Category: music (page 2 of 4)

The cast of the movie Sinners during the performance of "Magic What We Do" in the film.

May 1, 2025 / 2 Comments

‘Sinners’ Sings the Blues

They say the truth hurts, so I lie to you

Yes, I lied to you

I love the blues

—Miles Caton (as Sammie in the movie “Sinners”)

Sammie’s song for his father is called “I Lied to You”(Co-written by Ludwig Göransson and Raphael Saadiq). Sinners begins at the end with this preacher’s boy returning to his family’s makeshift church after surviving the harrowing night at the Juke. As Sammie holds onto the neck of his destroyed guitar for dear life, his father begs him to put the guitar down and embrace the pulpit. Isn’t all he’s seen enough to give up the devil’s playthings and stay safe with him and pray?

Sammie can’t do that. He loves the blues.

Sammie loves the blues because he loves life and all that comes with it. Born into poverty under Jim Crow, Sammie greets each day with gratitude, kindness, curiosity, and a desire to share his incredible gifts with the world.

I didn’t love the blues—maybe I never knew it. I have always associated blues with its maudlin themes, ignoring until now that joy stands right next to it. I have long preferred the rhythm of R&B—that boogie woogie—over the wobbly strings of a guitar or the warbles from a harmonica. Blues thrives in contradiction. It loves the saint and the sinner equally. It doesn’t seek to hide from grief, anger, frustration, weakness, or the devil. To do so would also deny the pleasure and possibility of being alive.

Ludwig Göransson’s score and the soundtrack album for this movie have me considering the blues with fresh ears. On the In Proximity Podcast, Göransson and Ryan Coogler discuss their love of the genre as they explain how the film’s music came together. Coogler finds a throughline between “Tha Crossroads” by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and the work of folks like Buddy Guy, who appears as the elder Sammie in the post-credits scene. Hip-hop artists Rod Wave, Young Dolph, and OG DAYV appear on the soundtrack.

Where “Tha Crossroads” lingers in grief and mourning, I find my hip-hop blues in De La Soul’s stripped-down reflections. Songs like “I Am I Be” and “Trying People” (see also The Grind Date & And The Anonymous Nobody…) remove artifice, mute the boom bap, and bare the soul of rappers taking stock of their lot in life at specific moments in time. These songs provide clarity and hope during challenging times, not by false bravado but through vulnerability and tenderness. Their mere existence as marvels of creativity let me know that whatever I’m going through, I will survive it. I may even thrive.

That is the motivation of all the film’s protagonists. They all buy into the Juke Joint dream of the Smokestack Twins because they can see the possibilities despite the dangers. They all gladly trade the doldrums of their everyday for just the chance to feel truly free away from the watchful eyes of their oppressors. By the end, most lose their lives but never give up their agency.

I’m starting to understand the blues.

In the film, Delta Slim tells the tragic tale of a friend who was a victim of the oppressive racism of 1930s Mississippi before turning his harmonica into a beautiful expression of all the trouble he’s seen and endured. My mind turns to Nina Simone and the unimaginable woe she conveys in her performance of “Mississippi Goddamn.” Simone doesn’t appear on the soundtrack or the official playlist that Coogler and Göransson put together, but Alice Smith does. She covered Simone’s “I Put A Spell on You” on a tribute album from a decade ago. In the weeks before the release of Sinners, I just so happened to be revisiting Smith’s debut album, For Lovers, Dreamers, and Me.

The surreal montage “Magic What We Do” awakens the lead vampire’s interest in Sammie in the movie and has stirred something deep in me. I’m weaving across genre, time, space, and race, as I reckon with my relationship with this powerful music.

Later in the podcast, Göransson refers to the silver-adorned instrument Sammie carries with him throughout the film as “The Hero Guitar.” Woody Guthrie—the American folk singer and songwriter inspired by the black blues artists of his time—often performed with a hero guitar of his own. Guthrie’s axe wasn’t meant to ward off vampires like those in Sinners. He wanted his audiences to know that “This Machine Kills Fascists.”

Woody Guthrie holding a guitar with the words 'This Machine Kills Fascists' written on it, promoting social justice through music.

Those were the monsters of his time. And ours.

