In the music industry today, finding artists who truly understand the importance and effect of their image is rare. Even moreso when it comes to females. It can seem like socially conscious musicians like Queen Latifah, Lauryn Hill, Tanya Stephens, and India Arie are anomalies of the industry. Compare their success to the stars who get the magazine cover shine today. Sometimes when I listen to the radio or watch music videos on TV, I’m filled with an overwhelming feeling of despair and unbelonging.

See, I’m a bella who’s constantly seeking music that uplifts, enlightens, and informs. So when Queen Ifrica came on the scene, I sat up and took notice.

I clearly remember the first time I heard her voice — at first I thought she was a dude, simply because her intonation in the chorus of Daddy is so deep. The lyrical content is so heavy. In case you’ve never heard Daddy, click here to experience it. Be forewarned – it’s not every day a song about incest becomes a hit reggae song.

Tackling heavy subject matter head on is what Queen Ifrica does. Name another female artist who’s addressed a topic as controversial as skin bleaching in the Caribbean — a chronic problem as revealed here.

“My complexion is better than ever!”

I love her spirit and her sentiment.

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My question is, is there anything Amanda Diva can’t do?

She can rap. She can sing. She can spit a mean spoken word verse. She’s a blogger and a cable television personality, and an internet television personality and an artist. She’s a hip hop diva with Caribbean roots who isn’t afraid to blaze her own trail.

To say she’s bold and ambitious is an understatement. She’s exactly the kind of role model I’m looking to in my own time of transition.

All this and more makes her a perfect Afrobella of the Month for these ever-changing times.

I interviewed Amanda forever ago, in like mid-2008. But I saved a stash of awesome interviews for the time when I could bring them to life in a fuller fashion.

Thanks to the incredible skill of my video editor Gisele Parson, we’re finally able to make that happen.

Bellas, I present to you the tour-de-force that is Amanda Diva.

I know I’m biased, but I need to shout about it — I love what Gisele is doing with the images! Please show her some love if you feel the same. And my next task is to work on getting better quality audio for my interviews. Apologies for the volume level and clarity there.

For those of you at work who can’t peep the video, we chat about the cookie cutter image of women in hip hop, being asked to alter your image in the music industry, and defining yourself when you do so many things so well.

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One of my resolutions for 2009 is to take Afrobella to the next level.

I started hot and heavy in 2006, but I found myself becoming overwhelmed, which resulted in a feeling of inability. I had a vision of a YouTube Channel where I could upload concert videos, beauty tips, and especially, especially awesome interviews with celebrity bellas who inspire me through their style, their music, their hair, and their personalities. Like my Esperanza Spalding interview, but better. Seriously, that one YouTube clip took me forever to complete, and I still see SO much room for improvement. So anyway, I kept getting these opportunities to interview people, and I didn’t know what to do with them, and…you get the picture.

I had a project in mind, but I knew I couldn’t undertake it alone. So I put out a Help Wanted blog post back in November, and that, bellas, is how I discovered Gisele Parson, a video editor and motion graphics designer in NYC who reached out and wanted to bring my vision to life. Check out her demo reel and her portfolio page, and you’ll see why I went with her. Gisele is crazy talented! And I knew with talent like hers, she could help to realize my dreams. I am so happy to be working with Gisele!

I am honored and thrilled to kick off the new year by bringing back the Afrobella of the Month series, by honoring a previously celebrated bella. I’m talking about the lovely and talented Miss Janelle Monae!

To me, Janelle is one of the ultimate symbols of what Afrobella is all about. She loves her all-natural pompadour, she is unafraid to speak her mind or express her personal style, and she most certainly marches to her own funky beat. Fiercely creative, bold, and beautiful. You can either get with Miss Monae, or make way for her. I interviewed her right around my second anniversary, and finally, finally I can share that interview with you all!

