Turn It Up - 6/16/2025

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

Soul-affirming protests from acts new and old for the work week after this No Kings weekend. Turn it up!

Sly & the Family Stone – “Hot Fun in the Summertime” (from Greatest Hits, 1970)

It did my heart good to attend the main “No Kings” rally here in Kansas City, Missouri on Saturday. The vibes were great: 10,000 anti-fascist attendees (per Indivisible KC) got to work embodying, if only for the afternoon, a vision of egalitarian, pluralist, multi-racial and cross-generational democracy. I’d been listening to Sly Stone all week, given his death at 82, and his Family Stone’s greatest hits made a perfect soundtrack for the event: “Everyday People,” “Everybody Is a Star,” Stand,” “Life” and so many of your other favorites too. (Don’t miss all the links to great writing on Sly’s legacy below, including from Charles earlier this year here at NFR.) The smash I kept coming back to, though, as the temperature pushed to a humid near-90, was “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” Its unhurried tempo fitted ideally with a need to keep pushin’ even with no end of work in sight. Besides helping me to realize that some modern country act needs to cover “Hot Fun…” ASAP (“county fair in the country sun,” people!), the day also reminded me the song is a low-key anthem for dancing in the streets, fighting old and new bosses, a model (as James Baldwin put it) for achieving our country. Turn this one up all summer long. – DC

Congress Alley – “God Save America” (from Congress Alley, 1973)

Speaking of Sly Stone’s legacy… Congress Alley, a New York vocal quartet led by former doo-wopper Lee Andrews, could never have imagined its sound—a funky pop with alternating male and female voices—without Sly’s precedent: Those refrains of “Yeah, yeah, yeah, YEAH” are direct homage. A single from the group’s only album, “God Save America,” never even cracked the R&B charts in the day, but sure sounds on point for 2025: “We’re in trouble, good citizens.” I have sympathy for the title prayer, too, though I suspect that for God to save America, She is going to need our help. (Hat tip to Joyce Linehan for turning me onto these guys.) – DC

CRYS – “(I Must Not Be) Cut Out for Honky Tonkin’” (single, 2025)

CRYS’ grandmother, according to the Black country singer-songwriter’s website, website, was a hill-country guitar player known as Miss Jim. CRYS plays what she describes as “cosmic country and honky tonk,” an updating of influences including “Patsy Cline, Curtis Mayfield, Elizabeth Cotten, and The Chicks.” Well, that sounds like exactly NFR’s jam. This slow, blousy pedal-steel dripping weeper lets her pay respects to some classic country queens while fretting that she just might not be cut out for living the broken-hearted honky-tonk dreams she sings about. Now, a black woman worrying that she might not be cut out for country works as a sly protest on its face, given the varieties of segregation still circumscribing the format on radio, but don’t undersell the more universal pains of, for example, “Him and his wife are tryin’ again.” CRYS (not to be confused with Americana up-and-comer Crys Matthews) can only say her prayers, with help here from Olivia Ellen Lloyd and Marley Hale: “Oh the honky tonk life just ain't for me / Ask Emmylou, Dolly, and Kitty /I'll pick up my heart /Ask God for a brand new start / And if the Lord don't answer / May Loretta help me.” I like this more every time through. – DC

Tire Le Coyote – “Ventouse” (from Ventouse, 2025)

My younger sister, a nurse practitioner who specializes in women’s health, confirms that a ventouse is “a vacuum device used to help deliver babies.” I’d looked up the translation after hearing Tire Le Coyote, a longtime singer-songwriter from Quebec, sing just one in-English line, borrowed from Woody Guthrie, in this otherwise French-spoken protest. Our collective courage in this moment, he sings in French, may need a metaphorical ventouse to be born, but born it will be. And then, “All you fascists bound to lose.” I’m here to tell you, friends, that the hair stood on my neck. In the interest of fairness, I should also add that, after listening to “Ventouse,” which is performed in a guitar-harmonica-falsetto kind of low-key French folkie cabaret style, my sister added that it was, in her midwestern estimation, “not an enjoyable listen” and “definitely not an earworm, that one.” Fair enough. On the other hand, I can’t get its central image and message out of my head. – DC

