Tag: Black Culture

  • What Juneteenth Means to Me

    What Juneteenth Means to Me

    I will be honest.
    I do not remember hearing much about Juneteenth when I was young.
    Maybe that was because I was from the Midwest. Maybe it was because, for a long time, Juneteenth was mostly spoken of as a Texas celebration. Maybe it was because some parts of our history were passed down in whispers, while other parts were left for us to find when we were older and strong enough to carry them.
    But when I did learn what Juneteenth meant, I felt something heavy settle in me.
    It saddened me.
    The kind of sadness that comes when you realize freedom was not only denied, but delayed. When you realize some people knew slavery had ended and still refused to release those who had already paid for this country with their bodies. Their labor. Their children. Their names. Their grief.
    It is one thing to know slavery existed.
    It is another thing to understand that even after freedom was declared, some still refused to let enslaved people go.
    That is the part that stayed with me.
    Those additional years.
    Those families were still held in fields, kitchens, barns, and houses while the world had already shifted on paper.
    And yet, inside that sadness, there was also relief.
    Relief that someone finally came. On June 19, 1865, word finally reached the enslaved people in Texas that they were free.
    Not free from struggle.
    But free from legal bondage.
    Free from being owned.
    And for that, we remember.
    For that, we gather.
    For that, we cook.
    Juneteenth, to me, has never felt like a holiday that should be reduced to a sale, a slogan, or a color palette. It is not simply a summer event. It is not just another reason to put something on a calendar and call it progress.
    It is ours.
    That does not mean others cannot stand beside us. I believe they can. I believe they should if they come to understand that this is not a costume, not a marketing angle, not a borrowed celebration to be emptied of its meaning.
    Juneteenth is not about making everyone comfortable.
    It is about telling the truth.
    It is about the last day of slavery, reaching the last people who were still being held in its grip. It is about delayed freedom and the people who survived long enough to hear it named.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • Thriller Was Never Gone

    Thriller Was Never Gone

    There are some things the world rediscovers only because it has forgotten how long they have been living inside it.

    That is how I feel watching people circle back to Thriller now, with all this renewed attention around Michael Jackson because of the movie, the trailers, the conversations, the clips, the younger people discovering what some of us never lost. The biopic “Michael” has brought his name back into the center of popular conversation, though for many of us, his name never really left. His music has continued to find new ears, new dance floors, new bedrooms, new cookouts, new children standing in front of mirrors, trying to make their feet obey something their spirit already understands. Even now, Jackson’s catalog keeps returning to the charts and to public memory in fresh ways. 

    But Thriller is different.

    I can keep this short, but that would feel dishonest. Thriller is not simply an album I admire. It is one of those cultural monuments that sits so deeply in the landscape that people sometimes stop seeing how large it is. It becomes weather. It becomes background. It becomes one of those things everyone knows, and because everyone knows it, we risk forgetting how impossible it once was.

    There are albums, and then there are events.

    Thriller was an event.

    Not just a release date. Not just a collection of songs pressed into vinyl, cassette, and memory. It was a door being kicked open with polished shoes, a red jacket, a white glove, and a sound so precise it felt engineered by lightning. Released in 1982, it became the kind of record that did not merely dominate its time. It bent time around itself. It went on to become widely recognized as the best-selling album of all time. It was later preserved by the Library of Congress for its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance. 

    But numbers only tell part of the story.

    Numbers can count sales.

    They cannot count the way a room changes when “Billie Jean” begins.

    They cannot measure the way the bass line walks in before the man does. That quiet, dangerous pulse. That sound of suspicion dressed as elegance. That feeling that something has entered the room wearing a fedora and secrets.

    They cannot count how many children ruined socks trying to moonwalk across kitchen floors.

    They cannot count how many shoulders moved before permission was granted.

    They cannot count the first time somebody saw him lean forward at an angle that seemed to argue with gravity itself and realized that the human body, under the right command, could become punctuation.

    Thriller was music, yes.

