Sound Check's Blog Posts Tagged 'Funk' (20)

What do you know about Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings? Did you check their new song "Retreat!"? It's a cut off their new album 'Give The People What They Want', to be released August 6th. If you pre-order the album on iTunes you'll get the track "Retreat!" immediately.…

For much of the world May Day is celebrated as an international worker's holiday. In America May 1st is Loyalty Day. No. Seriously. While most countries are celebrating worker's rights and international solidarity, in the Land of the Free® we celebrate obedience to the state. But cities across the country are holding their own May Day celebrations. In New York a coalition of Immigrant Rights groups, Unions, and Occupy are organizing a day of action and a march to promote…

Did you check out Amp Fiddler's banging and soulful new track 'Conant Gardens 3'? Detroit in the house! Always good to hear from the badass singer/producer/Parliament-Funkadelic alum. - L.…

I'm a sucker for a killer bassline. And the new single from Yinka (from the forthcoming full-length A Hundred Hurricanes Coming Through) delivers that and a hell of a lot more. A catchy dance-punk track, “No Brakes” is the missing link between Prince, the Talking Heads, and Q and Not U. (It's also reminding me that I really need to get my brakes fixed. But that's not really relevant, is it?)…

Prince has a long tradition of taking young women under his purple wing and pushing them into the spotlight. There have been some good (yay Sheila E!) and some bad (ugh Carmen Electra...), but there haven't been many as genuine and worthy of respect in their own right as the Cameroonian singer Andy Allo. Although her latest record Superconductor was produced by Prince and features performances from members of the New Power Generation, Andy Allo is clearly the real person in…

Funky singer Andy Allo has had about as good a year as it gets. After landing a gig that most people would kill for--guitar and backing vocals in Prince's band--the singer from Cameroon has just released her latest solo record Superconductor. She recently spoke with Afropunk about her musical upbringing, the new record, and of course playing music with Prince.



Interview by Nathan…

As the old model for the music industry continues to die an undignified death, all eyes are on crowdsourcing as the “new model.” While successes like Amanda Palmer's million-dollar-kickstarter will never be the norm (and really shouldn't be if were going to be honest about sustainability here...), Corey Glover's latest solo record 'The Pledge is a perfect example of why we should be optimistic about a future of crowdsource funded records.



Click…

Boots Riley is the outspoken frontman for Oakland revolutionary hip-hop group The Coup. Since their 1993 debut, Kill My Landlord, Boots has become known as much for his activism and revolutionary politics as his music. He founded Street Sweeper Social Club with Tom Morello in 2006, and has been an active and outspoken member of Occupy Oakland. The Coup's latest record Sorry To Bother You drops October 30th.

As Afropunk's resident Occupier, I talked to…

Boots Riley is the outspoken frontman for Oakland revolutionary hip-hop group The Coup. Blending hip-hop, soul, and punk rock, The Coup have a sound as radical as their politics. Since their 1993 debut, Kill My Landlord, Boots has become known as much for his activism and revolutionary politics as his music. He founded Street Sweeper Social Club with Tom Morello in 2006, and has been an active and vocal member of Occupy Oakland. The Coup's latest record Sorry To…

Funky as ever! Boots Riley's The Coup just released their new video and are kicking off their tour today, hitting Europe and North America. Dates are below + more US dates to be announced.

The Coup's new "aggressive but danceable punk-funk" album Sorry To Bother You is coming out October 30th, stay tuned for an exclusive AP interview with Boots Riley in the very near future.

In the meanwhile, here's their brand-new video 'The Guillotine'.…

The past few years have seen an increasing percentage of the music scene mining the vaults of Stax records circa 1968 in search of lost singles for inspiration. And why shouldn't they? There's some great shit in there. But retro savants The Heavy have picked a different corner of the Stax catalog for their muse; that sublime period around '71 when some of soul's best songwriters made the switch from songwriter to film composer. Outfitting their soul+indie formula with lush…

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.…

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…

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…

British indie soul-rock outfit The Heavy have a new single out, and it's huge. On their 3rd album the band “wanted to make a bold statement – it’s not shy.” The orchestral swoops add a level of epicness when matched with Spencer Page's distorted bass indie thump. Singer Kelvin Swaby describes it saying “We went pretty cinematic, setting out to score a film that hasn’t been written.” I'd be surprised if filmmakers don't take them up on it later this year. This is the rare sort of…

This FREE concert presents emerging, mid-career, and legacy Jazz artists that represent revolutionary talent and artistry. In the tradition of the Free Form jazz movement we are interested in ways that artist are challenging the boundaries of their practice and the jazz genre by interrogating conventions in areas such as collaboration, harmonic structures, experimental improvisation, interdisciplinary work, and instrumentation.  Past artists have included Billy Bang, Olu Dara,…

Afro-electro-funk performance artist Daví opens his new 'Got the Seed' EP boldly. The unsettlingly funky title track is based around a Bollywood sample run not through a web of filters, but some sort of Steampunk contraption; all winding gears and sprockets. Daví's music is just that set of contradictions, it's infectiously danceable and draped in Moog synths and effects, but the beats are always just a little jagged. Even the synths often have some organic quality. 'Wonder on a…

British funky pop and R&B band AlunaGeorge's new track 'Just A Touch' is real groovy, don't you think? If you like what you hear, check out their debut EP, 'You Know You Like It' (out now on iTunes).

Banner photo…

We talk a lot about the artists behind the microphone. But for every word written about the artists working on one side of the recording studio, tragically few words are written about the artists on the other side of the sound-proof glass. In his 40 year career, Nile Rodgers has worked with everyone from Bowie to Madonna, from Sister Sledge to Master Chief. His music unwittingly formed the backbone of hip-hop with the Sugar Hill Gang basing their breakthrough Rapper's…