I may not be well-versed in B.B. King, Albert King, Geeshie Wiley, Lightnin’ Hopkins, or Professor Longhair. Yet, I understand their willingness to acknowledge the trauma of the human condition while still delighting in the wonders of life.

I lied to you.

I love the blues.

A hip hop concert with dancer CeSee center stage as DJ House Shoes spins records to her right and other performers mill about behind her.

April 19, 2025 / 1 Comment

Shades of madlib

The floor of The Echoplex pulses as bass pumps through the speakers. CeSee, in her black tank top and tutu, is center stage, freestyling her flowing dance moves in perfect harmony with every scratch, jab, and trick that each DJ delivers. Stacy Epps, Wildchild, and Sway Calloway hype the crowd, urging us to make noise for the performers, Los Angeles, and hip-hop.

But no one lets us forget why we’re here: to raise funds and honor the residents of Altadena, who were devastated by January’s wildfires. This Tribute and Benefit concert centers around one resident in particular: Otis Jackson Jr., the DJ, composer, producer, and rapper Madlib.

A promotional graphic for Madlib, featuring bold text that reads 'MADLIB' against a starry background. In the bottom section, there are logos for various sponsors and a QR code with the instruction to 'SCAN HERE TO DONATE.'

The last time I was at The Echoplex might have been more than a decade ago—in 2014, for a show called Ultimate Breaks and Beats. I don’t want to believe that much time has passed, but so much of these past ten years has been a blur. Even these months since the fires in January have been lost in a haze of the near-daily disasters that have defined 2025. Here I am, though, among heads of all generations, seeking fellowship through breaks and beats.

From 7 p.m. until the wee hours, a roster of beloved DJs, beatmakers, and Rhymesayers rotate through 20-30 minute sets, crafting soundscapes from Madlib’s vast catalog, including unreleased joints, deep cuts, and rare grooves. Linafornia and DJ Benji B deftly open the show. Then comes House Shoes, whose presence yanks me back to the 2000s when I was chasing turntablists across every venue in town, trying to sustain the high achieved through deft blends and scratch mastery. Shoes mixes Madlib with Dilla in an “LA to Detroit” set that awakens something long dormant in me. The Gaslamp Killer follows with his signature chaos, spinning a hard-hitting electric fusion ending with an inspired blend of Kendrick Lamar’s “Squabble Up” and its sample, Debbie Deb’s “When I Hear Music” that is our return flight to the City of Angels.

Rhythms of the Village takes the stage at the show’s midway point. The cultural hub and store are among the event’s beneficiaries. Their performance is the night’s only non-hip-hop set. Before the djembe drums and singing begin, Onochie Chukwurah—a Nigerian elder and co-founder of the Altadena center for African heritage—addresses the crowd. “Even though the fires took our business, they didn’t take our lives,” he says. The din of the crowd quiets as he commands our attention—his words and the soulful performance root us. What could have been a bathroom break becomes a balm for the soul.

A group of performers on stage at a live event, singing and engaging with the audience, with a backdrop of colorful lights. The atmosphere is lively and celebratory.

It’s 10:30, and unexpected guests are flooding the stage. Taboo and will.i.am are dapping up Miles Brown and others as Monalisa navigates her set, her laptop threatened by flying elbows and sloshing drinks. The man of the hour, though, was nowhere to be found. Wildchild tells us it’s no surprise: Madlib rarely wants the spotlight. The Beat Konducta doesn’t even own a cell phone. The show is being live-streamed on DJ Spinna’s Twitch, and we’re told he’s watching.

He’s not physically here, but his presence fills the building.

After all, he’s always performed partly in silhouette, rhyming through his animated alter ego Quasimoto. And as we move through his sonic legacy—beat by beat, sample by sample—you sense how impactful his unique point of view has been. It’s a retrospective 25 years deep. You don’t need to see him. You hear him. You feel him.

I look around and notice the gray in performers’ beards, the wrinkles on their foreheads, the stories about kids turning eighteen, and events from the previous century. I should feel my age, but that’s not the dominant emotion. Instead, I think of one of Madlib’s most transcendent projects: Shades of Blue, the 2003 album where he was granted access to the Blue Note archives and created something timeless. New recordings built from classics, made fresh for young ears.

That’s the magic Madlib and his peers have gifted us. It is timeless, communal, and everlasting.

