Each month here we visit with a member of the community to find out what music they’ve been digging.
I use music, probably like a lot of people, to deliver me immediately to the mood I’d rather be in—which usually means joy. These days, that includes the playful, retro sexiness of Shannon Shaw’s growling purr or Kendra Morris, a super-facile neo-soul artist who reveals grit in the velvet, and a wicked sense of humor, in all her works: musical, stop-motion animation, and hilarious, lo-fi, online output. She’s got a new album out, I Am What I’ve Been Waiting For, which is curiously, also what I’ve been waiting for. For punk rock moments, I return to PJ Harvey perennially and recently have been introduced to Poly Styrene, the adolescent British-Somali singer with a voice like a frayed laser, of X-Ray Spex, arguably the 1977 beginnings of the Riot Grrl movement I came up with in Seattle in the ’90s. It’s such a straight shot of unpretentious power, with a totally incongruous punk rock saxophone that screams action.
On roller skates, I always turn (literally) to hip-hop, a genre from which there is a bumper crop of innovative stuff lately, but Leikeli47’s Mulita makes me bounce as much as any Missy Elliot, who comprises a lot of that playlist with other R&B heroes: Prince, Janelle Monae, Lizzo.
For masculine buzz, I like the Viagra Boys, a Swedish post-punk band that both fires and cracks me up simultaneously. Lord Sonny the Unifier bends genre like Bowie or Talking Heads—alt-rock with hip-hop beats and reggae swagger. Like all the best driving music, it urges me forward, egged on by a layered rack of shimmery, vigorous, psychedelic grooves. It’s a mood I love to be in, knowing this moment is new and has surprises in store.
This article appears in December 2023.
