I first heard the name Joyner Lucas last week. Sitting in Klein Park with a friend who raps and writes poetry, he pulled out his phone and said, “Hey, check this out.”
He pulled up the video for Lucas’ “I’m Not Racist” on YouTube — which now has nearly 82 million views — and I was blown away.
I have a confession. I’ve got 104,440 unread emails right now — an actual number, not an attempt at humor by way of hyperbole. There are a whole bunch of reasons for this.
First, I’ve had the same email address for more than 12 years. Over that time, the emails have sort of piled up. For eight of those years, I served as music director for a radio station — a job that generates a lot of unsolicited email. (I still get 15 to 20 of those emails each day.)
Early this week marked the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. It was, by all accounts, the defining cultural event of an entire generation. It was also, in many ways, much more than that. It was at once a cultural crescendo and a heavy, ideological tombstone — the final punctuation mark on a decade of revolution and activism. It was the culmination of a generation’s revolt against war; it was a celebration of the successfully-waged sexual revolution.
Folk rocker Richie Havens has witnessed some of Rock and Roll’s most memorable moments. Emerging from the Greenwich Village coffeehouse folk scene in the mid-Sixties, he came up with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul and Mary. He played the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Bob Dylan “plugged in” for the first time — going electric, much to the crowd’s dismay. Havens was the first act to take the stage at Woodstock, playing a set that would last almost three hours. As you might imagine, he has a few stories to tell.
