scenes that we shot, the scenes that I’m told are still in the movie, are akin to me with experiences that I have had playing roles considered lead.”Interviews With the Oscar NomineesKerry Condon: An ardent animal lover, the supporting actress Oscar nominee for “The Banshees of Inisherin” said that she channeled grief from her dog’s death into her performance.Michelle Yeoh: The “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star, nominated for best actress, said she was “bursting with joy” but “a little sad” that previous Asian actresses hadn’t been recognized.Angela Bassett: The actress nearly missed the announcement because of troubles with her TV. She tuned in just in time to find out that she was nominated for her supporting role in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”Austin Butler: In discussing his best actor nomination, the “Elvis” star said that he wished Lisa Marie Presley, who died on Jan. 12, had been able to celebrate the moment with him.In the past, academy voters might have said there weren’t enough Black women in leading roles to consider. But “Till” and “The Woman King” disprove that. So we’re left with other, more traditionally meritocratic arguments about who deserves to be nominated for best actress — the quality of the individual performance, the critical response to a film, and a decent budget to market and campaign for Oscar consideration. Yet this year, even those measures suddenly seemed to be thrown out the window.Instead, in the case of Andrea Riseborough’s surprising nod for “To Leslie,” we saw a new Oscar strategy playing out before our eyes. A groundswell of fellow actors, including A-listers like Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet and even Cate Blanchett, who would go on to be nominated herself, publicly endorsed Riseborough’s performance on social media, at screenings and even at a prize ceremony. Since only 218 of the 1,302 members of the academy’s acting branch needed to rank a candidate first to secure a nomination, in time, that momentum translated into a nomination upset. That, in turn, led to a backlash, a review by the academy to make sure none of its campaign guidelines had been violated, and a backlash to the backlash, with Christina Ricci and Riseborough’s “To Leslie” co-star Marc Maron calling out the academy for its investigation. “So it’s only the films and actors that can afford the campaigns that deserve recognition?” Ricci wrote in a now-deleted Instagram post. “Feels elitist and exclusive and frankly very backward to me.”What fascinated me, however, was that what was being framed as a grass-roots campaign to circumvent studio marketing machines revealed another inside game. A racially homogeneous network of white Hollywood stars appeared to vote in a small but significant enough bloc to ensure their candidate was nominated.And while that explains how an Oscar campaign can be both nontraditional and elitist, it also underscores the other obstacles that Black actresses, in particular, and actresses of color in general, have to surmount just to be nominated, let alone win. Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “The Woman King” was so critically praised for its filmmaking and masterly performances and was such a commercially successful film that Davis was expected (at the very least) to garner her third nomination in the best actress category.Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde.” The film was widely panned.NetflixIn contrast, Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde,” starring de Armas, was so heavily panned for its brutal and sexist depiction of Marilyn Monroe that I assumed the prerelease chatter about her performance would have dampened by the time Oscar voting began. For more than any other film with a best actress contender this year, “Blonde” raises the question: Shouldn’t a protagonist have depth or multidimensionality for that actor’s performance to be noteworthy? As conceived by Dominik, Monroe merely flits from injury to injury, all in the service of making her downfall inevitable.Such representations reveal another pattern: Oscar voters continue to reward women’s emotional excess more than their restraint. In most films with best actress nominations this year, women’s anger as outbursts is a common thread. “Tár” and even “To Leslie” examines the dangerous consequences of such fury; “The Fabelmans” positions it as a maternal and artistic contradiction for Williams’s character; and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” brilliantly explores it as both a response to IRS bureaucratic inefficacy and intergenerational tensions between a Chinese immigrant mother and her queer, Asian American daughter. “Blonde” is again an exception, for de Armas’s Monroe expresses no external rage but sinks into depression and self-loathing, never