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Jade was an R&B group active during the early to mid 1990s. The group consisted of Tonya Kelly, Joi Marshall, and Di Reed. During their brief yet successful career, Jade released two studio albums, one live album, and a string of popular R&B singles. Jade has not released any albums since 1994. Former member Joi Marshall continues to sing as an independent gospel artist and released an album, Testimony and Praise, on September 25, 2007. She also wrote the book Answers to the 20 Most Asked Questions about the Music Business in 2004. Rod Stewart hand picked Di Reed to sing backup for his 2008 world tour.

Dead Prez is an American underground political hip hop duo composed of stic.man and M-1. They are known for their confrontational style combined with socialist and pan-Africanist lyrics. These lyrics tend to focus on revolution, veganism, institutional racism, critical pedagogy, police, capitalism, education, prison systems, religion, activism against governmental repression, and corporate control over the media, especially hip-hop record labels. Dead Prez made their stance clear on their first album, declaring on the lead song, “I’m a African” that the group is “somewhere between N.W.A. and P.E.” Read the rest of this entry »

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“Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday. It condemned American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans that had occurred chiefly in the South but also in all regions of the United States.

“Strange Fruit” began as a poem written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish high-school teacher from the Bronx, about the lynching of two black men. He published under the pen name Lewis Allan.
Barney Josephson, the founder of Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, New York’s first integrated nightclub, heard the song and introduced it to Billie Holiday. Holiday performed the song at Cafe Society in 1939. She said that singing it made her fearful of retaliation. Holiday later said that because the imagery in “Strange Fruit” reminded her of her father, she persisted in singing it. The song became a regular part of Holiday’s live performances.