For seventy years Black spending has been filmed, measured, and pitched to advertisers, and all that counting has left the labels, banks, and brands. The money passes through in other hands. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/bl…

Black women get told to finish healing before they ask to be loved well. Ari Lennox keeps the mess and the wanting on the table and hands the work of the relationship back to whoever wants her. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/bl…

Who is the Black Messiah? We trace D’Angelo’s spiritual inheritance, finding salvation in ordinary Black lives and in the power of breath, love, and music to trouble an oppressive world. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/wh…

A reluctant encounter with Voodoo becomes a reconsideration of pleasure and political freedom. D’Angelo’s music raises questions about how Black artists inherit, express, and sell desire. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/to…

Smokey Robinson, Al Green and Prince offered D’Angelo different possibilities for the voice. His singing reveals how closely he studied them while developing his own approach to soul. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/th…

Across three albums and decades of silence, D’Angelo kept testing the limits of rhythm, faith, sexuality, and artistic control while resisting the image built around him. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/th…

From Igbo Landing to a slave freighter rebuilt in deep space to a Watts block, Black stories of flight belong to the people who stayed, and every escape in them keeps sending word home. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/wh…

The hopes invested in Songs in the Key of Life were matched by the success of a monumental album that finally appeared at the end of the summer of 1976 and is one of the best albums ever recorded. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/ha…

What made Nina Simone such an unusual musician in her own time, and still in ours? The defiant artist people are so eager to glorify emerged from a particular form of isolation. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/th…

A murder charge in Jackson moved a hanging death out of the lynching frame and into the one America never learned to watch: the violence that kills Black women through men they know. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/wh…

Duane Davis described the killing of Tupac in police rooms, on YouTube, and in a memoir before Nevada charged him. The conviction rests on an entertainment product rather than detective work. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/th…

In March 1971, James Brown and his JB’s, revitalized by the presence of Bootsy Collins, blew up L’Olympia during a three-day stop in Paris. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/ja…

Baby Keem and Kendrick Lamar released “family ties” on Keem’s debut album in 2021. It won a Grammy, went platinum, ran through the Big Steppers Tour’s 103 dates, and Lamar wrote new bars in 2025. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/ba…

Between 1971 and 1974, Stevie Wonder released albums in rapid succession, not all of them recognized at their true worth, but nevertheless essential works. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/be…

Through the combination of toughness in her temperament, her technical command, and her stature as a performer, Bessie Smith would give vocal blues some of its strongest claims to distinction. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/bl…

In 1972, she took the pencil out of a mammy notepad holder and gave it a rifle. Saar spent 54 years arguing that pictures of Black people are not decoration, and the institutions were wrong. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/th…

While most of Roberta Flack’s albums have just been reissued, the time has come to reconsider her work, which brought out the best in every form of great Black music, from folk and soul to jazz. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/th…

The belief that rap audiences run from intelligence gets the defendant wrong; the case belongs to the industry, and to a country that once wrote Black literacy into its criminal code. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/to…

Three nights at Yankee Stadium sold out, the third added for the overflow, and Saturday’s 45,832 broke an attendance record set 24 hours earlier by the man himself. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/my…

DOGE closed itself down on July 4 after shrinking the federal workforce by more than 272,000 jobs. Black women were 12 percent of that workforce and a third of 2025’s cuts. More: shatterthestandards.com/p/th…