
MFT: Egypt Sherrod Recalls First Big Break From Cathy Hughes
You may know Egypt Sherrod from years of dominating urban radio, or more recently flipping properties alongside her husband Mike Jackson on the fan-favorite HGTV series, Married to Real Estate .
However, her path to stardom wasn't without mentorship— it hinged on a singular moment of trust and belief from media powerhouse and our very own founder, Cathy Hughes. Egypt was simply a budding star, juggling aspirations and a crowded field of voices, when her first big break came via the woman responsible for Urban One and redefining Black media.
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In this 'My First Time' story, Egypt brings us back to a time in her career when she was striving to carve out a niche. Cathy Hughes, known for her keen eye in spotting talent, not only offered her kind words but also imparted lessons that would shape her career. Ultimately, it was Hughes' mentorship that left a lasting mark. Egypt learned what it meant to lead as a woman of color in media, navigating challenges while amplifying voices in the community. Hughes became a cherished mentor, proving that representation and opportunity can spark lasting change. What stood out for Egypt was not just Cathy's confidence in her skill, but the unwavering support she provided behind the scenes. Hughes would take the time to offer candid feedback, pushing Egypt to refine her on-air presence and discover her unique voice
The article 'MFT: Egypt Sherrod Recalls First Big Break From Cathy Hughes' was created with the help of Jasper.AI
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Chicago Tribune
2 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Column: Author's new creative outlet is writing songs, made into music via AI
Roll over Stephen Sondheim, tell Chuck Berry the news: Champ Clark has gone into the music business. There is little that surprises me about this creative man, who has had a career that has included writing for People magazine for decades; acting on local stages; writing a one-man play about Marlon Brando's ill-fated son Christian that was performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; writing in 2005 'Shuffling to Ignominy,' the first biography of Black film actor Lincoln Perry, known by the stage name as Stepin Fetchit; delivering singing telegrams and on and on. Most recently, he has been writing novels, creating four fine books with a protagonist named Drake Haynes, a slightly jaded former news reporter now writing an advice column and solving crimes. Clark reminded me that he has some musical background, that he was again taking accordion lessons and that he has seven of the instruments. He also has banjos and says, 'If I add bagpipes, I'd have a trifecta of the most hated musical instruments.' He admits to being 'a terrible musician, a terrible singer. But I am a decent songwriter.' He started writing songs, he says, 'About a dozen years ago when I fell into an unrequited love, which is a great impetus for songwriting. I've since written about 100 songs, though none won over the object of my affection.' His musical career recently came back to life and the reason is artificial intelligence. 'That was almost by accident,' he says. 'I had 15 friends, most from Chicago, help me out on my new album, performing the first 15 tracks recorded live, and then I ran out of friends and went to AI and started using that. 'It is a little scary, I will admit that, but I have decided to embrace it. I give my lyrics and just select the kind of feeling I want, what kind of style, what instruments,' he says. 'Do I want country? Broadway? Rock? And then in an hour or so, I will be delivered basically what I heard in my head.' We talked about the questions surrounding artificial intelligence, and about creating music in a way that takes musicians out of the creative process (except in the way live musicians' work gets sampled and copied by AI websites). He tells me that there are a number of source sites he has used. 'Some have free trials and even when they do charge, it's only a few dollars and you can keep going, revising until you get the sound you want,' he says. 'Is it cheating? Are the results too slick and not human enough? Is it ethical? Who knows? These are the things currently being debated about all uses of AI. What I do know is that AI is not going anywhere. It's here to stay. So we might as well get used to it and learn how to properly and ethically use it. 'I believe I'm doing this with my songs. All the words and music are mine. They don't get changed. It's the performance of these that is AI, but carefully and thoroughly and creatively controlled by myself.' 'I've learned since completing the album that some folks object to the whole idea of the use of AI in music … and elsewhere. I get this. But for me, it's been a godsend. Now I can put down my words and basic melody on paper and, through careful thought and discernment, produce something that reflects what I have in my head … even at three in the morning.' On his latest album, 'Chicory,' there are 35 songs and I was especially taken with 'Last Night (Back in Chicago)' because it arises from his affection for the city in which he spent many of his formative years. He has lived in Santa Monica, California, for three decades, but was 16 when he moved to our area from the suburbs of New York City in the summer of 1969 with his parents and three sisters. The family settled in Kenilworth, that fashionable suburb befitting his father's position as the new chief of Time magazine's Chicago bureau. His father was also named Champ. It's a family name, passed down with variations from his great-grandfather, James Beauchamp Clark, who was speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1911 to 1919, and his grandfather, Bennett Champ Clark, who was a U.S. senator from Missouri. After a couple of relatively uneventful years at New Trier High School, he spent a semester at Ripon College in Wisconsin before coming home and working as a dishwasher, Christmas tree salesman and bookstore clerk. He studied dance. He taught an after-school program and developed a filmmaking program for kids. He was an artist-in-residence at the Art Institute and also made a living as a house cleaner, artist model, waiter and bartender. He worked for a summer with Cirque du Soleil around the same time he started working in the offices of the People magazine bureau here. He then began to act on the stages of various local companies and was for seven years an ensemble member of Center Theater. He got some good reviews and some not-so-good reviews. He fell in love with a woman. They got married and, after a couple of years, decided to move to California so he could try to make it as an actor. He became a father instead and worked as a reporter and writer for People magazine's Los Angeles bureau. He and his wife divorced and, since being laid off by People a decade ago, he has been freelancing, exploring whatever creative urge strikes. His daughter just got married. His music, he knows, is unlikely to make him rich. 'The songs are meant, of course, to entertain listeners,' he says. 'But maybe they might attract recording artists, and maybe one of them will want to record a song of mine. Making tapes and sending them to artists I admire would be a much harder road.'


