JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Diana Ross’ 82nd birthday.
Tag: The Supremes
Throwback: Happy 82nd Birthday, Mary Wilson!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 82nd anniversary of the birth of The Supremes co-founder Mary Wilson.
Throwback: Happy Black History Month!/Happy 85th Birthday, Brian Holland!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and the legendary Brian Holland’s 85th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 81st Birthday, Diana Ross!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Diana Ross’ 81st birthday.
Throwback: Black History Month: The Supremes
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month and pays tributes to the glamorous Supremes.
Throwback: Black History Month: The Supremes
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to The Supremes.
New Video: Taleen Kali Shares a Fuzzy, Power Chord-Driven Ripper
Los Angeles-born and-based singer/songwriter, guitarist, poet, essayist, visual artist, and Dum Dum Records label head Taleen Kali (she/they) crafts romantic punk songs with a cosmic sound with elements of shoegaze, psychedelia and grunge that’s dreamy and defiant. Influenced by melodies and imagery from her Armenian heritage and her parents’ birthplaces of Lebanon and Ethiopia, Kali has manages to fuse her cultural linage with the sounds of the modern countercultures she grew up embracing and eventually exploring as a musician.
Kali initially starting her career in earnest as a member of Los Angeles-based band TÜLIPS. After TÜLIPS went out with a bang at their final headline show at The Regent Theater back in 2016, Kali stepped out into the limelight as a solo artist, sharing bills and touring the States with the likes of Ex Hex, Alice Bag and Seth Bogart.
The Los Angeles-based multi-hyphenate’s solo debut, 2018’s Kristin Kontrol-produced Soul Songs EP was recorded at Hollywood-based Sunset Sound Studios and was mixed by Machine’s Brad Laner. The EP, which found Kali’s riot grrl ethos maturing into a polished multifaceted punk sound with noise pop and New Wave, was released to praise from BUST Magazine and Stereogum, who likened her sound to a contemporary Blondie. Soul Songs was also included in Pitchfork‘s Guide to Summer Albums and LA Weekly‘s Best Indie Punk Albums.
Kali and her backing band followed up with an unplugged version of the EP and covers of The Supremes‘ “Baby Love” and Garbage‘s “#1 Crush.” She also recorded a two-song pandemic project called Changing with her TÜLIPS-era producer Greg Katz.
As I mentioned earlier, Kali is the founder of Los Angeles-based experimental label Dum Dum Records and what the The Los Angeles Times has called “cult favorite” DUM DUM Zine — and she’s a sound healer, who often leads group mediations. Interestingly, last year, she briefly pivoted from the punk psychedelia she’s best known for with the release of last year’s Songs For Meditation, a sound bath album. Additionally, her poetry, essays and visual art have appeared in digital and internationally recognized publications including The Onion, Spin Magazine, Razorcake, Los Angeleno, and The Bushwick Review.
Taleen Kali’s Jeff Schroeder and Josiah Mazzaschi-co-produced full-length debut Flower of Life is slated for a March 3, 2023 release through Kali’s Dum Dum Records. Sonically, the album sees the rising Los Angeles further cementing her fuzzy and noisy take on psych punk paired with vocals that run the range of femme punk and shoegaze siren.
Flower of Life’s latest single, album title track “Flower of Life” is a grungy psych punk ripper centered around Kali’s sneering delivery, fuzzy power chords, thunderous drumming, soaring organ chords paired with a mosh pit friendly chorus. To my ears, “Flower of Life” sonically, is a defiant and decidedly 120 Minutes-era MTV-like alt rock influenced song — think My Bloody Valentine meets riot grrr-era punk. So far, the track received praise from Buzzbands LA and Grimy Goods, and radio airplay from KEXP.
“‘Flower of Life’ was a spiritual concept I held onto for a long time before writing this song,” the Los Angeles-based multi-hyphenate explains in press notes. “The flower is a fractal, a cycle, ever blooming, ever decaying.
“For our 1st music video, we wanted to honor this cycle by highlighting the cultural moments we experienced in the recent past as a way of celebrating our resilience while also looking ahead to the future. For our band right now, it means being able to perform again and tour to support our upcoming album. In the larger scheme of things, it means so much more.
It was important to us to not only highlight resistance but also celebration in the music video. The news clips in the video range from footage of LGBTQ pride marches to recent protests, which include the recent Roe vs. Wade demonstrations, Armenians in L.A. protesting the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, Black Lives Matter, and even the 2017 Women’s March.”
Throwback: Black History Month: The Supremes/R.I.P. Mary Wilson
Today is the ninth day of Black History Month. And if you’ve been frequenting this site over the past few days of this month, you’d see that I’ve been featuring Black artists across a wide and eclectic array of genres and styles that I think can guide you towards understanding the Black experience.
Through the month — and throughout the year, I hope that you’ll come to understand and appreciate the following:
Black culture is American culture
Black music is American music.
Black history is American history.
America’s greatest and beloved contributions to the world are Black music styles — the blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and hip-hop.
Black art matters.
You can’t love black art and black artists without loving black people.
Black lives matter — all of them, all of the time.
I was awakened to see an alert from CNN that read “Mary Wilson, co-founder of The Supremes dead at 76.” I knew then that a tribute post to Wilson — and the legendary Supremes would be necessary.
The Supremes were one of the best selling, most popular acts of their day. They were also among a handful of Black acts that saw widespread mainstream success: They were not only Ed Sullivan Show mainstays, they were on practically every single variety show and entertainment show in the country — and they knocked off The Beatles from the top spot of the charts, eventually dominating the charts with hit after hit after hit after hit.
Best known as a member of Charles Bradley‘s backing band The Extraordinaries and Sharon Jones‘ backing band The Dap Kings, Lee Fields‘ backing band The Expressions, Antibalas and The Budos Band and for collaborating with Mark Ronson and others, the Chicago, IL-born, New York-based trumpeter Billy Aukstik began writing his own soul-inspired compositions and founded Brooklyn-based indie soul label Dala Records. And since founding the label, Aukstik has produced the debut efforts of a handful of locally-based artists including singer/songwriter, John Fatum, The Rad Trads, Michael Harlen, Patrick Sargent and Camellia Hartman, as well as his own solo work under the moniker Billy the Kid.
Last year, I wrote about a Dala Records split 7 inch single “Breathing Hard (Over You)”/”Honey Bee” featuring Camellia Hartman and its founder Aukstik, with both artists backed by the Dala Records house band, The Soulful Saints. And as you may recall, Hartman is an East Village-born and-based vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, who as a child studied the Suzuki method on violin, bass and guitar at rock ‘n’ roll day camp, trombone in middle school and a cappella in high school. Hartman’s latest single is the Billy Aukstik penned, “Return the Favor,” which is centered around the East Village-born and -based multi-instrumentalist and vocalist’s effortless and old-timey soulful vocals and an arrangement featuring twinkling keys, shuffling drums, and a loose, bluesy guitar line and a sultry horn line. Sonically, the song, which draws from Northern Soul production brings to mind the sounds of The Supremes and others, complete with a swooning and aching longing.
A Q&A with Jessica Childress
Despite the fact that the Los Angeles, CA-based singer/songwriter and vocalist, Jessica Childress, who won over millions of viewers on NBC‘s The Voice, grew up in a musical household where her mother, father and sister were all […]