Blood Beats: Vol. 1 Demos, Remixes & Extended Versions
by Ernest Hardy
Writing from a critical center that is melanin-based/ feminist/ pro-queer/ unabashedly-leftist, LA-based writer Ernest Hardy (a Sundance Fellow and member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vibe, the LA Times, the LA Weekly and more) pens essays, interviews and reviews whose subject matter ranges from underground hip-hop and American indie film to modern French cinema, from revealing interviews with Warren Beatty, Meshell NdegeOcello and Les Nubians to an essay on gay rappers and queer rap audiences that pushes beyond the clichés of the media-stoked “down-low” phenomenon. Blood Beats: Vol. 1 earned a 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Award.
Read an early interview of Ernest Hardy:
http://blog.stevengfullwood.org/archives/000596.html
Read more on Ernest Hardy: “Cultural Critic and Author Ernest Hardy Asks St. John’s Audience to Be Independent Thinkers”
ISBN-10: 0-9656659-8-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-9656659-8-8
Specs: Softcover,
218 pp.
Price: $19.95
Pub. Date: May 2006
Cover photo copyright © 2006 by Alex Demyanenko
Cover design: E.M. Corbin
Praise for Blood Beats: Vol. 1
Blood Beats sets the bar high for those for which cultural criticism—journalistic or otherwise—has been reduced to name dropping and ego-tripping. …[Hardy’s] work resides at the obvious (to some) intersections of Blackness, gender and sexuality, but to simply align his writing and style to the now clichéd province of intersectionality is to miss the point of the work. This is writing that is doing real labor—heavy lifting, if you will—on behalf of those folks—the artists, the audiences, and the activists—who are grappling with “new language in the effort to overthrow…everything.” …When all is said, Hardy is a critics’ critic—the kind of writer that demands that we all go back to the lab and press on.
—Mark Anthony Neal, seeingblack.com, July 11, 2006
Titled in the vernacular of a record album, this first of Ernest Hardy’s bound, printed mix tapes is a varied compilation of song-length essays, interview interludes, and a sampling of original reviews, none of which would ever be aired on mainstream radio or music television. Not that Hardy’s subjects—ranging from Outkast to Jim Jarmusch to Warren Beatty—aren’t “commercially viable,” but unlike many so-called critics willing to sacrifice scrutiny for the sake of the status quo, Hardy (who writes Flaunt’s “Video+DVD” column) is unabashed in his ability to stoke the flames of discord in the hopes that certain issues that are blatantly ignored, mediated, or pushed to the fringe can penetrate the larger cultural discourse. …Ethnic in-fighting, queer identity, black masculinity—while the conservative and the conventional have fun avoiding such topics, dismissing them as liberal lunacy or academic esoterica, Hardy confronts the often shameful play of ethno-sexual politics, using his subjects, whether a musician or a film, as a site for broader cultural inspection. Decisive deconstructions help locate the substance submerged beneath style, and personal insights help parse the “real” from mere rhetoric, until Hardy’s “niche” concerns bleed into a bigger picture that, once realized, can make the heart beat faster, or the blood boil.
—Andrew Pogany, Flaunt Magazine, August 2006