directing her frustration at the many men who abuse her.Within that cinematic context, I wondered if it was possible to applaud Deadwyler for playing a character like Mamie Till-Mobley. Unlike the main characters of the other films, Till-Mobley, in real life, had to repress her rational rage over the gruesome murder of her son, Emmett, to find justice and protect his legacy. Onscreen, Deadwyler captured that paradox by portraying Till-Mobley’s constantly shifting self and her struggle to privately grieve her son’s death while simultaneously being asked to speak on behalf of a burgeoning civil rights movement. If words like “nuanced,” “subtle,” “circumspect” or “introspective” garner leading men Oscar attention (how else do we explain Colin Farrell’s nod?), female protagonists are often lauded for falling apart.Deadwyler and Whoopi Goldberg in “Till.” The lead’s repressed rage stands in contrast with the emotional outbursts of the nominated performances.Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion Pictures, via Associated PressBut even that assumes that all women’s emotions are treated equally, when the truth is that rage itself is racially coded. Both “Till” and “The Woman King” depict Black women’s rage as an individual emotion and a collective dissent, a combination that deviates from many on-screen representations of female anger as a downward spiral and self-destructive.Commenting on such differential treatment, the “Till” director Chinonye Chukwu critiqued Hollywood on Instagram for its “unabashed misogyny towards Black women” after the academy snubbed her film. Likewise, in an essay for The Hollywood Reporter, Prince-Bythewood asked, “What is this inability of Academy voters to see Black women, and their humanity, and their heroism, as relatable to themselves?”It’s been over 20 years since Halle Berry won the best actress Oscar for her “Monster’s Ball” performance as a Black mother who grieves the loss of her son through alcohol and sex. The fact that she remains the only Black woman to have won this award is ridiculous. “I do feel completely heartbroken that there’s no other woman standing next to me in 20 years,” Berry reflected in the run-up to the Oscars last year. “I thought, like everybody else, that night meant a lot of things would change.”The difference between then and now is that there are far more Black women directors and complex Black women characters on the big screen than ever before. Maybe, next year, the academy members will get behind one of those actors. Then again, maybe I should know better. More

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      in Music

      Soul Told Black Musicians’ Stories. Its Archives Are Going Digital.

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      The newspaper, which started in 1966 with a focus on R&B, funk and disco, shut down in 1982. But one of its founders’ grandsons is devoted to finding it a new online audience.The rock ’n’ roll bible Rolling Stone was founded in 1967. The renegade music magazine Creem started in 1969. But another publication predated them both: Soul.Motown, Stax and Phil Spector’s Philles Records were busting out (and Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International label was on the horizon), but until Soul, no publication had been feeding the growing appetite for even the most basic information about Black artists like Marvin Gaye, Carla Thomas or the Isley Brothers. The world knew the names of the Beatles’ wives, but not of the Ikettes.With the smoke barely cleared from the Watts riots, two men saw an opening: Ken Jones, Los Angeles’s first Black television anchor, and Cecil Tuck, who revitalized KRLA Beat, an early rock title. But the face of Soul, the one who told record company bosses where to get off and had artists calling her at night with scoops, was Regina Jones, Ken’s wife. Fly, flinty and self-created, Regina was at one time both the paper’s publisher and editor in chief.Soul was groundbreaking, but it flamed out in 1982. Now Matt Jones, Ken and Regina’s grandson, is giving the publication a second life, creating an online archive of its issues for paying subscribers and uploading select audio from interviews. (Hard copies — dead stock — are also for sale.)