We chatted for over 40 minutes, and with Gisele’s editorial eye, we whittled the interview down to three video clips. In part one, we got the hair questions out of the way. Everything Janelle does, she does with purpose — her hair is an important part of who she is.

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Rihanna is fly. Rihanna is beautiful. Rihanna is becoming quite sexy. I say becoming, because compared to Alison Hinds, the reigning queen of soca, Rihanna is still not yet a woman (despite her newly acquired penchant for voguing in fetish gear). Alison Hinds has that grown and sexy thing down pat, and she’s been one of the Caribbean’s most popular entertainers for over a decade now. She was the pride of Barbados back when Rih Rih was singing Hero in school. In case you’ve never heard of her before, allow me to introduce you to the amazing Alison Hinds.

Born in England, she moved to Barbados at age 11. From then, she was steeped in soca. According to Wikipedia, she joined the band Square One in 1986, and played just about every hot club and fete in Barbados and the Caribbean islands en route to fame and fortune — dropping hits like One For the Road in 1992. Square One’s star was rising in Barbados, but not throughout the island archipelago just yet. In Trinidad, the first I heard of Alison Hinds was with her monster hit, Raggamuffin, in 1996. That song won Alison Hinds her first road march victory at Crop Over — the first time a woman had won the honor in Barbados. Raggamuffin was a certified hit throughout the islands, and ushered in what Trinis referred to as “The Bajan Invasion.” After that, everyone waited with anticipation to hear what Alison and Square One was about to drop next. Her commanding voice became like a rally cry for the party to kick into high gear. She singlehandedly changed the face of soca and paved the way for the younger generation of female frontwomen to come. As she says in this feature in Vibe magazine — “Several female soca artists have told me, “You inspired me so I could do this too.” I feel like I’ve had a huge impact on young Caribbean women.” She really has. Her combination of strength and sexuality has become a blueprint for the genre. Every up-and-coming soca starlet dreams of being Alison.

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Najwa Moses is striking. Najwa Moses is bold. Najwa Moses lives her life full speed ahead. She’s working hard towards making herself a brand, and from the interview we had a week or so ago, I’m convinced she knows what she’s doing.

She’s a podcaster, a videopodcaster, a writer, a fashionista, a marketing maven, a self promoter, a fashion do, and an unabashed fashion don’t all at the same time. And in this era of changing media, she’s one of my new heroines. I caught up with her in a fun phone interview recently, and we chatted about anything and everything.

One of Najwa’s first roles in fashion was doing business development for a not-for-profit organization through the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. “My job was to help promote the work of local designers, helping them get to trade shows, helping them do numbers, PR, whatever whatever. One of the first things I created was called a shopping party. All these shopping parties — Shecky’s, Gen Art, all of them were quote-unquote “inspired” by the concept I came up with,” she declared proudly.

“Wow,” I interjected.

“I know, right! I don’t get credit for that? When you’re 20 years old or 21 years old and you don’t have a big company with lots of money behind you… when you put something out that’s a novelty idea, you’re really leaving it out there for other people to pick up. And that’s unfortunate. But I’ve learned, and you know what, they can’t take creativity away.”

That pick yourself up, dust yourself off attitude has taken her from strength to strength. Najwa’s shopping party was called The Closet, and it involved a lot of indie designers who weren’t aware of their potential. She started the event in 2001, and she learned as she went along. “I understand how things work a little bit better now.”

The last time they held the event was in 2005. At the time, she was also writing for NPR, covering New York Fashion Week, and immersing herself in the culture of style. Still, she found herself yearning to do her own thing. “That’s when I learned about podcasting. It was like — you want your own radio show? Come learn about podcasting. I was like, hell yeah! Jumped into it, did a bunch of great audio interviews, got a brand new website and I was like, oh no, this website must have video. I lost my mind, forgetting how expensive video is,” she laughs. Her website is Styleaholics, and it’s as fabulous as you would expect.

