{Read} {PDF EPUB} ~download Rock Me by Olivia Marks Planners approve 779-home Boiling Springs subdivision. A 779-home development near the highly traveled Highway 9 corridor in Boiling Springs has received preliminary approval. The Spartanburg County Planning Commission this week gave the nod to that and four other housing subdivisions in the county. In all, the five projects total more than 1,100 homes. The biggest of the group by far is called "The Springs," a 779-home subdivision of patio homes on a 268-acre site on Double Bridge Road along Hanging Rock Road, west of Highway 9 and near the North Spartanburg Sports Complex in Boiling Springs. Mark III Properties of Spartanburg is the developer. Last year, an average of 7,600 vehicles a day traveled Highway 9 near Old Furnace Road in Boiling Springs, just north of the subdivision site. In 2016, the average was 6,900 vehicles a day, and the year before, 6,800 vehicles a day, according to the S.C. Department of Transportation. Although the highway was widened a few years ago, planning officials have said traffic counts have steadily increased in the corridor due to growth. Developer Jay Beeson with Mark III Properties said traffic will be addressed to minimize the impact on local roads. "We will have a full traffic study performed by a licensed traffic engineer in order to determine what upgrades may be warranted by the county or SCDOT," Beeson said. The developer has already begun clearing the land at the site. Other new projects. Spartanburg County's residential growth isn't limited to Boiling Springs, though. Other projects planners approved this week: Olivia Springs is a 144-patio home development planned for 55 acres along Cedar Springs Road, south of Southport Road in Spartanburg County. Mark III Properties is also the developer for Olivia Springs. It will be in the Croft Fire District and in Spartanburg School District 7, according to the plans. Reid Park is a 98-lot subdivision with single-family homes on 31 acres that fronts Duncan-Reidville Road and is next to Boiter Road in Duncan. The developer is Daven Acker of Spartanburg. Las Casas at Inman is a 49-lot subdivision planned on 34 acres off Clark Road and east of Pine Lane and Maxwell Street in Inman. The developer and home builder is Niemitalo Inc. of Inman. Niemitalo is also planning a 32-lot, single-family home subdivision on 21 acres on Highway 357, between Bruce and Rector roads in Lyman. It is called Christian Creek. On 'Sour,' Olivia Rodrigo Is A Lowercase Girl With Caps-Lock Feelings. Lowercase girls tend to fly under the radar by design, but once you start looking you'll see them everywhere. For one thing, they've been all over the streaming charts in the past few years: folklore , evermore , "thank u, next," girl in red, mxmtoon, dodie, beabadoobee, how i'm feeling now , "drivers license," "deja vu," "good 4 u" — to name just a few recent, femme-forward musical phenomena that wouldn't even think of imposing the tyranny of capital letters on the listener's imagination. But lowercase girls have been there forever, in the back rows of classrooms and the corners of parties, daydreaming, doodling, stockpiling vivid details and observations in the marble notebooks of their minds — waiting for the precise moment to launch them like a carefully crafted dart that punctures everybody else's apathy and proves just how sharply she has been paying attention. Some of the best of them never grow out of it. "My only advantage as a reporter," Joan Didion wrote in 1968, unwittingly describing her own species perfectly, "is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does." Beware the lowercase girl. Although she is usually overlooked, underestimated and even ignored, she sometimes turns out to be the one who's been writing the story all along. Such were the cultural forces that Olivia Rodrigo harnessed, streamlined and gloriously melo-dramatized earlier this year in her breakout single, "drivers license" — stylized all lowercase, because of course. A lifelong Swiftie (almost literally: When Taylor Swift's self-titled debut album came out, Rodrigo was 3) and the daughter of a therapist, Rodrigo was raised to be the kind of person who didn't exactly hide her feelings. On the chorus of the song that accelerated her to overnight fame, she saves her most impassioned vocal delivery for what she clearly considers to be her ex's most grievous crime: Guess you didn't mean what you wrote in that song about me . The implication being that in her songs, defiantly, she means every word. In the last few years, given the success of Billie Eilish's ASMR jams and Swift's soft acoustic reveries — "lowercase girl album" bona fides that were documented by Jill Gutowitz in Vulture last year — it has sometimes felt like pop musicians are playing one big round of the Quiet Game, daring each other into an ever more provocative hush. "drivers license" certainly benefits from that tonal shift, but the most moving thing about the song is actually its careening sense of dynamism, the way it swings repeatedly from a private muttering to a collective, belt-it-out exorcism of the heart. Such is the power of That Bridge. (Perhaps the surest indication of the song's massive, cross-generational appeal is the fact that its bridge inspired both a TikTok challenge and an SNL skit — some kids may have been editing their small-screen video responses to it as their parents watched the episode on some old technological innovation called live TV.) Rodrigo's songs play out like bottled-up soliloquies rather than two- sided conversations, which gives them the emotional force of someone who has previously felt unheard (by an apathetic boyfriend, or maybe by adult society writ large) finally speaking her mind. And so that bridge exposes the great irony of not only "drivers license," but the lowercase girl herself. Because on the inside, where all the feelings are, her caps-lock key is JAMMED. Music Reviews. Lindsay Zoladz Discusses Olivia Rodrigo's 