Happy New Year’s Eve, everyone. Our own Greg Harrell has passed on his own indie-tastic list of his favorites of 2008. Have a look-see, won’t you?
20.) Atmosphere – When Life Gives You Lemons You Paint That Shit Gold
19.) The Verve – Forth
18.) Raphael Saadiq – The Way I See it
17.) Ra Ra Riot – The Rhumb Line
16.) Coldplay – Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends
15.) Robyn – Robyn
14.) Bloc Party – Intimacy
13.) […]
You know, in a sense, it is quite a surprise Soulja Boy is still around, a year after he scored one of the biggest digital singles of all time: the triple-platinum juggernaut, “Crank Dat (Soulja Boy).” At a time when every other ringtone rapper who emerged in 2007—the same year as he—has gone the way of the Beta tape, Soulja Boy lingers on like a turd in a latrine that has just been flushed. […]
Befittingly, Miriam Zenzi Makeba—Grammy Award-winning songstress from South Africa, the “Empress of African Song,†Mama Afrika herself—died as she lived: on stage, and for a noble cause. After concluding a performance at a concert near Caserta, Italy—interestingly enough, supporting a writer opposing the oldest crime organization in the country—she collapsed and succumbed to a heart attack. She was 76 years of age.
Makeba needs the rest, for her entire life was characterized by struggle—by being in a three-decade exile from her homeland South Africa for speaking out against apartheid; by watching her record deals and tours cancelled as the consequence for marrying radical civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael; by being in prison with her herbalist mother…while still in utero. And Makeba singing became her conduit of struggle. Blessed with a calming, assuring tone that exuded confidence and doggedness, she found her calling in singing, right from the moment she was a child at a training institute in Pretoria, South Africa. From there, she would only soar higher: performing to exclusively black audiences with The Manhattan Brothers in the 1950s; formed her own group, The Sylarks; starred in the anti-apartheid Come Back, Africain 1959; and, of course, her collaborations with Harry Belafonte in the United States, forever linking the struggles of people of African descent everywhere.
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