I’m not, though. So we left The Echoplex before last call. That livestream Madlib was watching? I joined him there—from the comfort of my couch—as Nu-Mark, The Alchemist, J Rocc and others continued to guide us through sound.

As Mr. Chukwurah reminded us, coming together like this makes us better. In these layered frequencies, these echoes of jazz, hip-hop, and fellowship, we find ourselves and each other.

These are the shades of Madlib: fractured, funky, reverent, rebellious.

And Lord Quas willing, I’ll be back in the crowd again soon.

A young man on a busy city street with headphones on and a backpack. Only the back of his head is visible but he appears to be enjoying what he is listening to.

February 8, 2025 / 1 Comment

Escaping Spotify: My Month of Intentional Listening with TIDAL

On the day Spotify announced its first fiscal year of profitability, I canceled my paid subscription. My action was not in response to that news but in recognition that after a month of using TIDAL as my primary music streaming service, I didn’t miss the world’s most popular audio app enough to continue paying for it.

I switched to TIDAL at the beginning of 2025. I’m trying to live a more intentional digital life, and the question of the most ethical way to listen to music online led me to the service. It has been a fantastic replacement for the things on Spotify I had become too dependent on and less enamored with over time.

The music on TIDAL sounds great! I can hear the difference in audio quality, especially when using my high-quality speakers and headphones. TIDAL has fewer algorithmic bells and whistles than Spotify. However, the service still values human curation by music aficionados. It is obsessed with the people who make music rather than celebrities or hyper-personalization. Those subtle shifts mean I am not overwhelmed by their homepage when I select my next listen. TIDAL forces me to be a more active music selector, which has led to an increase in complete album spins and artist-centric radio stations. It has also led to me listening to more music overall.

Spotify Wrapped and Last FM’s Yearly Listening Reports tell me I am a high-volume digital music listener annually. I’m generally amongst the top 5% of all users on those services in spins. I listen to about 80 songs a day every day. My consistency is a crazy outlier.

In January, I pressed play 3900 times from over 960 different artists across nearly 1400 different albums and over 2400 unique songs. From what I saw in other people’s music listening wrap-ups for 2024, that might eclipse their digital streaming totals for the year. I’m a terrible customer of an audio streaming service. All that streaming means they likely are paying out all my monthly subscription payments in royalty distribution. I’m the kind of power user that subscription services have to mitigate in some way if their costs are variable by consumption, and I’m sure they do. Based on what I know about the digital subscription business, there’s a significant portion of dormant or extremely low-consumption users whose subscription fees have little to no royalty implications most months.

One of the reasons I switched to TIDAL was to get music artists and publishing rights owners the highest royalty payment I could. My spins in January could account for about $50 in royalty payouts or five times the value of a monthly TIDAL subscription. By comparison, those same listens on Spotify would equal $12, or about the total cost of their monthly premium tier. That’s what I intended to do!

My top five artists of the month should all earn at least a dollar from my listening, with Kendrick Lamar nearly making $2. On Spotify, that would be about 45 cents. Over time, I will likely generate the cost-equivalent royalties for my most loved albums as a digital or physical media purchase.

This is the way.

There are other benefits to this switch. My New Arrivals playlist isn’t overrun with bedroom producers (or fake artists) gaming the algorithm like Release Radar had become on Spotify. Social sharing from TIDAL is service-agnostic. I’ve returned to Pocketcasts as my podcast-listening solution—a service for which I have a lifetime, no-cost membership. I had already given up on Spotify’s audiobook offering, having found the limitation of listening by time rather than by the number of titles nonsensical.

I do miss some of the more serendipitous discovery features that Spotify offers. And I’m spending much more time updating metadata on Last.fm. I’m not sure this is a negative, though. Maybe I’m a weirdo, but I enjoy data cleanup. It also is a better time suck than doomscrolling.

TIDAL’s lack of intelligent app switching is annoying. Not being able to have my current listening jump from device to device was a bit of magic on Spotify. So was Smart Shuffle.

But I can feel confident that the creators are getting their rightful share in exchange for these missing features. At the same time, I listen to their work at the highest quality available and support music curators who have taste. It’s a more than fair trade-off.

January 6, 2025 / 1 Comment

Switch

What’s the most ethical way to listen to digital music?

