Category Archives: Soul

Historic wins for Nomadland – and surprise victory for Anthony Hopkins – at odd Oscars

Posted on by

Chloé Zhao made history as the first woman of colour to win best director with her drama about van-dwellers as Hopkins and Frances McDormand won top acting honours

During an unusual Oscars ceremony, on-the-road drama Nomadland triumphed with a win for best picture, best actress and a historic victory for Chloé Zhao, becoming the first woman of colour to be named best director and only the second woman ever.

The film, starring Frances McDormand as a woman living out of her van and interacting with real-life nomads, took home the top trophy near the end of a delayed night and a delayed season amid the pandemic. The ceremony played out in person but with safety precautions and a modest guest list.

Continue reading...

And the winner should be … Peter Bradshaw’s predictions for the 2021 Oscars

Posted on by

Will Nomadland clean up this year? Will Anthony Hopkins get best actor? Our film critic gives the low down on the contenders for the Academy Awards

Will win: Nomadland
Should win: Nomadland
Shoulda been a contender: Quo Vadis, Aida?

Continue reading...

No man’s land: in crowning Chloé Zhao and Emerald Fennell, Bafta has triumphed

Posted on by

An immaculate set of choices this year were capped by best film for Nomadland and best British film for Promising Young Woman – with Anthony Hopkins’ honour the cherry on top

This year’s Bafta list has confirmed the amazingly meteoric career ascendancy of Chloé Zhao, the Chinese-born film-maker whose debut movie was just six years ago and who was unknown outside arthouse-connoisseur circles until relatively recently; she now is set to rule awards season with a remarkable film displaying her now fully developed authorial signature.

Related: Baftas 2021: Nomadland wins big as Anthony Hopkins and Promising Young Woman surprise

Continue reading...

Merry Clayton: ‘Gimme Shelter left a dark taste in my mouth’

Posted on by

The singer who backed the Rolling Stones, Coldplay and more weathered a miscarriage, then the loss of her legs in a car accident – but her new album Beautiful Scars shows she refuses to give up

Merry Clayton has an excellent memory. The 72-year-old singer tells tales with such particular detail: the warmth of falling asleep between gospel legends Mahalia Jackson and Linda Hopkins in the pews of her father’s church in Louisiana; the recording sessions with Bobby Darin, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Rolling Stones, for whom she delivered the searing holler of Gimme Shelter.

What Clayton has no memory of is the 2014 car accident that was so severe that doctors were forced to amputate both of her legs below the knee. She remembers waking up in hospital, but the incident itself, and much of the five months she spent recovering, is lost. “It was like I was in another place,” she explains, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. “I knew I was here in the world, but it was just like I was somewhere else. I was in la-la land.”

Continue reading...

From Soul Train to Beyonce: the joy of black performance in America

Posted on by

In A Little Devil in America, Hanif Abdurraqib set out to celebrate black artists across music, dance, comedy and more, who succeeded even when their own country refused to honour them

When I began A Little Devil in America, I was thinking about Josephine Baker. The title of the book comes from Baker, from her speech at the March on Washington in 1963. It is a speech that is often overlooked. The legacy of the march so often centres on its male speakers (Martin Luther King Jr, A Philip Randolph), and Baker was well past her most notable prime. At 57, she chose to return to the US from France and make a small speech – but also to confront the country she’d left and vowed to not return to. The speech is at times tender, at times funny, at times teeming with rage. There was a fullness to it; Baker considering the vastness of her life and the many lives she’d lived. Her speech is defiant and brilliant, punctuated by Baker aligning her experiences with the national plight of black people in America:

You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.

Continue reading...

Dionne Warwick’s greatest tracks – ranked!

Posted on by

As the soul legend is nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, we pick her 20 greatest songs from her 60s collaborations with Burt Bacharach to her later power ballads

The live album A Man and A Woman is both delightful and slightly odd: Warwick dueting with Isaac Hayes, who had just had a hit with a paen to troilism called Moonlight Lovin’ (Ménage à Trois). Its solitary single isn’t a medley, more an attempt to bind two songs together as a call-and-response. It works.