“We have bound volumes of all the issues that have been in my grandmother’s home for as long as I can remember,” Jones, 39, said. He has digitalized 82 issues with 291 to go, and is leaning on Regina, now 80, for historical context. (The two talk every day; Ken died in 1993.)As the most granular source of news and images of soul, R&B, funk and disco artists in the Golden Age of those genres, Soul is a gold mine for Black history and pop culture scholars. It “documents an important turning point in U.S. race relations and the arts,” Susan D. Anderson, who stewarded Regina’s gift of Soul’s archive to the U.C.L.A. Library in 2010, wrote in an email.Few people, she added, know that Soul, “in its drive to document African Americans’ perspective in a self-representative way, was a pivotal vehicle” powering the shift from “race records” to America “becoming the locus of popular culture production,” with Black artists the prevailing force.Selling originally for 15 cents, the biweekly also covered jazz, television, Black Power, Hollywood and theater. Page Six-style columns delivered gossip in bites. Style was a de facto component: the Pointer Sisters in high-’40s drag, Al Green in hot pants and over-the-knee boots. A glossy sister was spawned, Soul! Illustrated.Soul threw down the gauntlet from the first issue. James Brown and Mick Jagger shared a split cover under the headline “White Artists Selling Negro ‘Soul.’” Daphne A. Brooks, professor of African American studies at Yale, singled it out for “the audacity of its critical focus,” stunned that in 1966 a music publication would lead with a piece on the politics of cultural appropriation. “Are you kidding me?!” she wrote over email. Other covers the first year featured Stevie Wonder, the Impressions and Sam Cooke. The website highlights major interviews with Aretha Franklin, Rick James and Bob Marley.Soul “helps to fill out and complicate our understanding of a seminal moment,” Gayle Wald, author of “It’s Been Beautiful: ‘Soul!’ and Black Power Television,” wrote in an email. “Soul!,” a variety show, was unrelated to the paper but had a similar mission. “Serious cultural journalism about pop music was just emerging,” Wald added.Regina and Ken bought out Tuck in 1967, producing Soul from their home near Watts while raising five children. Regina said she did not view Rolling Stone as competition but did “resent” it covering Black artists: her territory. In 1975, both publications printed Labelle covers; Jones enjoyed a measure of satisfaction when she beat Jann Wenner’s magazine to the newsstands by four months. Nona Hendryx, a member of Labelle, purveyors of a landmark mash-up of funk, rock, R&B and gospel, said that “for an African-American artist, Soul was definitely more important than Rolling Stone.” Fans approached her in public: “Hey, I saw you in Soul.”“You got your feedback directly from the people,” Hendryx added. “It had more weight than Rolling Stone because it kept us in the community.”In a novel marketing gambit, Soul partnered with 30 Black radio stations across the country, printing a different edition for each. Stations had their call letters on the cover and a spread inside for rotation charts and advertisers. Bruce W. Talamon, Soul’s star photographer, said that in turn, “D.J.s gave us on-air promotion — ‘Buy your Soul newspaper!’”Regina’s unfiltered access to artists could mean fielding a call from David Ruffin announcing he’d just been fired from the Temptations — and wanted to tell his story. “That speaks to how highly he felt about Soul,” she said. “It was almost like going to your parents.” Diana Ross kissed the Supremes goodbye in 1970 during their final performance at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, then slipped into a booth beside Berry Gordy, still in her Bob Mackie stage velvets, to spill tea with Soul.Sublime talent showed up on Regina’s doorstep unbidden, including Leonard Pitts Jr., the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and Talamon, whose book, “Soul. R&B. Funk. Photographs 1972-1982,” is a definitive visual record of artists in the idioms and period it covers.Before freelancing for Soul in 1976, Pitts said in a video interview from the 2000s, “I was there every day on the day” Soul came out, waiting for it to go on sale, to learn that the Temptations had suffered yet another personnel change, that King had been assassinated. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening? My world is crumbling.’”Pitts, who later held the top editorial position, said in the video that he admired Soul because it didn’t pander, printing that there was no love lost between Rick James and George Clinton. Nobody else, he noted, thought Black music warranted that kind of attention: “No one else was telling you, you know, ‘This is why Philippé Wynne left the Spinners.’ It wasn’t what the press releases say. It’s because they had a fight.”Nichelle Gainer, author of “Vintage Black Glamour,” noted in an email that Soul’s “coverage of hot-button topics” like the Motown star Tammi Terrell’s illness was “steadier,” with “consistent updates,” compared with general interest Black publications. But the paper’s quality was not always how alumni and scholars remember it. The writing could be crude; handout images were sometimes accepted as cover photos. And as the ’70s wound down, Soul lost its teeth. The Joneses’ marriage was unraveling. Regina admitted she was no longer minding the store. In 1980, ‌J. Randy Taraborrelli, who followed Pitts as editor in chief and would go on to write “Call Her Miss Ross,” a biography of the supreme Supreme, pushed successfully for a cover the publication’s readership could not abide: Barry Manilow.Matt Jones will dutifully digitalize the issue. But he won’t be sad if it goes unnoticed among firebombs like the Brown/Jagger story. Before Soul, he said, Jet and Ebony talked about soul music “as this weird kind of niche thing — they had trouble describing it. The press packets of many Black musicians in the ’60s consisted of a single one-page write-up: ‘Here’s who I am. Here’s this great interview on me in Soul newspaper.’” More

