Tag: musicians

The Heart of Low | The New Yorker
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The Heart of Low | The New Yorker

Last winter, I flew to Minneapolis to hear a funk quartet play at a bar. The weather was miserable: hard-frozen snowbanks in every gutter, skating-rink sidewalks, roads so ripped up by rock salt and plow blades that I had to return my first rental car, because it shook like a leaf if I took it above thirty. I had come to see the band Derecho (since rechristened the Derecho Rhythm Section), the newest project of Alan Sparhawk, who for three decades fronted the seminal indie-rock band Low, which he co-founded with his wife, Mimi Parker.Sparhawk had grown his hair out during the pandemic, and the red-blond mane was still shaggy past his shoulders. He wore work boots, a black T-shirt, brown overalls, and a black beanie that came off as the room warmed up. As in Low, he plays guitar and sings ...
Bruce Springsteen Has a Gift He Keeps on Giving
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Bruce Springsteen Has a Gift He Keeps on Giving

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly newsletter of the best New Yorker podcasts.At seventy-four, Bruce Springsteen has been cementing his status as a rock-and-roll legend for almost fifty years: he released his widely heralded, but not initially widely heard, début, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” in 1973. But, true to form, the artist who became known to his fans as the Boss hasn’t rested on his laurels. After weathering a spate of health troubles this past year, which led him to cancel much of his tour, the rock icon plans to hit the road again in the new year, all over the U.S., Canada, and Europe. When Springsteen published his autobiography, “Born to Run,” back in 2016, David Remnick called it “as vivid as his songs, wit...
The Best Music of 2023
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The Best Music of 2023

In mid-November, the musician André 3000—one-half of the beloved hip-hop duo OutKast, which released six idiosyncratic and irrepressible records between 1994 and 2006—announced that he was, at long last, putting out a full-length solo LP. “Hey Ya!,” OutKast’s biggest hit, from 2003, is the sort of song that belongs on one of those satellite time capsules NASA periodically launches into space, a rare and potent distillation of everything freaky and beautiful about life on Earth. His fans wanted a rap record, and why wouldn’t they? André 3000 is preternaturally good at rapping. Instead, he gave us “New Blue Sun,” an eighty-seven-minute, largely improvised, entirely instrumental flute record with song titles such as “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Wa...
How Far Can Amapiano Go?
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How Far Can Amapiano Go?

It was opening night at the Brooklyn Mirage, a seasonal rooftop night club in East Williamsburg. In the main area, about five thousand people were bobbing and waving along with an English d.j. named Chris Lake, who played a set full of muscular and rubbery dance tracks, rarely straying for too long from the unifying thump of house music. At around two-thirty in the morning, just as the revellers were starting to sweat, a smaller and stranger dance party was getting going in a dark room off to the side. Banele and Bandile Mbere, twin brothers from South Africa, took to a small stage, plugged in their gear, and cued up a track that resembled an alien variant of the music being played outside. The sound was sparse, tense, and slightly menacing, with a bass line that cut in and out of the mix...