On Theme

Throughout history and across the world, Black people have used protest songs to boost morale and inspire action. In this episode, Katie and Yves explore the history of protest songs created to uplift major social movements, including the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.

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Katie and Yves delve into the often overlooked yet impactful role of Black artists in times of war.

Join us as we unravel the stories behind the artwork, songs, and poetry that have played a crucial role in shaping perceptions, challenging systemic injustices, and advocating for change on the frontlines and beyond.

We also talk with surrealist blues poet, aja monet, about how she uses art to support Palestine.

Read aja’s poems in My Mother Was A Freedom Fighter

Listen to aja's album When the Poems Do What They Do

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What stories are you looking forward to this year? What stories will you create? Katie and Yves chat about all the stories to come in 2024. 

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We’re diving into a realm filled with characters who make us grit our teeth, furrow our brows, and sometimes—let's admit it—make us itch to reach into the story and deliver a perfectly executed whack! 

Listen to see if you’d slap the same characters we would.

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Haters get a bad wrap and for good reason. They demean, ridicule, and well...hate, but they are often the catalyst in many of the Black stories we know and love.

We hear about haters in songs, memoirs, acceptance speeches. It’s possible that without haters, we would only have a fraction of the Black stories we have today.

In this episode, Katie and Yves discuss haters’ place in the Black storytelling ecosystem. 

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Katie and Yves head to the movies to watch American Fiction. Afterward, they discuss the anatomy of the Black Struggle Industrial Complex™ using examples from the movie and Erasure by Percival Everett.

Buy Erasure by Percival Everett

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Katie and Yves talk with Ambar Johnson, an oral historian who created a guide specifically to help collect family stories. We discuss the dos and don’ts of gathering family histories, and Yves uses the guide to interview a family member.

Download Ambar Johnson’s guide on collecting family stories at dandelyonsstudios.myflodesk.com

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Some rappers put the brakes on their music careers and flipped the script — literally. In this episode, Katie and Yves discuss three different hip-hop artists who made their way down the rap-to-act pipeline and consider how we can reflect on their reinventions.

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With hip-hop in its 50th year, the music genre and cultural phenomenon has gone from the block to the world’s stage.

In this episode, Katie and Yves are taking it back to the block (and the cubicle and the classroom and the grocery store checkout line) and delving into the role of amateur rappers play in storytelling.

Discover how these part-time rappers become modern-day griots, chronicling the highs, lows, and hidden truths of their neighborhoods.

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Here at On Theme, the season to give thanks for Black stories is year-round, ya dig? As a small token of gratitude, Katie and Yves dedicate an episode to their appreciation for Carrie Mae Weems’s “Kitchen Table Series” and Fannie Lou Hamer’s 1964 speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Check out Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series

Read “Carrie Mae Weems by Dawoud Bey” in Bomb Magazine

Listen to Fannie Lou Hamer’s full speech

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