'Sour' on All Things Considered. Olivia Rodrigo Bridges Generations On Her Debut Album 'Sour' "drivers license" would have been a hard act for any new artist to follow, but in the past month, Rodrigo has seized every opportunity to prove that there's more to her than even that song could fully showcase. The two singles she's released in the lead-up to her debut album, Sour , have effortlessly slipped into unexpected genres — who among us could have predicted that the "drivers license" girl would go scorched-earth pop- punk on her third single, or that she'd pull it off? — and both have been sprinkled with striking, cleverly documented observational details. "Trading jackets, laughing 'bout how small it looks on you," she sings on the hypnotic "deja vu," as a chorus of backup Olivias exhale a scathing line of canned, can-barely-be-bothered laughter at such a romantic cliché: ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha . "Guess the therapist I found for you, she really helped," she shrugs on "good 4 u" — one of those kung fu lyrics that cuts its intended target in seven different places before he even realizes he's bleeding. Rodrigo's songs have lived-in details to spare, as though she had all this time been assembling a detailed dossier on the emotional minutiae of the teenage experience. The remarkably potent Sour , out today, plays a similar game of bait-and-switch with expectations. Far from the muted chords of "drivers license"—and worlds away from the musical-theater sheen of her songs for Disney+'s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series — the album's opening track, "brutal," crashes in with a torrent of loud, crunchy guitars, overtop of which Rodrigo's dryly compressed voice lists a seemingly unending string of adolescent neuroses: "And I don't stick up for myself / I'm anxious and nothing can help / And I wish I'd done this before / And I wish people liked me more." The and and and and 's pile up like a teetering Jenga tower of stress. Rodrigo proved on "good 4 u" that she can do a very effective vocal sneer, and on "brutal" she saves her most caustic one for the adults who insist, in their rose-colored recollections, that their teenage years were the best of their lives. "I'm so sick of 17," she sighs, "where's my f****** teenage dream?!" It's an exhilarating lyric, an expertly calibrated eye roll at anyone over the age of 18 — or maybe even at the previous generation's entire philosophy about how pop music should be made. "I'm very emo," Rodrigo said in a recent Rolling Stone video interview, sitting beside her co-writer and producer Dan Nigro. "Dan was in an emo band, and he still tells me I'm emo — that's how you know you're really emo." Now 39, Nigro used to be the frontman of the Long Island-based band As Tall as Lions, who found moderate success in the booming East Coast emo-punk scene of the early aughts. He might seem an unlikely musical partner for Rodrigo, until you remember that perhaps the most prominent current producer of pop music made by young women, Jack Antonoff, is a veteran of the very same scene. (His first band, New Jersey-based Steel Train, was signed to the beloved, influential pop-punk label Drive-Thru Records.) But as a one-time lowercase girl / emo kid / Drive-Thru Records enthusiast from suburban New Jersey, I do find it pretty surprising that two of the most successful producers in crafting pop music from a feminine point of view came out of that scene. Because, as I remember all too well, it was a realm almost entirely devoid of women's voices. "From my early-to-mid adolescence," I wrote years ago in a reassessment of this period in my music-obsessed life, "I listened almost exclusively to music made by sad boys." And it wasn't just that girls' perspectives were absent from this music that I loved so passionately during this confusing and hormonally tumultuous time: The Girl was always the reason the boys were sad. In these songs, she was often actively vilified, blamed for the Lead Singer Boy's every earthly woe — and not infrequently the star of his violent revenge fantasies. "Even if her plane crashes tonight she'll find some way to disappoint me," went a song I can still sing by heart as an adult, "by not burning in the wreckage, or drowning at the bottom of the sea." This was, to me, romantic, melodramatic, deep . I doodled lyrics like those on the backs of worksheets, in the margins of my diary. I played guitar — much better than I ever gave myself credit for then — but was too shy to be in a band, so I resorted to playing covers of those sorts of songs alone in my bedroom. Maybe I would have uploaded them to YouTube if it had existed. I gravitated toward emo and punk music because I was seeking out some sort of alternative to life as I knew it, so I think if Olivia Rodrigo had existed when I was a teen I would have at first been a little skeptical of her mainstream popularity, her preternatural poise, her Disney past. But in the end I have to think I would have been pulled in by the oceanic undertow of her music's subjectivity, an exquisitely detailed, deeply felt, young girl's perspective that was woefully lacking in the music I listened to when I myself was learning how to parallel park. Nigro's production style for Rodrigo is both playful and atmospheric, conjuring a kind of dreamy internal space in which it seems like the listener is eavesdropping on the singer's thoughts and impressions. Seemingly small, intimate moments — an ex sharing a Billy Joel song with his new flame, say, in "deja vu" — are underscored with operatic flair. Though updated for this world of social media surveillance and stream-of-consciousness text messages, this approach isn't exactly new. It's basically the foundation of modern pop music as we know it, dating back to the youth-oriented concerns of Brill Building songwriters in the 1950s and the early 1960s girl groups whose adolescent experiences were dramatized into three- minute symphonies thanks to Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound." But also: No thanks to Phil Spector. Because his unavoidable centrality in the story of modern pop music also reminds us that it is an industry with a long, troubling history of exploiting — or worse — the affective labor of teenage girls. Accusations of abuse now also loom over the previous generation's most influential pop hitmaker, Dr. Luke — ironically the architect of so-called "empowering" female-driven millennial pop anthems like "Roar," "Since U Been Gone" and, yep, f-ing "Teenage Dream." Editors' Picks. The Voices Of Black Women Were Essential To Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound. Best Music Of 2017. Don't Call Me Honey: In 2017, Women Confronted The Deep Roots Of Rock's Boys Club. Rodrigo's creative partnership with Nigro, though, seems to fit within a newer paradigm of pop star/producer power dynamics. Much like Antonoff's pairings with some of the artists who have most directly inspired Rodrigo (Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey), and even a little like the intimate workings of Eilish's bedroom pop laboratory with her brother Finneas, Rodrigo and Nigro present their work to the world as the result of a genuine, non-hierarchical collaboration. "I realize I'm okay at navigating my job because I played in a band for 10 years with three other very emotional, crazy people — myself probably being the most emotional crazy of the four of us," Nigro told Vice earlier this year. "Having those experiences with my bandmates has really helped me work with so many different artists, because I'm able to understand what they're going through and get them to feel open enough to be who they actually are." But maybe that supposedly "new" paradigm also has crucial antecedents scattered throughout musical history, too. Nigro's language there bears a striking resemblance to the way Alanis Morissette has described her creative partnership with producer Glen Ballard, with whom she first worked on another album with which Sour finds cross-generational echoes: Jagged Little Pill . "glen's presence with me had no agenda," Morissette reflected in a 2015 essay commemorating the 20th anniversary of that landmark album and written — it must be said — all in lowercase letters. "this presence and this lack of projecting onto me 'what i should be' was the ultimate freedom and support i needed to crack open." In that essay, Morissette acknowledges that part of her success was lucky timing: In the mid-'90s there was suddenly, she writes, "a readiness, perhaps, for people to hear about the underbelly, the true experience of being a young, sensitive, and brave person in a patriarchal world." That moment proved to be fleeting, though, and by the early aughts and my early teens the mainstream culture had shifted back to its norm of only caring about macho, masculine angst. Any girl trying to use the idioms of punk or emo to express herself — like, say, Avril Lavigne — was immediately regarded as an intruder, a poser or a sell-out until proven otherwise. What I realize when I reflect back on the silent voices of my youth, though, is that we girls had so much to rage and yell and be sad about — maybe even more than the boys ever did. Because for all the sense of community it gave me in connecting with like-minded friends, the punk and emo scene often still replicated the most misogynistic impulses of the broader culture. Something I have been sitting with for the past few years, and which I have not even known how to begin to process, is that the songwriter and frontman of my favorite emo band — the one who wrote those plane-crash lyrics I sang along to endlessly — was accused of sexual misconduct by girls who, at the time, were about the same age that I was when I idolized him. When I think too hard about that, I want to scream until my lungs explode. Rodrigo and her peers have come of age at a time when a lot of the gender norms that reinforce those exploitative power dynamics are breaking down, in part because most of them grow up with an awareness and acceptance of gender fluidity. Terms like "lowercase girl," or just "girl," are more pliable, inviting and optional than they used to be. Some very popular, very emotional musicians have also paved certain paths, whether that's Swift, Lorde, or Paramore's Hayley Williams. Even if I didn't always hear it affirmed in my own adolescence, it's heartening to now hear Rodrigo asserting, from the top of the charts, that girls have plenty to be emo about. As Sour progresses, the ability to feel deeply and express herself becomes Rodrigo's superpower. "Maybe I'm too emotional, or maybe you never cared at all," she sings on the searing bridge of "good 4 u." It's not her, it's him , she concludes, diagnosing an unfeeling ex as acting "like a damn sociopath." Rodrigo refracts the shattering experience of first heartbreak through a multitude of different moods and genres, and it's a testament to her transfixing strengths as a songwriter and a vocal performer that it only starts to feel repetitive one song from the end. Some of the most promising moments on Sour come when Rodrigo widens her view beyond The Boy or even herself, toward the larger forces keeping kids of her generation feeling so emo. "jealousy, jealousy" fixes its frustration on the picture-perfect distortions of influencer culture: "I kinda wanna throw my phone against the wall," Rodrigo groans. In response to a culture saturated with quick-fix life hacks, self-help truisms and therapy-speak, Rodrigo is refreshingly good at illuminating the space between what she knows she should feel and what she actually does feel. "I know their beauty's not my lack ," she sings, harmonizing with herself so that the line sounds like one of those annoyingly tidy Instagram graphics with an inspirational note written in cursive. "Never doubted myself so much, like am I pretty, am I fun, boy?" she sings, airing her insecurities on the stirring "1 step forward, 3 steps