Najwa’s got a lot of personality, and she talks at the speed of traffic in New York City. For example, she had me cracking up when I listened to this Showbuzz podcast, where she recounts visiting Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Pioneering forms of new media doesn’t come cheap, but Najwa’s trying to be savvy about it. Now she has her own YouTube channel, where she features her videopodcast “The In List.” She’s interviewed fashion icons and fabulous celebrities including Diane Von Furstenberg, Kelis, and Marc Ecko (I don’t know what it is, but I find him completely fascinating). She’s starting to make some commercial inroads, too — check her out pimping the Toyota Camry at one of her fashion events. It’s all part of her brand-building master plan.

“I cross many worlds. I don’t just stick with the black fashionista world, or the fashionista world. I am also into the music scene, the food scene, very international high end stuff, or very underground scenes. I think I represent many different types of people and subcultures.” No kidding. In addition to the podcasts, videos, and writing for sites like AOL’s Styleist and Bluefly, Najwa is also the ambassador for Ugly Talent NY, a character model agency started in 1969 that exclusively traffics in “interesting” faces. Multicultural? Old? Tatted up? Obese? Or generally unusual? Ugly NY is looking for you. “The models range from a 300lb Sumo wrestler to a Styleaholic like myself-and I’ve personally have never been happier to be UGLY,” says Najwa.

Which brings me to another defining trait of Najwa’s. Her style. I had to ask her what’s up with that defining look. “My style is just really eclectic. I’m always a little left of fashion, and at the same time, I have to pay attention to that and understand that not everyone will look at me and say oh my God, that’s brilliant. For me, it’s about creating a statement and making sure everyone is noticing me. Because you want to make sure when you walk into an event, all eyes are on you. And in New York City, there’s a lot of people for eyes to be on.”

Believe it or not, being a plus size chick who dresses flamboyantly is working for her. “I’m not a size two. People well say oh my God, is that a detraction? But you know what, it actually helps me. Because it’s like, who is that curvy girl with those big ass boobs and that big ass hair coming in here? You can’t help but notice me. And I’m confident. And I believe in the designers I’m wearing, so it is what it is. Even this year, I’m like, how can I go crazier?”

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Brash, brilliant, brave, beautiful – Nikki Giovanni is all that and then some. You could run through a whole dictionary of adjectives on this proud afrobella of note. She was once known as “the princess of black poetry,” but now, she’s undoubtedly the queen.

Nikki Giovanni helped to pave the way for today’s generation of young black poets, she stood strong, fought, and won her battle with breast cancer, and when her peers, students, and coworkers needed a unified voice in the face of unspeakable grief, she rose admirably to the occasion. Nikki Giovanni is a long overdue Afrobella of the Month.

One of the things I admire most about Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni is her refusal to play by the rules. She seems to revel in refreshing contradiction. She was born in 1943, in this fantastic and fun NPR interview, she laughingly describes herself as “a little old lady.” But despite any preconcieved generation gaps, she has a storied admiration of the late, great Tupac Shakur and to commemorate the spirit of the slain, controversial rapper, she proudly wears a “Thug Life” tattoo on her arm — which, in case you didn’t already know, was intended by Tupac to be an acronym. In that same NPR interview, she reveals her reason for loving ‘Pac the way she did. First she declares that it’s important to recognize genius. Then she adds, “I would always rather be with the thugs than the people talking about them.” Snaps to Bill Cosby. All kidding aside, as someone who definitely grew up as part of the hip hop generation (and as a big fan of Tupac’s), I appreciate her perspective. It makes me want to perk up my ears and listen to what else she has to say.

