Thomas Jefferson Byrd was an American actor who worked several times with director Spike Lee.
Tag Archives: 1950
RIP CP Lee (1950 – 2020)
CP Lee, was a British musician, author, broadcaster and lecturer from Manchester, England.
He was co-author of the witty composition “Gerry and the Holograms” (1979) which shows similarities with “Blue Monday” (1983) but then without the nagging tone which makes the latter nearly impossible to listen to in full.
CP Lee was also an authority on Dylan, a Dylanologist one might say. His comments after Dylan received the Nobel Prize were both deep and sharp.
He also contributed marginally to Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape (2010), an insightful documentary on the video nasty phenomenon.
RIP Bonnie Pointer (1950 – 2020)
Bonnie Pointer was an American singer, part of the The Pointer Sisters.
The Pointer Sisters also did background vocals on “God Make Me Funky” (1975) by The Headhunters, the American jazz-funk fusion band led by Herbie Hancock.
RIP Mory Kanté (1950 – 2020)
Mory Kanté was a Guinean vocalist and player of the kora harp best known for his 1987 hit song “Yé ké yé ké“.
RIP Genesis P-Orridge (1950 – 2020)
Genesis P-Orridge was and English musician and founding member of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV.
I first learned of P-Orridge in the late 1980s during the acid house period. I remember some of their Psychic TV material from the radio shows by Luc Janssen. However, I can’t seem to find the tracks that I heard at the time.
Where to begin? There is so much. Let’s start with the exceptional single “United/Zyklon B Zombie” (1978).
And let us add the album 20 Jazz Funk Greats (1979) also by Throbbing Gristle.
There was a time when I actually thought that these were jazz-funk tracks.
New listener, do not fear, it’s very experimental but actually not that hard on the irritation scale.
RIP Pedro “P-Funk” Bell (1950 – 2019)
Pedro Bell was an American artist and illustrator best-known for his work for Parliament-Funkadelic.
When I discovered Parliament-Funkadelic in the 1990s, part of the attraction was the visual style and the grand narrative holding the whole project together. This style was just as much due to George Clinton as to Pedro Bell.
Bell’s unique album and liner notes contributed substantially to the P-Funk mythology and begot the Afrofuturist aesthetic evident also in Jean-Michel Basquiat (see for example the sleeve design for “Beat Bop“).
His precursors in Afrofuturism are Lee “send him to outa space” Perry and Sun “space is the place” Ra.
“Bell is a shackle (all shackles are just as essential) in the chain of Afrofuturism, Afro-Surrealism and black science fiction.” –Sholem Stein
A seminal text in his poetic oeuvre is from the sleeve notes of Standing on the Verge of Getting It On (1974):
“AS IT IS WRTTEN HENCEFORTH… On the Eighth Day, the Cosmic Strumpet of Mother Nature was spawned to envelope this Third Planet in FUNKADELICAL VIBRATIONS. And she birthed Apostles Ra, Hendrix, Stone, and CLINTON to preserve all funkiness of man unto eternity… But! Fraudulent forces of obnoxious JIVATION grew…only seedling GEORGE remained! As it came to be, he did indeed begat FUNKADELIC to restore Order Within the Universe. And nourished from the pamgrierian mammaristic melonpaps of Mother Nature, the followers of FUNKADELIA multiplied incessantly!”
Pedro will be missed.