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More About

• Shawn Taylor
• LL Cool J
• Eve Ensler
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Hip-Hop and Rap

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It's going to be tough for us, or for anyone, not to make bad jokes about Big Black Penis: Misadventures in Race and Masculinity. Author Shawn Taylor's main point is that being a black man is complicated – for example, it is both dangerous and funny. In the course of some autobiography (the appearance of LL Cool J in Krush Groove is Defining Life Moment (DLM) #2), he functions as a male Eve Ensler of sorts, bringing penis back. "If I call it a 'penis,'" he writes, "most people look at me as if I had spat on their mother. 'It's not a penis, man! It's a dick!'" Please note we're not using a common metaphor to say that the whole project must have taken a considerable amount of courage to complete. Taylor is also the author of Tribe Called Quest: People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, part of the excellent 33 1/3 series of short books on individual records.
Fri., Aug. 8, 7:30 p.m., 2008