Every time she sang, we were all graced with a glimpse of the divine. | | | | Aretha Franklin poster outside the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, on Aug. 29, 2018.
(Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Every time she sang, we were all graced with a glimpse of the divine.”
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| | rantnrave:// And summer ends with another Memorial Day weekend, so to speak. On Saturday, SEN. JOHN MCCAIN's four-day funeral ends with a private service in Washington D.C., while today, ARETHA FRANKLIN will be laid to rest in Detroit with a ceremony and celebration that may last into 2019. The senator's service will be somber, reflecting a dark moment in American politics that, one hopes, will eventually prove to have been a minor blip in the history of a nation. The singer's service might get loud, reflecting something more everlasting, more irreplaceable, more—dare we say it—joyful. STEVIE WONDER, CHAKA KHAN, ARIANA GRANDE, JENNIFER HUDSON, BILL CLINTON, SMOKEY ROBINSON and the REV. JESSE JACKSON will be among the musicians and notables inside the GREATER GRACE TEMPLE, and there will be more than 100 pink CADILLACs parked outside. The service will be broadcast and live-streamed widely starting at 10 am ET. The public mourning of celebrities, writes NPR MUSIC'S ANN POWERS, is "a form of protest and of mutual recognition and, yes, of entertainment, in the deepest realization of that word's potential." Expect Aretha's funeral to be the deepest realization of all of that, in honor of a voice and spirit that has been part of our collective cultural conscience for half a century. Her songs are part of who we are and part of who we will continue to be—and that's why I feel confident we can survive a dark moment in politics, that we can outlast a temporary loss of grace. Voices like Aretha's can still carry us through, together. MusicSET: "Aretha Franklin Was the Voice of America"... Long before he wanted a job in Washington, BETO O'ROURKE worshipped the D.C. punk label DISCHORD RECORDS: "They started their own label, they pressed their own records, they wrote their own songs, they booked their own tours and they set conditions, like: you’re not gonna pay more than five bucks to come into this show." A self-sufficient small business, that is. I'm not clear what the Republican Party would have against that. His band was called FOSS and sounded like this... The JAMES LAVELLE documentary THE MAN FROM MO'WAX opens today in the UK and NEW YORK... Yes that really was MICHAEL JACKSON on that SIMPSONS episode in 1991. Until the singing started...It's FRIDAY and that means new music from TROYE SIVAN, IDLES, EMINEM (surprise!), WHY DON'T WE, ANNA CALVI, SUNNI COLÓN, ALKALINE TRIO, BIG RED MACHINE, ALEXIS FFRENCH, WILD NOTHING, THOU, IRON & WINE, JAKE SHIMABUKURU, MADELEINE PEYROUX, LLOYD, KATELYN TARVER, AMOS LEE, MENACE BEACH, AARON LEE TASJAN, SAINTSENECA, MUNCIE GIRLS, BUN B, MOGWAI, AYOKAY, KRAKOW, OMNIUM GATHERUM, the PINEAPPLE THIEF, CURREN$Y, the KOOKS and DARWIN DEEZ... RIP COLIN MICHAEL MULHERN... MusicREDEF will be off on Monday, which is Labor Day, not Memorial Day, no matter how it may feel. See you Tuesday. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| You can’t just throw out a piano. You can’t just turn one down, either. We enter a glittery fugue state that blinds us to the likelihood that no one will play this piano unless forced to. Because in this vision, it’s not us playing; it’s our kids. | | |
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| “And Nothing Hurt,” the first Spiritualized album in six years, is the result of the 53-year-old musician’s “obsessive” process of assembling sounds. | | |
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| Her new FourTet-produced album, "Broken Politics," is out October 19. | | |
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| | | | | | | Live at the Fillmore West, March 7, 1971. |
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