I think Giovanni’s admiration for Tupac can be partially attributed to her love for plain talk. She has never been a highfalutin poet-with-a-capital-P, even from youth she appreciated the magic of real, unpretentious storytelling. According to this Ohioana Authors article, family influence had everything to do with that –

“I come from a long line of storytellers,” she once explained in an interview, describing how her family influenced her poetry through oral traditions. “My grandfather was a Latin scholar and he loved the myths, and my mother is a big romanticist, so we heard a lot of stories growing up.” This early exposure to the power of spoken language would influence Giovanni’s career as a poet, particularly her tendency to sprinkle her verses with colloquialisms, including curse words. “I appreciated the quality and the rhythm of the telling of the stories,” she once commented, “and I know when I started to write that I wanted to retain that… I didn’t want to become the kind of writer that was stilted or that used language in ways that could not be spoken. I use a very natural rhythm; I want my writing to sound like I talk.”

I love that about her. She is a spoken word artist, but when Nikki Giovanni reads a poem, she doesn’t use that “I am a POET reading a POEM” voice. Y’all know what I’m talking about. She deliberately doesn’t memorize her work, so her readings have that unvarnished feeling. In this early interview, she accounts baldly for her meteoric rise to fame, traces her history as a self-published author, and ends on a very candid note — “Artists as a rule tend to think that somebody ought to do something for them. I don’t believe that. I think that as a rule it is your work, it is your responsibility to get it out.” The accessibility of her voice has taken her places that many traditional poets have not gone.

Nikki Giovanni’s poetry is universally acclaimed, but she has always spoken to African American culture. The influence of the civil rights and black power movements resounds in her first book, Black Feeling, Black Talk. Her books for children and young adults — Rosa, Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People, and Grandmothers : Poems, Reminiscences, and Short Stories About the Keepers of Our Traditions, all aim to celebrate the accomplishments of ordinary black people, the people who endured daily hardships to help us get to where we are today. She reveals that she feels pretty good about the progress we’ve made in this CNN interview about the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

Despite all of her accolades — more than 20 honorary degrees, a list of keys to the city, book awards, and various recognitions as long as your forearm, Nikki Giovanni manages to keep it real. At least, she tries to not believe her own hype. She shrugs away cancer survivor tributes in this New York Times article: ”I get so sick of these people who talk about how cancer made them better people,” she says, sitting in the dining room of her brick ranch house in Christiansburg, Va., near Roanoke. ”I don’t think I’m any nicer or kinder. If it takes a near-death experience for you to appreciate your life, you’re wasting somebody’s time.”

Despite her modesty, Giovanni is a survivor of note and her vibrancy in the face of the disease is awesome. She recounts the difficulty of losing her mother and sister in this NPR interview, where the interviewer can’t help but notice the brightness of her personality, despite the pain of her recent loss. That appears to be her way. She keeps things simple, doesn’t want to be canonized, or depicted as more-than. In this interview with Black Press USA, she speaks to that — “I’ve had people who’ve been very complimentary, yes,” Giovanni responded in a telephone interview. “And I’m glad, but, I’m not a priest; I’m an acolyte. I’m not trying to do anything to anybody but bring a point of view.

Giovanni continues to publish her point of view at a prolific rate, and she’s the rare kind of writer who appears to actually love teaching as well. She is practically an institution at Virginia Tech — she’s been teaching there since 1987. She taught shooter Seung-Hui Cho, and remembered him as “downright mean.” She admits she felt shaky about her words at the Virginia Tech Convocation, but she created a rallying cry for the Hokie Nation — in the wake of that terrible tragedy, the words “we are Virginia Tech” were heard around the world, giving reassurance to those who were shaken to the core. And isn’t that what a great poet should do? Rise to even the bitterest of occasions and give hope to those who might feel hopeless? We all can only hope for that kind of grace under pressure.
Nikki Giovanni proved the power of poetry that day, as she’s been doing every day for a long time. Like I said, she’s all that and then some. She’s complicated, bold, gritty, and honest. In one of her most famous poems, “Ego Tripping” she declares, “I am so hip even my errors are correct.” True that! Maximum respect to Nikki Giovanni, Afrobella of the Month!

Looking for a perfect holiday gift for that intellectual bella in your family? They’ll definitely be happy to unwrap a copy of Giovanni’s latest collection, Acolytes: Poems.