Boston Globe
2 hours ago
- Boston Globe
At the Peabody Essex Museum, tracking the American Experiment through more than two centuries of art
SALEM — 'Making History,' the immodest title of a somewhat more modest exhibition newly opened at the Peabody Essex Museum, promises much and delivers some of it. Gleaned from the considerable collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts are 86 works by American artists across eras and generations, some wildly famous and many not at all so. What's more American than make or break? Past the marquee names — Winslow Homer, Alice Neel, Georgia O'Keeffe, Andrew Wyeth, Stuart Davis — a theme emerges; or should I say, is driven home? 'Making America' isn't subtle and can feel simplistic in its corrective effort to wedge neglected branches of American art history into a canon that's still too narrow. Even so, it's a worthy cause, especially this weekend, as America looks at itself and tries to decide if it likes what it sees. 'Making History' is a reminder that the American Experiment is a forever-unfinished work in progress, and offers a broader base to build on. PAFA, in Philadephia, has its own story to tell, too. Established in 1805, it was one of the first academies to admit women and Black artists. 'Making art is a process of making history,' a block of text on the wall proclaims; in national mythmaking, artists matter. 'Making History,' with fewer than 100 pieces, can't offer much more than a skim of a complex and fractious national narrative still being fought over — and maybe never more than right now — but it's a meaningful one. Advertisement Horace Pippin, 'John Brown Going to His Hanging,' 1942. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia In the first gallery, competing visions of an uneasy country rub up against each other: Benjamin West's 'Penn's Treaty with the Indians,' 1771–72, a shining vision of revisionist history — colonists kneeling before their Indigenous hosts in gratitude and respect — shares space with Horace Pippin's 'John Brown Going to His Hanging,' 1942, and Alice Neel's 'Investigation of Poverty at the Russell Sage Foundation,' 1933. Advertisement Myth, meet reality: West's beatific scene was painted a century after the British colonist William Penn's Alice Neel, 'Investigation of Poverty at the Russell Sage Foundation,' 1933. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. © The Estate of Alice Neel, Courtesy of The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner The painting's golden glow further tarnishes against its gallery mates. Neel's, a dun and gloomy scene of Depression-era suffering — the woman at the frame's center, Neel wrote, was living in an overturned car in New York with her seven children — is an unflinching document of urban poverty. Pippin's, dense, claustrophobic and bleak, depicts the final moments of the firebrand abolitionist John Brown, who tried to mount an anti-enslavement revolt in 1859. Pippin, who was Black, was also self-taught, making his inclusion in the esteemed Academy collection all the more poignant. Painters like West have long been pillars of the canon; for generations, they held it up on their own. Recent years have seen a broader, more enlightened view begin to inflect its standard fare. Examples are many and close at hand, from the Advertisement Charles Willson Peale, 'The Artist in His Museum,' 1822. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia That display is just downstairs, and withers 'Making History' a little by comparison; fuller and more deliberate, the stories it unpacks are a model of what a museum collection should look like in this fractious moment. 'Making History,' as a traveling show, feels more general and rootless, because it is. And though it can feel like supplementary reading, there's a richness not to be ignored. Mid-exhibition, it labors a little; Charles Willson Peale's 'The Artist in His Museum,' 1822, a self-portrait of the PAFA founder literally raising a curtain on the many wonders of the collection he's assembled, is a gesture of self-aggrandizing pride. It lifts the veil, if you'll pardon the pun, on early museum-making as a practice of pilfering, rounding up exotic bits from far-flung cultures deemed as primitive as a gesture of dominance and ownership — critical for a young nation's sense of itself. I would have liked to see that explored — indeed, the exhibition is begging for it — but Peale's self-portrait is paired with a 1977 self-portait by Joan Brown, same-scaled and similarly self-declarative, which makes another very valid point about the exclusion of women from the American canon. Barkley L. Hendricks, 'J. S. B. III,' 1968; and Gilbert Stuart, 'George Washington (The Lansdowne Portrait),' 1796. