“When Feist told the sold-out crowd at the Lincoln Theatre that “it’s been a while, D.C.,” it wasn’t just because her tours haven’t come through the DMV lately. While it has been five years since she performed in the area, and 10 since she played D.C. proper, her absence hasn’t just been physical: Until the release of “Pleasure” earlier this year, it had been nearly six years since fans had held or heard a new album by Leslie Feist.”
“Just because you got a preconceived notion of what I should do,” JMSN sings on his new album “Whatever Makes U Happy,” “don’t mean it’s the truth.” The lyric is a bit of wisdom that JMSN, the Los Angeles-via-Detroit singer-songwriter born Christian Berishaj, has gleaned after more than a decade in the music industry.
“Chino Amobi used to “mess around with music.” When he was in elementary school, the Richmond-based producer and his brother would record songs off the radio, creating “radio shows” with a mix of their own DJ patter and tracks that Amobi wrote on a Casio keyboard. Then, when Amobi was in high school, the brothers started making their own hip-hop: his brother would rap and Chino would make beats on early DAW software. Soon, he figured out how to supplement factory-provided sounds and samples with WAV files from other outlets, like tactical shooter video game Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six.”
“Cinema Hearts frontwoman Caroline Weinroth was a theater major in college, and when it came time to name her band’s second album, she looked to the world of musical theater for inspiration. Burned and Burnished is a riff on a line from The Fantasticks, the world’s longest-running musical. In that show, two fathers fake a feud so that their children will fall in love. They plot a mock abduction, hoping that the boy will save the girl and end up together, which they do, by the end of Act I. But in between acts, as the fathers and their children are frozen in a happy tableau, the narrator explains, “For the story is not ended/ and the play is never done/ Until we’ve all of us been burned a bit/ And burnished by—the sun!” Their happiness doesn’t last, of course: when the ruse is revealed, the couple breaks up and spends the second act learning about heartache and the harsh realities of the real world.”
“For most rappers, “THC” stands for tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in marijuana. For Mick Jenkins, it also stands for “The Healing Component,” which, as he explains on the album of the same name, is God’s love. That type of wordplay — flipping a rap trope into a lofty idea — is a key part of Jenkins’s verbal alchemy, with lyrics that favor the Christian gospels and reject the gospel of contemporary rap.”
“Editing is the craft of mourning what you need to kill,” says Will Eastman, recalling a lesson he learned when he worked at the Smithsonian. “The more brutal and ruthless you are, the better it will be.” As he was crafting what would become his debut album, the DJ-producer (and owner of U Street Music Hall) recorded 24 songs over a two-year period, rearranging and reconfiguring them as 68 different playlists on his iPhone.
What does rap sound like in 2017? Is it Kendrick Lamar’s visceral, big-picture poetry? Is it the machine-gunned triplet attack of Migos? Is it the synesthetic sound-play of Future and Young Thug? Is it the goody-two-shoes gospel of Chance the Rapper? While hip-hop heads continue this eternal debate, the next generation of rappers is figuring it out for itself. On Tuesday night, a handful of these new voices performed at the Rock & Roll Hotel, following in the wake of Kendrick and Chance with lyric-loaded jams perfect for both the poetry slam and the house party.