back" (a song that interpolates, with permission, the piano riff from Taylor Swift's "New Year's Day" — the ultimate baton-pass). "I hate that I give you power over that kind of stuff," Rodrigo sighs. And yet, how could she not? It's brutal out there. The final song on Sour finds one last opportunity to flip expectations. "hope ur ok" is not — as its title might suggest — a feel-good message to the ex of "drivers license," thus cleanly and cathartically closing the narrative loop. It is instead a series of character sketches of kids Rodrigo once knew well and lost touch with over the years. Each of them carries their own trauma, which Rodrigo sketches in empathetic, economical writing ("he wore long sleeves 'cause of his dad"). The song is sad but hopeful, radically unsettling at times, and almost disarmingly earnest in its benevolently universal well-wishing. Again, Rodrigo plays the girl who's always been observing everyone around her with a gimlet eye, whether they realized it or not. Maybe, she seems to be concluding on behalf of her much-misunderstood generation, this is a more realistic teenage dream. Not to be ecstatic, euphoric, eternally empowered. Just to be — as Rodrigo puts it in unpresuming lowercase — "ok." Lindsay Zoladz is a critic, reporter and essayist living in Brooklyn. Why Did Los Angeles Become a Cultural Mecca in the Early 1970s? When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. By Madeleine Brand. March 23, 2021. ROCK ME ON THE WATER 1974 — The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics By Ronald Brownstein. In 1974, the most popular TV show in America was a comedy that put a racist, sexist homophobe center stage, then let him rant, impotently, against the churning social change all around him. Some 20 million households tuned in every Saturday night to watch Archie Bunker and his dysfunctional clan hash it out. After “All in the Family,” most of those TVs stayed tuned to CBS for “M*A*S*H,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “The Carol Burnett Show” — a lineup of socially conscious shows that some critics have called the greatest night in television history. It was also a singular year for movies and popular music; you could see “Chinatown,” “The Godfather Part II” and “The Conversation” at your local movie theater, and listen to new, career-defining albums from Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt or Bob Dylan. All of it was produced in Los Angeles. As Ronald Brownstein writes in “Rock Me on the Water,” his in-depth tour of the city’s pop culture in 1974, “Those 12 glittering months represented magic hour.” He paints Los Angeles then as a kind of patchouli-scented version of Florence during the Renaissance. These are not new stories, of course — the brief window of early-1970s creative filmmaking, the Laurel Canyon music scene, the golden era of television. All have been relentlessly examined, artifacts of a once-mighty baby boomer civilization. What Brownstein has done is expertly knit the scenes together, giving the reader a plus-one invite to the heady world of Hollywood parties, jam sessions and pitch meetings, as well as a pointed demonstration of how culture can be made and unmade. By the time we approach the end of that fascinating year, it’s clear that the creative frenzy is about to come to a screeching halt. What was it about Los Angeles in the early 1970s that attracted so many creative people? It had always been a mecca for film. But now it drew young musicians, who felt free to experiment. Some wanted to escape the dirty decay of New York, which was on the brink of bankruptcy. Los Angeles offered not just sunshine and cheap housing, but something more elusive, and more explosive: hope that the social and political activism of the previous decade was yielding fruit. The city’s first (and only) Black mayor, Tom Bradley, had just been elected in 1973. Brownstein, a political analyst for The Atlantic and CNN, who also worked for The Los Angeles Times for many years, is the author of several well-regarded books about politics. He points out that Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, just as 36-year-old Jerry Brown, promising a fresh vision, was elected California’s governor. (Brown went on to date Linda Ronstadt.) But this book is more interested in how politics and Hollywood ricocheted off each other. One chapter considers Jane Fonda and her left-wing political awakening during her marriage to the activist Tom Hayden. The earthquake they wanted to set off in Washington never came, while in the cultural realm, as Brownstein chronicles, America convulsed with change. More permissive attitudes about sex and drugs, a perception that the American dream was not only unattainable but rotten at the core — this new sensibility charged up the films, music and television that Los Angeles exported to the rest of the country, and the world. Brownstein is at his most convincing when describing the film and TV worlds, which produced the most radical assault on mainstream culture. “Chinatown,” for example, which was nominated for 11 Oscars, recounts the original sin of Los Angeles, that the city exists only because a handful of powerful men conspired to steal water from people who were not powerful. It was obviously a metaphor for Watergate (the film came out two months before Nixon’s ignominious departure back home to California), among other government misdeeds, but it also served as a kind of gravestone for 1960s optimism and the hope that positive political change was possible. Music responded by turning inward. The Laurel Canyon musicians weren’t interested in scoring a revolution. They focused on themselves. Some of them, notably Joni Mitchell, were achingly poetic. The more successful bands, like the Eagles, trailed behind them a constant drug-fueled party, and as Brownstein points out, presaged the drift from political activism to personal pleasure that enshrined the 1970s as the Me Decade. TV tried to have it both ways: