Shock G was the Donald Fagen of hip hop: a piano player, most comfortable behind his instrument, thrust into the role of a front man. His birth name was Gregory Edward Jacobs, and most of his audience knew and remembered him as Humpty Hump – a sign of how uneasy he was in his skin, with even his onstage persona hidden behind other personas. But every one of them exuded warmth and good humour. In Oakland, where Shock G made his name, he’ll be remembered not just for his genius but for being a gentle and generous force on the scene.
Oakland is not a big city; one of its nicknames is ‘the Town’. But for a long while, starting in the late 1980s, it had one of the strongest rap scenes in the country. Too Short, E-40, Del tha Funkee Homosapien, Saafir, Souls of Mischief, the Coup and Tupac Shakur were all Oakland rappers. Until Shakur came along, MC Hammer was far and away the most popular. (Elsewhere, Hammer may have been seen as a joke; in Oakland he’s a hero.) Shock G, who mentored Saafir and Shakur, among others, liked to play the role of a clown. But really he was the scene’s jack-of-all-trades.
Raised up and down the East Coast, like Shakur, he’d been there when hip hop emerged from New York’s outer boroughs. In Tampa, where his father lived, he dropped out of high school, got in and out of trouble with the law, and formed a large crew of MCs and DJs called the Master Blasters. They were popular enough to land Jacobs his own radio show on Tampa’s big R&B station.
Steph Curry over the last 5 games:
— Hoop Central (@TheHoopCentral) April 20, 2021
53 PTS - 58 FG% - 55 3P%
42 PTS - 70 FG% - 68 3P%
33 PTS - 5 AST - 48 FG%
47 PTS - 55 FG% - 57 3P%
49 PTS - 50 FG% - 58 3P%
MVP talks need to intensify. 👀🔥 pic.twitter.com/iMQN97eErB
Hello, you can read it here: Making a playlist of songs by people whose voices are shot, in a way… https://t.co/zKndVdrzri See you soon. 🤖
— Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) April 18, 2021
Rhiannon Giddens’ new album with Francesco Turrisi, her partner in life as well as music, explores two subjects that occupied them (and, frankly, the rest of us) over the last tumultuous year. One is often comforting: home. The other is usually the opposite: death. But for this American and Italian, locked-down in their adopted Ireland, they found that exploring these subjects through songs from the perspective of their respective upbringings was uplifting. “Every culture has these songs that are laments,” said Giddens. “Those feelings that you have … you experience them through the song and at the end, you’re a little bit lighter.”
This is a big, beautiful album, a showcase for direct, punchy emotions and Giddens’ vocal versatility. She trained as an opera singer and executes astonishing levels of beauty and control on Monteverdi’s Si Dolce è’l Tormento and When I Was in My Prime, a folk song previously covered by Pentangle and Nina Simone. Old-time staple Black As Crow is different and delicate, its banjo-plucked tenderness further softened by Emer Mayock’s Irish flute. Then O Death lands with a whack, as heavy, funky gospel blues: Turrisi does propulsive work on the frame drum. Giddens goes the full Merry Clayton.
There is mournfulness on a joint a cappella, Nenna Nenna, an Italian lullaby that Turrisi used to sing to his daughter, as the couple’s close harmonies twist and yearn with great feeling. But there’s also hope in Niwel Tsumbu’s beautiful nylon string guitar on Niwel Goes to Town, and even on the title track, by US bluegrass singer Alice Gerrard, about an old friend “on his dying bed” leaving songs behind him, his “sweet traces of gold”. This album is full of dazzling examples in this vein. They’ll live on.
The fishermen of Lough Neagh make their living from eels - ugly, slimy and oddly exotic, writes Nuala Haughey
The lough will claim a victim every year.
It has a virtue that hardens wood to stone.
There is a town sunk beneath its water.
It is the scar left by the Isle of Man.
- Seamus Heaney,
A Lough Neagh Sequence - 7 Poems http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/17kvq
I grew up near the shores of Lough Neagh. The freshwater lake is home to one of the biggest commercial wild-eel fisheries in western Europe, but to me it was an unremarkable expanse of water where we swam in the summer, fearful that we would be sucked into huge holes caused by sand dredging. Other children had died that way, we were warned, as we waded out from the grassy foreshore, which was dotted with cowpats.
Oddly, we never ate eel in our house, although on Fridays we sometimes had pollan, another fish indigenous to the lough. As a teenager I studied Seamus Heaney's seven poems from A Lough Neagh Sequence, dedicated to the fishermen. I shuddered at the image of a youth standing in the midst of a "jellied road" of eels crossing land.
Like many people I developed prejudices against eels, a much stigmatised fish. Slimy, ugly, slippery snake-like creatures. But although I was repulsed I was also attracted by the exoticism of their life cycles: the long journeys from their spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea, between the Azores and the Caribbean, to the shores of my native Lurgan, in Co Armagh, carried across the Atlantic Ocean by the Gulf Stream. About 14 years later, after they have turned from brown to silver, they leave the lough, when the moon is in its dark phase, to spawn and die in that same salt water.
