I didn’t want to be a classical pianist. I wanted to play music. | | | | | Bernie Worrell, 1944-2016. (Manfred Werner) | | | | | | “I didn’t want to be a classical pianist. I wanted to play music.”
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| | rantnrave:// Winter is here. I'm pretty sure I'm not spoiling anything by noting that one of the messages of season six of "GAME OF THRONES" is that winter is no longer simply coming. It is too late for that. And, like, no kidding #2016. On THURSDAY, we lost RALPH STANLEY, one of the founding voices of bluegrass music and one of the most haunting voices in any music, who succumbed after years of literally asking death to spare him for just one more year. But this is not one of those years that waits. On FRIDAY, death called upon BERNIE WORRELL, in many ways the driving musical force behind both the PARLIAMENT-FUNKADELIC empire and the peak incarnation of TALKING HEADS, a keyboard searcher and visionary who poured rainbows of funk across four-plus decades of groundbreaking music. A man who, for all the freedom he expressed in his playing, saw himself as a vessel... And now it's late SUNDAY night and I'm catching up on the BET AWARDS, which is spending a good deal of its nearly four-hour running time honoring the memory of PRINCE in a way I don't think I've ever seen an awards show do (and not a small amount of time devoted to current politics, too, god bless 'em, but that's a different rant for a different REDEF). This isn't a medley here and an all-star tribute there. This isn't pro forma thoughts and prayers. This is a call to action, and I'm crying oceans of purple tears all over my living room. At JENNIFER HUDSON's "PURPLE RAIN." At BILAL's "THE BEAUTIFUL ONES." At the entirety of the majesty of the moment that is SHEILA E. And so much more. Winter is coming, but this is an important reminder that we've beaten it back before, and we still can... Also, god bless the ROOTS... And KANYE. God bless him, too.. And one final blast of winter: "I can never pick a 'favorite' song, just as I can’t pick a favorite SCALIA dissent." That is, in case you couldn't guess, ANN COULTER on the GRATEFUL DEAD. (Actual spoiler: She has nothing much to say, and a couple of her most basic assumptions are, let's just say, strange. But in a previous life I interviewed her about her fascination with the DEAD and it seems like it would be wrong to not share.) | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Parliament's novelty songs, with all their stagy, dramatic, corny scenarios, delivered powerful messages about being black through irreverence. The music was dangerous, irresistible - made me want to sing out loud. I felt a bright flash of recognition, a nod to the fact that I was participating in art created with black people in mind first, if not exclusively. | | |
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| The bluegrass musician Ralph Stanley, who died Thursday evening, at the age of eighty-nine, leaves behind an enormously influential-and just plain enormous-body of work. As one half of the Stanley Brothers, a band on the short list of bluegrass originators, he recorded more than three hundred songs over two decades, ending in 1966. | | |
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| The last time I saw Jay Z he was smiling. It was almost exactly five years ago. Rocking back and forth in an Eames lounge chair, as he paused and unpaused “Otis,” running back Otis Redding’s trill again and again: “It makes it easier, eeeeeasier to bear.” Pause, rewind, play. Smile. Pause, rewind, play. Bigger smile. This was 2011 and no one had heard “Otis” before. | | |
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| As a music fan and avid gig-goer I understand the frustrations of knowing your favourite band have just put tickets for their next tour on sale and that desperation of having multiple screens open and frantically clicking refresh in the hope of being able to secure tickets for a band I want to see all too well. | | |
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| Life lessons and erotic discovery through music. | | |
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| The musician and London native is nourished by both the elegant and the mundane as he seeks out and studies the city’s many crevices and ghosts. | | |
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| Bernie Worrell was a crucial part of Parliament’s Mothership - and then he went on to help Talking Heads change gear. | | |
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| New releases from Florida Georgia Line, Carrie Underwood and Hillary Scott hinge on spiritual imagery. | | |
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| The money buys the fan access, but the boundaries of that access are rarely at the discretion of the artist. | | |
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| I can predict, with 100 percent certainty, that hottest movies this weekend will be the latest releases. The same is true in books. I don't even need to look at The New York Times bestseller list to know that it is filled with recent titles. Clothes are the same. | | |
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| | | and your you-know-what will follow |
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| Based on a ‘real’ story, the hit John Travolta film Saturday Night Fever became the prism through which the world viewed disco. Twenty years later it was revealed that the actual inspiration was a British mod called Chris. | | |
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| Being a woman in a man's world is hard enough, but there's a special sort of injustice that comes with being a trans woman in a gay man's world Over the past five years, queer nightlife has blossomed in Brooklyn-almost every night of the week, you can see a drag show, some enigmatic performance art, or cruise for a new boo on the dancefloor. | | |
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| Many perfectly well-done products in search of a problem. | | |
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| Even with a decade and a half of hindsight, it still feels weirder than anything that ever actually happened within a Coen brothers movie. | | |
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| The artist speaks to VF.com about George Bush, Kim’s co-sign, and why his life is “walking performance art.” | | |
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| MUSIC • TECHNOLOGY • POLICY |
| Which should come first: Fixing the legacy business problems in a contract or a legislative fix? Fixing the problems in a contract is much more doable, will produce a quicker result and could be a guidepost for any legislative reform to bring the DMCA into the 21st Century. | | |
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| The secret life of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up.’ | | |
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| The jazz saxophonist and Kendrick Lamar collaborator talks about his past year in the spotlight. | | |
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| "I always tell [recording engineers], 'Press record,' 'cause the first thing off the top of my head, that’s what it will be. I play what is sent to me. I’m a vessel. The gift comes from God and I’m a vessel and the music comes through me." | | |
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| At 82, he sits atop a 60-year legacy of making music, both as the preeminent purveyor of clawhammer-style banjo picking and as a singer with one of the most widely imitated voices in country music. | | |
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| | Nov. 6, 1978 at the Capitol Theatre, Passaic, NJ |
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| © Copyright 2016, The REDEF Group |
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