#Island Black Music

[redcarpetview]

Hezekiah Walker, Karen Clark Sheard and Kierra Sheard Join Producer Stanley Brown on New Single "God Is Good"

Stanley Brown Press Image Credit: J. Monroe Scott

     Stanley Brown is Gospel music’s go-to producer and composer, especially when a project calls for a fresh but authentic sound laced with Godly reverence and an urban feel. He has worked with everyone from Karen Clark Sheard to LeAndria Johnson to T.D. Jakes. His discography also includes Run DMC, Christopher Williams, Dru Hill and a host of urban artists, making his position in the music industry multi-faceted, unique and highly sought-after.

    A humble giant in the genre, Brown has spent his entire career cultivating music projects for countless artists. Now, he is cultivating a project for himself: the release of “God Is Good” on his own Timeless Music Group label. Brokered by TITLE9, Timeless Music Group has entered into a distribution partnership with music powerhouse Roc Nation. Written and produced by Brown along with Rodney Jerkins and J. Drew Sheard, “God Is Good” is an effervescent track that is sure to become an anthem. 

     “This song represents the best that Gospel music can offer,” says Brown. “We have the greatest vocalists making a declaration that is simple and relatable, over a beat that will attract music fans from a multitude of genres. It’s a song that we had fun putting together, and that we hope motivates the masses to declare just how good God is.”

    As the song begins, Hezekiah Walker proclaims “this is the vibe we’re on, no negative energy,” and it sets the tone for the entire track. Karen Clark Sheard and Kierra Sheard trade pristine vocals that imbue every lyric with perfect-pitch joy.

   Rodney Jerkins says “God Is Good” is a song that the Gospel genre needs right now. “It is infusing the genre with something new sonically, and has a message that everyone will gravitate to.”

   “God Is Good” is the prelude to an upcoming album project that Brown is completing, which will continue his track record of blending an urban sound into contemporary Gospel music.

    “It is an honor to be in business with Roc Nation, and I am grateful that they believe enough in me and my vision to bring Timeless Music Group into their family for this project,” says Brown. “My career was shaped early on by being an executive at Island Black Music, and still having a focus on Gospel. I think when we – as a business – approach Gospel music as the crucial component of Black music that it actually is – we win.”

    “God Is Good” is available now on all digital service providers.

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[nowootwoots]

serena and kordell, heart of a woman.

[chroniclesofnadia111]

.🖤🖤🦋

[every-sanji]

[lolapath]

[flossytiptin]

Southern Girls with Grillz

[ilvcilla]

it's been a few weeks since I started ballet, best choice ever made.

[queenofdisaster88]

he’s juts sooooooOOOO🧎‍♀️‍➡️🧎‍♀️‍➡️🧎‍♀️‍➡️😻😻😻😻😋😝😝😝😝🙈🤰🤰🤰🙈🙈❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

[lichfucker]

The idea for me Max to be the “wife” in treasure island only works if they remain miserable and constantly wanting different people but also…the familiar company keeps them going. They will outlive everyone but they’ll stop wanting too. They both made the choices that lead them here and now they can only stare at each other knowing it didn’t have to end this way.

Like I don’t know if it’s mean, but sometimes I think it cheapens the tragedy if like…Max ends her life happy. Like if anything, she needs her Jim Hawkins to be a clear sign of change but she can’t do it. And in the end, her and silver are still stuck clawing at surviving.

I know this fandom isn’t a musical one. But Max and Silver reminded me a lot of the songs in “Lempicka” especially “Here it Comes” and “In the Blasted California Sun.”

oh for sure. that situation on nassau we leave max in is NOT a stable one, not by any means, and it's only a few years after the end of the series that jack gets executed and anne disappears. I imagine that that's probably when max finally pulls the plug and flees to bristol.

