To quote the ever-quotable Toki Wright: when a door closes, a window opens. Just six months after finding out that he would lose his long-running position as Department Head of the Hip Hop Studies program at the now-shuttered McNally College of Music, Toki has announced that he’s relocating to Boston to take an Assistant Chair […]
Resmaa Menakem, a licensed independent social worker and therapist, released his book My Grandmother’s Hands this past September. The book sought to tackles issues of racism and white supremacy from an unexpected, yet plausible place: how it affects the bodies of the oppressed and oppressors. My Grandmother’s Hands focuses specifically on how Black bodies and […]
BJ Burton likes to keep a low profile. He mentioned this several times while chatting over coffee on Wednesday, a sheepish grin creeping across his face as he squinted into the morning sun. That low profile is probably why, even after several years of co-writing, producing, engineering and mixing critically acclaimed albums by Bon Iver, […]
Every Wednesday night this month, the Chicago-based punk poet Ike Reilly will hold court at Icehouse to celebrate the release of his new album, Crooked Love. The artist-in-residence concept has become increasingly common at Twin Cities venues this year, particularly in the colder and slower winter months. But for Ike, it’s an approach to playing […]
When it comes to techno music, few, if any, names loom as large as that of Carl Craig. Alongside several peers from his native Detroit, Craig is considered one of techno’s pioneers, but one would be hard-pressed to name an electronic musician of any kind who can match the sheer volume and breadth of Craig’s […]
Kimbra gets Prince. Since buying Musicology in a New Zealand record store, she’s released three of her own shape-shifting albums, including today’s Primal Heart. But she’s never lost sight of principles she learned from Prince — especially evolution, duality, and joy. You know her from “Somebody That I Used To Know,” the song that sent her and Gotye to […]
On the night that Prince and the Revolution were recording their historic August 3, 1983 concert at First Avenue — where the band would debut “Purple Rain” — the studio technician Susan Rogers was celebrating her 27th birthday and packing up her life in Los Angeles to move to Minneapolis, where she would spend the […]
Whenever reporters talk to John Maus, they tend to end up writing a lot about the way John Maus talks. Some phrases and sentences that have been used to describe him in conversation include “maddeningly referential,” “circular,” “nonlinear tangents abound,” and “It is not easy to talk to John Maus.” The very first sentence of […]
The story of Prince on keyboards is also the story of how technology routed his music — and all pop music — in the ’80s. Manning a bank of synths in his trademark surgical scrubs, “Dr.” Matt Fink wasn’t Prince’s longest-running keyboardist (Morris Hayes played with the NPG for 20 years), but Fink’s dozen years, […]
When you think about the Minneapolis Sound, synths and drum machines probably jump to mind before you think of bass. Possibly the best-known thing Prince ever did regarding bass guitar was to leave it out of one of his most iconic hits: “When Doves Cry.” As BrownMark explains, though, there was a reason that song […]