    But it was also proof.

    Proof that Black artistry did not need to be translated into something smaller to be understood by the world. Proof that soul, funk, pop, rock, theater, horror, dance, precision, and spectacle could sit at the same table and not fight for space. Proof that a Black artist could become the center of the machine, not as a guest, not as a novelty, not as someone grateful to be let in, but as the reason the doors had to be widened.

    That part matters.

    It mattered then, and it matters now.

    Because there was a time when the industry loved Black sound but feared Black centrality. It loved the rhythm, the invention, the sweat, the church, the moan, the hips, the hunger, the heat. It loved what we made, but not always us standing in the bright middle of it. And then came Michael, not asking permission so much as revealing that permission had always been too small a thing for what he carried.

    He did not just cross over.

    He made the crossing look foolish.

    He made the border disappear.

    That is one of the reasons Thriller remains so difficult to reduce. It was not merely “Black music” becoming acceptable to white audiences. It was Black excellence arriving so fully formed, so undeniable, so complete in its craft, that the old categories began to buckle. The album did not abandon Blackness to become universal. It showed that Blackness had always contained the universal.

    That is the thing some people still struggle to understand.

    The universal does not always begin in the middle.

    Sometimes it begins in Gary, Indiana.

    Sometimes it begins in Motown rehearsal rooms.

    Sometimes it begins in gospel phrasing, James Brown feet, street-corner rhythm, Sunday-morning ache, and the discipline of a child who learned too early that applause could be both love and labor.

    And that is where the beauty of Thriller becomes complicated.

    Because when we talk about Michael Jackson, we are never only talking about music. We are talking about genius and cost. We are talking about what America does to its brightest children, especially the ones it wants to consume. We are talking about the strange bargain of being loved by the world and still somehow being alone inside yourself.

    There is joy in Thriller, but there is also pressure.

    You can hear the perfectionism.

    You can hear the reach.

    You can hear a man trying to become larger than every room that ever tried to contain him.

    Maybe that is why the album still feels alive. It is polished, but not empty. It is immaculate, but not bloodless. Even at its most dazzling, there is something haunted running beneath it. “Billie Jean” is not a party song, though people dance to it. “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ moves like celebration, but it carries anxiety in its bones. “Beat It” has the muscle of rock, but the wisdom of survival. Even “Thriller,” with its monsters and choreography and graveyard theater, knows something serious about fear: that sometimes the only way to face it is to dance directly in front of it.

    That is the secret.

    The album moves because it understands movement as more than entertainment.

    Movement is escape.

    Movement is resistance.

    Movement is testimony.

    Movement is a child saying, “Look what I can do.”

    Movement is a man saying, “You will not look away.”

    And we did not look away.

    We still have not.

    The visuals changed everything. “Billie Jean” helped push Michael onto MTV at a time when Black artists were not being given the same access to that new visual marketplace. The “Thriller” short film took the music video and stretched it into cinema, into an event, into a ritual. After that, a song was no longer just something you heard. It could be something you entered. Something you watched. Something you wore. Something you practiced in the mirror until your body began to remember what your mind could not explain. 

    The red jacket became scripture.

    The glove became a symbol.

    The loafers became instruments.

    The choreography became a language passed down without formal instruction.

    Nobody had to explain it to us. We saw it once, and the body understood.

    That is rare.

    That is not marketing.

    That is culture.

    And culture, real culture, does not stay where it is placed. It travels. It leaks under doors. It crosses oceans. It lands in countries where people do not speak the language but know exactly when to throw their shoulders back. It becomes a wedding reception, a school talent show, a Halloween party, a family reunion, a halftime routine, a child alone in a hallway trying to spin without falling.

    That is why I smile a little when people say Michael Jackson is “back.”

    Back from where?

    He has been in the grocery store aisle.

    He has been in the skating rink.

    He has been at the cookout.

    He has been in the DNA of every pop star who has ever learned that the body could sell the song as much as the voice.

