Jay-Z & Usher coming through with the heat!!!!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx8wCegEIUY&hl=en]

There will be no free downloads of this album from my site, however I will let it be known that the album is on the money. Many rumors have been circling around the internet and the blogs that Usher was about to drop a dud.

Well if you’re a 5 year old and can not appreciate a man’s growth through his music then you will probably not like this. But if you are ready for a sincere to R&B, I mean that real rhythm and blues then I suggest you go out and purchase Usher’s new album when it drops on Tuesday, May 27th.

From the beginning to the end of the album Usher will bring you on a roller coaster journey of a man and his emotions battling love and facing his fears head on. “Moving Mountains” finds Usher more than comfortable while divulging his feelings about a love going down the wrong path. Those who have been there can relate to the metaphor with ease and are fighting for Ush to move the mountain, climbing and hoping for things to change. What can you do?

“Prayer for you” is just an interlude but you can see the growth in my man Usher singing a prayer for his little man. I remember back when Usher was a young dude singing “just call me a mack” and now he is showing the true evolution going from the ladies man to now becoming a family man.

A sure hit for the radio “Best Thing” finds Young Hov and Usher riding the beat getting the ladies ready for a hot summer!

“Appetite” will be a favorite of all these gossip sites looking to throw some salt or hate into dude’s new marriage. He’s hitting the fellas with a message though telling us not to feed our appetites or we’ll be trying to get into the crib but the key won’t fit no more.

All the Ladies looking to find that special dude will hope that when the time comes that he serenades them with the words to “Before I Met You”! A beautiful dedication to the special one in your life, like I said Usher is definitely showing growth on this one, not the same player from Confessions!

Everyone is going to attempt to compare this album to Usher’s last but that will be their first mistake. You can not compare the two; Usher released Confessions at 25 fresh out of break up. He is now 29 and a happily married man with a child, in those four years there has obviously been a lot of growth and it shows on Here I Am. Quality Product, I’ll be buying the retail copy as soon as it drops on the 27th!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tZAFCX2Rlk&hl=en]

1. Intro
2. Love In This Club featuring Young Jeezy
3. This Ain’t Sex
4. Trading Places
5. Moving Mountains
6. What’s Your Name featuring will.i.am
7. Prayer For You Interlude
8. Something Special
9. Love You Gently
10. Best Thing featuring Jay Z
11. Before I Met You
12. His Mistakes
13. Appetite
14. What’s A Man To Do
15. Lifetime
16. Love In This Club Part II featuring Beyoncé & Lil Wayne
17. Here I Stand
18. Will Work For Love

As a member of a Black Greek Lettered Organization, I found the following article “interesting” to say the least. I will allow you the pleasure of reading these words and encourage you to engage in lofty discourse over the tone of this article. Please check back tomorrow where I will then post my response to this article. Enjoy!

My “Fascination” With Greeks By Hananie Albert

By Hananie Albert, on 22-03-2008 20:39

Did they starve the consciousness out of you during hazing?

I have always been wary of those within the black community who pay a superficial homage to black history, only to turn and defecate on the legacies they pretend to uphold. Unfortunately this trait seems inherent to the black Greek system at this university—a cluster of complacent organizations who meander around issues of social justice and command respect because of the actions of their predecessors rather than their own commitments to equality, justice and progress. These groups only seem interested in the performative aspects of black culture and fail to reckon with the significance of their complacency, given their immense influence in the black community.

My time here at UF has been marked by crises that challenged the strength of the black community—from the bitingly ignorant Alligator cartoon, to the lack of funding for the African-American Studies Program to the controversy with the Jena 6. In these instances, individuals from Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs) offered their support—but the Greek community at large stood idly by, seemingly ignorant of their power to galvanize the students and the administration to action. Oddly enough, they put this power to great use when it was time to raise awareness for a party or a step show. I began to wonder if these organizations felt at all ashamed to claim great Civil Rights leaders and political figures as alumnus, given the insignificance of their records of local social activism.

A recent forum titled “What’s your fascination with black Greeks?” promised to facilitate a dialogue between the Greek and non-Greek community, and I attended on my editor’s insistence. I was curious to see how the black Greek community would address the stark hypocrisies in their records—the fact that they had stopped earning the respect they demanded, the fact that “brotherhood” came to be marked by well documented instances of hazing and male on male sexual harassment, and the fact that they seemed to privilege mindless assimilation and social mobility over social justice.

The responses at the forum were as contrived and hollow as I had assumed BGLOs to be. When questioned about their failure to live up to their founding tenets, one Greek panelist responded that the public underestimated the efforts put into step shows; others insisted that Greeks were normal people and were unfairly put on a pedestal. Finally, one Greek responded with what seemed to be the default answer whenever a particularly tough question was posed: there was just so much that the public did not know. This implies that the public does not have the right to judge BGLOs because they are not privy to the same information. I doubt that adequate justification for black Greek complacency is somehow written into the founding principles that are beaten into them– or that one acquires intellectual infallibility by “crossing the burning sands.”

If the BGLOs at the University of Florida want to take the cowardly route favored by organizations such as the Black Student Union and respond to accusations of complacency by claiming that they are a “social” organization rather than a “political” one, they have every right. However, black Greeks must understand that they invoke a higher standard every time they mention alumnus like Huey P. Newton, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other prominent figures in black history who might very well be ashamed to have their names associated with the uninspired, unengaged morass that is black Greekdom at this university.

This is not an assault on individuals within the organization—I know several exceptional individuals that join these organizations and strive towards social equality and consciousness—unfortunately the overall character of these groups is impermeable to the progressive intentions of the individuals. BGLOs, like other university organizations, will be judged as a whole, not just the sum of its more progressive parts.

I must note, however, that if black Greek existence on this campus seems shallow and self-serving, it is because black Greek organizations are composed of and cater to a shallow and unengaged black community who love to point out the evils of discrimination but fail to meet these evils with intellectual resistance and social activism. So, critiquing black Greeks for thinking that uplifting the black community entials nothing more than wearing letters on Wednesdays, the occasional self-gratifying forum on Fridays and a routinized and thus hollow commitment to “community service” on Saturdays, is ultimately a critique of the black community as a whole. Assuming that new members have had the consciousness and social awareness beaten and starved from them during the hazing ignores the fact that that many of these new members may not have cared about these issues to begin with.

As an immigrant to this country, I was ignorant of the significance of black Greeks until I stepped foot onto Turlington Plaza. There, I was ushered out of the way in order to make room for the strolling Greeks; a friend even jokingly suggested that looking them in the eye was disrespectful. I didn’t understand how a group could command this amount of unquestioned respect.

After conducting some research, I began to believe that these students were respected because the letters stitched onto their jackets were a sacred covenant—a reminder of the great contributions of past members and a promise to continue while improving upon their auspicious legacies. I believed that the initiation process was well-reasoned and commendable for its commitment to restoring rites of passage, similar to those in tribal Africa.

After several years on this campus, I am starting to realize just how wrong I was.

http://www.blacklistedmagazine.org/