On this episode, host Minkah Makalani sits down with Evan Narcisse and Tao Leigh Goffe to discuss the horror film “Us”.

Evan Narcisse is a journalist and critic who writes about video games, comic books, movies and TV, often focusing on the intersection of blackness and pop culture. He is a senior staff writer at io, having previously written for The Atlantic, Time Magazine, and Kotaku. He’s taught a course on video game journalism at New York University and appeared as an expert guest on CNN and NOR. He’s also the author of the Rise of the Black Panther graphic novel for Marvel Comics. A native New Yorker, he now lives in Austin, TX. 

Tao Leigh Goffe is assistant professor in the African Studies Department, and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is also a writer and a DJ. Born in London and raised in the UK and US, her research examines the unfolding relationship between technology, the senses, memory, and nature. Her writing has been published in Small Axe, Amerasia Journal, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas. She is currently completing her first book, A History of Touches: Vernacular Archives of Afro-Asia, which explores the poetics and entanglements of African and Asian diasporas in the Caribbean. 

For anyone who grew up in the music or who has a deep love for the culture, there’s a song that takes you back to the exact moment when you first heard it, what you were doing, and who you were with. And easily the best era is Hip-Hop’s Golden Age. Some of the best music from the 90’s was influenced by the speeches and iconography of Malcolm X, the teachings of the Nation of Islam and the theology of the NoI off-shoot, the Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths. Black Muslims were hardly new to black political thought but Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple never had a soundtrack like this. Turn on a hip-hop radio show in the early 90’s and you couldn’t get three tracks in without a five-percenter on the mic. From MCs like Rakim and Nas, groups like Brand Nubian and Poor Righteous Teachers—five percenters shaped a culture and provided a few that, for better or worse, questioned political norms, stressed intellect, and persistently attacked what they considered mental slavery. The notion of the black man as God is esoteric as hell but it appealed to a generation that suffered from the racial entrenchment of the 70’s and 80’s, the Reagan Era, HIV/ AIDS and crack. It also lead to a lot of great music. If the cypher is where five-percenters build then the 90s albums and CD where cyphers with a national distribution network that could reach and civilize 85-ers globally.