    He has been in the architecture field.

    The truth is, some artists do not disappear. The world only changes its volume.

    For those of us who lived with the music, Thriller was never a relic. It was never just nostalgia. It was not trapped in the 1980s with the jackets, the hair, the posters, the television specials, the moonwalk, and the glow of a world beginning to understand the power of images. It kept breathing. It kept showing up, generation after generation, because great work does not ask permission to survive.

    It survives because it is useful.

    It gives people joy.

    It gives people movement.

    It gives people memory.

    And maybe that is what I return to most when I think about Thriller: memory.

    I think about how music marks us. How a song can become a room. How a bass line can bring back a floor, a television set, a cousin, a summer, a mother’s voice from another room. I think about how the records we love become part of the family even when we do not say it that way. They sit with us. They raise us a little. They teach us rhythm, confidence, drama, and escape. They teach us that ordinary life can suddenly become cinematic if the right song comes on.

    That is what Thriller did.

    It made the world feel bigger.

    It made possibility feel visible.

    It made a Black boy from Indiana into a global language.

    And it did so with craft.

    That part should never be forgotten. The magic was not accidental. Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson built that album with care, discipline, taste, and hunger. Nothing feels wasted. Every song knows what it is doing. Every groove has a purpose. Every silence has shape. The album is joyful, but it is not careless. It is smooth, but not soft. It is commercial, but not hollow. It is accessible without being simple.

    That is a hard thing to do.

    To make something everybody can enter, without making it cheap.

    To make something polished enough for the whole world, but still alive enough to sweat.

    That is why the greatness of Thriller is not really up for debate.

    People may debate Michael.

    People may debate legacy, celebrity, myth, memory, pain, and all the complicated human wreckage that surrounds a life lived too publicly.

    But Thriller?

    The work stands.

    It stands because the work still works.

    Drop the needle. Press play. Let the first few seconds hit. Watch what happens.

    The body answers before the mind can form an argument.

    And maybe that is the final proof.

    Not the sales.

    Not the awards.

    Not the records.

    Not even the history.

    The proof is in the involuntary response.

    The foot taps.

    The shoulders loosen.

    The room wakes up.

    Somebody smiles before they mean to.

    That is not just an album.

    That is inheritance.

    That is architecture.

    That is a force of nature dressed in melody and leather.

    That is Thriller.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Theater Forgot to Sing

    The Theater Forgot to Sing

    I loved the new Michael.

    I want to begin there plainly.

    Not with an argument.

    Not with a defense.

    Not with the careful language people sometimes reach for when something connected to memory, fame, Blackness, childhood, music, and history walks back into the room.

    I loved it.

    The songs moved me.

    Not in some distant, critical way. Not the way a person listens to music after they have read all the books, watched all the interviews, studied all the contradictions, and learned how to hold admiration at arm’s length. I mean, the songs moved me in the old way. The body-before-language way. The way music enters through some door you forgot was still open.

    At fifty-five, I do not hear those songs as artifacts.

    I hear them as weather.

    I hear them as radio coming through a kitchen that probably smelled like something frying, or boiling, or being stretched into enough. I hear them from the backseat of cars where adults controlled the dial, and children learned the world through whatever sound came through the speakers. I hear them on Saturday morning, as vinyl, as television, as that strange and beautiful era when even a cartoon version of the Jackson 5 felt like an event. I remember that cartoon. I remember what it meant to see Black children animated into joy, color, rhythm, and possibility.

    Maybe that sounds small to someone who did not come up that way.

    It was not small.

    There are certain things you do not understand as history when you are living them. You only know that they are there. You only know that they have become part of the wallpaper of your becoming. The music played, and you were young. The world was not simple, but for three minutes at a time, it had a beat. It had a hook. It had a high note that made you think the ceiling could be negotiated.

    So when I sat in that theater, I was not just watching a film.

    I was sitting with a younger version of myself.

