Maaaaan listen, don’t get me started on him and his tongue. This is something I believe @generalgemini-booknerd and I have discussed at length…pun intended 😏
this guy is a criminally underrated comedy hero. i watched him on All That, then on Kenan and Kel, and when he got on SNL i felt a great deal of vicarious pride that my guy made the big leagues. he’s just not on the team, he’s often carried it. he deserves this emmy and like a hundred more!
Aretha Franklin, onstage in Chicago in 1992. She sold more than 75 million records during her life, making her one of the best-selling artists of all time.
Aretha Franklin, pictured in 1968, died Thursday. Known as the “Queen of Soul,” she recorded 17 Top 10 singles.
The singer poses with her Grammy Award for best female R&B vocal performance at the 1972 awards ceremony.
Franklin arrives for the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, 2009.
Franklin onstage at a gala performance on April 19, 2017, in New York City to celebrate the world premiere of Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives, a documentary film about Davis.
Aretha Franklin, the “Queen of Soul,” died Thursday in her home city of Detroit after battling pancreatic cancer. Her death was confirmed by her publicist, Gwendolyn Quinn. She was 76.
Franklin sold more than 75 million records during her life, making her one of the best-selling artists of all time. She took soul to a new level and inspired generations of singers who came after her.
No one’s life can be condensed to one word — but Aretha Franklin came close when she sang one word: “respect.”
“Respect” was written by the great Otis Redding. In his version, a man is pleading, offering his woman anything she wants in exchange for her respect. He sang: “Hey little girl, you’re sweeter than honey / And I’m about to give you all of my money / But all I want you to do / Is just give it, give it / Respect when I come home …”
Aretha changed those lyrics to demand parity. “Oooh, your kisses,” she sang, “Sweeter than honey / And guess what? / So is my money …” In her hands, “Respect” became an empowering song — for black women and for all women. It was a No. 1 hit in 1967, and it became her signature song.
Franklin was 25 years old when “Respect” was released. But she had been singing since she was a small child in her father’s New Bethel Baptist Church.
First I get a video of Krasinski doing push-ups and now this shit here?
Are they fucking with us on purpose today or what? Is Evans about to post a shirtless pic of his running or something? Or are we about to get a video of Jason Momoa or Winston Duke lifting weights all sweaty?
For Refinery29’s celebration of Black History Month we put together a list of Black men and women you ought to know. Their legacy in civil rights, feminism, and LGBTQ equality lives on today.
Bayard Rustin — A leading Black figure in the civil rights movement and advisor to Martin Luther King, he was the architect of the 1963 March on Washington and was heavily involved in the first Freedom Rides. He was also gay and a registered communist who went to jail for his sexual orientation. Although widely heralded, he was attacked even by fellow activists for his faith in nonviolence, unapologetic queerness, and attention to income equality. President Obama honored Rustin posthumously with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
Combaheee River Collective — A seminal Black lesbian feminist group active from 1974-1980. Although officially short lived, its influence has been major. The group is best known for writing the Combaheee River Collective Statement, an important document in promoting the idea that social change must be intersectional — and that Black women’s needs were not being met by mainstream white feminism and therefore must strike out on their own. Members of the collective included Audre Lorde and…Chirlane McCray, now First Lady of New York City and author of the landmark essay “I Am a Lesbian,” published in Essence in 1979.
John Carlos, Tommie Smith, and Peter Norman — The winners of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics 200 Meter Sprint. In one of the proudest and most political moments of sports history, John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their leather-gloved fists in the Black Power salute. They wore black socks without shoes to represent black poverty and a scarf and necklace to symbolize “those individuals that were lynched, or killed and that no-one said a prayer for, that were hung and tarred. It was for those thrown off the side of the boats in the middle passage.”
We also include in our list Peter Norman, the white Australian silver medalist from that ceremony, to commemorate his solidarity with the two Black athletes. White people are more than indebted to black history, and Norman is an excellent example of a white ally. Although he didn’t perform the black power salute, he publicly supported the duo without regard to personal safety or retribution. Norman was penalized for his alliance with Carlos and Smith and was never again allowed to compete in any Olympics despite repeatedly qualifying. Largely forgotten and barred from major sporting events, he became a gym teacher and worked at a butcher shop. At his funeral in 2006, John Carlos and Tommie Smith were his pallbearers.
