A comedy of manners with a dark moral heart

Don’t read this review before listening to Herman Koch’s novel, The Dinner. Instead, try to imagine the love child of Hitchcock’s single-take thriller Rope, a New York Times Magazine cover story on the evils of helicopter parenting, and the prissily detailed menu from the latest farm-to-table eatery. OK, have you got the picture? No? Well then read on, but beware of spoilers.

Though it’s actually set in the Netherlands, Koch’s home country, the story could just as easily take place in Brooklyn or Berkeley. Two couples, of youngish middle age, meet for dinner at a well-regarded restaurant. The narrator, Paul, seems resentful of the evening ahead; the husband of the other couple, Serge, is a flashy guy of some celebrity (we soon discover he is Paul’s brother and the leading candidate for Prime Minister). Paul is annoyed by Serge’s need to show off and the fact that he can’t just enjoy a quiet night at a local café with his wife, Claire. At first it seems The Dinner will be a comedy of manners: Serge shows off his wine knowledge by gargling his first sip, and the restaurant’s host points a pinky finger at every carefully sourced item on their plates.

But some details are sinister: Babette, Serge’s wife, arrives with sunglasses covering red-rimmed, puffy eyes; Paul is preoccupied by an incident with his son Michel. Earlier that afternoon, he snooped on Michel’s phone, and whatever he saw there haunts him. Claire doesn’t know — or does she? And Serge and Babette’s own children may be involved as well. Especially suspicious to Paul is his sibling’s adopted son from Burkina Faso, Beau. It is Paul’s lack of empathy toward Beau’s very existence in his family — he refers to the adoption as a “rent-to-own agreement” — that tips the reader off. Something is very wrong here, though Paul may not be a reliable narrator. The evening darkens, the courses come and go, and the true moral vacuity of The Dinner’s diners becomes as obvious as the warm goat cheese appetizer.

The Dinner has been a bestseller in Europe for several years already. However, the issues it raises — social responsibility, class conflicts, racism, violence, and the use of new technology — feel universal, as do Paul, Serge, Claire and Babette’s ultimately selfish and self-protective form of parenting.

A treat as bubbly and illicit as bootleg champagne

In this eponymous first installment of her new The Diviners series, YA favorite Libba Bray takes on a genuinely wild ride. It’s the height of the Jazz Age, and flapper Evie O’Neill has been “banished” to New York City by her conservative parents. Consigned to live with her stuffy Uncle Will, who just happens to run the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition and the Occult, Evie is thrilled to swill bootleg hooch, dance all night in Harlem speakeasies and…help solve a series of grisly murders? Beneath Evie’s Roaring Twenties slang and cloche hat, she hides a special power: She can divine (get it?) all sorts of information about people by holding objects that belong to them. Or – more importantly, in the case of the relevant murder victims – belonged.

Evie is just one of The Diviners‘ many characters. Clearly Bray is writing the first book in a series here, and while the main plot is resolved (no spoilers), almost too many threads remain tangled. How will our favorite Harlem numbers runner and poet, Memphis Campbell, help his possessed brother and make a life with Ziegfeld-girl-with-a-past Theta? Will young radical and Evie’s best friend, Mabel Rose, find love? And will Evie’s weird old lady neighbors, the Proctor sisters, ever explain why they’re sprinkling bags of salt in protective circles around their apartment?

No doubt, The Diviners‘ next installment will answer some of these questions while raising still others. In the meantime, Bray’s thriller is a kicky ride. Period details are delicious: Evie’s clothes seem to be exclusively peacock-patterned, and Mabel’s life changes when she bobs her hair. Silent film idol Rudolph Valentino has just died, and the girls love watching his pictures at red velvet-covered movie palaces. If your taste runs to historical fiction with just a soupçon of gore, The Diviners will be a treat as bubbly and illicit as bootleg champagne.

