Jamie XX – Chris Writes Things

Pains of Being Pure at Heart at Cheer Up Charlie's (Kathryn Yu)

For the final day of SXSW, I went big, big, big. Though I saw close to 40 bands over the duration of the conference, nearly half of those were notched on Saturday. Memorable moments not included in my Spin coverage below: Catching Wallpaper’s Ricky Reed when he leapt into the crowd at Vice Bar, head-nodding to Shlohmo’s beat-burbling set at Daedelus’ Magical Properties showcase, rocking out to the chillblues/blueswave of Writer in a dusty field at Cheer Up Charlie’s, and shredding my arm hopping a fence whilst trying to get in to see Big Freedia at Mess With Texas (turned out her set was long over, and there wasn’t actually a wait to get in). Yeah, you could say I went out in style.

The Best and the Worst: Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Dan Deacon, Jamie XX, We Are Enfant Terrible, Ty Segall, and Superhumanoids.

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Jamie XX and Gil Scott-Heron, "We're New Here"

For more than two decades, younger artists have been reinterpreting the work of legendary spoken-word poet and rap forefather Gil Scott-Heron. He’s been sampled, quoted, name-dropped, and featured by Common, Blackalicious, Aesop Rock, and Public Enemy. One of his famous poems from the ’60s took up a startling amount of real estate on Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy last year, even as Scott-Heron returned with a stunner of a new album, his first since 1994, I’m New Here. The man’s relevance is established (gilded), so is a remixed version of his latest necessary, or is We’re New Here—a reinterpretation by The XX producer Jamie Smith—simply hype-mongering?

Read the rest of the review over at the A.V. Club.

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