Push the boundaries but still appeal to a broad audience. “All in the Family,” which perhaps more than any other show transformed TV into an art form people could take seriously, paved the way for other groundbreaking, top-rated shows: “The Jeffersons,” “Maude,” “Sanford and Son” et al. These shows, along with “Mary Tyler Moore” and “M*A*S*H,” took on socially conscious themes like civil rights, women’s liberation and the toll of war. And yet no one will be surprised to read that behind the scenes, these shows did not walk the walk. Even when they were specifically about women and Black families, these programs were written, directed and produced by white men. Brownstein details the fights that Black actors had with Norman Lear to hire Black writers and directors. The “Sanford and Son” star Redd Foxx often complained about the lack of Black talent offscreen, while the star of “Good Times,” Esther Rolle, was furious that the character of her son, J.J., was turned into a racist stereotype by the white writers. In movies and music, Black people had more control. In the early 1970s, Hollywood released around 200 movies centered on Black characters, which, in their success, helped avert a financial crisis for the industry. These so-called Blaxploitation films, which though allowing some creative autonomy also trafficked in racial stereotypes, featured powerful funk music by artists like War, Isaac Hayes and Marvin Gaye — music that was produced in Los Angeles, but had nothing to do with the Laurel Canyon scene. Just a few miles away, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and the Jackson Five were also recording massive hits at the Hollywood studios of Motown Records, which had moved from Detroit to Los Angeles. Yet, Brownstein notes, the white and Black music worlds rarely mixed. The Motown record label stayed, as he puts it, “defiantly disconnected from the white Los Angeles music scene.” It’s unfortunate that Brownstein spends so little time exploring the Black film and music worlds. They’re discussed in just one chapter, into which he also stuffs the exclusion of women in Hollywood. Brownstein’s lens is focused squarely on what white men had to say in film, television and music, making the book itself a demonstration of that same problem. Even the stories of discrimination that the successful producers Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and Julia Phillips faced — plus Ronstadt’s uphill battle in music, which Brownstein presents with genuine outrage — feel like detours off the main freeway. That freeway ends at the ocean, where a giant shark swims. A year after “Chinatown,” in 1975, Steven Spielberg released “Jaws,” featuring a policeman-as-everyman hero. The summer blockbuster was born, and the movie industry never looked back. It was the beginning of the end for the idea that complicated movies commenting on society’s ills could be central to the culture, and even mainstream. The ’70s were morphing into long gas lines and inflation. Tired of confrontation, Americans just wanted to be entertained. TV obliged. After five years dominating the ratings, the Bunkers were displaced by another family, a happy family: the Cunninghams. And, just like that, we were back in the 1950s. “Happy Days” was the top-rated TV show in 1976. Perhaps the most salient lesson of Brownstein’s engrossing book is that surely as day follows night, America devours its most provocative cultural expression and spits it back up, polished and unthreatening. These 16 early Afro-Punk artists made huge contributions to alt-rock. In the realms of punk, ska, metal and art-rock, the roles of Black innovators are long, distinguished and deserving of wider acknowledgment. The 2003 documentary Afro-Punk lifted the lid on how many black musicians and fans were part of punk culture. Yet even today, there persists the idea that black participation in rock music is some sort of novelty or anomaly. That disregards, of course, mountains of evidence to the contrary, going back all the way to March 1951. Ike Turner (under the name Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats) released “Rocket 88” pretty much inventing rock ’n’ roll. Punk and alternative are genres that have long been stereotypically white. However, the list of black innovators is long, distinguished and deserving of wider acknowledgment. Read more: These groundbreaking black artists helped move the underground forward. Some names you know, or should . What would the history of alternative music possibly look and sound like without Prince? How many ’80s stars owe their careers in large part to producers Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic? Can you count the number of punk, rock and metal bands launched in the massive wake of Living Colour? Founder Vernon Reid put African-American rock on the map with his groundbreaking Black Rock Coalition. No one list can capture all the ways black musicians helped shape punk and alternative culture over the decades. The Afro-Punk list that follows is a start, at least. Listen, learn… and then listen and learn some more. Death – “Politicians In My Eyes” (1975) Here’s one of the most improbable resurrections of all time. Death were Bobby, David and Dennis Hackney, who started playing music after seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. The three Detroit brothers switched their style from R&B to rock when the Who blew their minds. Death created a link between garage rock and punk with their 1975 single, “Politicians In My Eyes.” They put it out themselves after a Columbia Records executive couldn’t convince them to change their name. (It was a tribute to their father, who had died in an accident. The brothers wanted to put a positive spin on the tragedy and the word “death.”) After decades of near obscurity, Death were rediscovered in 2009. The trio’s lone existing album was released on Drag City, and the band reformed with Lambsbread guitarist Bobbie Duncan replacing David, who died in 2000. The