Longtime readers may be able to guess at the breadth and depth of Atwood’s frames of reference. Somewhat predictable influences include Victorian novels, nature writing, the language and feminist literature. However, it might be unexpected to hear that such a “serious” author would also harbor a love of classic B movies, comic books of the 1930s and ’40s (especially those featuring female superheroes), and proto-sci fi-ers H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.

We often expect today’s great male writers to have read and absorbed Stan Lee and Mad magazine along with Hemingway and Melville. Similarly, we might expect our female writers to have absorbed — even channeled — Jane Austen and Vogue (along with Hemingway and Melville). So to hear about Atwood spending her WWII Canadian childhood drawing superhero bunnies in capes, and following her brother’s hand-drawn maps of their island home…It’s not surprising so much as it is gratifying.

The Snowman begins with some backstory. A little boy and his mother go to visit a mysterious house on a snowy day. Leaving her son locked in the freezing car, the mother goes inside to meet her lover for a final tryst. It’s all very creepy and Freudian; we see the scene from the perspective of both mother and son, and clearly, something is not right. Next, we go forward to (almost) present day Oslo, Norway. Harry Hole, the city’s most tortured detective, notices a pattern of disappearances — women with children, all on the day of the season’s first snow. Of course, a serial killer is on the loose, and his “calling card” would only be possible in a wintry land: a snowman, adorned and/or completed with some gruesome reminder of his victim. Hole is a classic noir detective, brilliant yet flawed, a bad drunk with a history of failed romances and run-ins with his police force superiors. But, like all such anti-heroes, he always gets his bad guy. There are too many twists to The Snowman‘s both sexually and forensically explicit plot to risk spoiling, but suffice to say, if you don’t enjoy gritting your teeth in squeamish fear, this is probably not the greatest listen for a dead-of-night road trip through the Yukon.

The Snowman is being marketed as the Next Big Thing out of the frozen north, although it’s actually the seventh Harry Hole book. While it’s not quite necessary to have read the earlier installments in the series, Hole’s character is by now rather the worse for wear. If you’d like to know why the detective is so emotionally and physically battered, as well as the roots of his alcoholism and beginning of his love affairs (especially with Rakel, his Snowman love interest), be sure to check out the earlier books, which are all now available in translation.

A debut album purposefully recorded to sound as weathered as the singer's voice

Before CDs, before the Internet, soul music freaks had to rely on serendipity find the best dusty tracks: O.V. Wright's "Nickel and a Nail," Bunny Sigler's "Regina," Erma Franklin's "Piece of My Heart." I heard all of these for the first time on a little radio station, between the hatch marks on my dorm room FM radio, fine-tuning the dial enough to hear the announcer, writing down the info, and then heading off to my local dusty used record store, hoping to get lucky. Listening to Charles Bradley's No Time for Dreaming, reminds me of those musical dorm-room epiphanies. His voice is gritty as a gravel road, reminiscent of deep-soul men from Otis Clay to Joe Simon.

But Bradley is no forgotten soul great, though tracks such as "How Long" and "Golden Rule" could be lost Stax B-sides. Dreaming is a debut album purposefully recorded to sound as weathered as the singer's voice. Of course it's a Daptone record, those same soul-purists-with-hearts-of-gold who brought us the beloved Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. As with all of the artists in the Daptone catalogue, Bradley is backed by horn and rhythm sections that sound, literally, vintage. In this case, it's a new combo: the Menahan Street Band, led by guitarist/producer Thomas Brenneck, beautifully backing Bradley's stories of hard luck and regret. "Heartaches and Pain" is Dreaming's standout track. The true story of Bradley's brother's murder, it's disturbing in a way few of those "classic" soul records could ever dare to be.

