Home » Television
Category Archives: Television
I Wish We Had Twitter Back in the Day. #BlackenAsiaWithLove
I wish we had Twitter back in the day. When I was a kid, I would sometimes spend playtime alone in my room, singing to the radio. Between the pop station and WLOU – the Black station which cut off around five or six in the evening – I could’ve tweeted the mix-tapes I made. I’d take momma or my grandparents’ radio alarm-clock, and put it face-to-face with my tape recorder to record songs from the radio. I even got pretty good at cutting the recording off before the radio DJ started talking over the end of the song. That’s why the Black station was better for recording because they always played the adlibbed outro/coda, the sweetest part of the song where the story and storyteller reached a resolution. The songs were always resolved, despite the dilemma at the start, especially love songs – either falling in or out of love. I had to play the record to listen to the full song.
Even though no singer sang about the love I knew I had inside of me, I could identify with others feelings – human feelings. My aunt Shirley still laments about the times we’d be riding in her car, listening to the radio, and “your song would come on.” She says I loved Dionne Warwick’s I’ll Never Love This Way Again, such adult themes, too, she adds. Or: “Reunited… and it feels so good.” Shirley says I sang as if this were my love affair. “And you was still small’nough to stand up in the back seat of the car.” Billboard ranks that Peaches and Herb’s jam as fifth out of the hundred hottest songs of ’79 – amid all the Disco greats I loved. I must have been four. Shirley often tells me about my precocious empathy as a child. I kept a diary from an early age, but by the time I was a teen, I was ready to share with the world the things I knew needed to change.
I’d tweet about all the singers and songs that meant so much to me – how their lyrics and artistry changed me. I’d make videos of me practicing combinations we’d learned in dance class, or choreographing my own music videos. “Video killed the radio star,” had no good dance moves yet was the very first video to play on MTV when the channel debuted in ’81. That that format quickly came to dominate how music was consumed and promoted. Otherwise, I was just alone in my artistic world, thinking I was the only boy who danced like a girl.

At home, it wasn’t ever taboo to talk about Jim Crow. Prince and Michael Jackson had to dress a bit femme to disarm the wider/whiter masses; as did Jackie Wilson back in the day. I could see Motown was a white-washed version of the hymns my grandaddy sang from his book at home. This is what these artists did to crossover to the pop ‘genre’ and earn consequent pop radio circulation, pop sales, pop accolades and pop cash! Even now, Beyonce still gets over-nominated only in the Black categories. People tweet about that sort of stuff now, but I didn’t even have those words at that age; still I sensed something was off about cultural appropriation and its economic consequences for all involved. I also knew that I was doing was taboo. Back in the day, I’d suppress any femme in me in order to crossover. I’d have tweeted about that.
Tweeting ole dirty work.
I wish we had Twitter back in the day. Imagine Nat Turner proselytizing and organizing through Black Twitter. They’d still have had to use coded language, just like they used Negro Spirituals to encode messages of freedom: ‘Follow the drinking gourde’ would probably still fool folks now, just as much as today a murderous police officer’s defense attorney can claim that bodycam shows George Floyd saying, “I ate too many drugs,” when he actually said “I ain’t do no drugs.” Who eats drugs? Not in any Black English I know, and thanks to Black twitter, there’s an ivy-league sociolinguist who’s published a research paper on this very matter while we watch the overseer’s trial like we used to watch Video Soul. Ole uncle Nat would’ve gotten pretty far on his rebellion had he had Twitter back in the day. Tweet tweet, MF! We’ve got Twitter today, so: “Let’s get in-formation.”
Switching off?
I am not sure whether this relates to age or not but during my late 20s I became increasingly reluctant to engage with watching television, using my phone and engaging in social media. I suppose there are a number of reasons for this. One reason is that I enjoy being able to ‘switch-off’ from looking at any form of screen. The change in the nature of my job role and in this current lockdown context means that at the moment I am less able to ‘switch-off’.
The increased screen time demand plays all sorts of tricks on the human body. We seem to be a nation of people that are experiencing the sensation of a ‘buzzing brains’, ‘square eyes’, headaches and ‘burning faces’ due to too much screen time.
Recently, I made an irrational decision to watch the rather grim Fifteen Million Merits episode of Black Mirror. This episode consists of individuals being forced to look at screens at all hours, and it also included much seedier scenes. This episode has absolutely no resemblance to the current situation that we are all in. Although, the episode did remind me of some of the diffculties that people may be experiencing in terms of not being able to ‘switch-off’ from looking at screens whilst working from home.
Work now consists of me using my laptop in my office. I do wonder whether living in smaller living spaces makes matters worse? In terms of my own flat, my office is six steps away from my living room and two steps away from my bedroom. I have never experienced such close proximity to work. When work ends I then attempt to ‘wind-down’ by using my phone or watching the television. My whole day seems to consist of looking at some form of screen. Some of us are fortunate to have gardens. I wonder if this helps people to spend a bit or time relaxing whilst working from home?

