“What’s Going On” is MusiQology’s weekly news round-up. Running each week, we curate a selection of relevant items from across the spectrum of popular culture, adding our own commentary and spin when it makes sense. With any luck, you’ll be able to spend a little less time browsing the web for what matters. We’ve got you covered.
Songs of Protest and Love
Dr. Guy’s MusiQology returns to the Philadelphia stage at South this Friday and Saturday. After a sold-out performance at the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania this past fall, our fearless leader continues his exploration of the themes of the moment with a show entitled “Songs of Protest & Love.” It’s a multi-genre showcase featuring three sets of music from Dr. Guy’s band, with set times at 8, 9:30, and 11PM. Reservations are encouraged and can be made HERE. “Protest can be a song that speaks to injustices. And in a lot of ways, when you’re under attack, a love song can be a protest song as well,” he told WURD this past fall. “It’s times like these where we really need and depend on our cultural forms to make sense of the world.”
Don’t Stop the Music
In an excellent Vogue cover story out this week, Rihanna announced that she’d acquired the rights to all of her previously recorded masters after creating her own Roc Nation imprint record label. In a post-Tidal time, artists are working more than ever to maintain autonomy and the ability to benefit financially from their creative output, and the master recording—from which all other copies of a song will be produced—is one of the key industry bargaining chips, a moneymaker for years to come. Throughout her career, Rihanna has proven to be an artist for whom agency is important. She sings her own words, and now she owns them too.
To Be Young, Gifted, and Black
Somehow in last week’s roundup of the great writing across the Internet, we missed Ta-Nehesi Coates’ brilliant explication of the true heart of the controversy swirling around the upcoming Nina Simone biopic. After the casting of lithe, light-skinned Zoe Saldana to play the iconic Simone, many have decried the film’s use of blackface and prosthetics to alter Saldana’s appearance. Coates’s confessional voice is frank and biting, reminding us that Simone was a voice and a face and that her face and skin and person carried with them a particular place and a particular history. “Simone was in possession of nearly every feature that we denigrated as children…able to conjure glamour in spite of everything the world said about black women who looked like her,” Coates writes. “And yet somehow she willed herself into a goddess…and for that she enjoyed a special place in the pantheon of resistance.”
Dearly Beloved…
Few if any artists have a chance to pull back the curtain on a life of wonder quite like Prince, who announced earlier this week that he will release an autobiography in 2017. Titled The Beautiful Ones, the book got its announcement in a way befitting the mysterious man at its center, with a cryptic dispatch of invitations bringing attendees to Avenue, a Manhattan club. Prince emerged in a gold-and-(of-course)-purple striped pajama suit to announce the book before playing a short set, and has already submitted pages of the book to his editor. Years ago, many (read: just this writer) were thrilled to get a peek inside Prince’s refrigerator. Who knows what more mysteries his book will reveal?
John Vilanova is MusiQology’s Managing Editor. Follow him on Twitter @JohnVilanova.
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