A debut album purposefully recorded to sound as weathered as the singer's voice

Before CDs, before the Internet, soul music freaks had to rely on serendipity find the best dusty tracks: O.V. Wright's "Nickel and a Nail," Bunny Sigler's "Regina," Erma Franklin's "Piece of My Heart." I heard all of these for the first time on a little radio station, between the hatch marks on my dorm room FM radio, fine-tuning the dial enough to hear the announcer, writing down the info, and then heading off to my local dusty used record store, hoping to get lucky. Listening to Charles Bradley's No Time for Dreaming, reminds me of those musical dorm-room epiphanies. His voice is gritty as a gravel road, reminiscent of deep-soul men from Otis Clay to Joe Simon.

But Bradley is no forgotten soul great, though tracks such as "How Long" and "Golden Rule" could be lost Stax B-sides. Dreaming is a debut album purposefully recorded to sound as weathered as the singer's voice. Of course it's a Daptone record, those same soul-purists-with-hearts-of-gold who brought us the beloved Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. As with all of the artists in the Daptone catalogue, Bradley is backed by horn and rhythm sections that sound, literally, vintage. In this case, it's a new combo: the Menahan Street Band, led by guitarist/producer Thomas Brenneck, beautifully backing Bradley's stories of hard luck and regret. "Heartaches and Pain" is Dreaming's standout track. The true story of Bradley's brother's murder, it's disturbing in a way few of those "classic" soul records could ever dare to be.

When Cash reaches the latter half of the book, things go from relatively benign musical memoir, to a list of tragedies and deaths that would make any country ballad sound optimistic. Her father, stepmother, stepsister, aunt, and mother died within months of one another. And that was before Cash developed a rare brain malformation that required terrifying surgery and extensive rehabilitation. This makes Composed even more of a restrained celebration: True survival and artistry is both quieter and more complicated than any Hollywood bio-pic.

eMusic’s Elizabeth Gold spoke with Cash about guitar lessons, legacy, and the challenges of balancing music with writing.

Can you speak a little to the idea of legacy? How did you decide now was the time to write about your parents, and especially your father?

I don’t think that’s a cognitive decision I could come to. I had to live life to get to that decision, and part of that was actually losing my parents. I don’t think I could have accepted it until they weren’t on the planet any more. It’s a bittersweet paradox. After making The List — and actually after the brain surgery, the things I wanted to do in my life became very urgent, I realized how it would be to have not taken the legacy. It was too painful to think about.

I’ve read your very beautiful writing on songwriting. As a writer and a musician, what do you feel are the challenges of writing about music? How do you feel being a musician changes that for you?

It’s difficult to write about music — the classic quote is it’s like dancing about architecture. I guess it’s from Joni Mitchell.

Some people say it’s from Thelonius Monk.

In some ways [that quote] is true. In another way, I think you can go as deep into pure language as you can into pure music. If you just find the place that they connect, it’s possible to do it, to write about it. If that fails, you can write about process: how you got to this song, where the inspiration came from…

When you sit down, do you know you’re going to be writing a song or writing prose?

Oh yeah. It’s not that fluid. I do think it comes from the same kind of source, but I have to choose the medium.

Is there ever a song that you look at after a while and think, this could really be something else, or vice versa?

Yes, that happens occasionally. The most obvious example is I wrote — I can’t even remember which one I wrote first now! — I think I wrote the song first, “Bells & Roses,” on my album 10 Song Demo. I was just obsessed with that image of bells and roses together, so I wrote a short story called “Bells and Roses,” for an [anthology] Blue Lightning, which was all musicians writing about music. Certainly, there are also other more subtle cross-references.

Would you say that your prose style is particularly musical?

I listen for the melody in prose. Maybe that’s more important to me because I’m a musician, but I don’t even think so. Some of the best writers I know have an amazing sense of melody in their prose — Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I just read Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, and she has a great sense of melody. I’m reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog [by Muriel Barbary], and she goes even further than Mantel.

I have to ask: guitar lessons with Carl Perkins and Maybelle Carter. That was one sentence in the book. Come on!

[Dry laugh.] Other people have told me the import of that, beyond what I realized myself.

