Blood Beats: Vol. 2 / the bootleg joints
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 Carl Hancock Rux, Sarah Schulman, Meshell NdegeOcello, visual artist Mark Bradford, legendary French filmmaker Agnès Varda and Ledisi to essays on the Fugees, Kanye West, Eminem and gay hip-hop porn.
Listen to Ernest Hardy in a May 6, 2009 interview:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Sippin-on-Ink/2009/05/07/Ernest-Hardy
ISBN-10: 0-9656659-9-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-9656659-9-5
Specs: Softcover, 399 pp.
Price: $19.95
Pub. Date: February 2008
Cover photo copyright © 2006 by Alex Demyanenko
Cover design: E.M. Corbin
Praise for Blood Beats: Vol. 2
For pop culture critics, fans and professors looking to engage their students, Blood Beats: Vol. 2 is a collection that illustrates the imbrications of race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender in pop culture through accessible language and unwavering wit.
—Leticia Miranda, ColorLines,
January–February 2009
Before comedian and sketch artist Dave Chappelle became what we might now call uncomfortably famous, he slyly provided his Comedy Central audience with a mantra deployable against the twin gods of realness and authenticity: “when keeping it real goes wrong.” In a far more deliberate manner, Ernest Hardy, insufficiently described as a “film and music critic,” offers his collection, Blood Beats: Vol. 2 / the bootleg joints, as a trenchant critique of our cultural worship at the throne of Ms. Representation. …With a refreshingly brash wit, Hardy considers everything from the archetype of the “R&B thug” as modeled by R. Kelly to the spaces of possibility opened up by the radical visioning of Black queer experimental filmmakers like Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, and Marlon Riggs. …Hardy does the necessary labor that makes for deeply insightful and cutting cultural commentary.
—Alisha Gaines, make/shift, Fall/Winter 2009
In a world of cookie cutter “entertainment reporting,” we need more critics like Ernest Hardy. This collection of his work, much of which originally appeared in L.A. Weekly, is smart, well-informed (mostly covering the pop music beat, he’s an astounding encyclopedia of music,) written with a driving clarity, and always grounded in the understanding that pop culture matters precisely because of its triviality. Hardy goes beyond bullet points to unpack the messages about race, class, gender and sexuality that are bound up in the latest prepackaged pop princess, and swallowed unthinkingly by American audiences.
—Brian Jewell, Bay Windows, July 19, 2008
...While Hardy follows blood [in Blood Beats: Vol. 2], he does so while remaining critical of the hackneyed performances of authenticity that often dictate communal belonging. It is this renegotiaton of what "realness" looks, feels, and sounds like that provides coherence to the collection.
...Hardy reminds us to subvert, distort, and play with the edges of blackness. Or as he writes, "Blackness is experimental."
...Hardy ends his collection with two very sexy, previously unpublished "downloads"—an almost too lengthy genre-bending essay of personal reflection and multi-person interviews on the gay, mainly Latino, porn scene in New York, and a quilted "interview" with Lil' Kim stitched together from a series of other sources (her publicist let Hardy know she wasn't interested in a sit down). ...both pieces fly in the face of propriety, interrogating constructions of colored sexuality and gender that work to soothe and balm, as well as irritate.
Hardy theorizes the political through the banal and the spectacular, the funky and the vanilla, while unapologetically forcing his readers to take some necessary conceptual risks: to challenge categories of identity, agitate the status quo, and push the boundaries of what is counted as "culture."
This is black criticism.
—Alisha Gaines, American Book Review,
May-June 2008
Ernest Hardy has long been the culture critics’ critic, a rare writer whose every opinion we read and debated and measured our own against. Blood Beats: Vol. 2 shows why: the expansive mind, the humanistic ear, the timely question, the passionately committed voice. There may be no better guide through pop’s image-storm of identities than Mr. Hardy.
—Jeff Chang, editor of Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop
I’m not sure whether Ernest Hardy is a pen name or not but his writing is everything his name implies. His dissections of pop culture are neatly carved into well-thought proportions over which he pours a tangy, sometimes biting, down-home styled gravy. To read his work is to think twice. He raises the question that only someone who truly believes in the power of art would seek to answer.
—Saul Williams
