Five decades after David Bowie’s seminal tour, our music writers reflect on the concerts that have left a mark, from Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish
Café Society, New York City, early 1939
The 23-year-old Billie Holiday was mostly unknown outside the jazz loop when she began her 1939 residency at this liberal New York club. Her understated, delicately implacable debut of Strange Fruit, a terrifying depiction of lynchings in the south, made a unique new vocal sound famous worldwide. John Fordham
Almost since it first emerged on the streets of the Bronx, audiences have expected hip-hop to express a revolutionary purpose. But perhaps this music shouldn’t have to take a political stand
Halfway through side one of A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, the 1991 debut album by the hip-hop duo Black Sheep, some protesters interrupt the music. “Yo, man,” one guy says. “Why don’t you be kicking some records about, y’know, the upliftment of the Blacks?” Another asks why Black Sheep is silent about “the eating of the dolphins”. Someone else mentions “the hole in the ho zone”, turning environmental degradation into a dirty joke – perhaps unwittingly.
In response to all these demands for instruction, the guys from Black Sheep can only chuckle. Something about hip-hop makes listeners greedy for more words, better words. But Black Sheep made a brilliant album. What more could anyone want?
Continue reading...I had grown up in brutal poverty, and saw touch as a privilege for those with less traumatic backgrounds. Then a friend and mentor changed my life
Welcome to the Guardian’s Power of Touch series
It happened one day during my first year of college at Rutgers University, in my home state of New Jersey. The anti-apartheid movement was raging on my college campus, there was still a massive buzz about Jesse Jackson’s first run for president and I had instantly become woke, as we say, because of names such as Winnie and Nelson Mandela, because of the Aids and crack epidemics, and because of my adopted big sister on campus, an older student named Lisa Williamson, who would later become the famed activist and bestselling author Sister Souljah.
For sure, Lisa was one of the most incredible speakers I had ever heard. She was a fearless leader, and I became so instantly fond of her, I even called her “Ma” just like I did my own mother. And she adored me, taught me and shared with me everything that she knew and was learning, in real time.
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