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      Whitney Houston’s Enduring Legacy: Lifting Up Other Black Women

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      THERE ARE, STRANGELY, a lot of other women in Whitney Houston’s 1993 video for the song “I’m Every Woman,” that can-do anthem powered by Houston’s unparalleled midrange pipes. “It’s all in me,” she sings of a spellbinding force that would seem to make others unnecessary. Yet there alongside her we find the funk powerhouse Chaka Khan, who first recorded the song in 1978; the song’s co-composer Valerie Simpson; Houston’s mother and mentor, Cissy Houston; a dance team of young Black girls; and the trio TLC. Houston recorded “I’m Every Woman” for the soundtrack of “The Bodyguard” (1992), which she co-executive produced, and which secured her megastardom such that “the wonderment of her talent and her career impacted everyone,” as her sister-in-law and estate executor, Pat Houston, puts it. The open secret of this video is that Houston had a hand in that influence: She deliberately used her status as an icon to light up a whole network of Black female forebears and creative descendants.Now, 11 years after her death, Houston has a new MAC cosmetics line and a Scent Beauty fragrance; her original recordings are featured in the recent biopic starring Naomi Ackie. The coming months and years will bring, among other initiatives, a compilation of her unreleased gospel recordings and a Broadway musical. These ventures — the fruits of a 2019 partnership between the Whitney Houston estate and the music publishing company Primary Wave — invite us not only to look again at Houston herself but to realize that her own gaze was often turned toward other Black women. We now expect celebrities such as Beyoncé, Rihanna, Ava DuVernay and Lena Waithe to share their resources, establish record labels and production companies and engage in collaborations to demonstrate that they, in the words of Issa Rae at the 2017 Emmys, are “rooting for everybody Black” — especially other Black women. Yet it was Houston, who linked arms with gospel icons like CeCe Winans and Kim Burrell, and mentored pop stars such as Brandy and Monica, who pioneered this form of Black female boosterism on a grand scale.We haven’t been able to see this in part because of the scrim of myth that treats Houston’s Blackness only as a problem for her, not as a source of pride or opportunity. Too Black for the puritanical white pop mainstream, too white for the narrow-minded Black listeners who booed her at the 1989 Soul Train Awards, she married “bad boy” Bobby Brown, we are told, in an effort to regain her hometown Newark, N.J., street cred and to neutralize the whitening effects of her pop hits with Arista, the label founded by Clive Davis. The story of her life, thus staged as a battle between two charismatic men, admits Black women only as historical precedents (her musical mother, Cissy; her celebrity cousin Dionne Warwick), or as illicit lovers. (Her longtime best friend and creative director, Robyn Crawford, writes in her 2019 memoir, published in part to correct the record, that there was a sexual dimension to their relationship in the beginning — they met when Houston was 17 — a point on which the new biopic is refreshingly matter-of-fact.) Houston’s much-publicized addiction — she drowned in a Beverly Hills hotel bathtub, with drugs in her system, in 2012 at age 48 — seals her reputation as a woman who was scarcely in control of herself, let alone over the prospects of other Black women across the entertainment industry. It’s nearly impossible to see how intently and compassionately she wielded that power in the post-“Bodyguard” years, given that most accounts depict that period as a blank free fall toward her death.YET FOR ALL that, Houston’s boosterism has also escaped us because it was personal. She wasn’t really a race woman: A star of her stature and ambition could not have declared her racial commitments like, say, the actress Ruby Dee, or, later, Rae herself; and Houston bid a raucous farewell to the race woman’s politics of respectability, as well as to the position of role