On “May the Lord Watch,” the legendary Durham duo is in classic form, underscoring their influence on the hip-hop landscape from which they’ve been absent for too long.
Brandon Soderberg
Bio: Brandon Soderberg lives in Baltimore, where he writes the No Trivia hip-hop column for Spin.Link: http://no-trivia.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/notrivia
Posted inMusic
Onstage or in a Museum, George Clinton’s Cult of Personality Keeps on Funking
GEORGE CLINTON Saturday, April 29, 7:45 p.m., $30–$265 Carolina Theatre, Durham www.aocfestival.org It wasn’t a national election year, but in 1975 George Clinton was campaigning with a whole new plan for the country. On the title track to Parliament’s Chocolate City, over an instrumental brimming with black music history, past, present, and futuresearching Coltrane horn-drone, […]
Posted inMusic
Moogfest 2016: How Moogfest’s Grimes, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Mykki Blanco Mess with Memory
Thanks to that disorganized archive of damn near everything that we call the Internet, the flotsam of the past seems permanently accessible for the future. So many memories now exist in a state of digital immortality, documented in Twitter and Facebook streams of thoughts and, before that, through MySpace or Friendster profiles, LiveJournal or Angelfire […]
Posted inMusic
Art of Cool 2016: Finding Modern Democracy in Modern Jazz
Jazz, the critic Stanley Crouch wrote in 1995, “is democracy in sound.” It is, he continued, “the highest American musical form because it is the most comprehensive, possessing an epic frame of emotional and intellectual reference, sensual clarity and spiritual radiance.” Essentially, Crouch was suggesting that, through jazz, we witness a few or many people […]
Posted inReviews
Record review: The Foreign Exchange’s Tales from the Land of Milk and Honey
For The Foreign Exchange, romance has often been communicated through the parlance of war. On the group’s 2010 album, Authenticity, released around the time Little Brother finally reached its end, Phonte Coleman sang, “Love is at worst an excuse, at best it’s a truce/So what is the use?” But five years later, on the new […]
Posted inReviews
Record review: Nicolay’s City Lights Vol. 3: Soweto
The City Lights series, by The Foreign Exchange producer Nicolay, transforms his travels into obliquely personal instrumentals. The albums are about a place’s effect on him, not some cheap cherry-picking of ethnic sounds set to a beat. Nicolay’s background is rooted in a complex cultural give-and-take, so these are transmissions from someone who grew up […]
Posted inMusic
Art of Cool: How Roy Ayers and his disciple Robert Glasper have used jazz to infiltrate soul, hip-hop and electronica
Roy Ayers Friday, April 24 7:30 p.m. $65–$125 Durham Armory 220 Foster St. Durham www.aocfestival.org Robert Glasper Trio Friday, April 24 midnight $65–$125Durham Armory 220 Foster St. Durham www.aocfestival.org Tribute concerts can feel like burial ceremonies for the living. But at a live 2011 homage to vibraphonist and icon Roy Ayers by hip-hop-loving jazz pianist […]
Posted inMusic
Sage Francis helped launch a self-serious revolution, but he let it beat him, too
Sage Francis with B. Dolan, Cas One, Seez Mics Monday, June 30, 9 p.m., $18–$20 Cat’s Cradle The hip-hop underground had gone cold and codified more than a decade ago, waddling in predictability just like the Puff Daddy pop-rap it allegedly opposed. And then the frame broke again: The chip-on-the-shoulder, puffed-chest raps of Sage Francis […]
Posted inMusic
New York legends Mobb Deep stay scowling
Mobb Deep with GQ and Big Remo Tuesday, April 1 8:30 p.m., $17 Kings Barcade Mobb Deep came into the rap world scowling. On the cover of their 1993 debut Juvenile Hell, the two baby-faced Queensbridge kids, Prodigy and Havoc, lounge on the lip of a dumpster, staring down the barrel of a camera. Prodigy […]
Posted inMusic
Mykki Blanco represents the new normal
A few weeks ago, Mykki Blanco—a hyper-poetic noise-rapper who often dresses like a woman on stage—released a darn-near industrial rap track called “Booty Bamboo” that begins with Blanco slurring, “Y’all know I’m from North Carolina, right?” INDY readers may find that shout-out more heartening than surprising. See, back in 2002, the INDY afforded Blanco—who was […]