Opinion | Watch Sundance Winner Don t Go Tellin Your Momma by Topaz Jones and rubberband nytimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nytimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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The Montclair, NJ-based rapper follows his breakout debut with an expansive, funk-embroidered recollection of his childhood, complete with an accompanying 35-minute film.Â
On his 2016 debut,
Arcade, Topaz Jones offered a bright-if-brief introduction to his quick-witted personality. His biggest hit was the pop-rap single âTropicana,â whose lopsided hook showcased his slippery songwriting and love of funk. Despite that, Jones bristled at the trackâs success (âI was petrified of being labeled as the âTropicanaâ guy,â he explained). In the five years afterward, the artist dug deep into his roots in Montclair, New Jersey, and drafted a screenplay for an audiovisual project about his upbringing there. On the expansive result,
Rolling Stone How Topaz Jones Made the Next Great Visual Album
Hip-hop artist Topaz Jones had one hit. Now, with the help of director-duo rubberband., he has an award-winning film
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During one particularly striking moment in New Jersey musician Topaz Jones’s stunning short film
Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma, Jones’s grandmother, Emma Janice Jones, reveals the riches that evaded their family. Jones’s great great grandfather, Marshall Jones, was a cotton farmer who saw an entire season’s yield destroyed by the rain. The interview comes towards the end of the film, part of a constellation of vignettes and interviews that serve to place the 27-year-old musician in a context both familial and historic. The Roots’ Black Thought muses on intellectual property, and a child is teleported home after the streetlights come on.
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Legendary investigative journalist I.F. Stone famously said “All governments lie.” Nanfu Wang’s flawed but still worthwhile documentary “In The Same Breath” shows why Stone’s pronouncement is unfortunately still true. Her new film assesses the history of the Chinese and American governments’ early responses to the Coronavirus outbreak. In different ways, both governments’ public lies and coverups contributed to the COVID death toll in both countries.
Nobody is credibly denying the Coronavirus originated in China. But what is being disputed is the use of that information as license to engage in “socially acceptable” public racism against the Chinese in America. The Orange Skull regularly whipped his cultists into racist frenzy by peddling that attitude. It’s one of the flaws of Wang’s film that this point isn’t even mentioned or consider