    The boy who heard those songs before he knew how complicated people could be. The boy who watched the Jackson 5 cartoon without needing permission. The boy who did not yet understand how memory works, how it stores light right next to shadow, how it refuses to separate joy from the time that gave it to you.

    The theater itself was nice. Comfortable. Clean. Respectable.

    The audience was attentive and respectful.

    And that, oddly enough, became my problem.

    Because as a Black American, I know how we can be in a movie theater. And I will be honest: sometimes it bothers me. Sometimes the talking is too much. Sometimes the commentary arrives before the scene has finished breathing. Sometimes the theater becomes less a place of watching and more a place of public performance.

    There are times when I want quiet.

    There are times when I want people to sit down, hush, and let the movie do what it came to do.

    But this time, sitting in all that good behavior, I found myself missing the very thing I sometimes complain about.

    I had heard stories of other audiences singing along. People are dancing in their seats. People clapped when the old songs came alive. People who understood that certain music was never meant to be consumed silently, like medicine taken alone in a dark room. Some songs are communal property. Some songs do not belong to the screen once they begin. They belong to everybody who survived long enough to remember them.

    And I wished I had been there.

    I truly did.

    I wished I had been in the theater where somebody forgot themselves during a chorus. Where an auntie somewhere in the middle row could not help but sing. Where somebody’s foot betrayed them. Where the room stopped pretending it was only an audience and became, for a little while, a family reunion without potato salad, folding chairs, or somebody arguing over who made the greens.

    Because I would have joined in.

    I know that now.

    The part of me that usually wants order would have stepped aside. The part of me that loves silence would have understood that this was not noise. This was testimony. This was memory refusing to stay seated. This was the body remembering what the mind had tried to file away.

    There is a difference between disruption and communion.

    There is a difference between people being rude and people being careless.

    And maybe that is what I wanted.

    To be carried.

    Not just entertained. Not simply impressed. Carried backward and forward at the same time. Back to the radio. Back to the cartoon. Back to the sound of a people finding brilliance in children, rhythm in hardship, spectacle in discipline, and magic in a world that did not always make room for Black genius unless it could first package it, sell it, and survive off the shine.

    Michael’s music, especially for those of us who grew up with it, is not just celebrity memory. It is part of the architecture. It was in the rooms we lived in. It was in the cars. It was at family gatherings. It was on television when television still felt like a shared national fireplace. It gave us something to marvel at.

    And Black people know what marveling means.

    We know what it is to look at one of our own doing something impossible and feel, for a moment, that the impossible has been slightly revised.

    That is why the respectful silence felt incomplete to me.

    Not wrong.

    Just incomplete.

    Maybe it was only my particular audience. Maybe I caught the quiet room. Maybe everyone else was feeling what I was feeling, but had been trained, like me, to behave. Maybe we were all sitting there with songs rising in our chests, politely swallowing them back down.

    There is something sad about that.

    Not tragic. Just sad.

    Because sometimes respect can become another kind of restraint. Sometimes we are so careful not to disturb the room that we forget we are allowed to be alive in it. Sometimes adulthood teaches us to sit still during the very songs that once taught us how to move.

    I left the theater grateful, but also a little hungry.

    Hungry for the version of the experience where the room loosened. Where people remembered they had bodies. Where nostalgia wasn’t treated like a museum piece behind glass, but like something you could clap along to. Something you could sing wrong and still mean with your whole heart.

    Maybe that is why I believe I will go see it again.

    Not because I missed the film.

    Because I may have missed the room I was supposed to see.

    I want another chance to sit among people who remember. People who know that certain songs do not simply play. They open a door. And when that door opens, the child in you steps through first.

    At fifty-five, that child is still there.

    Older now. Quieter. More careful. More aware of the cost of everything.

    But still there.

    Still listening.

    Still remembering the radio.

    Still remembering the cartoon.

    Still waiting for the room to sing.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • “Hunger Without End: On Gluttony, Illusion, and the Ache Beneath Our Shine”

    “Hunger Without End: On Gluttony, Illusion, and the Ache Beneath Our Shine”

    We were taught to consume.

