The Plane That We Inhabit: A Conversation with Ashley M. Jones
Ashley M. Jones discusses her new poetry collection, REPARATIONS NOW!.
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Posts Tagged: James Brown
Voices On Addiction: A Conversation with James Brown and Patrick O’Neil
James Brown and Patrick O’Neil discuss WRITING YOUR WAY TO RECOVERY.
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Claiming Our Untold Stories: Talking with Gina Frangello
Gina Frangello discusses her debut memoir, BLOW YOUR HOUSE DOWN.
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Freedom Knows Who We Are: Talking with Kelly Harris-DeBerry
Kelly Harris-DeBerry discusses her debut poetry collection, FREEDOM KNOWS MY NAME.
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Notable Los Angeles: 3/2–3/8
Literary events in and around L.A. this week!
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What to Read When 2020 Is Just Around the Corner
Books releasing in the first half of 2020 that we can’t wait to read!
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Swinging Modern Sounds #92: Perfection
You will now find some version of the list below. It is imperfect.
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Ian Svenonius’s “Principles of Modernism”
[T]he most essential thing is actually a kind of worldview, a mindset—or maybe it’s an ideology.
...moreSong of the Day: “The Heat Is On (Part 1 & 2)”
Everyone knows funk music reached its heyday in the 1970s, but even legends like James Brown and George Clinton were hard pressed to compete with funk powerhouse The Isley Brothers in 1975. The title track “The Heat Is On (Part 1 & 2),” from their record of the same name, is a hard-driving, wall-shaking revelation that takes […]
...moreThis Week in Posivibes: Songs for Survival
In addition to his song “Spiritual,” which deals with the issue of police brutality, Jay Z has released a playlist of songs to get us through the crushing violence lately exposed by social media. “Songs for Survival” includes music by Beyoncé, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Common, Outkast, Gil Scott-Heron, Fela Kuti, Kendrick Lamar, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Kanye West, and others. You can listen to […]
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Swinging Modern Sounds #73: Prince Rogers Nelson, Guitar Player: A Symposium
I started thinking about additional, more slantwise ways we might talk about his legacy. What if I organized a bunch of guitar players?
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Five Stages of Prince Fandom
You don’t need to know him personally, you say. You get the best of Prince through his music. Maybe that’s the truth, and maybe it isn’t.
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The Rumpus Interview with Derek Ridgers
British photographer Derek Ridgers discusses his fetish for nightclub portraits and what it’s been like to shoot the London underground scene for nearly four decades.
...moreSong of the Day: “Cold Sweat”
James Brown is known for creating a thing called funk, but it was the song “Cold Sweat,” co-written with his bandleader Pee Wee Ellis and released in 1967, that truly encapsulated this new genre of music. The track exploded all kinds of boundaries. Without a distinct melody, it treated every piece as a rhythm instrument. In the two-part […]
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Chris Frantz’s Pocket Camera
What I want/need/love most are the tools that allow me to document what I see and experience, at home and in my travels, now and in the future.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Patrick O’Neil
Patrick O’Neil talks about his debut memoir Gun Needle Spoon, being big in France, the drug/recovery genre, and writing through trauma.
...moreSong of the Day: “Run Like A Girl”
Lizzie Karr’s influences range from Ani DiFranco to James Brown. The Godfather of Soul’s funkiness is apparent in Karr’s latest single, “Run Like A Girl,” which trades DiFranco-style staccato verses for punchy horn lines. The Bay Area artist recently toured the Pacific Northwest in support of her new record Like It’s Bad. “I was tired […]
...moreFrom the Limousine, the King of Funk
We want the intent. Whatever happened basically to the ethnic man, it happened through trials and tribulations. There’s no intent to make them better. Martin Luther King—and Black Panthers organized to start riots. SNCC—the hate groups, whether it was the Panthers or whether it was the Klansmen, or whether it was they called the self-defense […]
...moreThe One
The NYT‘s section Books of the Times reviews RJ Smith’s biography of James Brown, The One, which came out earlier this spring: “This book’s sparkle speaks for itself, as does Mr. Smith’s ability to take on his screaming, moaning, kinetically blessed, unbeatably shrewd subject.” Smith covers Brown’s life from his childhood in the rural South […]
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