Taiye Selasi, author of “Ghana must go” for full interview check out www.5minuteswithfranny.com
(via africanexistence)
Yes, Nina. Yes.
If you ever want to know what you’re passionate about, listen to yourself as you speak about the things you cannot be silent about.
Erykah Badu Interviews Kendrick Lamar
- BADU: How do you choose chicks from backstage?
- LAMAR: How do I choose chicks from backstage?
- BADU: Yeah, what is the protocol?
- LAMAR: I try not to. [laughs] I’m too scared. Anybody who knows me knows that I’m probably the most scared person when it comes to that because I’m so caught up in the act of sex, of something going crazy, going out of my control. I’m too paranoid.
- BADU: [laughs] So you just pass?
- LAMAR: I’ve got to because I’ve seen a situation where it got totally out of hand, where something seemed so innocent, and now this person has got allegations on them. It spooked me. This was before my career really started, though—before any “Kendrick Lamar.” And that right there? It changed my whole perception about certain things. I’ll always keep that in the back of my head.
- BADU: So who is your asshole-checker?
- LAMAR: Who is my what?
- BADU: Your asshole-checker—the person in your crew or your family who let’s you know if you’re being a asshole.
- LAMAR: I have two, actually. [both laugh] But the main one is a friend of mine—a lady friend who has known me since high school. She has always been someone, since day one, who has said something whenever I’m an asshole, or also if I’m doin’ something positive—but more so when I’m out of my element.
- BADU: What’s your favorite cereal?
- LAMAR: Fruity Pebbles. When people ask for my rider, they think I’m crazy: Fruity Pebbles, baked chicken, bottle of Hennessy, and some Polo socks.
- BADU: What do you, as a man, envy about what it means to be a woman?
- LAMAR: There’s just a certain knowledge instilled in a woman. There are these things that women have that men just can’t grasp: the understanding of love; the understanding of being; having a certain type of care in your heart and knowing when to be compassionate; knowing how to be a confidante…
- BADU: That’s a good perspective. Something I envy that men have is that ability to grow a goatee. I think that’d be really hot on me.
The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kind.
—Dalai Lama (via hippierev0luti0n)
Faith is a strange and wonderful thing. You come up to a kind of wall of unknowing and instead of turning back in despair you leap over it into something else.
—Ayana Mathis
A Question of Faith, an interview with Ayana Mathis
The debut novelist on the Great Migration and nation-building, conflations of race and class, and her “belief in belief.”
(Source: blackfashion, via black-culture)
