Bill Caraher |

We’re slowly getting our feet back under us at NDQ during the “frog days” of summer, and starting to get NDQ 91.3/4 together for its fall release.

To set the tone for the rest of the summer, I thought I would share a couple things that got me excited this fall.

First, is Meshell Ndegeocello latest album is a brilliant tribute to James Baldwin titled No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin. The album as a whole is good and smart, but the song “Thus Sayeth the Lorde,” in particular, caught my attention. It uses lyrics from Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival”:

If that entertains you, you might enjoy this short film by Jenn Nkiru based on the Kamasi Washington song “Get Lit” from his album Fearless Movement. Nkiru is a video artist who has produced short films for the Tate Modern, participated in the Whitney Biennial, and contributed a short film, “Out/Side of Time” to the Met’s exhibit on Afrofuturism, Before Yesterday We Could Fly. She also won a Grammy for directing the video for Beyoncé’s “Brown Skin Girl.“

Anyway, you can watch the video of “Get Lit” which features poet Saul Williams and George Clinton here:

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Bill Caraher is the editor of NDQ and the author of The Archaeology of Contemporary America (2024) and blogs about music every Monday.