“What’s Going On” is MusiQology’s semi-regular news round-up. We curate a selection of relevant news items from across the spectrum of popular culture, adding our own commentary and contextualizing the moments within a broader conversation. In some cases, we’ll be drawing your attention to news items you may have missed; in others, we’ll try and shed a new light on the pop culture moment. With any luck, you’ll be able to spend a little less time browsing the web for what matters. We’ve got you covered.
The GRAMMYs are, indeed, coming. We’re less than two weeks away from music’s biggest night (and one of our most high-traffic weeks after), but we’ve been getting started early with our new Extended Play series, which involves a set of articles (or tracks if you want to extend the metaphor) on a theme. The debut of the series, written by Managing Editor John Vilanova, asks an important question in the run-up to the show on January 28: “What would a win by each artist in Album of the Year mean?” The two pieces so far—on Jay Z and Kendrick Lamar—are ready-made for advancing the discourse and setting the context.
But there’s a lot more going on in non-GRAMMY news, like…
Parliament Returns
While George Clinton’s recent years have been closer to Dr. Funkenstein’s prolific past after decades addled by mismanagement and addiction, one aspect of the P-Funk ecosystem lay dormant, a sleeping giant of funk. Parliament—the Clinton nom-de-band that gave us Mothership Connection (1975), The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein (1976), and Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome (1977)—returns with a new song, “I’m Gon Make You Sick of Me,” the first new music released by the band since 1980. A new album, Medicaid Fraud Dog will follow, and while Clinton was coy during a recent Reddit AMA, the choice, given the time off, is indeed significant: Parliament is the punchier, horns-driven sound that contrasted the deeper explorations of Clinton’s other band, Funkadelic, and while both bands contained many of the same members and the group has continued touring the country, this return to the studio under the Parliament banner is another signpost of a reinvigorated Clinton, who at 76 is experiencing a career renaissance. Another Easter egg for the uninitiated comes in the single artwork, featuring Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk, the notorious no-dancing villain of the universe, who is writing a prescription for Nozitol, ostensibly to cure the funk that ails listeners. Thankfully, Clinton is ready to spread the sickness far and wide once more.
Nas Appeal
Nas’s 1994 masterpiece rap album Illmatic casts a long shadow in the history of the genre, its sonics, messages, and stakes: If there were a rap albums Mount Rushmore, the picture of Nasir Jones as a young child would be carved into the bedrock. So with the announcement that PBS will air Great Performances — Nas Live From the Kennedy Center: Classical Hip-Hop on February 2nd, featuring the rapper backed by the National Symphony Orchestra, the album moves to another heightened space—the symphony hall. While jazz’s move into the concert hall is marked by complicated cultural conversations around respectability politics and rap’s growing centrality should likely face some of the same scrutiny, this is an exciting moment for Nas, and we’ll be watching. “It’s crazy, you know, I wrote this in the projects in New York City,” he says in the trailer. “Here we are in the capital of America, Washington, DC, and, you know, a bunch of white people with strings and all that, playing this album…and they’re feeling it.”
Come A-Live
Every few months, we like to check in on the concert calendar and while late-winter/early-spring isn’t the high time of the summer season, in a city like Philadelphia, there’s always a gig worth watching. The Theater of Living Arts (TLA) has a wide-ranging roster of upcoming shows, including DMX on January 27 and poet and avant-garde composer Benjamin Clementine two days later on January 29. Chart-topping R&B attention grabber SZA is at the Fillmore on January 31, with acts like Jeezy and Miguel following in March. And in the jazz scene, stalwart Chris’s Jazz Café boasts a stacked 2018 lineup, while an upcoming highlight at South is drummer Jimmy Cobb, who famously played on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and other seminal records.
Musical Conversation
Despite disparate genres, scenes, and interests, musicians all share certain vocabularies and fluencies. In short, when you put two musicians in a room discussing their craft, even when they come from two totally different arenas, the conversation has real potential. Such was the case in a recent NPR video recording, matching Dev Hynes (AKA Blood Orange) and Philip Glass. Hynes discovered the classical legend while digging through the crates and being drawn to one of Glass’s album covers and suggests that he has become an unexpected influence on the Blood Orange sound. The whole conversation is a fascinating window into how shared experiences and vocabularies can bring disparate entities together in the service of collaboration.
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