By ethical, which major services pay the fairest royalty to artists and music rights owners on a per-play basis? Spotify has been the most prominent digital music provider for years, and they have used that position to pay less than their competitors. They also are increasingly doing what tech companies tend to do when they begin to dominate the industry they are disrupting: find ever more creative ways not to pay people.

The collective disappointment with this year’s Wrapped—including me—has sparked a drumbeat of social media users reminding us that there are services that treat artists better than Spotify and provide more value for their customers if higher audio quality is your thing. TIDAL, Apple Music, and Amazon Music can all make this claim.

An infographic explaining streaming royalty rates, including a bar chart that shows that Tidal pays out the best while Deezer pays the worst, and several factoids about the state of music industry revenue

credit: ProducerHive

I have requirements beyond the baseline of a good digital music service—catalog size, playlist diversity, personalization, and audio quality. The most important of which is relatively niche: integration with Last FM. If you’ve been paying attention, you know I’m a bit obsessive about capturing my listening data, and this year’s Spotify Wrapped hammered home the need to continue to have a solution independent of the digital streamers.

That requirement severely limits my options as few services natively integrate with last.fm anymore. I could make it work if I only listened to music via iTunes or a web browser. Still, I regularly switch between my laptop, my phone, and my tablet, and so, despite having access to all of the major services in some form via bundles I pay for, they won’t work for me in this case. [ed. Note—we’ll need to examine the value of these bundles in the future.]

It’s frustrating that this is the case, but I don’t mind shifting to TIDAL. I’ve used the service before. They pay the best per stream of all the major digital music providers. They have the highest quality audio. It should be a no-brainer, but I have used Spotify so much over the decade since the death of rdio that I have gotten used to the things they provide.

A Pay table with three columns—Streaming Platform, Royalty Rates (per stream), and Streams Required to make $1. It only requires 78 streams to make $1 from Tidal Music while it takes 314 to achieve the same on Spotify.

credit: ProducerHive

But I’m listening right now, and the music sounds excellent. The transition felt daunting initially, but playlist transfer was easy thanks to TuneMyMusic (though why they require a subscription is bewildering. This is a once-in-a-blue-moon use case. Charge me once or on a per-usage basis). Within a couple of hours, I started to find my way. TIDAL has human-curated playlists like New West Coast, Women of Hip-Hop, New Arrivals: Hip-Hop and R&B, Grown Rap, Real Love: Best New R&B, R&B Hits, and Pop&B that are fair proxies for the mostly ML-based recommendation playlists that I used on Spotify. As I listen to more music, the home page is refining and showing relevant playlists, artists, songs, and albums I will likely explore.

My Tidal home feed has sections for Suggested new albums, recently updated curated playlists, user playlists I might like, and albums it thinks I might want to revisit.

After using TIDAL exclusively this weekend, personalized music mixes appeared on my home page feed this morning.

My Tidal home feed has sections for custom mixes, my favorite artists, recommended new music, and curated Essentials playlists from artists I might want to get to know better.

There were some mishaps. I lost some song scrobbles because I didn’t check if I had to sign in to Last.fm on every device where I am using TIDAL (I do). Track-level data cleanup will be an ongoing concern, but I learned that I can correct metadata mistakes from TIDAL’s scrobbles to Last.fm by editing a track at the scrobble level. The cool thing is that when I correct that data, Last.fm allows me to correct previous scrobbles and set it so future appearances of that track will be automatically updated to the proper naming conventions. What a revelation! For example, I was able to go back and update scrobbles from when Kendrick Lamar’s GNX first dropped—before the featured artists were included in the track name—and fix those so I have an accurate count of how many times I have listened to dodger blue (feat. wallie the sensei, siete7x, roddy ricch) and peekaboo (feat. AzChike).

Fewer algorithmic playlists mean more active and intentional listening, and intention is IN for 2025. I’m tired of being tricked by convenience into being passive in so many things in my life. I want my brain to make more choices about things that matter to me, like what I’m listening to and why. I want my values to be the driving factor in where and how I spend money and time.

If you’re on TIDAL, you can find me here.

Where do you listen?