I don't know if I'd say the tragedy is cheapened by max having that smug power shot overlooking the tavern. I think the tragedy is complicated by it. a pyrrhic victory, of sorts. yes, she got the thing she claimed to have wanted-- the image of a little girl in the muck peering through the window at the safety and warmth afforded to people Not Like Her-- but look at all that had to be destroyed to achieve it. how long can it possibly last? even with the reinforced backing of colonial rule, not nearly so ephemeral as some independent pirate haven, this place is still just sand. it still cannot love her back. other people have articulated this point better than I can right now.

also when I said I like writing madi in bristol because I like tragedy and misery, that's not to say I think everyone would be fine and happy if max were there instead lmao. I just mean that the dynamic of two people who thought they loved each other once trying and failing to make a life in circumstances neither of them could ever have wanted is particularly compelling to me. like. for a few months in her mid-20s madi had Everything. she had a vision of the future that would see the world changed and her people freed; she had authority over a community who not just respected her but revered her; she had the good love of a good man. and ALL of that got eviscerated in an instant by that very same man, and now for the rest of her life if she wants to have a life at all she must be anchored to that man as she knows him less and less; is forced to leave her home and travel across an ocean where she scrapes a living servicing englishmen; will die long before the end of the transatlantic slave trade. how can she ever move on from silver's betrayal? how can she ever get over it? silver isn't over it. silver stays fixated on it for the rest of his life, too. silver names his parrot captain flint. silver goes back to skeleton island to find that fucking cache and when he finally gets his share he disappears just like he always dreamed of doing-- one big prize, and with it freedom-- and where does that leave madi? alone, in fucking bristol, running the spyglass, playing barmaid to white english sailors until she dies. and this, according to silver, is better than her having died in the war? what if her death had meant their victory? he still wants her to believe that THIS is preferable to that? that HE finds this preferable? still? does he even bother pretending he still loves her? does she believe he ever did anymore? did he ever tell her a single thing that's true? she cleans spilled beer off the floor. her father died a king. this is not what she wanted.

[machetelanding]

Debbie Harry at Coney Island in the 1970s.

[nowootwoots]

wow, what a pretty fucking face.

[coneyislandbabyy1]

[noahtally-famous]

music duo ella and beardo! ella sings/does the vocals, beardo beat-boxes the tune/music and/or creates synth pop stuff with his dj equipment

topher hypes them up by mentioning them in like every video on his vlog and/or social media he has

[bigmack2go]

Modern Albert DaSilva you say🧐?

[starknesskenobi]

RIP Captain Flint you would've thrived on that island in Mamma Mia!....you would've loved ABBA

[blairbarely]

"If You Could Save Yourself (You’d Save Us All)" is not just a song but a statement of collapse, a reckoning. It belongs to Quebec, Ween’s 2003 album, a project born out of exhaustion, addiction, and the slow erosion of things that once worked. By then, the band—so often irreverent, sardonic, grotesquely playful—seemed to be on the brink of something irreparable. The humor that defined them had curdled. What’s left is this track: sparse, resigned, painfully clear.

The song is about failure, but not failure as an event. Failure as a slow realization. The kind that reveals itself in the smallest moments—a forgotten promise, a missed call, the quiet understanding that the person you once believed in, perhaps even loved, cannot fix what they’ve broken. “If you could save yourself, you’d save us all.” The refrain lands with the weight of inevitability, because we already know that they won’t, or can’t save themselves, let alone anyone else.

The song’s melody is deceptively lush, its softness betraying the severity of its message. There is no anger here, only a kind of suspended grief, the knowledge that sometimes we ruin things not out of malice but because we simply don’t know how to stop ourselves. Gene Ween (Aaron Freeman) sings as though he has been rehearsing this apology for years, but knows no apology will suffice. By the time he delivers it, it feels less like an olive branch and more like a eulogy—something for the living to hold on to after the fact.

Ween’s work has always thrived on ambiguity, but this track refuses to obscure. It is brutally specific and yet universal: a song about a band, a relationship, a person’s own self-destruction, and the collateral damage left behind. It doesn’t ask for forgiveness, nor does it offer it. It just lingers in the air, a reminder that sometimes the things we love most are unsalvageable.