Which in and of itself is interesting — that it seemed just like another Thursday night on the bus for you.

Well, it kind of was. I was so young, Carl Perkins was like my uncle, he was a really close friend of my dad’s. At that time, I knew he was good and people liked him, but I didn’t realize his importance in the history of this. These guys were still alive, so their legend had not been codified yet. And Mother Maybelle… This was all grownups.

Did they set you lessons? What was the teaching process?

Carl would show me something, but then he would be impatient, and want to go off and play on his own. Maybelle would show me something… but it was Helen Carter who really put in the time with me. A lot of times [Maybelle] sat there while Helen would teach me the songs, and really stick with me, and then would suggest another song for Helen to teach me.

And you’d go back and practice in your room at night?

Oh yeah. Until I could do it — practice and practice and practice.

How old were you then?

Eighteen, 19.

And you hadn’t really decided you were a musician yet?

At that time, when they were teaching me, I started to decide I wanted to be a songwriter. I got very excited about the music, and learning to do it.

Did it take you by surprise that you actually wanted to be a musician?

No. It felt like something I’d been circling around for my whole life.

What were the first songs they taught you?

The very first one was “The Banks of the Ohio,” which is a classic Carter Family song. Then they taught me “The Winding Stream,” which is a very obscure one. “Blackjack David,” “The Merry Golden Tree,” some of the other murder ballads — “Hello Stranger.” It was a huge lexicon.

Were any of those on your dad’s list?

The one I did: “Bury Me Beneath the Weeping Willow,” and also “Black Jack David.”

This was the first time you were playing the guitar, but you had always been singing, right?

No, I didn’t care about singing — it just seemed like a horrible thing to do. But I had been playing piano for many years. I took a year of music theory around that time, so I had an understanding, and could read music very slowly.

Music is such a collaborative medium, and writing is about being by yourself. How does that work for you?

I have to have both. Writing becomes too isolating, and too depressing. It just leads to this solitary life and it’s all in your head.

Yeah…

So I really crave collaboration: being in a band, and playing with other people.

I guess songwriting — when you’re writing with another person, you’re not by yourself…

No, when I write with John [Leventhal — her husband], we don’t write together. I usually give him lyrics. So it is very solitary.

Sort of going with the idea of being a private person versus a public person, you’re so active on Twitter! And sometimes people write really rude things to you about your family.

Oh God, I’ve dealt with that my whole life! The distinction I have to make it that I’m very private, but I’m also quite gregarious. I love a social life, and Twitter is kind of a virtual café society. My mind moves around a lot, and I like discussions about politics and music and culture. Also, I’m not baring my soul.

What songs would be on your list, if you were to compile one for your own children?

I think there’d be an overlap with my dad, but I grew up in Southern California in the sixties and seventies, so I’d have to have Neil Young, Elton John and the Beatles, Springsteen, Joni Mitchell. But I’d still have “Long Black Veil.”

What else are you reading these days?

A. M. Homes’s memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter. She’s interviewing me at the 92nd Street Y [in New York City] next month.

And what are you listening to?

Cory Chisel, I love, love, love him so much. He’s new — a great songwriter. Alejandro Escovedo. Yesterday, I was listening to Sibelius.

Do you feel as if you have more books in you? A novel?

No, I’m not interested in writing a novel. I just don’t think I could. I’m interested in writing volume two of my memoirs.

The six illuminating works below are listed in chronological order — not of their publication, but of the era in which each is set. Several of the books — Sarah Walters’s The Night Watch, Armistead Maupin’s Babycakes and David Sedaris ‘Naked — are ensemble pieces: novels or collections that deal with a cast of characters connected through bonds of blood, friendship and/or hardship (and in Sedaris’s case, somehow all three at once). This makes sense: Community is vital for people who have often been cast out and/or ignored by society. Perhaps this is why the “genres” — historical fiction (the Walters, again), sci-fi, humor (Sedaris, Wilde, Maupin), dramatic writing (Wilde, though not in this iteration, and Hwang’s M. Butterfly) — have been such welcoming homes for non-hetero authors.