Continue reading...

Jazmine Sullivan: ‘I want to get to the root of why people do things’

Posted on by

With 12 Grammy nominations since her 2008 debut, the US singer is already a genre leader – and her new EP seals her reputation with a cinematic portrait of six women commodified by their beauty

“Did you see the message from Issa?” Jazmine Sullivan asks me excitedly. For all the acclaim and Grammy recognition the R&B star has accrued over the past 12 years, she still reacts to starry praise with joy and disbelief. A hopeful tweet suggesting Insecure’s Issa Rae turn Sullivan’s latest EP into a short film elicited a positive response, and later in the week, the pattern repeats with Mary J Blige. “Wait … wtf?! I’m so happy man!” Sullivan tweeted after the soul legend signals her eagerness for a guest spot.

To onlookers, though, there was little surprise about the Philadelphia native – also picked to sing the national anthem at this year’s Super Bowl – being treated as one of the modern greats of R&B. When Sullivan arrived on the music scene in 2008, a much-touted 21-year-old protege of Missy Elliott, her USP was familiar in the genre: a vocal force of nature, honed in church, who drew on personal experience to deliver raw soul in the lineage of Blige (with whom she toured in 2010) and Keyshia Cole.

Continue reading...

‘A legend in her own right’: Carolyn Franklin, Aretha’s forgotten sister

Posted on by

She was a genius songwriter and singer but could never escape her sibling’s shadow – and died at just 43. Family and friends including Martha Reeves and Bettye Lavette celebrate the life of a cruelly overlooked artist

Some of the most remarkable footage of Aretha Franklin was taken in 1968, as she rehearses Ain’t No Way, written by her youngest sister, Carolyn. Diminutive and tomboyish in appearance, Carolyn is clearly in control of the session: she anchors the beat with a church clap, teaching her sister the melody while Aretha holds down chords on the piano. For the woman who ferociously demanded respect, Aretha appears meek, almost sheepish. Carolyn’s commanding presence and musicality are what shine.

Yet it was Aretha who would go on to become the Queen of Soul, and whose story will be depicted this year in the biopic Respect, while Carolyn has been mostly overlooked, known – if at all – for a few songwriting credits. Her life and career as a songwriter, backing vocalist and solo artist, though cut short, is one of frustrated opportunity, hidden identity and fantastic accomplishment.

Continue reading...

‘All that mattered was survival’: the songs that got us through 2020

Posted on by

Butterflies with Mariah, Bronski Beat in the Peak District, Snoop Dogg on a food delivery ad … our writers reveal the tracks that made 2020 bearable

When it came to lockdown comfort listening, there was something particularly appealing about lush symphonic soul made by artists such as Teddy Pendergrass and the Delfonics. But there was one record I reached for repeatedly: Black Moses by Isaac Hayes, and particularly the tracks arranged by Dale Warren. Their version of Burt Bacharach’s (They Long to Be) Close to You is an epic, spinning the original classic into a nine-minute dose of saccharine soul. But their cover of Going in Circles, another Warren exercise in expansion, is their masterpiece, reimagining the Friends of Distinction original as a seven-minute arrangement with stirring strings and beatific backing vocals that builds into a story about lost love that transcends the genre’s usual parameters. A perfect, if slightly meta, balm for the repetitive lockdown blues. Lanre Bakare

Continue reading...

Why is Pixar so brilliant at death?

Posted on by

From Up’s moving life story to the father-son parting of Onward, the animation powerhouse has never shirked from profound contemplation

There comes a time in the life of a writer, director and, perhaps, a company when the days shorten, the shadows lengthen and contemplating the inevitable must begin. The guy in the cloak with the retro lawn equipment can’t be ignored any longer: Death. In Pixar’s latest film, Soul, mortality springs itself with supreme bad timing on protagonist Joe Gardner, a New York jazzman about to play the gig of his life when he falls down a manhole. After 2017’s Coco and this year’s Onward, this is Pixar’s third film about death in as many years. Is this fixation the Californian animation giant’s midlife crisis in multimillion-dollar CGI form?