The Friendship Nine — This group of nine Black students from Friendship Junior College willingly went to jail without bail in 1961 after staging a sit-in at McCrory’s lunch counter in Rock Hill, South Carolina. They pioneered the civil rights strategy “Jail, No Bail,” which placed the financial burden for racist incarceration back on the state. They’re appreciated today for their bravery and strategic ingenuity. In 2015 their conviction was finally overturned and prosecutor Kevin Brackett personally apologized to the eight living members of the group.
Barbara Jordan — A lawyer and politician, Barbara Jordan was the first Black woman elected to the Texas Senate after Reconstruction, the first southern Black woman to be elected as a US Senator, and the first Black woman to deliver a keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. Her keynote address is widely considered the greatest of all time, aided by her charismatic and eloquent public speaking skills. She is also remembered as one of the leaders of the impeachment of Richard Nixon. We chose the above quote to illustrate her unique punchy sense of humor.
Pauli Murray — This civil rights activist, feminist, and poet was a hugely successful lawyer who is also recognized as the first Black female Episcopal priest. Like many figures on this list, Murray was acutely aware of the complex relationship between race and gender, and referred to sexism as “Jane Crow,” comparing midcentury treatment of women to that of African Americans in the South. Although she graduated from Howard University first in her class, she was barred from enrolling as a postgraduate at Harvard because she was a woman. Instead, in 1965 she became the first African American to receive a JSD from Yale Law. Once armed with a law degree she became a formidable force in advancing feminist and civil rights. She is a cofounder of the National Organization for Women (NOW). She also identified as having an “inverted sex instinct,” which she used instead of “homosexual” to describe her complicated gender identity and lifelong attraction to women.
“’Retha,“ I venture, trying to see just what she will talk about today. “I know that you’ll neither write a song nor record one unless it has a very special meaning for you. Now take Spirit in the Dark. You wrote and recorded it and it’s one of the most successful things you’ve ever done. What’s the story behind it?“
She thinks a while, then says, “Well, it’s true that I have to really feel a song before I’ll deal with it, and just about every song I do is based on an experience I’ve had or an experience that someone I know has gone through. Spirit in the Dark? Hummh … that’s one I’d rather not talk about. It’s very, very personal and I don’t want to get into it right now”
Here we go again, I think, but then she opens up and says, “But let’s take Brand New Me. That’s one that expresses exactly how I felt when I recorded it, and actually how I feel right now— like a brand new woman, a brand new me.” She ignores a hint that, maybe, being away from Ted has something to do with it. “I’m feeling much brighter these days. I’m a far gayer person. Like, I’m coming up with a lot of fresh new material and I’m putting a lot more into working on my act.” I ask why. “Well, it’s just that I’ve gotten rid of a lot of things that were weighting me down and I’m, well … like a new person right now.”
She doesn’t explain. The guard is still up and she’s not going to drop it very much.
But one of the things she has rid herself of, she says, is the inordinate shyness which, at one time, made her act one which some people described as “great singing, dull show.”
“What has happened,” she says, “is that, over the years, I’ve gained enough experience to work anywhere and relate to people on all levels. I know I’ve improved my overall look and sound; they’re much better. And I’ve gained a great deal of confidence in myself. I wonder how many people know that I once had this big problem about actually walking out on the stage. Sometimes I still have that problem … you know, it’s a thing about whether everything is hanging right, whether my hair looks O.K… . all those people sitting out there looking at me, checking me out from head to toe. Wow! That really used to get to me, but I’ve overcome most of that by just walking out on that stage night after night, year after year."
"But you’ve been singing all your life,” I say, “… in church to big crowds, on the road doing those revivals with your father. Why do you think you had all those fears?”
“I don’t know whether you can call them real fears,” she says, “Maybe whatever it was stemmed from the fact that I had no confidence in my natural self. I suppose I wanted to look a lot more glamorous, you know, so I came off looking very starched, acting very starched. At the root of it was a thing I had for years about wanting to be a little shorter, so I tried to shorten myself by sort of stooping over when I walked. That developed improper posture, which is something I really had to work on. Well, I worked on it and now I walk tall and I’m proud of myself just as I am."
"Maybe the last decade of Black Pride and all that had something to do with it,” I say.
“Well, I believe that the Black Revolution certainly forced me and the majority black people to begin taking a second look at ourselves. It wasn’t that we were all that ashamed of ourselves, we merely started appreciating our natural selves … sort of, you know, falling in love with ourselves just as we are. We found that we had far more to be proud of. So I suppose the Revolution influenced me a great deal, but I must say that mine was a very personal evolution – an evolution of the me in myself. But then I suppose that the whole meaning of the Revolution is very much tied up with that sort of thing, so it certainly must have helped what I was trying to do for myself.”
JackburtonSays 