The final line, “I was on my knees when you knocked me down,” lingers not just because of its stark simplicity but because of its layered implications, its quiet devastation. To knock a man down while he’s already on his knees is not simply an act of brutality; it is an act stripped of honor, a deliberate violation of an unspoken rule. A man on his knees is not just vulnerable—he is pleading, resigned, exposed. And yet, this plea is met not with mercy but with force, a cruelty that feels both personal and senseless.

Freeman’s admission, “I was on my knees,” carries its own weight. It is not just an acknowledgment of physical submission but of emotional collapse, of a self-inflicted damage so profound that no external force could truly worsen it. The act of knocking him down becomes almost incidental, a final indignity piled atop his own undoing. There is no victory here, not for either side. To win against a man already brought low is no triumph; it is a hollow gesture, a meaningless exertion of power in a fight that never needed to happen. The line forces the listener to ask: What was the point?

And then there is the voice—the way Freeman delivers the line, with anger, accusation, and with a weary kind of wonder. It does not simply ask, How could you do this to me? It asks something deeper, more existential: What are we even doing here? It is not just about this moment, this act of violence; it is about the futility of the struggle itself. The line is not an ending so much as a question, one that hangs in the air long after the song fades away.

Failure, in Black Sails, is also not a singular act. It is not a mutiny, nor a betrayal, nor a single, fateful misstep. Failure in Black Sails is a slow, creeping inevitability—the kind that arrives not with a bang but with a gradual hollowing out, until nothing remains but the separation of ways. From the beginning, the show has toyed with its audience, upending expectations of what a prequel should be. It is a story of pirates, yes, but it is also a story of myth-making, of lies told to cement legacies, of truths swallowed to bury pain.

In the fourth season of Black Sails the long-standing alliance between Flint and Silver dissolves, and what remains is two men stripped to their rawest forms, their truest natures. Flint burns—consumed by the fire of his need for revenge, a flame that refuses to be extinguished no matter how much it costs him. Silver freezes—his resolve hard and cold, a glacial determination to survive at all costs. Where Flint rages, Silver endures. Where Flint sees the fight as the only path forward, Silver sees the fight as a means to an end, and when that end threatens his survival, he steps away without hesitation.

In the series finale, Captain Flint’s dream for Nassau collapses at the hands of John Silver, the man he knew better than anyone else in the world. Flint makes pleas with his friend, but in the unflinching face of Silver’s resolve, he recognizes the inescapable truth: there is no path left for him to walk. In that moment, the myth collapses into the man, and we see not the towering figure of Flint—the pirate legend, the scourge of Nassau—but James McGraw.

The inevitability of Flint’s failure has always loomed over Black Sails. The audience carries it with them, a specter hovering in every scheme, every alliance, every desperate promise of revolution. We know Treasure Island. We know history. A figure like Flint—if he had succeeded in toppling empires, in rewriting the rules of power and freedom—would not have disappeared into the shadows of either fact or fiction. His defeat is preordained, as much a part of his story as the victories that led him here. And yet, in his final monologue, we see Flint not as a man defeated but as one reshaped, resolved, the sharp edges of his ambition dulled but not broken.

The speech lays Flint bare, revealing the man he has always been—a man who reshapes himself as the world demands, not to thrive, but simply to endure. When he says, “They paint the world full of shadows and tell their children to stay close to the light,” he is not simply condemning the institutions that shaped him; he is acknowledging their complicity in his turn. These forces did not merely fail him. They created him, forged him into the weapon that could be their undoing. But Flint learns over the course of the show that these institutions are even stronger than he once thought, and the only way to combat them is to appeal to his fellow man, trusting that none of them want to live under this tyranny that plagues them.

It’s why he begins his speech with

“This is how they win.”

He’s hoping he’ll be able to appeal to an impulse for freedom in Silver.