model, with the 2005 reality TV series “Being Bobby Brown.” Nor was Houston a mogul like some of her contemporaries, such as Oprah Winfrey or Spike Lee. (An artist-management company and record label were both short-lived.) But she was part of that same embattled, entitled post-civil rights generation who integrated previously white spaces before drawing other artists into them. And because she was intimately aware of how punishing the spotlight could be, she did not simply guide Black women to greater visibility but tried to ensure they survived it.McKinniss’s “The Star Spangled Banner” (2022).Courtesy of the artist, JTT and Almine Rech. Photo: Charles BentonIn a shift signaled by the “I’m Every Woman” video, she began trading in her America’s sweetheart card in the mid-90s for that of Black culture worker, emerging not only as the Voice but as a multimedia strategist with a discerning ear for new talent. In 1994, she performed a series of concerts in Nelson Mandela’s South Africa. In 1995, she co-executive produced and appeared on an all-Black-female soundtrack for the film adaptation of Terry McMillan’s 1992 novel, “Waiting to Exhale,” in which she co-starred; the album featured everyone from Aretha Franklin to the R&B vocalist Faith Evans to the wunderkind Brandy — who later starred in the 1997 multicultural version of “Cinderella” that Houston co-produced (she herself played the Fairy Godmother). She helped put contemporary gospel on the map with her 1996 soundtrack to “The Preacher’s Wife” and by collaborating with Winans and Kelly Price. In 1998, she worked with the musicians Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill (whom she called “the new breed”) to help produce “My Love Is Your Love,” an album that initiated her turn toward a new bent-but-not-broken brand of hip-hop-inflected R&B. She had Price and Evans sing with her on the sultry track “Heartbreak Hotel.” The song doesn’t call out for a group arrangement, but Houston seemed to want to “shine some light on some other Black females from church,” Evans says. The Grammy-nominated song, as well as the video, brought Evans and Price even greater exposure to a pop audience (while also helping Houston reach the so-called urban music market these younger artists represented). Her last project was a 2012 remake of the 1976 Black film musical “Sparkle,” in which she portrayed the mother to a group of aspiring singers — fitting, given the supporting role she had been playing offscreen for nearly two decades.Having signed her own recording contract at age 19, Houston was, by her 30s, something of an industry elder. (Burrell, who was one of Houston’s closest friends, tells me that, following an unimpressive encounter with a rising female superstar, Houston wanted to make a documentary on dos and don’ts for women in the industry.) She encouraged Monica, a mentee 17 years her junior, to keep recording then-unorthodox songs about urban life such as “Street Symphony” (1998), and to stick to the thigh-high leather boots she preferred even when she was being told to wear gowns. Monica recalls that Houston also instructed her to keep her notes “pure” so as to distill a song’s feeling, instead of “mixing tones and textures,” the way the younger vocalist had learned to do in church. It was also crucial to find the “spaces and places to add inflections, but not too much,” she says: “Whitney was big on that.”The point of getting it right was less to impress than to properly perform one’s musical ministry. “It wasn’t about going onstage looking glamorous or wondering, ‘Did I sound good?’” Pat Houston says. “She came onstage to sing to you. She was looking to make sure you extracted what you needed from what she had to say.” The music mattered because it was the medium through which Houston enacted the best of what she aimed to be offstage: vibrantly available, sensitive to nuance and need. She encouraged Burrell’s dream of a church in Houston, where Burrell has served as the senior pastor. When Evans’s husband the Notorious B.I.G. was killed in 1997, Houston got her out of the house. When Monica suffered a tragic loss at 18, Houston flew to the singer’s home in Atlanta, staying for nearly a week.These gestures and generosities were things only her friends could tell you about. She had no desire to advertise them, not least since her private life had already been thoroughly consumed by the public. Yet she was nonetheless pleased when people found out. In 1998, the future journalist Quencie Thomas, then in her early 20s, interviewed Houston on MTV and thanked her for “employing so many of our people.” Houston sat up straight and said, “Do you know that?” Knowing has always depended on whom you asked, and where you looked. More

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      It’s Beyoncé’s Time to Shine at the Grammys … Right?