Banner Photo by Kojo Kwarteng on Unsplash

January 2, 2025 / 0 Comments

No More Hiding

As the clock ticked to midnight, we were in Disney Concert Hall with the rest of “grown & sexy” Los Angeles losing our minds to Mike Phillips doing saxophone solos over Bone Crusher’s “Never Scared.” Nothing says you’re of a certain age like stomping the yard in one of the world’s premiere orchestral venues as a jazz saxophonist gets you hyped to a song that started fights in clubs 20 years ago.

We old, y’all. But much like Big Daddy Kane—who closed the D-Nice & Friends New Year’s Eve Club Quarantine Show and is well into his fifties—these knees still work, and we’re still out here getting the job done.

We are dancing in the aisles. We sing along loudly and off-key with Johnny Gill and Jon B. We canoodle to NEXT and Case’s hip-hop ballads. We get hyped to Greg Nice, En-Eye-Cee-Eee. We praise 90s icons in the building like Arsenio Hall, Yo-Yo, and the dearly departed DJ Clark Kent, whose turntables, kicks, and signature fitted cap were in a place of honor on stage.

I did not want to enter 2025 on my couch watching other people’s lives on our TV. Leaving 2024 behind required something tactile. I needed catharsis.

I am not so dramatic as to need to burn off the sadness, loss, and illness that were frequent in the previous year, but I longed to feel of and in the world. I wanted to feel the electricity of being alive.

I wanted to feel all the days of my big Gen X age and, instead of standing on the sidelines shaking my head, be in the thick of it shaking my ass.

We took public transportation to experience the holiday with our fellow Angelenos. We ran into Cadence of the LA Sparks Crew on the train there. I took that as a good omen. Was our favorite tumbler from our favorite team going in the same direction as we were? Yes.

As we returned home, downtown LA was filled with shiny, happy people. We got to pet dogs and laugh at kids up way past their bedtime while dodging our intoxicated neighbors as they navigated to their next destination.

Like us, I hope they all made it safely to their beds and opened their eyes this morning to a day of perfect winter weather in our fair city.

As I opened my eyes for the first time in 2025, I was immediately reminded that getting home safe and waking up is not guaranteed.

If we are so lucky as to wake up in this life, let’s face it directly.

I ain’t never scared.

December 10, 2024 / 2 Comments

My 2024 Musical Journey

I started 2024 by getting infected by COVID-19. By the end of the year, I would have lost my appendix, my job, and my father. Moments of hope were often dashed by the harsh realities of this moment in time. Kamala Harris would not win the US presidency. The entertainment industry wouldn’t find its footing. I wouldn’t win the lottery.

The ache of loss wouldn’t ease, only transform.

In February, though, Hiatus Kaiyote started sending signals to my aching heart with new music. “Everything’s Beautiful” quickly became a guide for my soul. I might be sad, weary, anxious, and gloomy, but when Nai Palm reminds me that the sun is kissing my face, that I’m singing this song that’s blaring in my headphones, and that I know love, well, everything is beautiful.

I am free from harm’s way. Everything is fine.

Every time my song of the year played, I was back on the path to joy no matter how far I had veered off the road.

My Hyper-Specific Listening Behavior

I wrote about my disappointment with this year’s Spotify Wrapped. Their lack of meaningful genre exploration led me to utilize my own last.FM data to understand my digital music consumption.

While not fully comprehensive, I used the top five tags for each artist that got 100 or more plays from December 2023 through November 2024. These genres and thematic clusters represented my listening for the year.

Hip-Hop/Rap
- Instrumental
- Underground
- Trap
Soul/R&B
- Neo-Soul
- Alternative R&B
Jazz
- Fusion
Pop
- Singer-Songwriter
Female Voices
Los Angeles

In Spotify hyper-specific genre parlance, my 2024 music listening might be categorized as Love Heart Cheat Codes for West Coast Heads Having a Shitty Year.

Beyoncé, KAYTRANADA, and NxWorries (or Anderson. Paak in general) were glue artists this year, often providing the music that allowed for a seamless transition between these clusters.

Charli xcx and Sabrina Carpenter had their moment in the sun during August, my BRAT summer month, and while I think those are great albums, they ultimately didn’t feel like they belonged with the core list.