Two books on the list, John Colapinto’s As Nature Made Him and The Trials of Oscar Wilde, are true stories. Both are simultaneously deeply upsetting and eloquent: the story of a mutilated child who had to find his own way to his true gender, and the transcripted downfall of the 19th century’s bravest and least abashed gay pioneer.

Hitch 22 is more political and cultural bildungsroman than prototypical autobiography. Beginning with his English country childhood, in the embarrassingly named hamlet of Crapstone, Hitchens lays out his path from bourgeois beginnings to intellectual infamy. When his mother sent him to boarding school so he would reach the upper class, he guzzled books as if they were soda, and began a lifetime of in-print and in-person rabble-rousing. By 1969, Hitchens was an Oxford luminary, as infamous for his arrests for various left-wing causes as for his crystalline debate skills and ability to put away bottles of top-shelf alcohol. His next stop was London. Writing for various newspapers and journals, Hitchens became friends with fellow hippie-intellectuals including the then-budding novelists Martin Amis and pre-Satanic Verses fatwa Salman Rushdie.

Most Americans know Hitchens in his next incarnation. As Brit-in-America columnist for The Nation and Vanity Fair, he’s reported from war-torn Yugoslavia, gotten water boarded on camera, and — infamously — backed the Gulf War. It is on this last item that a bit more confession would have been appreciated; one of the great questioners of our time does not stop to exhume his own political missteps. As a frequent traveler to Iraq, Hitchens was privy to some of the worst and bloodiest of Saddam Hussein’s crimes. Understandable passion for the dictator’s overthrow caused Hitchens to atypically disregard the banner under which he marched: the Bush Doctrine and the disregard and lies it encompassed.

But still. This man stood literally side by side with Rushdie when few other so-called radicals would even publish his name for fear of violent retribution. Who, at the scene of his beloved mother’s death, still managed to think about the revolutionary greater struggles in the world — and so puts that loss into the context of the rest of his life. Whose friendships not only have lasted longer than his marriages, but who also has the dignity not to delve into personal-life details that would hurt or anger those still alive.

In the end, and especially for a book that so frequently uses the term “Trotskyite,” Hitch 22 is riveting. Or at least the next best thing to raising a glass or two and smoking a pack with the gadfly himself.

Whatever. Better to forget the whole thing and listen to a good book. How about a few chronicles of less-than conventional love? We’ll start and end with 19th Century tales of obsession. Wuthering Heights and the Picture of Dorian Gray will freak you out on several levels. Not only are they genuinely frightening, but the thought of dating any of their characters is beyond bone chilling. While The 19th Wife and The Postman Always Rings Twice may seem as different as, well, Mormons and homicidal star-crossed lovers, they both depict the American West’s lonely deserts and two-lane highways as fertile territory for sexual corruption. Tales of the City is the antidote to such made-in-the-USA alienation. Don’t have a sweetie this year? Just hang out with your friends — you’ll have a better time anyway. And Never Let Me Go is so weird and eerie and gorgeous that you might just forget all about candy hearts and roses and all of that nonsense. Maybe…

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Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte

2009 | Unabridged

If your last experience with the Bronte sisters was snoozing through high school English class, you are in for a major surprise. Emily Bronte’s legend of the doomed love between lonely teenagers Catherine and Heathcliff makes the protagonists of Twilight look well-adjusted. This 1847 novel is not only one of the greatest creepy reads of all time, it’s also a brilliant reality check. Even your worst love affair wasn’t this messed up.... Told from multiple points of view, and alternating between flashback, letters and present-day first person point of view, Wuthering Heights’ narrative form is practically post-modern. So not only did Bronte emphasize "goth" in the gothic, her work has influenced contemporary writers from Margaret Atwood to the authoress of the aforementioned little-known blood-sucker series.