Soul, directed by Pete Docter, is a classy offering with smart colouring-book metaphysics in the vein of his 2015 film Inside Out, as Joe attempts to escape the “Great Beyond” and return to his body, via the “Great Before”. This is the realm where nascent souls must find their spark – their animating passion in life – and are then dispatched to Earth. Visually drawing on Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, broaching the dark subject for children with life-affirming insouciance, and – featuring the company’s first black lead character – a big diversity coup, it’s a typically slick, four-quadrant-pleasing, stock price-boosting entertainment package. This is what Pixar do.

Continue reading...

10 of the best Christmas songs (that aren’t by Mariah Carey)

Posted on by

The classics are back in the charts even earlier than usual – alongside the perennial row about the Pogues. So why not discover these lesser-known festive bangers?

Judging by the number of trees and lights going up already, the UK is rounding off the worst year ever by turning Christmas 2020 into a six-week celebration of successful vaccine trials. Sure enough, sales and streams of festive songs are up by 50% compared with the same week last year, with Mariah Carey leading the charge and likely to go Top 40 tomorrow. But to avoid being thoroughly sick of All I Want for Christmas Is You before you have even opened an Advent calendar, consider adding these lesser-known tracks to your playlists.

Continue reading...

Steve McQueen: ‘It’s rebel music that moves me’

Posted on by

The director on the reggae-fuelled house parties he witnessed as a child - lovingly recreated in his new film, Lovers Rock – and how their raw energy shaped his taste in music

Reggae music is the beating heart of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, which traces Black British experience from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. In the 1970s, when the characteristically defiant Bob Marley song that gives the series its title was released, McQueen’s aunt, Molly, used to regularly sneak out of her family house in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, on weekend nights to go to “blues parties” – all-nighters usually held in someone’s house.

Back then, the blues party was a staple of West Indian immigrant life in England, a makeshift club-cum-shebeen, usually held in someone’s front room or basement, where, as the night progressed, the sweet smell of ganja merged with the lingering aromas of West Indian home cooking. As an escape from her strict, religious upbringing, Molly would dance until dawn to roots reggae, sweet-sounding “lovers rock” and floor-shaking dub instrumentals.

Continue reading...

Too black, too queer, too holy: why Little Richard never truly got his dues

Posted on by

How did a turbaned drag queen from the sexual underground of America’s deep south ignite rock’n’roll? We unravel the mystery behind Little Richard’s subversive genius

As the world marks and mourns the passing of Little Richard, many have been asking: how was someone so unapologetically black and queer present at the origins of rock, a world-shaking music still associated, to this day, with white male musical acts like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones?

All these artists and more, including Bob Dylan in a Twitter thread, would be quick to acknowledge Little Richard’s formative influence on them. But “influence” is perhaps too weak a word here. Rock’n’roll history has never exactly neglected or ignored Little Richard: it just has never quite known what to do with him. The longstanding pissing contest over who can claim the title “King of Rock’n’Roll” – Elvis? Jerry Lee Lewis? – is a case in point. While his authorised biographer went celestial in choosing to style Richard “the Quasar of Rock”, perhaps we might do better to listen to the artist, introducing himself at the Club Matinee in Houston, Texas, in 1953: “Little Richard, King of the Blues … and the Queen, too!”

Continue reading...

Betty Wright, US soul, funk and R&B singer, dies aged 66

Posted on by

Singer with remarkable vocal range had been sampled by generations of hip-hop and R&B artists, including Beyoncé and Mary J Blige

The soul, funk and R&B singer Betty Wright, celebrated across pop genres for her remarkable vocal prowess, has died aged 66.

The cause of death was not immediately known but Wright’s niece confirmed the news, writing on Twitter: “Sleep in peace aunty Betty Wright. Fly high angel.”

Continue reading...