Albums of the Year

GNX – Kendrick Lamar
Chromakopia – Tyler, the Creator
GLORIOUS – GloRilla
Love Heart Cheat Code – Hiatus Kaiyote
Ceremonial Contrafact (empathogen deluxe) – Willow – Pop
Alligator Bites Never Heal – Doechii
Cowboy Carter – Beyonce
Timeless – KAYTRANADA
Please Don’t Cry – Rapsody
BRAT – Charli xcx

There’s some recency bias at play here, but IDGAF. GNX is a master at work. All these albums were made by people with impeccable taste, vision, and a commitment to their craft. They also all demand to be listened to in their entirety when any of their songs shuffle through the speakers.

Discoveries

While I have listened to Willow since she first whipped her hair back and forth, Empathogen is the album where, for my ears, she became more than one of Jada and Will’s talented children. She is one of the few artists I saw live this year, and I was a bit overwhelmed by her musicianship, stage command, and vocal quality.

Pale Jay’s Shameful Game likely came to me as a discovery from a Spotify playlist. Before their data-driven “Pulse of…” playlists started to falter in May of this year, it was my routine to add the most recently added tracks to my “New Music” listening on Saturdays. Shameful Game showed up on a Saturday in early January, and Pale Jay’s music has been consumed every month since. Over the summer, his 2021 release, The Celestial Suite, entered regular rotation by blending well with Hiatus Kaiyote and Cleo Sol.

KOTA The Friend’s Lyrics to Go vol. 5 was also likely discovered via a Spotify playlist. His track TULUM surprised me enough to seek out the full-length that it came from, and that album was popular on my playlists for the first half of 2024, especially in February.

I’ve been thinking more about how we discover music now. I find myself seeking out more human music curators and tastemakers lately to counterbalance both the increasing dependence on recommendation engines to drive playlists on digital platforms.

2025 will likely have me returning to hunting out the playlists of DJs and music critics whose ears I respect just as much if not more so than algos and AI even as I have been a fan of that kind of data magic in the past.

My musical consumption is hungry for more balance between tech and taste.

How did you discover new music in 2024?

Mixtape

December 5, 2024 / 2 Comments

Spotify Wrapped 2024: Not Handled with Care

Dr. Georgie Carroll, an Australian fan Engagement Expert, wrote on LinkedIn yesterday that “Spotify Wrapped learned a hard lesson today: data isn’t enough.”

Indeed. The true value of data lies in the connections we find and the stories we tell. In the past, Spotify’s human curators would weave these narratives, aligning the recap with the cultural and musical zeitgeist, rather than just showcasing the Company’s technological prowess.

For example, using the Musical Evolution Cards as a starting point, I delved into my journals, my last.fm profile, and my memories to piece together a narrative that was more than just a jumble of words and AI-generated podcasts.

I’m a fan of NotebookLM and its potential as a research tool, but the podcast creation here was nothing more than a parlor trick. Until AI can approximate a lived experience that reflects and remixes what it has learned about me and finds something more profound, it is nothing more than soulless novelty.

I want two things from any recap of my content consumption:

A map of my year that might reveal something that I wouldn’t otherwise see or remember as it was happening
Breadcrumbs that might inform where I should go next in my entertainment journey

Since its launch, Wrapped has been good at showing listeners where they sit in audience clusters on the service. It’s one of the reasons I lament the degradation of The “Sounds of Spotify” playlists over the last 12 months. In 2022 and 2023, Wrapped told me what genres I most enjoyed (with increasing nuance and specificity), and they had playlists that showcased the core sound, pulse, and outer bounds of those genres that I could dig into and follow. New and old music would funnel my way through those algorithmically driven curations and they had a strong hit rate for my ears.

They laid off the person who created Every Noise at Once, the algorithm that powers those playlists, right after Wrapped was released last year. So, 2024 Wrapped features none of those breadcrumbs that would have been generated by this lovingly managed cluster model. Instead, I turned to last.fm again to see if I could determine my preferred genres and subgenres. It’s not nearly the same, but we make do.

With a little effort, I can see that neo-soul, female vocalists, West Coast hip hop, Memphis hip hop, and electronic dance grooves were my genres of choice this year.

When I look to refine and expand my listening in 2025, jazz, including nu-jazz, alt-rnb, post-rock, and LA hip-hop, are subgenres I should explore further.