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The 19th Wife

David Ebershoff

2008 | Unabridged

I first picked this one up in an airport bookstore, deep into Big Love withdrawal (and, yes, I know the show is not representative of the current state of the world’s fastest growing religion, but who can resist the power of Chloe Sevigny’s long braid?). In David Ebershoff’s multi-narrated novel, the author contrasts the life of Anne Eliza Young, estranged wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young, with that of Jordan Scott, a... runaway teen from a contemporary polygamous compound, and Kelly Dee, a LDS feminist grad student determined to unearth the "truth" about her prophet. While 19th Wife may not be as guilty a pleasure as HBO, it’s an equally convincing deterrent to checking the "Open Relationship" option on Facebook. Plus, there’s all that important history and stuff.

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Tales of the City

Armistead Maupin

2009 | Abridged

Every few years, I go on a Tales of the City binge, rereading all six volumes in one glorious swoop, immersing myself in the lives and loves of such unforgettable and hilarious characters as goodie-two-shoes Mary Anne Singleton, out-and-proud Michael Tolliver, and Anna Madrigal — Russian Hill’s grooviest landlady. The series is both a deliciously non-guilty pleasure, and also sobering reminder. We all need friends as much as we do lovers, and... no matter what we do to try to stave off changes, our lives never stand still.

Maupin began writing Tales as a serialized column in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1976. It was the perfect time and place for such a project. The city by the bay was the center of a huge cultural shift: the gay rights movement, the waning days of the hippies, clashes between high society and Berkeley radicals and a range of lurid scandals and strange occurrences, from Patty Hearst’s kidnapping to the Jonestown massacre. The author’s incomparably sharp eye and equally sharp wit — and his sympathy for all manner of lost souls — makes this one of the most cheering books ever written. As this version is abridged, consider it a pitch to join of the best cults ever. Your Kool-Aid is ready.

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Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

2007 | Unabridged

Our protagonist narrator, Kathy, is a young woman in an alternate-reality present-day United Kingdom. Most of the book takes place in flashback, as Kathy reflects on her life thus far, and especially her years at a rural orphanage/boarding school. While Never Let Me Go may sound like an almost too-typical coming of age story, it’s not — nor is it remotely a conventional romance. Instead, this stark piece of speculative fiction examines... what it means to be human. It’s difficult to explain more without ruining the genuinely strange futuristic story line. Suffice to say that the answer is, as the gushiest songs always say, love, love, love.

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The Postman Always Rings Twice

James M. Cain

2009 | Unabridged

The classic pulp novel from the writer who invented noir. Cain’s thriller about an adulterous romance between drifter Frank and short-order waitress Cora epitomizes post-war California’s unexpected freedoms — and their consequences. Of course, the lovers’ passion is too hot not to cool, especially once Cora’s husband, Nick, is out of the way. At first, it may seem like miscasting that Stanley Tucci, one of the seemingly nicest guy actors in the... biz, as the reader of such dark material. Yet, his clipped and sympathetic voice turns out to be a perfect match for Cain’s prose. Frank on Cora: "She got up to get the potatoes. Her dress fell open for a second, so I could see her leg. When she gave me the potatoes, I couldn’t eat." Take that, Hallmark.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde

2009 | Unabridged

You think your most recent ex was full of herself? She’s got nothing on the exquisite Master Gray, the most malevolent narcissist ever committed to paper. Even after many re-readings, I always forget just how wonderfully repulsive and irresistible this slim volume is. But the story of a man who stays forever young, even as his painted likeness grows hideously decrepit, is also tragic, especially when viewed through the lens of the... author’s own life. I always wonder what Oscar Wilde’s feelings would be to learn that this novel is his most famous legacy — after his own heart-breaking biography. No doubt, he’d have a beautiful and brilliant quip at the ready, which would be its own tragedy, of sorts.