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia But the show comes to life in other matchups: Gilbert Stuart's iconic 'George Washington (The Lansdowne Portrait),' 1796, sharing space with portraits by contemporary Black painters James Brantley and Barkley Hendricks. There are so many ways to go with this — Washington, paragon of freedom, crafting a nation of freedom denied to both men's ancestors, for one — but let's stick with the pictures. Stuart's portrait has the sheen of stiff aristocratic hagiography — Thomas Gainsborough and the British Royals, say — with the ornamentation of Republican Rome, the classical democratic ideal. Brantley paints himself in shadow — 'Brother James,' 1968 — wrapped in a grimy American flag; he had just returned from the war in Vietnam, waged in the name of a freedom far from ideal. Hendricks, meanwhile, is just cool, cool, cool — his 'J. S. B. III,' 1968, has a relaxed and confident swagger, an avatar for the frank depictions of self-possessed Black subjects to which he devoted his painting life. The counterpoint he makes with Washington is just as powerful as Brantley's: He meets fusty myth with the indomitable joy of his own now. Advertisement The show is never quite so socially powerful and vibrant as it is right here — its apex, come too soon. From there, we follow what's essentially a long denouement, through old favorites and themes of quotidian American life and on to the landscape — inseparable, city or countryside, from the nation's self-imagining. Myth pervades here, too — Homer's beloved 'Fox Hunt,' 1893, with its red fox struggling through snow to evade hungry crows, an allegory of the elemental cycle of life and death — and nudges up against the anxiety of modern progress. Nearby, Childe Hassam's 'The Hovel and the Skyscraper,' 1904, captures rapid, inexorable change: From his apartment window on the Upper West Side, construction scaffolding frames a riding stable in the near distance — soon, you can guess, not to be. Advertisement I would have loved to linger long and more deeply on this theme, bound up as it is in every aspect of American history and art. There's a continuum hinted at, but unexplored: From the Hudson River School with More friction means more truth, not to mention a better story. 'Making History' hints at frictions, but mostly defers. Its deference is largely in favor of beauty, I'll give it that. I'll never turn down a chance to see the soft focus of an Arthur Dove landscape, more feeling than fact, and his 'Naples Yellow Morning,' 1935, loose and dreamy, is pure pleasure. But pleasure is far too easy, and especially right now. History is being rewritten as we speak. Don't look away. MAKING HISTORY: 200 YEARS OF AMERICAN ART FROM THE PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY OF THE FINE ARTS At Peabody Essex Museum, 161 Essex St., Salem. Through Sept. 21. 978-745-9500, Murray Whyte can be reached at

Hypebeast
5 hours ago
- Hypebeast
Nike Air Max 95 "Black Border" Returns Later This Year
Name:Nike Air Max 95 'Black Border'Colorway:White/Hyper Jade-Black-Metallic SilverSKU:IM7409-100MSRP:$190 USDRelease Date:Fall 2025Where to Buy:Nike As your editorial copywriter, I'm thrilled to report on the highly anticipated return of a cult classic from Nike's iconic Air Max lineage. Nikeis diving deep into its celebrated archives to bring back a fan-favorite, much to the delight of sneaker enthusiasts worldwide. TheNike Air Max 95'Black Border,' a distinctive colorway originally released in 1996, is set for a highly anticipated return in Fall 2025. This release will be a key highlight in the ongoing celebration of the Air Max 95's 30th anniversary, blending nostalgic appeal with subtle modern enhancements. Designed by Sergio Lozano, the Air Max 95 has always stood out for its human anatomy-inspired design and visible forefoot Air cushioning. The 'Black Border' iteration, known for its bold, contrasting paneling, deviates from the model's more common gradient fades, offering a striking two-tone aesthetic. The 2025 retro will feature a clean white base across its signature layered upper, meticulously complemented by stark black overlays across the side panels—the detail that lends the shoe its 'Black Border' moniker. Vibrant Hyper Jade accents will provide pops of color on the tongue, the miniature Swoosh logos on the heel, and within the visible Air units in both the heel and forefoot, capturing the essence of the original. What makes this return particularly significant for today's sneaker collectors is the incorporation of Nike's updated Big Bubble heel unit. Expected to retail for $190 USD, the Nike Air Max 95 'Black Border' will be available at select Nike Sportswear retailers.