If you live under a (non-cocaine) rock, there’s a better than 100 percent chance that you were confused as to why Soulja Boy (is it still Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em?) was all over your social media timelines on Wednesday. It is the year of our lord 2019—why in West Hell would that lil “Superman dat ho” nigga be taking up…

One of the best parts about VSB over the course of our existence—which is going on 11 years(!!!!!) come March—is that we’ve had the opportunity to write about and share many different aspects of blackness in America. Some of it has been serious and some of it has been fun, but the vast majority of it has been rooted…

When I was younger, say 7 or 8 years old, I wanted to be an astronaut/pediatric neurosurgeon/inventor/NBA player. Though my life has been successful, it’s safe to say I’ve stopped just short of being the most awesome multi-hyphenate careerist of all time. By the time I hit my teen years, I wanted to be some version of…

Back when Cash Money was takin’ over for the ’99 and the 2000, at least once a week, the homies and I would trek from various points on the west and southwest sides of Atlanta to the Circuit City at Greenbriar Mall. We made this weekly pilgrimage because, for some reason, Circuit City, at least the one at Greenbriar,…

This morning started out like any other day. I hopped up out my bed, turned my swag on, looked myself in the mirror and said what’s up, and then promised myself not to throw any 10-year-old lyrics from Soulja Boy songs into anything I wrote today. But things happen. When I sat down to decide what to write about today,…

VSB, in conjunction with a black-owned and -serving bricks and mortar bookstore in Washington, D.C., Mahogany Books, started a book club a few months back. So far we’ve read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Glory Edim’s Well-Read Black Girl Anthology, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. Next month’s book is all about love by…

Like what I can only presume was the vast majority of black America, I spent a significant portion of the past weekend either watching the dream hampton produced/directed Lifetime docuseries, Surviving R. Kelly or talking about it. The discussions dominated social media and actual face-to-face interactions with…

If you’re like me, and presumably millions of other folks across Los Estados Unidos, student loan debt is a monkey on your back. I personally know people whose student loan burden ranges from $4,000 to as high as $200,000. Whether you’re on the low end or the probably-need-to-stay-high-to-manage-it high end, no…

The internet can take you down very strange rabbit holes, but sometimes those rabbit holes remind you of good times past. Such was the case recently as I perused Facebook looking to see what shenanigans the people I follow were up to. Somebody posted the music video for “Bist du down?” a 2017 single with a ’90s-era…

Radical acceptance. The Serenity Prayer. “It is what it is.” That’s just a few of the myriad methods many of us employ when trying to come to grips with shit we don’t like. You didn’t get that Chrimmuh bonus you just knew you deserved? It sucks, but being unwilling to accept it isn’t going to change that reality. You…

Attending an HBCU tends to unlock one’s awareness about the other hundred or so HBCUs that you’re not attending. Some of us get to school and know the big name ones, but our football and basketball schedules put schools like Benedict College, Paine College, Lane College and Lemoyne-Owen College (to name a few) on the…

When many of us think about athletic paths for our children to follow, competitive swimming isn’t typically high up on the list. Black Kids Swim (BKS) is an organization trying to change both the way we look at swimming in general and competitive swimming as an outlet and scholarship source for black children. We…

Since the dawn of time, there has always been tension between “old school” and “new school.” Nowhere is this shit more common than in the world of hip-hop, though it’s been happening in R&B, too. Where’s the love? Despite the nostalgia we are all coked up on, half the groups we swear to love—just because they’re…

I don’t try to make bad choices. Really, I don’t. In fact, I don’t think most people set out to do make them either. I think we all end up in a place we hoped not to be and in retrospect say, well, that was probably a bad idea.

OK, Jacquees might be an idiot. Perhaps a brilliant idiot since before last week’s “King of R&B” (of his generation) moment, I couldn’t point him out in a lineup, much less tell you the name of a single, solitary song he sang. But now? That pendulum has swung the entire other way. Again, as much as I want to call that…

I’m not sure if I qualify as a sneakerhead or not. Most people that come into my home and see my shoe collection would probably say that I am, but I follow several people on social media whose collection of shoes would look at mine, call it a bitch and then give it a wedgie. Now, comparing myself to sneaker addicts is…

I’m about to admit something that I was originally ashamed of because I thought I’d been neglecting my responsibilities (family, work, Black Jesus, etc.) because of how much time I clearly had spent playing Candy Crush. Turns out, what I’m about to admit actually makes me feel shamed for having thought I was doing…

It looks officially official: New York Undercover is coming back. A deal has been struck for a pilot production with ABC. If you’ll remember back in the ’90s, New York Undercover was a FOX television show, following Martin and Living Single on Thursday nights in that murderer’s row of black television watch-hood. The…

I don’t know what constitutes R&B anymore. Rather, I don’t know who is an R&B artist anymore. That’s the first thing that popped into my head when Decatur, Ga., singer Rodriguez Jacquees Broadnax, popularly known as Jacquees, proclaimed himself the king of R&B for this generation.

If there’s one movie I’ve seen a possible, actual, literal 1,000-plus times in life, it’s The Sound of Music. If you grew up overseas on military bases in the 1980s, movies were your viewing pleasure. The Department of Defense provided us with one channel, the Armed Forces Network (or AFN, for short), and decided what…