    Not just food, but image.

    Not just goods, but symbols.

    And when the goods were kept from us, when the symbols were gated behind color lines and zip codes and unspoken rules, we carved our hunger into a religion.

    We baptized our children in a name-brand.

    We anointed ourselves in oil and gold—some real, some not.

    And somewhere in the soft blur between lack and longing, between what we were told we could never have and what we dreamed we could hold, we lost the ability to tell the difference between wealth and its costume.

    This is gluttony—not of appetite, but of aching.

    A consuming of things to quiet the absence.

    And the Black body, especially the Foundational one, has been trained to perform this pageant of possession for survival and pride alike.

    I’ve seen the gleam of a gold chain reflect the face of a boy who hasn’t eaten.

    I’ve watched a girl unzip a thousand-dollar purse in a home where the lights flicker.

    I’ve heard engines roar from cars bought with back-breaking hours, only to idle outside crumbling apartments owned by people who never stepped foot on the block.

    This is not mockery. This is mourning.

    Because none of it is accidental.

    They built us a hunger.

    They stole land, language, family, and future, leaving behind hunger.

    They gutted neighborhoods through redlining, zoning, and predatory loans.

    They made it illegal for us to buy homes in the same cities we built.

    They passed down violence through policy and called it economics.

    And when we looked around at what little we had, we did what any scarred people do: we reached for shine.

    If they wouldn’t let us live in their luxury, we’d bring the illusion of it into our closets.

    We’d wear it like armor.

    We’d measure ourselves not by equity or ownership, but by how much we could afford to spend in a weekend.

    The bag on the table became the dream deferred.

    The belt buckle became the new birthright.

    The car became the crown.

    Even if the lease costs more than the rent.

    Even if the address was still subsidized.

    Even if the neighborhood fell apart as we sped through it.

    But it’s not just economics. It’s spiritual.

    Gluttony—absolute gluttony—isn’t about food or fashion.

    It’s about a soul that no longer believes in enough.

    It’s a bottomless wanting.

    A kind of despair that arises because it cannot be built.

    That consumes because it cannot heal.

    That hoard because it cannot rest.

    In our community, this manifests in patterns that appear to be pride but are actually rooted in pain.

    We spend on the visible because the invisible feels like failure.

    We reject home ownership because we’ve been evicted from history itself.

    We distrust banks, land, and institutions because they’ve burned us for centuries.

    So we trust what we can carry.

    What we can wear?

    What they can see.

    And yet, the question remains:

    Who are we feeding with all this performance?

    What hunger are we really trying to satisfy?

    Is it the hunger for love we never got?

    For dignity we were denied?

    For recognition, power, presence?

    Gluttony, unchecked, eats through the village.

    It turns neighbors into competitors.

    It replaces mutual aid with envy.

    It leaves no room for wisdom, only impulse.

    And when the high wears off—when the car note’s late and the purse is out of season—we are left again with that same ache. That same emptiness. That same stillness where self-worth should have been planted.

    But this isn’t where the story ends.

    We are still the descendants of builders.

    Still, the children of people who knew how to sew dignity into rags.

    Still, the bloodline of men and women who understood that legacy is not found in what you wear, but in who you lift.

    The solution is not shame.

    It’s not judgment.

    It’s remembering.

    Remembering that wealth is not a symbol—it is a tool.

    That a home passed down is worth more than a car driven alone.

    That the quiet power of ownership outlives every designer label.

    A neighborhood invested in is worth more than a vacation post.

    And that healing will never be sold in stores.

    Healing is slow. It is communal. It is spiritual.

    We do not lack style. We lack the space to grieve.

    And so we dress up the grief.

    We perform it with leather seats and champagne flutes.

    But beneath it all—beneath the chrome and the chain and the tag—there is still a child, still a people, still a history asking:

    What if enough was never what they told us it was?

    What if enough of us remember who we really are?

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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