album N.E.W. appeared in 2015, and the “life-after- death” puns were both irresistible and warranted. Read more: 10 new songs from black artists who should already be on your playlists. X-Ray Spex – “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” (1977) It’s axiomatic that punk was a vehicle for reinvention. From the beginning, punk’s ranks were filled with repurposed rockers who’d shed their shag haircuts and flares. But was there ever an Afro-Punk who better represented pure innovation than Mari Elliott, aka the late Poly Styrene? Billboard deemed her “one of the least conventional frontpersons in rock history, male or female.” That might still be an understatement. In her trademark dental braces, Styrene took the Sex Pistols’ DIY challenge and thrillingly, memorably upped the ante. Pure Hell – “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” (1978) West Philadelphia born and raised, the quartet Pure Hell aren’t just, in all likelihood, the first black punk band. (They beat Bad Brains, who cite them as an influence, to the punch.) They were also one of the first authentic American punk bands, period , moving to the Big Apple in 1975. But after a successful U.K. tour, the band fell out with manager Curtis Knight. Their lone album, Noise Addiction , didn’t see release until 2006. Lead vocalist Kenny “Stinker” Gordon described the band in its heyday as “ four Jimi Hendrixes .” Their sizzling Afro-Punk cover of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” supports that claim. Read more: These 9 seriously underrated bands broke up entirely too soon. Barry Adamson (with Magazine) – “Shot By Both Sides” (1978) One of the most brilliant and perpetually underrated characters in British music history is bassist Barry Adamson . The Moss Side native came to prominence as part of post-punk legends Magazine, whose spiraling debut single “Shot By Both Sides” also became their anthem. But Adamson would go on to play key roles in outfits as diverse as New Romantic hitmakers Visage and Nick Cave’s Birthday Party and Bad Seeds. He would then become a successful solo artist, soundtrack composer of renown (he scored David Lynch’s Lost Highway ) photographer and filmmaker. A true renaissance man. The Specials – “Concrete Jungle” (1979) The 2 Tone movement that spawned Coventry’s the Specials is a virtual primer on how to blur musical and racial boundaries. The Selecter, the English Beat and the Bodysnatchers all boasted ethically diverse lineups that mashed up punk, pop, ska and reggae. But it also never lost sight of reality. “Concrete Jungle” might be the best example of how this music captured the exhilarating but scarifying tension of the times. Bad Brains – “Pay To Cum” (1980 ) If Washington, D.C.’s Bad Brains weren’t the first black punk band, they were, legendarily, the fastest punk band of any and all races. But they could also switch gears effortlessly to Rasta-centric reggae whenever they chose. The breakneck “Pay To Cum,” led by the precise riffing of guitarist Dr. Know, still packs such a pin-your-ears-back wallop that its 85-second duration seems almost merciful. Despite a soap-opera history and serious health scares, Bad Brains—now entering their sixth decade—persevere. Read more: These 12 punk albums of 1981 are rich in sound and fury. ESG – “Moody” (1981) The four Scroggins sisters (plus Tito Libran) wowed the music world on both sides of the Atlantic in the early ’80s. Their minimalist funk— hypnotic grooves mostly stripped down to their bass, drums and vocal chassis—became an underground sensation. When Factory Records impresario Tony Wilson signed them, it forged a crucial link between British new wave and American R&B. ESG’s rhythm tracks made them one of the most sampled acts of all time, and they returned to action in the new millennium to show the kids what they’d missed. Their debut single, “Moody,” still sounds as fresh and mysterious as it did when it was released. Jean Beauvoir (with the Plasmatics) – “Squirm” (1981) Bassist/guitarist Jean Beauvoir’s towering blond mohawk became as much of a visual trademark of the Plasmatics as frontwoman Wendy O. Williams’ gaffer-taped boobs. The New York punks-turned-metallers were best known for their live shows, where destruction was the name of the game. Beauvoir would exit the group after two albums and an EP. He went on to score the Sly Stallone action flick Cobra, and collaborate with artists as diverse as the Ramones, Bruce Springsteen and the late K-pop icon Jonghyun. Fishbone – “Party At Ground Zero” (1985) There were lots of apocalyptic anthems during the 1980s, but the eve of destruction never sounded better than it did on this debut single from Los Angeles collective Fishbone. The group pumped steroids into 2 Tone, adding hyperactive funk and equally manic humor. At their Afro-Punk peak, Fishbone were the rarest of bands. They could make you think, even while you were losing your mind in the pit and on the dance floor. Read more: Patty Walters is engaged but wants you to support black organizations. Glorious Din – “Closely Watched Trains” (1987) Possibly the most obscure and unlikely of all the acts on this list, Glorious Din were fronted by Sri Lankan native Eric Cope. He took his surname from post-punk icon Julian Cope of the Teardrop Explodes and his musical inspiration from bands such as Joy Division and the Cure. The short- lived band self-released a pair of albums that seem both of their time and completely out of it. A.R. Kane – “Baby Milk Snatcher” (1988) A.R. Kane encompassed delicate shoegaze pop, subwoofer-rattling dub and avant jazz (sometimes all in the same song). The British duo of Alex Ayuli and Rudy Tambala created some of the most pioneering music of their era. The pair actually achieved U.S. chart success with 1987’s “Pump Up The Volume” by teaming with the group Colourbox to form the one-off group M.A.R.R.S. But their Afro-Punk legacy really rests on the work they did as A.R. Kane in the late ’80s and ’90s. Perhaps