Will Varley with Billy Bragg – “End Times” (from Machines Will Never Learn to Make Mistakes Like Me, 2025)

Will Varley is an English singer-songwriter who I’ll shorthand here, however unfairly, as Anglo Americana. I recommend his latest album pretty much straight through. “Machines Will Never Learn to Make Mistakes Like Me,” the title track that grabbed me in the first place, is an affecting, droning working-class lament, a slow, self-reproaching honky tonker for the era of AI and other job-and-people-killing automations. “End Times” is especially moving. A lullaby for a daughter, and for the fathers singing it too, the song is about fearing that the famines and floods and wars out there now are portents of the end of the world. “She did not ask for your plastic oceans…,” Billy Bragg sings, taking up the final verse at the very bottom of his range. “There’ll be no place to buy more time when the wells run dry.” The song is so fragile it feels like it might blow away, but then Varley and Bragg’s voices join as one, a drum bangs time, and you dare to suspect endings are also where new worlds are born. – DC

Prince – “Free” (acoustic) (single, 2025)

A new drop from the Prince archives, this stripped-down version of a 1999 album track knocked me sideways. Recorded in 2008, this “Free” particularly spotlights his acoustic playing, with an interplay of thrumming rhythms and piercing melodic runs that supports the lyric’s call for liberation. Prince is in clarion falsetto throughout, except when he gets up close to our ears near the end: “This time,” he insists, “we all fight together, for the most important cause. We all fight for the right to be free.” There’s never a bad time for this message, but it hit me hard in this week of fascist escalations and political assassinations. As did the wordless moan that ends the track, as Prince soars above us as we hopefully march toward a better world. We’re all in this together. – CH

Brian Wilson – “Sketches of Smile” (from At My Piano, 2025)

I’ll be writing more about Brian Wilson, who died last week and who (like Sly Stone) is impossible to sum up in one song. But I’ll here note an album that I had never listened to before this past week, 2021’s At My Piano, on which Wilson offers solo-piano instrumental versions of some of his classics. Listening now, I’m floored. This is such elegant and lovely stuff, which spotlights the richness of Wilson’s melodies and their place in a set of interlocking song traditions across both 19^th and 20^th centuries. “Sketches of Smile” is a stand-in for the whole album, but I chose it for how effectively it captures the strange beauty of the Smile songs – from “Our Prayer” to “Surf’s Up” – in a setting free of the lush harmonies, layered productions, or Van Dyke Parks’ puzzle-box lyrics. (All of which I love, of course.) It also frees the songs from the fifty years of mythologizing that has surrounded Smile for both better and worse. Here, at his piano, Brian Wilson delivers these songs with a kind of playful wonder, as if his works remain newly delightful, even for him, even all these years later. I know they will always do that for me, and for that I am deeply grateful to him. – CH

Mavis Staples – “Godspeed” (single, 2025)

The return of Mavis Staples is always a good thing, and what a striking choice: a version of Frank Ocean’s “Godspeed” that adds a spoken performance by Kara Jackson in the mix. Staples adds a layer of prayerful blessing to the lover’s goodbye of Ocean’s original, a reminder of the tight link between the spiritual and the sexual that both artists have explored so beautifully, and hearing Ms. Staples’ elder wisdom in lines like “There will be mountains you won’t move” and “Still, I’ll always be there for you” is achingly gorgeous. Brad Cook’s production is a tender balance of textures, and Jackson’s concluding verses are both benediction and enigma. “Godspeed” is graceful, in every sense of the word. I’m so glad Mavis Staples is still with us. – CH

Lil Wayne (feat. BigXThaPlug and Jay Jones) – “Hip-Hop” (from Tha Carter VI, 2025)

