Sound Check's Blog Posts Tagged 'Afropunk' (16)

Vernon Reid is the legendary guitarist of the band Living Colour and the founder of the Black Rock Coalition. He'll be performing as part of a retrospective of the career of the late great poet, performer, and teacher Sekou Sundiata at the…

Congrats to teenage punk rock band and Afropunk Festival alums Radkey for their feature in The New York Times.

"They play hard-driving rock and pop-punk, with intricate guitar and bass riffs." (...) "The lead singer and guitarist, Dee Radke, 19, possesses a rich baritone and…

So you got your flight booked. You got your badge. You got your 5x7 corner of someone’s living room that you paid $500 for, but they’re totally hanging a sheet up, so you know: privacy. You’re ready for SXSW, so don’t fuck it up. Here are the shows you most definitely don’t want to miss.…

Think you've got what it takes to play the big stage at AFROPUNK FEST '13! Here's your shot!

AFROPUNK is hosting BATTLE OF THE BANDS. The 16 bands with the most votes will get to battle it out in Brooklyn.

It's simple:…

AFROPUNK FEST 2013 is right around the corner! We're bringing you another weekend of food, fun, sun and beautiful people August 24th and August 25th 2013 at Commodore Barry Park in Brooklyn, NY. Mark your calendars and join us in…

Party Animal is a new hardcore band featuring Kool AD of Das Racist. Their debut record drops later this month, and is one of my most anticipated records of 2013. I recently spoke with the band about DIY, punk rock, and moving out…

Das Racist may be dead (and eloquently eulogized here by Alexandria Gamlin), but Kool AD (aka Victor Vazquez) is soldiering on with his new project, Party Animal. The band is a major departure from Das Racist's erudite hip-hop. Blunt force punk rock, Vazquez' new band has all the subtlety of a fist to the jaw.

Their new track “I Love Society (Oil!…

After she enjoyed the Afropunk Fest performances like the rest of us, AP member Olivia Haynes got a chance to catch up with hilarious mad scientist Reggie Watts and Alexis Brown of Metal band Straight Line Stitch.

They told her about what Afropunk means to them and what they have in store for us in coming months. Check it out.



(Straight Line Stitch photo by wagz2it/TimeOut NY)…

We've been repping the Skins for a while here, and hopefully by now you know why. This badass quintet of teenagers (siblings Bayli, Reef, and Kaya Mckeithan and not-siblings Daisy Spencer and Russell C) has recorded 2 EPs in the past year and hitting the road and playing shows whenever they have some downtime between school. (When I was 17 the best I got was playing Golden Eye whenever I had some downtime between school...)…

Our love for New York singer/songwriter Tess is no secret. Straddling the world of RnB and rock like the second coming of Tina Turner, Tess has spent the past few months kicking some serious ass. After dropping her debut EP…

There's nothing new about musicians putting jokes into their songs. Hell, Mozart wrote multiple choral pieces with “lick my asshole” as the text. And comedians using music to tell a joke is about as old as the whole idea of telling jokes. But there's something rare about an artist who's able to transcend both labels to the point where he's neither a comedian singing songs, nor a musician telling jokes. Reggie Watts is his own special category of indefinable.…

The absurdly prolific Chaz Bundick, better known to the world as Toro Y Moi, has somehow found time between Lollapalooza, a collaboration with Tyler the Creator, releasing a series of 7 inches in April, and of course Afropunk Fest 2012 to work on new material. Apparently already at work on Toro Y Moi's next album, Bundick and band debuted a handful of new songs at Lollapalooza last week.…

I first heard of Bad Rabbits in 2009 from my old roomate with the words “I just heard this band you'd love. They sound like Prince if he was a punk.” No more needed to be said. That sentence has New Favorite Band material written all over it.



At the time, Bad Rabbits were fresh from recording their 2nd EP the wall-to-wall fantastic Stick Up Kids. The Boston-based (yay hometown pride!) multi-cultural quintet had previously formed the brunt of the appropriately…

Body Language's not-so-secret weapon is the dueling lead vocals of Angela Bass and Matt Young. Though boy-girl vocals are kind of the thing these days in the indie pop world (see also: Gotye, Of Monsters and Men, and the XX), it's rare to see them just sound this sexy. Twee, playful, useful from a storytelling perspective, sure, but sexy? This is why we love Body Language.…

Science-fiction has always been the haven for misfits. You can create a world where the bullshit of our modern era is either mostly figured out, or has deteriorated to a point where there's no choice but to solve it immediately. And whether dystopian (The Matrix), utopian (Star Trek) or pragmatic (Foundation series), sci-fi enables those of us who never easily fit in anywhere to imagine a world in which we do fit. Or at least one in which we understand the rules. So it makes…

The sprawling 9 piece hip-hop collective Phony Ppl are nothing if not ambitious. Barely 7 months after their debut LP, their new EP nothinG Special cements their status as one of the most exciting new acts of 2012. The band moves effortlessly between sampled, sequenced and full band; switching genres and sound on a dime. Anchored by one of the tightest rhythm sections in the game, the EP is a slice of retro hip-hop, soul, and disco. But unlike many the many groups who…