the best way to think of them is as the Velvet Underground of their time: an act who inspired almost everyone who heard them to test boundaries, as well. 24-7 Spyz – “Grandma Dynamite” (1989) Living Colour got lots of well-warranted press for their uncompromising yet accessible brand of black rock. Yet, they were far from the only band of their time to pursue this path. Memphis’ should-have-been-superstars Xavion were one example, and the South Bronx’s 24-7 Spyz—heard here on their ode to the wise and wonderful “Grandma Dynamite”—were another. The Spyz leavened their heaviness with hair-raising soul harmonies. Deserved commercial success didn’t quite follow, but like many of the Afro-Punk acts on this list, the Spyz are still active and potent. Read more: These 14 punk albums of 1984 made the year heavier and meaner. King’s X – “Over My Head” (1989) Speaking of success (and grandma references), one of the most durable, long-lived and best-loved bands featured here is King’s X, led by singer/bassist Doug Pinnick. Pioneers in the field of progressive metal, this power trio are celebrating their 40th anniversary this year. Over the years, Pinnick’s powerhouse vocals have brought life to lyrics that reference his own struggles with religion and acceptance. (He came out as gay in 1998.) “Over My Head,” from the band’s landmark 1989 concept album Gretchen Goes To Nebraska , is a perfect showcase of the group’s precision-tooled metal and gospel fervor. The Veldt – “Soul In A Jar” (1994) Taking their name from a dystopian Ray Bradbury short story, North Carolina brothers Daniel and Danny Chavis had to navigate a particularly fraught racial minefield in the late 1980s. Living Colour had opened the door for black rock bands—who sounded like Living Colour. That didn’t describe the Chavises, whose singular sound melded soul with shoegaze. They got the last laugh: The hypnotic, danceable “Soul In A Jar” became an underground hit, and today the Veldt are recognized and loved as true musical innovators. Skunk Anansie – “Intellectualise My Blackness” (1995) A multiracial Afro-Punk quartet from London led by the outspoken, skin-headed vocalist/guitarist Skin, Skunk Anansie were first lumped in with the mid-’90s Britrock movement. But Skin (aka Deborah Dyer) preferred “clit-rock,” which describes the feminist anger that fueled the band’s metallic attack. A fine example from the group’s debut album, Paranoid & Sunburnt , is “Intellectualise My Blackness,” which has typically tough words for a white-race explainer: “Don’t you ever try to lecturize me!” Mike Ladd – “I’m Building A Bodacious Bodega For The Race War” (1997) Over the past two decades, Boston’s Mike Ladd has consistently broken down barriers between a number of genres (hip-hop, jazz, ambient rock, musique concrete , spoken word) to forge one of the most fascinating and rewarding careers in music. It all started in 1997, with his debut, Easy Listening 4 Armageddon , whose contents somehow managed to live up exactly to their title. “I’m Building A Bodacious Bodega For The Race War” references The Iliad , Pol Pot and Snoop Dogg over a scratchy soundscape that could be the last thing you’ll ever hear on your TV before all stations sign off for good. The Day Prince’s Guitar Wept the Loudest. On March 15, 2004, George Harrison was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As part of the ceremony, an all-star band performed “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Mr. Harrison’s best-known Beatles song. The group featured Tom Petty and two other members of the Heartbreakers, as well as Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, Dhani Harrison (George’s son) and Prince, himself an inductee that year. Marc Mann, a guitarist with Mr. Lynne’s band, played Eric Clapton’s memorable solo from the album version of the song. But Prince, who essentially stood in the dark for most of the performance, burned the stage to the ground at the song’s end. His three-minute guitar solo is a Prince milestone, a chance to see him outside of the purple-tinted (for once, he is dressed in red) context of his own meticulous studio craft. This was Prince the Lead Guitarist — those chops apparent on songs like “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?,” “Electric Chair” and “When Doves Cry” were given free range to roam. And when he tossed his instrument into the air at the very end of the song, it never appeared to land; it was almost as if Mr. Harrison had grabbed it himself in midair to signal, “That’s enough of that.” Several people who were onstage or at the ceremony that night recalled Prince’s involvement and performance. These are edited excerpts from the conversations. JOEL GALLEN (producer and director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony) My dream right from the start was, imagine if I can get everybody up onstage at the end of the night to do “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and Prince comes out and does the guitar solos. I wrote basically a personal letter to Prince, care of his lawyer. I got a call from one of Prince’s guys, a week or two later, saying that Prince was in L.A. and he wanted to have a meeting with me. He said, “You know, I got your letter, I liked the idea, I’m going to listen to the song a few times, and I’ll get back to you.” A couple weeks later his security guy called me again, and said, “Prince would like to meet with you again.” He said he definitely wants to do the song, he’s definitely going to do it. Both in the initial meeting and the second meeting, he did talk a lot about what we’re going to do with the music, who’s going to own the music — he was concerned like, if he does this, who’s going to own the performance? He wanted to make sure that his performance was not exploited without his knowledge. TOM PETTY (shared lead vocals with Jeff Lynne on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”) Olivia Harrison [George’s widow] asked me if I would come along and induct George. I