Maybe we will all be diagnosed with ‘square eyes’ and ‘buzzing brain’ disorders in the future. Maybe these terms will make it into the dictionary. What I do know is that when lockdown ends I would love to spend a whole day just staring into space, lying on the grass or floating in a warm sea somewhere outside of the U.K. Is it just me that feels this way? Maybe I have just lost the plot.
The moral of this story is, do not watch dystopian television programmes during a lockdown. As you may begin to reflect about all sorts of nonsense!
The lone wolf: a media creation or a criminological phenomenon?

In a previous blog post, I spoke how the attention of the public is captivated by crime stories. Family tragedies, acts of mindless violence and other unusual cases, that seem to capture the Zeitgeist, with public discussion becoming topics in social situations. It happened again; Friday March 15 after 1:00 local time, a lone gunman entered the local Mosque in Christchurch and started shooting indiscriminately, causing the death of 50 and injuring as many, entering what the New Zealand Prime Minister would later call, in a televised address, one of NZ’s darkest days.
The singular gunman entering a public space and using a weapon/or weaponised machine (a car, nail bomb) is becoming a familiar aberration in society that the media describe as the “lone wolf”. A single, radicalised individual, with or without a cause, that leaves a trail of havoc described in the media using the darkest shades, as carnage or massacre. These reports focus on the person who does such an act, and the motivations behind it. In criminology, this is the illusive “criminal mind”. A process of radicalisation towards an ideology of hate, is usually the prevailing explanation, combined with the personal attributes of the person, including personality and previous lifestyle.
In the aftermath of such attacks, communities go through a process of introspection, internalising what happened, and families will try to come together to support each other. 23 years ago, a person entered a school in Dunblane, Scotland and murdered 16 children and their teacher. The country went into shock, and in the subsequent years the gun laws changed. The community was the focus of national and international attention, until the lights dimmed, the cameras left, and the families were left alone in grief.
Since then numerous attacks from little people with big weapons have occurred from Norway to USA, France to Russia and to New Zealand, as the latest. And still, we try to keep a sense of why this happened. We allow the media to talk about the attacker; a lone wolf is always a man, his history the backstory and his victims, as he is entitled to posthumous ownership of those he murdered. The information we retain in our collective consciousness, is that of his aggression and his methodology of murder. Regrettably as a society we merely focus on the gun and the gunman but never on the society that produces the guns and raises gunmen.
At this point, it is significant to declare that I have no interest in the “true crime” genre and I find the cult of the lone wolf, an appalling distraction for societies that feed and reproduce violence for the sake of panem et circenses. Back in 2015, in Charleston another gunman entered a church and murdered another group of people. Families of the victims stood up and court and told the defendant, that they would pray for his soul and forgive him for his terrible act. Many took issue, but behind this act, a community took matters into their own hands. This was not about an insignificant person with a gun, but the resilience of a community to rise above it and their pain. A similar response in the aftermath of the shooting in Orlando in 2016, where the LGBTQ+ community held vigils in the US and across the world (even in Northampton). In New Zealand, the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern was praised for her sombre message and her tribute to the community, not mentioning the gunman by name, not even once. This is not a subject that I could address in a single blog post (I feel I should come back to it in time) but there is something quite empowering to know the person who did the act, but to deliberately and publicly, ignore him. We forget the importance celebrity plays in our culture and so taking that away, from whomever decides to make a name for themselves by killing, is our collective retribution. In ancient Egypt they rubbed off the hieroglyphs of the columns. Maybe now we need to take his name from the newspaper columns, do not make the story about him, but reflect instead, on the way we live as a community and the people who matter.