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      With a dominant new album, “Renaissance,” and the chance to become the most awarded artist in Grammy history, all eyes are on the pop superstar ahead of Sunday’s show. What could go wrong?Beyoncé enters the 65th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday in rarefied air — a pop deity festooned with trophies, supported by one of the music world’s most ardent fan bases and on the precipice of Grammy immortality. So why does she also feel like an underdog?Already the winningest woman in Grammy history, with 28 victories, Beyoncé has a field-leading nine nominations this year. She is tied with her husband, Jay-Z, for the most nods collected by any artist, with 88.In what could make for dramatic television, Beyoncé needs just three more Grammys to match — and four to beat — the record for most overall wins, a position currently held by the conductor Georg Solti, who died in 1997. And for the third time in her career, Beyoncé, 41, is nominated in all three top categories — record, song and album of the year — raising the possibility that her crowning moment could come at the climax of a show that in recent years has struggled to find an audience and generate positive headlines.And yet.While many Grammy watchers believe Beyoncé will enter from a position of strength, with “Renaissance,” her dance-infused album, garnering both commercial and critical success, the singer’s coronation is far from assured, thanks to her own complicated history with the awards. Despite Beyoncé’s oodles of wins, she is just 1 for 13 in the major, all-genre categories for releases on which she was a lead artist.As the ceremony approaches — with stars like Adele, Harry Styles, Lizzo, Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny also in contention for the premier prizes — the key question for fans and industry insiders isn’t how big she will win, but rather: What if she loses, again?Harry Styles, who is slated to perform at the Grammys, has six nominations, including album, record and song of the year.The New York TimesThis year more than most, public perception of the Grammys’ relevance may come down to the fate of a single artist. A prominent win for Beyoncé could be seen as an overdue make-good, which is something of a Grammy specialty. But a notable loss could call into question the redemption narrative that the Recording Academy, the institution behind the awards, has been carefully tending for years, as it has tried to address longstanding criticism that the show too often fails to recognize Black talent with top awards.The Grammy Awards 2023The 65th annual ceremony will be held on Feb. 5 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, after two years of delays and complications caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.Beyoncé: With a dominant new album and the chance to become the most awarded artist in Grammy history, all eyes are on the pop superstar ahead of the ceremony. What could go wrong?Bonnie Raitt: Long renowned as an interpreter of songs, the musician has quietly built a catalog of her own. Up for song of the year, she talked about her lifetime onstage in an interview with The Times.The-Dream and Muni Long: Ahead of the first-ever Grammy Award for songwriter of the year, the two musicians, who are both up for awards, trace their unique journeys to recognition.That complaint, along with suspicions about the voting process, has led some high-profile Black artists to abandon the Grammys in recent years, like Drake, Frank Ocean and the Weeknd. But there are also some signs that the awards may be changing. Last year, Jon Batiste, the Black jazz bandleader, took home album of the year, and in 2021 a Black Lives Matter protest anthem by H.E.R. won song of the year. A push to attract a younger and more diverse voting pool has resulted in 19 percent more women and 38 percent more members of “traditionally underrepresented communities” since 2019, the academy says.Those numbers would seem favorable for Beyoncé. But her track record in album of the year, traditionally the most coveted prize, is especially wrenching. In 2010, her “I Am … Sasha Fierce” lost to Taylor Swift’s “Fearless.” In 2015, Beck’s mellow “Morning Phase” was the upset winner, beating out Beyoncé’s internet-breaking, self-titled surprise LP. Two years later, when Beyoncé’s paradigm-shifting visual album “Lemonade” lost to Adele’s “25,” Adele seemed almost embarrassed to accept the award, calling Beyoncé the “artist of my life.”Should Adele win a third album of the year trophy on Sunday, with “30” — or if Styles, Abba, Coldplay or Brandi Carlile comes out on top — it would be the fourth time that Beyoncé has lost that prize to a white artist, noted Paul Grein, the awards editor at Billboard. “The Grammys would get beat up,” he said. But, he added, “I don’t think it’s going to happen.”After two years of disruption by Covid-19, the Grammys are finally back in Los Angeles, on their home court, the Crypto.com Arena (formerly known as the Staples Center).Bad Bunny, Lamar, Lizzo and Mary J. Blige round out the competition for album of the year, and besides Beyoncé, the night holds some potential buzzy moments. Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” a streaming juggernaut, is the first release entirely in Spanish up for album of the year. After five failed nominations in song of the year, Swift could finally win for “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” an extended remake of a track she first released in 2012.The performers on Sunday will include Styles, Bad Bunny, Lizzo, Sam Smith and Kim Petras, Steve Lacy, Blige, Luke Combs and Carlile. Fan cults and industry gossips have been speculating for weeks over whether Beyoncé, Swift, Lamar or Adele will also perform.Lizzo is also nominated in the top three categories, for her album “Special” and single “About Damn Time.”Scott Legato/Getty Images For SiriusXMBut the story line that has drawn by far the most attention is Beyoncé’s. And as much as fans desire a triumph, pessimists have history on their side. Only three Black women have ever won album of the year — Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston and Lauryn Hill, all in the 1990s — and of Beyoncé’s 28 wins, only one has been in a top category, song of the year. That was more than a decade ago, when she was recognized as a songwriter for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).”“The fact that she has not won a major award since 2010 is insane,” said Brandon Katamara, a student in Cardiff, Wales, who has run @rumiyonce, a Beyoncé fan account with more than 400,000 followers on Instagram, since he was 13.Katamara, now 20, said that even if Beyoncé’s No. 1 hit “Break My Soul” came away with wins in song or record of the year, it wouldn’t lessen the sting. “We don’t care if she just takes one award,” he said. “We just want her to win album of the year.”And should she lose? Katamara predicted a “9.5 out of 10” on the social-media backlash scale. (The nightmare scenario for the BeyHive: a shutout that results in their heroine being passed by the Americana artist Alison Krauss, who has two nominations in genre categories this year and trails Beyoncé by only one win as the most-awarded woman.)Harvey Mason Jr., a producer who is the chief executive of the Recording Academy, said it would be unfair to look to a Beyoncé victory or loss in any single contest as a test of changes to the voting membership, which numbers about 11,000.“If voters are more diverse,” he said, “my hope is that the results would be more diverse across the entire field, not in just one category.”According to figures provided by the Recording Academy, the largest voting blocs by genre are pop at 23 percent and jazz at 16 percent. Rock and alternative are counted separately but, if combined, would make up 25 percent of voters; R&B sits at 15 percent.In 2018, the academy also expanded the number of nominees in the top categories to eight from five, and increased that number again to 10 nominees in a last-minute change in 2021, potentially adding more unpredictability to the results.Yet for many Grammy observers, Beyoncé is indeed a barometer of the awards’ complex treatment of Black musicians overall.“It’s always rocky,” said Cipha Sounds, a veteran radio personality now with 94.7 The Block, a throwback hip-hop and R&B station in New York. “It feels like they don’t give the same amount of love that they do to other genres, but when they do it feels kind of forced,” as if the academy has to “check the diversity boxes,” he added.Still, he said, Black artists and fans crave the affirmation that comes with winning a Grammy. “We just want regular credit,” he said.For the academy, a nonprofit group that draws the bulk of its revenue from fees related to the television broadcast, attracting eyeballs to the annual show is vital. Those numbers have been sliding for years. In 2021, 8.8 million viewers watched the show, an all-time low; last year, it was 8.9 million.At the same time, the Super Bowl halftime show has emerged as perhaps the most gargantuan media event in music — last year an average of 103.4 million people watched a nostalgic hip-hop segment with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent and others — and this year’s show, on Feb. 12, featuring Rihanna, has been bubbling for weeks as a huge pop-culture moment. Recently, an email bounced around the offices of Billboard magazine. “Music’s Biggest Night is coming up,” it read. “And a week earlier, there’s the Grammys!”In recent years, the Grammys have been buffeted by a series of controversies over nominations, performances and even the power struggles within the academy. As unpleasant as those may have been for the organization, they did drive a certain amount of interest. This year, there has been much less buzz, good or bad. Is the Beyoncé question enough to make it a successful show?“I’m OK with there not being controversy before the show,” Mason, the academy chief, said diplomatically. “I like to think it’s going to be about the music.” More