was told, “Well, Prince is going to play too,” and I was like, “Wow, that’s fantastic.” Look, we got Prince here willing to play lead guitar. Why should we give him an eight-bar solo? Over a solo that — the Beatles solo, everyone knows it by heart and would be disappointed if you didn’t play that particular solo there. And Prince was a great fan of George’s, and the Beatles in general, but I think he particularly admired George. I think George would have liked it a lot. CRAIG INCIARDI (Curator at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum) I’ve seen every induction performance from ’92 to the present, so that’s like 24 shows. On a purely musical level, a technical level as far as musicianship, that performance seems like the most impressive one. GALLEN We get to the rehearsal the night before the show at the Waldorf Astoria. Prince’s rehearsal was actually earlier — he rehearsed his big 10-, 12-minute medley that opened the show. He was having all kinds of audio problems, I remember he had his own monitor engineer that his camp had hired, and I think Prince fired him during the rehearsal because he couldn’t get the sound right. After that he went back to his hotel, and I said, “You’re going to come back at 10 o’clock tonight, that’s when we’re going to rehearse the finale,” and he says, “I’ll see.” [Laughs.] He didn’t give me any guarantees, he just said, “I’ll see.” The Petty rehearsal was later that night. And at the time I’d asked him to come back, there was Prince; he’d shown up on the side of the stage with his guitar. He says hello to Tom and Jeff and the band. When we get to the middle solo, where Prince is supposed to do it, Jeff Lynne’s guitar player just starts playing the solo. Note for note, like Clapton. And Prince just stops and lets him do it and plays the rhythm, strums along. And we get to the big end solo, and Prince again steps forward to go into the solo, and this guy starts playing that solo too! Prince doesn’t say anything, just starts strumming, plays a few leads here and there, but for the most part, nothing memorable. STEVE FERRONE (drummer for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who played at the 2004 ceremony) I had no idea that Prince was going to be there. Steve Winwood said, “Hey, Prince is over there.” And I said, “I guess he’s playing with us?” So I said to Winwood, “I’m going to go over and say hello to him.” I wandered across the stage and I went up to him and I said, “Hi, Prince, it’s nice to meet you — Steve Ferrone.” And he said, “Oh, I know who you are!” Maybe because I’d played on Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You,” which is a song that he wrote. I went back over and I sat down behind the drum kit, and Winwood was like: “What’s he like? What’d he say?” Then I was sitting there, and I heard somebody playing a guitar riff from a song that I wrote with Average White Band. And I looked over and Prince was looking right at me and playing that song. And I thought, “Yeah, you actually do know who I am!” GALLEN They finish, and I go up to Jeff and Tom, and I sort of huddle up with these guys, and I’m like: “This cannot be happening. I don’t even know if we’re going to get another rehearsal with him. [Prince]. But this guy cannot be playing the solos throughout the song.” So I talk to Prince about it, I sort of pull him aside and had a private conversation with him, and he was like: “Look, let this guy do what he does, and I’ll just step in at the end. For the end solo, forget the middle solo.” And he goes, “Don’t worry about it.” And then he leaves. They never rehearsed it, really. Never really showed us what he was going to do, and he left, basically telling me, the producer of the show, not to worry. And the rest is history. It became one of the most satisfying musical moments in my history of watching and producing live music. INCIARDI You hear all this sort of harmonics and finger-tapping, sort of like what you’d hear Eddie Van Halen do. He runs through all these different sort of guitar techniques that are sort of astonishing. You hear what sounds like someone cocking a shotgun. There’s all these strumming power chords that really, really connected. Then he plays his version of the Eric Clapton solo. He evokes Eric’s solo in very sort of truncated fashion. As he ends the song, he plays this flourishing thing that sort of ends up sounding a little bit like Spinal Tap, but in a good way. PETTY You see me nodding at him, to say, “Go on, go on.” I remember I leaned out at him at one point and gave him a “This is going great!” kind of look. He just burned it up. You could feel the electricity of “something really big’s going down here.” FERRONE Tom sort of went over to him and said, “Just cut loose and don’t feel sort of inhibited to copy anything that we have, just play your thing, just have a good time.” It was a hell of a guitar solo, and a hell of a show he actually put on for the band. When he fell back into the audience, everybody in the band freaked out, like, “Oh my God, he’s falling off the stage!” And then that whole thing with the guitar going up in the air. I didn’t even see who caught it. I just saw it go up, and I was astonished that it didn’t come back down again. Everybody wonders where that guitar went, and I gotta tell you, I was on the stage, and I wonder where it went, too. GALLEN I still feel like people don’t realize what an amazing guitar player he was. As a rock guitar player, he can go toe to toe with anybody. PETTY It’s funny because just a few days ago, he was in mind all afternoon, I was thinking about him. And I had just been talking with Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles — he wrote their “Manic Monday” song. She was telling me the story of that, of how she came to have that song and meet Prince. And I was thinking about him a lot that day, and I almost told myself I was going to call him and just see how he was. I’m starting to think you should just act on those things all the time.