Afro-Punk Festival: Saul Williams and Janelle Monae: 6 July 2009 - Brooklyn Academy of Music
Perhaps no individual musician better captures the spirit and attitude of James Spooner’s Afro-Punk Festival than Saul Williams. Though the evolving sounds of Brooklyn rockers TV on the Radio are routinely cited as the Afro-Punk movement’s musical vanguard, Williams’ idiosyncratic mixture of hip-hop, electronica, grime, spoken word and poetry, all delivered with a potent punk ethos, proved an exemplary cross-section of Afro-Punk. Earlier in the evening Janelle Monae delivered a lively—though verbatim—set of her space-age meets rockabilly music, complete with an interpretive painting. A free skate park, bmx demos, and graffiti murals were seamlessly incorporated into the musical portion of the festival, demonstrating the scope and vitality of the Afro-Punk scene.
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