Issue #15: Concrete Jungle Wet Dreams Tomato
We still banging, we never lost power
Welcome to Shamira Explains It All, a culture newsletter discussing the origins and impact of Black production and exchange, identity, and intellectual property via our digital, social, and archival discussions - and whatever else may be timely and interesting. Part English, Part Francophone. Reach out with feedback, suggestions, tips, and ideas at contact@shamirathefirst.com.
For those who are so inclined, please feel free to send a token of appreciation to my CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal. Think of it as a birthday gift for me!
Ahem…*taps mic* is this thing on?
I’ve been toying around with the best way to announce my return to substack for the better part of a month, but kept coming up dreadfully empty on pithy quotes that I felt met the moment. No matter how hard I racked my brain for some really poignant quote, all that kept coming up was Nicki Minaj’s opening monologue at the beginning of “Fractions,” where she dons her caricaturish version of the affectations of Marlon Brando in The Godfather:
I fell back, I had a baby, you know I did the mother thing, I did the wife thing All that shit But I think it's quite clear now You's need the bad guy
To be clear — and mostly in case my family stumbles onto this post — I am far from married or pregnant. However, I do find a sense of kinship with Onika Tanya in the sense that I had to take a step back for the past year to, for lack of better phrasing, really get my shit together. I had neglected both my physical and mental health, ground myself to a halt, and any attempts to restart my engines just created puffs of gaseous smoke that I would mistake as momentum, only to flame out disastrously without much insight as to what I was doing wrong or how to fix it. Six months of physical therapy, some massive kidney stones, and an ADHD diagnosis later, I finally have a handle on the pitfalls I kept skidding through and was ready to reenter the world of cultural criticism, just as the media infrastructure and job market became more perilous than ever. Like they say, you make plans and God laughs. That said, I still felt there was no better time to relaunch into the community with renewed vigor than the week of my birthday, which I have always felt was a time of rebirth and reflection over what I wanted to help make bloom in the upcoming year. (Maybe it’s because I am a spring baby, but I don’t like to overthink it.)
After wallowing for a bit about the precarious state of the world and the rapidly decaying capacity of mainstream media to meet the needs of the moment, I decided it was high time to start to be part of the solution instead of consistently pointing out the problems. This site will remain a hub for nuanced cultural conversations that I deem important, as well as to share work that failed to publish over the years for one reason or another, but I will be expanding my horizons a bit to add insight from the corners of our cultural dialogue that I feel are being consistently neglected: talking about New York City from the perspective of New Yorkers, adding a lens on immigration from the perspective of Black immigrants, introducing conversations happening in the Black Francophone world, and whatever else comes to mind that is part of the cultural zeitgeist. I will be publishing something new every two weeks and playing around with formats as I see fit: sometimes it will be a quick blog like this one, other times an interview, another a reported essay, and perhaps even a podcast or two (more on that later). The general aim is to 1) do my best to fill the gaps I see in cultural conversations, whether they be about music, reality television, or NYC influencers; 2) use this site as a way to play with form and structure in a way that I cannot with magazine writing. Ultimately, this shift will come with a transition to (affordable) paid subscriptions — I sincerely hope that a few of you reading this will find my creative labor worth your time and money. I also understand if you and your dollar simply cannot part; times are hard right now, and I have no qualms if I am simply an unwelcome expense to add to your plate. I thank you for your patronage all the same, and I will still be making public posts for free subscribers, although they will not be as extensive as my paid work. Commenting will be reserved for paid subscribers as well.
I cannot tell you how much it means to come back to this page and see that I still have a following that engages with the work I published here over a year ago — it genuinely brings a single thug tear to my eye. To thank you for your loyalty, I will be making these changes over the next month to give everyone time to adjust as I archive my old work. To give a sense of what is scheduled in the coming weeks, I have planned out essays on The Valley and how it encapsulates the tragedy and consequences of millennial arrested development, interviews with Brooklyn DJs, a personal essay on immigration, and an essay that I have been shaping for quite some time about how the entertainment and political apparatus of Southern Queens has taken all of America under its wing. If I were you, I would certainly want to watch this space as it continues to evolve.
For those of you who are curious about the work I am doing outside of here, I am currently working on several projects. My main home is currently at Africa Is A Country, where I am a contributing editor (I encourage you to read recently published work by Naima Kane on Andrée Blouin’s memoir and Kinaya Hassane on Cyclone Chido and the Comorian archipelago that I was honored to bring to life). I still freelance fairly regularly, recently taking on projects such as interviewing Chi Osse for BET and writing about puffer jackets for Gothamist. I am a fairly regular rotating guest on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, and I still do public speaking events, having recently moderated a mayoral plenary (more on that later); I will be moderating the opening event for the African Film Festival at the Africa Center on May 1. I have been fortunate enough to work on a few print projects and books that will all be out soon, and am also knee deep in fleshing out a book and podcast of my very own (more to come on both of these points; again, watch this space!).
I will still be recommending work I am reading that I find interesting and updating you on external work — I believe part of being a cultural worker is by reaching across to support the creative labor of others in our community, and that part will never stop. That said, I do hope you are appreciative and excited for the more robust direction this site will be taking; I am looking forward to going on this journey with those of you who have continued to support me for years.
Hope to have everyone right back here in two weeks — see you then!