An all-star lineup of artists performed at Icehouse on Thursday night. The sold-out Stay Awake Vol. 3 show, presented by Hope Community Inc.'s Parks and Power campaign, aimed to promote racial justice and awareness. Minneapolis indie-rap stud Brother Ali, Sarah White, Zuluzulu and Lady Midnight performed. All photos by Mike Madison.
City Pages slideshow
http://www.citypages.com/slideshow/brother-ali-rocks-icehouse-for-racial-justice-8274813/43
Damon “Dam-Funk” Riddick is the epitome of funk. Ever since debuting with Stones Throw in 2008, Dam-Funk has become one of the genres most passionate proselytizers, out to save it from devilish depictions of cartoonish caricature. To Dam, funk is a way of living, “a feeling of struggle and staying cool through it all.”
Dam-Funk grew up in the Los Angeles city/suburb of Pasadena. A ‘70s baby, he came of age in the era of the Uncle Jamm’s Army parties, of electro-pharaoh Egyptian Lover, of Prince’s purple reign. His parents nurtured his musical talents as a child and by his teens, he mastered the drums, then the drum machine. A chance encounter led to an apprenticeship under funk songwriter/producer Leon Sylvers III (SOLAR Records) and by the mid-90s G-Funk era in hip-hop, Dam found his musical skills in high demand by rappers such as Mack 10 and MC Eiht. “Everybody was trying to do the live instrumentation thing, so then you got cats like me playing on records,” Dam explains.
Sideman status wasn’t enough though. Dam remembers “watching gold plaques hitting the wall” for everyone but him and he decided to go “full-funk” and make a do-or-die try to become an artist on his own terms. In 2006, Dam-Funk and a few friends launched the popular Funkmosphere party in L.A., bringing the boogie back. It’s around then that Dam drew the attention of Stones Throw and both label and artist related to Dam’s insistence that “funk is not just a Jheri Curl. There was more than that..”
http://www.amsterdambarandhall.com/events/dam-funk/
Since their inception, Greg Grease's experimental side project ZULUZULUU has been one of the few can't-miss live sets in the Twin Cities. Yet there's been one problem, they've barely released any music. Lucky for us, that's all about to change in 2016 as the crew says they have plenty of records in the stash. To start, AfroPunk just premiered a new song of theirs, a space funk cover of Syreeta and Stevie Wonder's Black Maybe. In addition, their multi-talented band-member MykeShevy released his own reinterpretation of Dwele's Angel. Keep your ears and eyes peeled for where they go next. via Greenroom Magazine
http://www.greenroommagazine.com/blog/2016/2/15/zuluzuluu-black-maybe
Sarah White has a great track record for generating buzz. She’s now four-for-four when it comes to starting new music projects that people quickly latch onto.
Problem is, she’s zero-for-three in keeping her acts together more than a couple of years.
“This one’s gonna stick,” White promised with a laugh, “because it’s me.”
Known from the fondly remembered bands Traditional Methods, Black Blondie and Shiro Dame — all of which ended too quickly — White is stepping out under her own, birth-certificated moniker. She dropped her debut solo EP on March 2, the day she also played a captivating coming-out set opening for Poliça at the Turf Club. Now, she’s taking over Icehouse next Thursday for the EP’s official release party.
Along with Lizzo, Dessa and her release party’s opening acts Dizzy Fae and Lady Midnight, White’s five-song collection, “Laughing at Ghosts,” marks an exciting new era in Twin Cities music. She and her peers are all blending and expanding the realms of hip-hop, R&B, electronic dance music and neo-soul in a tender, personalized way that strips out the machismo of those first three genres.
Trying to fit White’s EP into just one of those categories is like calling the Midtown Global Market on her native South Side simply a great taco joint. There’s so much more to bite into here.
"Laughing at Ghosts" by Sarah White
In an interview last week between a gym session, business meeting and school pickup, White raised another music term to apply to her new songs: Afro-punk, which is also the name of the New York-based music blog that posted an exclusive stream of “Laughing at Ghosts” (afropunk.com).
“Afro-punk, to me, simply means music that radical black people are making,” she said, pointing to the ’80s punk band to which the term was first widely applied. “I was really influenced by Bad Brains, but I was also into the Deftones, Björk, Portishead, Lenny Kravitz. I didn’t just sit in my room listening to India.Arie all the time, in other words.”
White, 35, actually did not get to listen to a lot of music until her late teens because her parents are conservative Christians.