He then pleads with his friend-

“You know this. You’re too smart not to know this.”

And still, Flint is also too smart not to anticipate Silver’s answer, the blunt, unyielding, inevitable response:

“I don’t care.”

The words fall like a blade, severing any pretense of common ground. Flint’s argument, built on intellect and fire and an almost desperate need to be understood, collapses against Silver’s cold refusal to engage. Flint has spent his life fighting shadows, believing that if he could just explain, just show the truth to someone who mattered, it might make a difference. Silver’s indifference, his calculated choice not to care, is more devastating than any physical blow. It is not just a rejection of Flint’s plea—it is a rejection of Flint himself.

If you believe Silver’s story of Flint’s end—that Flint agreed to lay down his war and be reunited with his lover Thomas in Savannah—you believe in a man who, in his final act, stripped away the layers of armor, deceit, and vengeance he had worn for so long and became something else entirely: a man willing to let go. It is not a capitulation but a transformation, a quiet surrender that reclaims the humanity he sacrificed in pursuit of his impossible dream. To walk away from the war is not to admit it was meaningless; it is to acknowledge that the war forged him, broke him, and, in some strange way, remade him. In this telling, Flint’s concession is not a loss of nerve but the ultimate act of courage—a refusal to let the fire consume him entirely.

But that is *if* you believe Silver’s story. The alternative—the one the show never dares to explicitly portray—is that Flint refused to abandon his war, that he met his end at the hands of the man who once stood at his side. It is a brutal possibility, a counter-narrative that denies Flint the peace Silver so artfully weaves into his tale. And yet, many believe it. They believe it because the Flint they know cannot stop fighting, because to lay down his arms feels as much a defeat as death itself. The absence of this ending on screen feels less like ambiguity and more like omission, as if Silver—the most potent storyteller in the show—has erased it, choosing instead to craft a version of Flint’s fate that serves his own need for resolution. To speak the truth aloud would be to admit the cost of what he has done, and so he leaves the question unanswered, the war unresolved.

The story of Black Sails was always going to end in failure for Captain Flint. But failure, here, is not the absence of victory; it is the inevitability of a man who fights against a world too vast, too unyielding, to ever truly be conquered. Flint’s story lingers not because of how it ends, but because of what the fight revealed: the fire, the humanity, and the unrelenting complexity of a man who, in the end, is as much a myth as he is a memory.

When the final season of Black Sails was announced, the audience could, for once, feel ahead of the game with a show that delighted in keeping them on their toes. Prequels come with certain obligations, after all. We think we know how this ends, because Treasure Island tells us. Flint and Silver must diverge, not merely ideologically but physically, narratively. This certainty feels like a compass in an otherwise tempestuous sea. But Black Sails was never a show for the obvious course, and its final season delights in using that foreknowledge against us. Every scene between Flint and Silver tightens the noose of inevitability, but it also plants doubt: is this the story we thought it was? Was it ever?

The brilliance of Black Sails is not just in the way it subverts the archetypes of pirates and plunder, but in the way it makes us question the archetype of storytelling itself. Each glance, each confrontation between Flint and Silver, plays out as if it knows we are watching, as if it knows we are anticipating the rift. And yet, when the moment arrives, it does not feel like the triumph of clarity, but rather the shattering of it. The show does not merely end; it folds back on itself, leaving the audience pondering whether the story was ever about truth at all.

This is the kind of brilliance that unnerves because it demands more of us. It asks us to sit with the discomfort of ambiguity, to grapple with the possibility that Flint and Silver’s tale—this grand chess match of ideologies and betrayals—may be just another myth. It refuses the clean resolution we expect of prequels, because it understands that the weight of failure, and the inevitability of parting ways, is not in how it ends but in the echoes it leaves behind. In the haunting thrill of its refusal to play by the rules, Black Sails achieves something rare: it becomes not just a story, but a piece of art that leaves a mark.