Bill Withers, influential soul singer behind Ain’t No Sunshine, dies aged 81

Posted on by

Lean on Me and Lovely Day singer dies of heart complications, according to a family statement

Bill Withers, the influential US soul singer who wrote Lean on Me, Ain’t No Sunshine and Lovely Day has died aged 81 of heart complications, according to a statement from his family.

Withers wrote and recorded several other major hits including Use Me and Just the Two of Us, before retiring in the mid-1980s and staying out of the public eye.

Continue reading...

Childish Gambino: 3.15.20 review – at the peak of the zeitgeist

Posted on by

The actor, comedian and musician Donald Glover has made the first truly outstanding album of the decade, offsetting cultural examinations with moments of sweet levity

In hindsight, music has always been Donald Glover’s true calling. Before the sitcoms, the Star Wars movie, the Saturday Night Live hosting gigs, and the well-worn gifs of the performer walking horrified into a burning room with a stack of pizza boxes, you could find him on YouTube as a member of Derrick Comedy. The group’s greatest sketch, B-Boy Stance, saw Glover play an ageing hip-hop pioneer who had his arms surgically attached to his back, ensuring he was forever pulling the iconic pose – it riffs on the distance between the New York acolytes who witnessed the birth of hip-hop and those who came to the music after it was commodified. Glover’s understanding of American culture shines with diamond clarity; Atlanta, his comedy-drama that goes deep into the city’s rap scene, is the evolution of those ideas.

Glover’s early forays into rap were corny and forgettable. The Childish Gambino project felt like the side hustle of a talented kid eager to test every limit of his creativity – that the moniker was taken from an online Wu-Tang Clan name generator seemed to reflect how low it fell on his list of priorities. In 2016, the funk record Awaken, My Love! was an artistic breakthrough. Then came 2017’s vicious This Is America and a video that encapsulates the racial prejudice, police brutality and vicious gun lust freezing the soul of the self-proclaimed greatest country in the world. The clip became a pop cultural juggernaut, anointing Glover as spokesman for the Black Lives Matter generation.

Continue reading...

David Bowie’s 50 greatest songs – ranked!

Posted on by

What more could you ask for, at this bizarre, unnerving and outlandish time, than a roundup of the greatest hits of one of the most bizarre, unnerving and outlandish musicians of all time

A rejected single finally released on a 1970 cash-in compilation, Bowie’s first collaboration with the producer Tony Visconti is better than anything on his debut album. Driven by acoustic guitar, its sound points the way ahead and there’s something appealingly odd, even sinister about the lyrical come-ons: “Wear the dress your mother wore.”

Continue reading...

A duel with Van Morrison: ‘Is this a psychiatric examination? It sounds like one’

Posted on by

The singer-songwriter is releasing his sixth album in three years – his best since 1997. Would he like to expand on how he made it, or why he chose his collaborators? He would not

There is a song on Van Morrison’s 1991 album Hymns to the Silence called Why Must I Always Explain? in which the Northern Irish singer-songwriter appears to rail against the endlessly tiresome process of giving interviews. “And I never turned out to be the person that you wanted me to be,” he sings. “And I tell you who I am, time and time and time again / Tell me why must I always explain?”

The song is in my mind when I meet Morrison on a midweek morning in Cardiff. The singer sits by the window in a fourth-floor hotel room; a pale white knuckle of a man in a blue patterned shirt, his hair a sweep of bracken red. Beyond him, the view over the bay has been obscured by heavy autumn mist.

Continue reading...

Amy Winehouse hologram tour postponed due to ‘unique sensitivities’

Posted on by

Base Hologram, which was planning a concert tour featuring the deceased singer, says ‘creativity does not necessarily follow a schedule’

The company developing an Amy Winehouse hologram tour has postponed the project. Base Hologram said in a statement that it had encountered “some unique challenges and sensitivities” on the path to “remembering Amy Winehouse and her legacy in the most celebratory and respectful way possible”.

In a further statement issued to Billboard magazine, Base chairman and CEO Brian Becker described the production as a “cross between a Broadway show and a concert spectacle which requires creative engineering”, and added: “that type of creativity does not necessarily follow a schedule.”

Continue reading...