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File under: Globally conscious funk, hip-hop riot grrlery, Reggae

From: Germany, Lagos, Nigeria by way of Dresden

Remember way back in the late '80s and early '90s, when artists would sing about politics and social justice just as much as money and heartbreak — you know, like Tracy Chapman on the Amnesty International tour, or everything Boogie Down Productions ever did? For those of us who miss music that moved us in complicated ways, Nneka is a powerful answer. Not only is she a beautifully raw singer, whose range and influences span neo-soul, afro-beat and reggae, Nneka is politically-committed, spiritually-motivated and as fiercely smart as her lyrics imply.

eMusic's Elizabeth Gold caught up with Nneka days before her NYC debut.

On her first musical memories:

Six in the morning, cleaning my father's old school Volvo in Nigeria, when I was about 13 — while I was washing those tires, I was singing to myself. I didn't have my own CD player or Walkman, so most of the music I heard was traditional Nigerian music on the local radio station. And I would hear Bob Marley once in a while — his songs are always easy to sing along to.

On the surprisingly difficult choice between music and anthropology:

[When I got to Germany] I started studying Archeology, and then switched to Anthropology and African Studies. I always wanted to know more, apart from the Biblical aspect, about where we come from. More about the biological side, and the science side, and to be able to read in between the lines of the Bible, to understand why we're here. I met DJ Farhot when I was just doing music for fun. He was living in his parents' place, and I would go sit with him in the basement and exchange ideas. He would show me his hip-hop collection, I would tell him about Africa. I was always writing, and I used to rap for myself, but he was the first person who gave me the courage to use my own lyrics to express myself and make music out them. We were like two dummies who don't know anything, teaching each other, and growing together. I still have not made up my mind [about music as a profession]. The first gig where I earned money for music, I felt guilty taking it.

On breaking into the record business without really trying:

I had this part time job working in a boutique, and I got fired. When I was running through town looking for a new job, I found Yo Mama Records. The secretary told me it was a distribution and record company, and I was like, “Okay, why don't you listen to some stuff I have,” because I always carried my songs in my backpack. It was very unprofessional, ghetto-y. That these guys even allowed me into their office… I went straight to the chief in charge, and he listened to my three tracks. “Changes,” and the “Uncomfortable Truth” made [my first] record.

On Big Oil and the Remember Saro-Wiwa project:

Nigeria is one of the major oil-producing countries in the world. Ken Saro Wiwa was a freedom fighter who came from the Niger Delta, a region located in the south that is rich with oil — it's where I grew up, and my parents still live. Saro-Wiwa was hanged in 1995 by the then-president of Nigeria, the dictator Sani Abacha. [At the time of his death], there was also a lot of tribalism — [different] tribes were asking who the oil belonged to. So the problem came from within and without Africa.

It's good that [Nigerians] have oil, but it's also been a curse for us. The Deltans' livelihood is farming and fishing, but there is nothing left for them. Only the rich survive. The area has been exploited environmentally, and people live in abject poverty, due to our corrupt political leaders working with these oil extraction companies. The money is not invested into the community, and there's a lot of pollution — the area is in a state of total exploitation. You can't imagine: a country like Nigeria, with almost 200 million people, being the fourth biggest oil producer in the world, and we don't have proper petrol stations [or] refineries. What I'm trying to do with this movement is raise awareness, and to educate my fellow Nigerians outside of Africa on what is happening back home. Even to raise your voice and put up a blog, or help some family, or an orphanage.

On why Africa is the Future:

Africa is the past, the present, and the future. Africa is the source. When it comes to American history: take a look a slavery times, at hip-hop, at blues. Who built Europe? Who went to war?