“No cussing, no alcohol in the house, no sleepovers, no dances — nothing that wasn’t connected to church,” she recounted, explaining why she ran away from home at 17. “I wanted to hang out with the cool kids, and just do things like watch ‘The Simpsons.’ ”
She first came to the attention of local music fans in the early ’00s as a rapper with Traditional Methods, a playful yet topical band that also featured members of Heiruspecs and Kanser. She quit that group, however, when she became pregnant with the first of two daughters, Iza, now 11.
She continued rapping but with more of a soulful, cosmic, jazzy vibe in Black Blondie, an all-woman quartet whose success partly led to its undoing: White fell in love with the East Coast when the group played gigs there, and she abruptly picked up and moved with her daughter to start anew in 2007.
White regrets quitting Black Blondie but has no remorse about her five years in New York, where she issued some of her first solo tracks and worked as a photographer.
“I never felt so alive than when I moved there. To grow as a woman — especially as a woman of color — I needed to be exposed to other cultures. It felt like I was stuck here. [Minneapolis] is a lot more diverse now, and a lot more open to the different ways we express ourselves, but back then I felt stuck.”
With the birth of their second daughter, Mica, White and her longtime partner, Rico Mendez, moved back to Minneapolis in 2012 and soon formed the futuristic electronic soul/funk band Shiro Dame. She and Mendez split up, however, just as the group was about to record an album — a scenario that explains both the musical and the lyrical makeup of “Laughing at Ghosts.”
Musically, the EP picks up where Shiro Dame left off, using the same rhythm section, bassist Ry Dill and drummer Blayr Alexander. Lyrically, songs like the buoyant, melodic rouser “Huesos” and the climactic final track “August” sound like the work of a woman fighting to carry on and maintain her identity, while the funkier “Sweet Song” is a clear ode to fallen romance.
Evasive when asked, White offered this simple explanation of the EP’s meaning: “When I was writing these songs, I had to find ways to laugh and still love myself.”
One way she upped the laughter quotient was to reunite with former Black Blondie bandmate and ex-Heiruspecs keyboardist Tasha Baron, who also plays on “Laughing at Ghosts.” Said White: “Tasha hated me for the way I left Black Blondie. We were not cool. But now we’re close as can be.”
White has also long since patched things up with her parents, a change she credited to “the fact that my babies are so damn cute, they couldn’t resist them.” She’s even now thankful for the way she was raised, although she said “music is more my religion now.”
“Their faith in me and in God made it so that the hard things really don’t keep me down,” she said. “They gave me the ability to withstand a lot of stuff, and to believe in myself.”
Let’s all pray she keeps believing in this latest of her musical endeavors.
Many know I Self Devine from his stellar projects under the Rhymesayers umbrella, most notably his recent project “The Sounds of Low Class Amerika” was an album that pinned down the frustration, woes, and rage from a subsection of America losing its voice among the batshit crazy of the far right and the affluent yet apathetic liberal left getting lost among the echo chamber. Muja has been grinding equally as hard, his last project “God Kissed It, The Devil Missed It” was a soulful and gripping tour-de-force project exploring similar topics with a hazy and interesting gusto. For those keeping score at home, the two rappers have collaborated previously on the song “Patriot Act” on Muja’s “Thee Adventures of a B-Boy/D-Boy,” so when word was brewing about “9th House,” the duo’s first full length together, all ears were piqued as to what to expect.
As far as what “9th House” is as a project between two lyrical powerhouses in their own right, and it plays as a woozy, hazy, and eerie project, one that is politically loaded with double entendre and vivid depiction, especially on tracks like “Arrow Dynamics,” and the skeletal, yet soulful lead-off “9th House.” Meanwhile, the stream of consciousness feel of “Midnight on Jupiter” has a neck-snapping groove that has both Muja and I Self trading verses effervescently, while Lady Midnight of VANDAAM fame keeps it all calm and breezy.
Production-wise, folks like J-Hard, M¥K, and Orko Eloheim leave a lot of the soundscapes of this project with enough breathing room for I Self and Muja to trade bars easily while keeping their deliveries not so much about energy, but more to do with how they deliver imagery and do so in a way that listeners are able to peel back the layers of meaning with relative ease and wonder. The 808 kicks, snares, and claps roar and rumble, but never overpower the two artists at the forefront, which allows for maximum transparency of their message. Leave both Muja and I Self to put out a project to speak to the days and times we’re in, and to keep the music as equally engaging as the message itself.
Welcome to the land of the headless horseman, where police will kill a man while he protest abortion… –Muja Messiah “Palm Trees & Zombies”
— Ali, @egyptoknuckles