As tech companies in media trend towards investing in the promise of future tech over people with taste and a fundamental grounding in the living world, we must seek out the storytellers on our own.

I love data, and I love stories. Thanks to last.fm for allowing me to tell my own story independent of digital music platforms. They are not a sponsor of this post, but I have been a fan and a user for nearly 20 years.

November 27, 2024 / 0 Comments

The Next Movement

The music video for Kendrick Lamar’s “squabble up” pays homage to “The Next Movement” video by The Roots. They are placed in the same setting—an enclosed room with green walls where you never see anyone enter or leave, but the occupants are constantly shifting—and both videos start the same way, with a few seconds of silence before the first musical notes hit.

In 1999, The Roots were both pushing back on the shiny suit/hyper-commercial era of hip-hop and also announcing the arrival of something new: the thrilling Soulquarian era of black music that they were generating in the Electric Lady Studios in New York with D’angelo, Common, J Dilla, Erykah Badu, and others. There were more commercial artists of the era, but none influenced the culture more than the merger of hip hop and soul and the rise of Dilla Time, as Dan Charnas puts it in his book of the same name, that Questlove and his co-conspirators delivered to us.

I’m unsure if K. Dot began this year intending to shift the culture. The operating plan seems to have grown organically as his thesis solidified throughout the beef with Drake. “I’m what the culture feeling” led to him wanting to be explicit about which culture he meant. The impact of “Not Like Us” on Los Angeles and its ability to generate mass appeal for a very South LA, very California sound seemed to spark a more extensive idea about what he wanted to do with his label and his work.

“The Pop Out: Ken and Friends” further confirmed this was magic in a bottle. Since it happened, I have thought a lot about Kendrick’s performance during that show. He flubbed the lyrics in both “euphoria” and “Not Like Us” and could never get “The Colonizer” section of that song correct once. Making quotable, punchline-dense hits is light work for him. He made those songs to win a rap battle, but they aren’t meaningful, incredibly thoughtful pieces.

They won’t win him any literary awards.

They did wake people up, though.

Music audiences didn’t know they were hungry for authenticity, cultural specificity, or even a return of the boom bap in rap, but we were. I was. In the aftermath, I have locked in with bombastic, honest, and enthusiastically unique albums. Tyler, the Creator, Glorilla, and Doechii put out whole bodies of work that felt free from chasing trends and were precisely the music they wanted to be making.

And now we have gnx and Kendrick’s “The Next Movement” moment. Lamar is ready to expand beyond his solo introspective work and utilize this next phase of his career as an artist and tastemaker to put the West Coast on, unite disparate communities, and uplift people. As Spence Kornhaber put it, it’s populism with a point. Thirty-plus years after Dr. Dre’s The Chronic brought about the rise of the g-funk era and LA laying claim as the center of the hip-hop universe, Kendrick Lamar seems to be generating that same gravitational force.

Get on board, get left behind, or be prepared to squabble up.

Photo by Kind and Curious on Unsplash

June 16, 2024 / 0 Comments

Alive in the Room

This past Wednesday, my family hosted a musical tribute to my father, Kevin Toney. I wasn’t an active participant in the production or planning. Outside of doing half of a rough draft of a script for the M.C., I tapped out.

“This is not for us,” I said. “This is for everyone else.”

It was more than that, of course. It was my mother’s gift to his musical legacy. The show was a retrospective of his work in a way he had not done during his life. It spanned eras and genres. It merged his faith with his soul-stirring compositions.

It was expertly performed by his talented friends and loved ones, including my sister, Dominique Toney. Video of him talking about and performing his work played throughout, allowing him to speak for himself even though he was gone.

Despite this spectacular show, it couldn’t give me the one thing I wanted: Kevin Toney alive in the room.

The show closed with a video of my dad alone on stage at a piano. The audience can’t be seen, but you can feel their presence. They are in awe as his outstretched fingers glide across the keys. It’s Kevin Toney, the entertainer, in all his glory. One foot is on the pedals, and the other rests under the bench. He was tall with long arms, so he leaned away from the instrument, giving himself room to move. I watch as he hears the sounds in his head before they exit from the strings on the piano. A phone rings. It’s his. It’s my mom. He finally banters with the crowd a little bit, and they chuckle at this break in seriousness from the maestro. He turns back to the piano and closes with a flourish.