On coming home to Africa from Europe:

My biological mother is German, but I grew up with my dad and stepmom who are Nigerian. That had never been an issue until I stepped out of Nigeria for a while — then I understood I had color, and knew what racism and prejudice was. In the Western world, I was black! In Germany, they give it to you straight and to your face. When I went back to Nigeria, after experiencing all this in Germany, knowing that I am mixed… You don't know where you belong. I feel at home in Nigeria, I just have to remove that inferiority complex that Europe gave me. I'm cool; I'm in between.

On which other Nigerian artists you should be listening to:

King Sunny Ade, Victor Uwaifo, Edna Ogholi, MajekFashek

On who she'll be jamming with in the afterlife:

With Bob Marley, with Fela, and with Nina Simone.

A return to the golden age of women in hip-hop

For those of us awaiting a return of the golden age of women in hip-hop (I miss you, Neneh Cherry!), Nneka seems almost too good to be true. Nigerian born and bred, Nneka moved to Hamburg, Germany (her mother’s home) at 19, in pursuit of both musical success as well as a degree in anthropology. Concrete Jungle, her first American release, reflects the earnestness of such mixed ambitions.

Jungle’s songs range from ska on “Kangpe,” a spiritual exhortation for women to stand up to abusive men, to old-ish school hip-hop on “Walkin,” to neo-soul on “Mind vs. Heart,” but it's “Heartbeat” and “Uncomfortable Truth” that are standout tracks. The first, a jumpy and jumped-up plea to someone (a whole nation?) who has broken the singer’s heart, packs an irresistible hook: Nneka chanting “Blood, blood, blood,” at an aerobically pressing 150 beats-per-minute. “Truth” feels retro in the best way. With a rolling soul groove and gritty horn blasts, Nneka makes a sweetly optimistic case for loved-based politics.

Concrete Jungle has been compared to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, but that feels a little easy. Sure, both women are socially-conscious, beautiful singers and convincing rappers, but Nneka is a lot sweeter than Hill in tone and ambition. Even when she’s singing “Wake up Africa, and stop blaming,” on “Africans” or “They talk of elections, Nigerians, but … nothing may change,” on “Suffri,” Nneka comes off more hopeful than bitter. Maybe those good old days of hip-hop sisterhood and “positivity” are back after all.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, Simone grew up poor but proud in the best ways. Her parents had been financially comfortable until the privations of the Great Depression, and never ceased striving to improve the lives of their eight children. As Simone herself wrote in her candid and fascinating autobiography I Put A Spell on You (1991, written with Stephen Cleary), “Everything that happened to me as a child involved music.” She was picking out songs on her mother’s upright from the age of two, and soon thereafter began formal classical piano lessons.

The rest of Simone’s childhood would have been amazing enough had she been a boy born with this sort of talent in 19th Century Vienna: she practiced as much as possible, all day, every day, preparing for auditions to classical conservatories. But for a black girl in the Jim Crow south, her devotion and unswerving self-assurance was miraculous. When, in her early 20s, Simone was shocked not to receive admission to Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, she had to figure out how to make a living. In the course of playing accompaniment and club gigs, she ended up inventing her own musical genre.

The next stage of Simone’s life may be best construed from her musical path. Though she started in the fifties with coolly complex versions of jazz tunes such as “My Baby Just Cares for Me” and “Porgy,” Simone began to write her own songs by the 60s – spurred on by friendships with intellectuals and revolutionaries from James Baldwin to Stokely Carmichael. There’s more black history in the anthems “Young, Gifted and Black,” “Four Women,” and “Mississippi Goddam” than in many textbooks.

The years following the Black Power Movement’s peak were not always kind to those who’d been on the front lines. “I’d presumed I could change the world,” Simone wrote, “and had run down a dead-end street leaving my career, child, and husband way behind, neglected.” Pursued by ghosts – and the IRS – she left the United States by the mid-70s, rarely returning for any length of time until her death in 2003. Her last few decades may have been less creatively fertile than those that had come before; even so, she continued to draw sold-out crowds around the world. Her influence can be heard in artists from Rickie Lee Jones to the Roots, but there’s never been another artist quite like her.