If you’d been in the back seat the other night, as my son Luke was zooming down the Kennedy Expressway—he was taking me home before heading back to school in Bloomington—here’s one of the things you would’ve heard jumping out of the radio.
J. Cole, “Power Trip” (feat. Miguel), 2013
a week in New Orleans: day five
Big Freedia
“Na Who Mad,” 2011
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Talking, walking around town, performing, etc.
Pitchfork TV, 2013
keep on dancing
Then suddenly I could hear Q-Tip—blessed Q-Tip!—not a synthesizer, not a vocoder, but Q-Tip, with his human voice, rapping over a human beat. And the top of my skull opened to let human Q-Tip in, and a rail-thin man with enormous eyes reached across a sea of bodies for my hand. He kept asking me the same thing over and over: You feeling it? I was. My ridiculous heels were killing me, I was terrified I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delight that “Can I Kick It?” should happen to be playing at this precise moment in the history of the world, and was now morphing into “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I took the man’s hand. The top of my head flew away. We danced and danced. We gave ourselves up to joy.
—Zadie Smith, “Joy,” The New York Review of Books, 1/10/13
A Tribe Called Quest, “Can I Kick It?” (album, 1990; single, 1991)
what you’d be listening to if you were 21*
Kendrick Lamar, “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe”
Lady Gaga mix, released 11/8/12
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Album version (good kid, m.A.A.d city), released 10/22/12
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lagniappe
reading table
David Ferry, “The Birds,” Boston University, 2011
This poem appears in Ferry’s latest collection, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, which just won the National Book Award. Ferry, now in his late 80s, has said of the book’s title: “It’s not entirely personal. I think everybody’s slightly off the rails. Me too, but I don’t mean it’s my exclusive territory. Yours and mine.”
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*Based on a sample of one, my son Luke, who’s home for the holiday.
The voice, too, is a rhythm instrument.
Yasiin Bey, AKA Mos Def
Live (studio performance), Paris, 3/5/12*
*“Quiet Dog,” “Niggas In Poorest,” “Sunshine/Screwface,” “Forever Alive”
two takes
Robert Glasper Experiment, “Always Shine” (feat. Lupe Fiasco & Bilal)
TV show (David Letterman), 2/29/12
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Recording, Black Radio (2012)
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Jazz, classical, R&B: so much great music, no matter the genre, shares a particular quality—density.
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reading table
It’s as if your body were itself a person
And the person wasn’t you.—Frederick Seidel, “Track Bike” (excerpt), London Review of Books, 7/19/12
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art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago (between court hearings at the nearby federal court building)
Willem de Kooning, Untitled XI (1975)
more favorites
Digable Planets with Lester Bowie (trumpet), Joe Sample (keyboard), Melvin “Wah-Wah Watson” Ragin (guitar), “Flying High in the Brooklyn Sky,” live, 1990s
(Originally posted 3/23/11.)
*****
Talib Kweli, “Get By”
Live, New York, 2007
(Originally posted 9/29/09.)
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Recording & Video, 2002
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Lupe Fiasco, “Hip-Hop Saved My Life”
Live, Los Angeles, 2008
(Originally posted 9/14/09.)
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Recording & Video, 2008
Happy (Day After) Father’s Day
Nas (son) with Olu Dara (father), “Bridging the Gap” (2004)
(sampling Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy”)
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lagniappe
Here’s more from the old man.
David Murray Octet, “Dewey’s Circle” (DM, tenor saxophone; Olu Dara, trumpet; Butch Morris, cornet; George Lewis, trombone; Henry Threadgill, alto saxophone; Anthony Davis, piano; Wilber Morris, bass; Steve McCall, drums), Ming (Black Saint, 1980)
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Muddy Waters, “Mannish Boy” (Chess, 1955)
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lagniappe
reading table
People are mysterious, unfathomable—like divinities: natural objects for reverence. But our habits of thought turn the people around us into objects, the means for our self-protection.
—Lama John Makransky, “Family Practice,”
Tricycle, Summer 2001
what’s new
The Very Best, “Yoshua Alikuti” (Nairobi, Kenya), 2012
Any resemblance to this is purely intentional.
Lil Wayne, “A Milli,” 2008
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Here’s a big shout-out to my son Alex, who just finished his last week of classes, graduates from Harvard next month, and introduced me to The Very Best in the first place.
Shabazz Palaces, live (studio performance, KEXP-FM), 2011
These guys—their mix of drums, mbira, electronics—call to mind the AACM’s* tagline: ancient to the future.
*Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Fred Anderson, Leroy Jenkins, et al.).
music clip of the day 