Ernest Hardy

I just want to bang on me drum all day.   Photo by D. Lee/Rogue Pictures

Party Over Here!

A year and a half ago, as word quickly circulated via radio and the Internet that Dave Chappelle was putting together a concert in Brooklyn, and that it would feature alternative-neo-indie Negro artists like the Roots, Erykah Badu, Dead Prez, Jill Scott, Common, Mos Def, Kanye West — and maybe......
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Berkeley to Go

Goapele . Change It All . Skyblaze/Red/Sony A few weeks ago, a black hipster music-industry insider spat snark and truth when asked about Goapele’s music: “She sounds like a weak-ass Aaliyah singing ?India.Arie and Amel Larrieux songs produced by Anthony Hamilton.” In other words, she’s Afro Boho Coffeehouse Quiet Storm......
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Garth Trinidad & Friends

GARTH TRINIDAD & FRIENDS “Chocolate City” birthday at The Roxy, February 10 This concert was originally intended to pull double-duty as a celebration of KCRW “Chocolate City” host Garth Trinidad’s 10-year anniversary and as a fund-raiser for Macy Gray’s M. Gray Music Academy. Instead, as Trinidad announced from the stage,......

14th Annual Pan African Film & Arts Festival

The second week of the Pan African Film & Arts Festival continues this year’s strong program of fantastic documentaries. Favela Rising opens with the onscreen quote “Between the years 1987 and 2001, 467 minors were killed in Israel and Palestine combined. During that same time, 3,937 minors were murdered in......
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Thank You, J Dilla

It’s a bittersweet irony. Visionary hip-hop producer James Dewitt Yancey, a.k.a. Jay Dee, a.k.a. J Dilla, purposefully kept himself off the radar of mainstream celebrity: no partying with Paris Hilton, no clothing lines, no sports drinks or cameos in the videos of artists with whom he worked. Yet when he......
Hill: She aint crazy

Fugee-L.A.

Read more on the Fugees’ reunion, DJ Quik’s House of Blues show, and other Grammy-week stuff in Ben Quiñones’ Grammy Diary, at laweekly.com! PLUS! Silversun Pickups! On the tour bus with Gogol Bordello! Fugees at Hollywood & Vine, February 6 KANYE WEST at Avalon, February 6 Devoted followers of the......
Let em eat fish...scraps.  Photo by Coop 99

The End of Species

By contrasting the historical backdrop to a series of modern horrors, Hubert Sauper’s documentary Darwin’s Nightmare proves a cautionary tale of human arrogance and folly. Sometime in the 1960s, an unknown party dumped a bucketful of Nile perch in Africa’s Lake Victoria, the world’s second largest freshwater lake, the source......
Hip-Hop Colony

14th Annual Pan African Film & Arts Festival

This year’s Pan African Film & Arts Festival boasts one of the strongest programming slates in the event’s recent history, due in large part to the wealth of documentaries on deck — a large number of which concern themselves with issues affecting black artists and artistry around the world, from......
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Brother Love

Isley Brothers at the Henry Fonda Theater, January 16 As the opening strains of “Between the Sheets” brought the crowd to its feet, Ron Isley strolled onstage with a grin — flaunting shades and a cane, squeezed into a belly-emphasizing shirt, too-tight velvet jacket and ill-fitting pants — and exhorted......
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Schmooze Operator

If you’re in the business of mindlessly making babies, have a hard-on for ’90s R&B production, and find the testes-crushing banalities of hetero “romance” and booty calls to be cutting-edge material, have I got a CD for you. And because you’re also a big fan of irony, it’s called Unpredictable......