The new Lil Wayne album isn’t a masterpiece, by any stretch, but I’ll be damned if the latest release in his cornerstone Tha Carter series doesn’t feature a bunch of tracks that remind me of the wild-and-woolly exuberance that made him perhaps the most exciting MC in the world for a few years. The propulsive “Hip-Hop” is one of those. Weezy dances around a stuttering beat punctuated by an instantly memorable hook from ascendant Dallas rapper BigXThaPlug. (New Orleans’ Jay Jones also stops by for a suitably relentless guest verse.) As with the best of Lil Wayne, the sheer sound of the words in his fluid, polysyllabic flow means as much if not more than whatever they might be expressing; as if to hammer that home, he harmonizes over BigXThaPlug on the last couple choruses. Laid back in the cut, deep in the groove, “Hip-Hop” is a highlight of an album that feels more like a return to form than I ever expected it would. – CH

KIRBY – “The Man” (single, 2025)

Born in Memphis and raised in Mississippi, KIRBY’s written hits for Rihanna and Ariana Grande and now returns to her literal and figurative roots with this fiery, blues-drenched condemnation of race and class injustice. It’s laid out with plainspoken power, as KIRBY reminds her listeners of the costs of an American dream built on the backs of workers who never get to share in it. Her father was her specific inspiration, and he’s featured in an evocative video filmed on his land. (I’m not sure if it’s him offering the spoken wisdom after the first chorus, but it’s an essential lesson regardless of who’s delivering it.) KIRBY’s pop instincts come through on a chorus that builds the piano-and-guitar arrangement into an undeniable, unforgettable rejoinder: “I can’t stand the MAN,” she insists, a moment of reckoning that – in the best tradition of Ralph Ellison’s “blues impulse” – “fingers the jagged grain of a brutal experience” that has tainted both past and present. But maybe not the future, if we’re all willing to work for it. Let’s get working. – CH

Reading recommendations:

-Emily Nussbaum on Gertrude Berg, the “first show runner” and the woman behind early sitcom The Goldbergs, for The New Yorker

-Steve Neavling on the search for a lost Detroit soul singer, from Metro Times

-Mark Anthony Neal on Billy Paul, for Medium

-Marissa R. Moss talks to Lucius about music and motherhood, for Rolling Stone

-David Browne talks to Joan Baez, for Rolling Stone

-Jeff Sharlet on “Kristi Noem and Fascism’s Sadistic Eroticization of Power,” for Religion Dispatches

-Alphonse Pierre on how ICE raids have impacted Houston rapper Hoodlum’s hometown, for Pitchfork

-Andrea Williams on why the new Grammys country category is about more than Beyoncé, for Tennessean

-Elizabeth Nelson on The Pretenders’ Learning to Crawl, for Pitchfork

-Vernon Reid on Sly Stone, for Rolling Stone

-Ben Greenman on Sly Stone, for Pitchfork

-Wesley Morris on Sly Stone, for The New York Times

-Brandon Ousley on Sly Stone, for Discogs

-Jack Hamilton on Sly Stone, for Slate

-Hanif Abdurraqib on Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On, for The New Yorker

-Carl Wilson on Sly Stone’s memoir, for Bookforum Fall 2023

-Greil Marcus on Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, from Creem April 1972

-Chris Willman on Brian Wilson’s 20 best songs, for Variety

-Chris Willman talks to Darian Sahanaja about working with Brian Wilson, for Variety

-Stephen Thomas Erlewine on 15 great Brian Wilson deep cuts, for Stereogum

-Carl Wilson on Brian Wilson, for his newsletter Crritic!

-Sam Sodomsky on Brian Wilson, for Pitchfork

-Erin MacLeod on Brian Wilson, for Medium

-Gina Arnold on Brian Wilson, for her newsletter Bring Me Giants

-Amy Rigby on Brian Wilson, for her newsletter Diary of Amy Rigby

-Annie Zaleski on how Brian Wilson soundtracked California, for The Guardian

-Bob Mehr on Brian Wilson’s unreleased projects, for New York Times

-Caryn Rose on Brian Wilson, for Apple News

-Ann Powers on Brian Wilson, for NPR Music

-Craig Jenkins on Sly Stone, Brian Wilson, and the problem with “genius,” for Vulture

(No Kings, Kansas City 6/14/2025)

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