It’s quintessentially him, and what I felt intensely in that moment was his absence.

Everyone did right by him, but Kevin Toney was not on that stage. My father is gone.

In the three months since he passed, the primary feeling I have had is relief. I’ve been relieved that he was no longer in a hospital attached to machines and stuck in bed. I’ve been relieved that the stress of being his advocate was no longer a burden for my mom. I’ve been relieved not to make myself physically sick with worry for all of us. I’ve been relieved for life to be taken off pause.

I’d been dreading the show, though, as I sensed some new emotions creeping in as it approached: sadness and loss.

During the tribute, a montage of photos was played on the video screens. One image took my breath away: a picture from my parents’ wedding reception. My father shared the frame with my grandmother and my uncle, Mike.

Michael Saunders and Kevin Toney are the two most influential men in my life, and they are both gone now.

On this Father’s Day, I’m allowing that reality to wash over me and accepting this next stage of grief.

In what ways is my life a tribute to theirs while I’m the one alive in the room?

May 5, 2024 / 0 Comments

Kendrick Lamar’s West Side Rallying Cry

On my 20th spin of Not Like Us, I figured out why Kendrick Lamar‘s latest is so electrifying. The last time LA hip hop was up was Nipsey Hussle’s Victory Lap at the GRAMMYs in February of 2019. His death a couple of months later, followed by Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and several others less than a year later, turned the city and the music melancholy and insular. The pandemic would soon follow, and the LA sound has rarely found a reason to celebrate since then. You don’t take the lap when the victories are rare, fleeting, or pyrrhic.

The energy is different today. As I walked around my neighborhood with that Mustard beat blasting on repeat and Kung Fu Kenny going dumb with his South LA accent turned all the way on, I had this vision of people opening up their windows, poking their heads out, smiling, putting on their house shoes, and coming out to step to this. It’s not merely a diss record. Not Like Us is a West Coast rallying call.

The song is the fourth diss track that Lamar has released this week in his ongoing battle with Drake, though the consensus is that he won. Not Like Us includes strong bars covering the scandalous accusations many people glom onto. However, it is overwhelmingly an indictment of Drake as a culture vulture. Besides the rapping, which you always expect to get from Kendrick, the structure and vibe of the record are about showcasing what’s possible when you are of a place, people, and culture.

Not Like Us seems destined to be a national hit but it sits perfectly in a mix with Kalan.FrFr, Blxst, 03 Greedo, JasonMartin, Lil Vada, and BlueBucksClan. There’s a California timelessness to it as well. Check out these mashups with Hit ‘Em Up and No Vaseline (shout out to DJ Fred Litt).

It even reminds me of We’re All in the Same Gang.

We back outside!

Before Not Like Us came out, I saw parallels between Lamar’s strident stand for morality and authenticity and his strong beliefs about racial identity, manhood, and parenthood with those of August Wilson. I’d been reading Patti Hartigan’s biography—August Wilson: A Life—while this back-and-forth between the two rappers has been going on.

Wilson had his diss battle of sorts in the 1990s. The playwright gave an influential and controversial speech called “The Ground on Which I Stand” in 1996, hitting some third rails in the theatre community and the country. Robert Brustein, a theater critic who was rarely a fan of Wilson’s, took the opportunity to challenge his positions.

They went at each other in the press, on TV, and in speaking engagements until culminating in the equivalent of a rap battle called The Big Event. Wilson’s battle with Brustein was fairer than Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake. The playwright and critic were both about something. They cared passionately about their craft while coming from two very opposed points of view. They were both well-read, adept with words, and had real animus.

In 2024, Drake doesn’t measure up, so he lost before it began.

August Wilson, who was biracial and fair-skinned, always identified as a black man. His white father was absent and abusive, and thus, perhaps it is no surprise that much of his work centers around what it means to be Black, a man, and a father in America throughout the 20th century.

Wilson never understood hip-hop. The blues was the music that moved him. He’d have found a kindred spirit in Kendrick Lamar, though.

While a conversation between the two is not in the cards, I’ll twist my fingers into Ws and dance it out to these K.Dot hits while interrogating the lyrics like I might a signature speech in one of the plays in Wilson’s cycle.