Will Hackney is packing gear into a van on a loading dock in Portland, Ore. He’s the bass player and tour manager for the band Flock of Dimes. They’ve got four amps, a ton of guitars and keyboards — and, Hackney says, “a British guitar player who brings the biggest suitcase I’ve ever seen.”

Over the course of 30 days, the group will travel 8,000 miles and visit 22 cities in the U.S. and Canada. It is Hackney’s job to get them there. Tour managers are responsible for virtually every aspect of planning and executing the trip, and almost anything can go wrong. But there are some things Hackney has never worried much about.

“You know, in all my years of touring, security has not really been something I’ve ever had to think about,” Hackney says. “It usually feels like a pretty safe bubble.”

For many, that bubble popped after the Paris attacks. Just a few days later, Robin Laananen was on tour in Belgium with the band Refused — and Bataclan was on everyone’s mind. During a Refused show, she spotted members of the military inside the showroom behind their sound engineer.

“That’s hard to see — people that you love playing music up on stage and knowing that that’s a possibility and that could be going through their heads,” she says. “And then everyone’s worried about everybody in that room. It’s really hard.”

Among those killed at the Bataclan was Nick Alexander, one of the crew for Eagles of Death Metal, the band playing that night. Jim Runge was friends with Alexander. Runge toured with The Black Keys and worked shows at the Bataclan before last year’s tragedy.

He says the attack was the catalyst for some changes to industry practices. It’s now more common to use spotters to keep an eye out for anything unusual in the crowd. “There is somebody on stage, whether it be the tour manager, production manager, stage manager — somebody who is in charge of calling the show,” Runge says.

But Runge freely admits there’s only so much that can be done. “You can check bags to make sure people aren’t carrying in bombs or explosives or guns — dangerous things,” he says. “But — I hate to even say it — if someone is coming at your door with automatic weapons, other than having armed guys at the door, protecting the door, which none of us want, what can you do?”

That sense of helplessness has had a lasting effect on the psyche of the touring community, says Chris Coyle, calling from the road while on tour with rock band Red Fang in Malmo, Sweden.

“I don’t really know how to put it into words about how I felt about [Bataclan],” Coyle says. “It was immediate sorrow. Talking about it now gets me all choked up. We never thought about having to deal with guns or anything at shows.”

Although Coyle says he hasn’t drastically changed the way he runs tours, he now finds himself in the job of spotter more often. “If I see anything, I will stop the show and I will get the boys out,” he says.

Back in Portland, Hackney is done packing the van. True to form, he has already shifted his attention to working out the logistics of his band’s next stop. But before driving off, he takes a few moments to reflect on the one-year anniversary of the Bataclan attack.

“The point of that attack was to make people scared to have live music and do things like this,” he says. “And everybody that I know is not going to stop for that.”

He doesn’t have time to stop. He’s got 17 cities and 6000 miles to go.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

So I called Tony Trov. He’s an artist out of Philadelphia, but more important, he plays in a Chuck Berry cover band called It’s Marvin, Your Cousin Marvin Berry, a reference to a memorable scene in Back to the Future.

Trov couldn’t comprehend how I wasn’t a fan. “I dunno, are you a communist?” he asks me. “How can you not like Chuck Berry music? It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

So he recommended three songs — “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Too Much Monkey Business” and “Maybellene” — and made a suggestion for how I should start my Chuck Berry education.

“I think you need to put yourself in the right environment,” Trov says. “I think you need to drive across the country with a Chuck Berry tape, a crappy copy that you get at a gas station, and the open road.”

I’m not an open-road kind of guy, so “Too Much Monkey Business” was more my speed: Its beleaguered, chip-on-your-shoulder attitude is somehow both specific and universal.

Then there’s the sound that I most associate with Berry — the licks, like from “Roll Over Beethoven.” Similar licks show up in hits like “Johnny B. Goode” and “Carol” — call it same-y, a callback or a signature.

Trov says this signature riff is pretty easy to play, which makes it attractive to new guitar players. You can pick it up, nail it and then feel like a god. “You make your amp loud enough, you can sound pretty good playing that riff,” Trov says.

As for Berry himself, he’s still at it at 90. He just announced a new record that’s coming out next year — his first in 38 years.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“Thank you for reading about all of our deaths over the past year and a half!” the band says in an official statement. “This is not a hoax. We’ve decided to take The Chopping Channel concept to its logical conclusion by ‘productizing’ an actual band member. It is also a celebration of the degree to which no idea in art was ever off-limits to Don, and offers a literal piece of him, and of his audio art, for the listener to repurpose and reuse. We are pretty sure he would have wanted it this way.”

The Chopping Channel is the ninth volume in a series of albums compiled of edited recordings from Negativland’s long-running live-mix radio show, Over The Edge. It’ll be released on Oct. 21.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Citing its “unique mix of breakneck-paced hardcore punk and dubby reggae,” the Hall included the band Tuesday on a list that also proposes Tupac Shakur, Pearl Jam, Jane’s Addiction and Depeche Mode among first-time nominees. Bad Brains not only set a standard for speed and fury, but it also had an all-African-American lineup in a genre generally dominated by white musicians. (Above: Live At CBGB 1982, featuring the band in its prime.)

Often imitated, never duplicated: the cover of Bad Brains from 1982.

A nomination is just the start of the process — actual induction comes via a vote by more than 600 historians, artists and music industry figures. If Bad Brains is inducted this year, it would be the first D.C. hardcore band to make the Hall, although one product of D.C.’s hardcore scene, Dave Grohl, was inducted in 2014 as a member of Nirvana. (Another legendary underground rock band, the MC5, is back on the list this year after receiving an unsuccessful nomination in 2003.)

Bad Brains was in the news earlier this year as family and friends launched a campaign to help fund medical care for frontman H.R., who was diagnosed in late 2015 with a rare and painful disorder called SUNCT.

The 2012 documentary Bad Brains: A Band In D.C. traced the band’s complicated history, from its roaring appearance on the D.C. punk scene in the late 1970s, through its move to New York in the 1980s, and into a phase in the ’90s and ’00s that included disagreements among members. (H.R. and two of the filmmakers appeared on WAMU 88.5’s The Kojo Nnamdi Show in 2012.)

Beyond Bad Brains’ musical influence on bands such as Minor Threat (and by extension, Fugazi) and the Beastie Boys, the cover art for the group’s 1982 self-titled album — with its image of a jagged lightning bolt striking the U.S. Capitol — has inspired countless homages.

The latest installment in Bloomsbury’s 33 ⅓ series, this book will be released on October 20.

Most people will tell you that Donny Hathaway’s true home as an artist was not the studio but the stage. “The live Donny was the most moving Donny, the most unadorned and direct Donny,” states writer David Ritz. The singer Leroy Hutson, who was Hathaway’s best friend, concurs that he “was most comfortable in live performance and literally at his best.” That’s why his 1972 album Donny Hathaway Live holds a privileged place among his small but stunning constellation of recordings.

For artists like Hathaway, whose art is forged within African American sacred and jazz traditions, the idea that live settings offer greater freedom than the studio is familiar. But what does that freedom actually sound like? What models of black community, intimacy and joy was Hathaway creating in performance? These questions draw us toward that elusive nexus between rehearsal and improvisation, spirit and practice, intuition and craft. Here we can see that, far from the stereotype of the instinctive soul artist driven by pure emotion, Hathaway was driven by a desire for musical training that would allow him to express his ideas and impulses in the moment, thus making each performance a new act of creation.

That this process involved as much pleasure as pain is an unexplored facet of Hathaway’s art. As Hutson says, “Few people really knew of the fun side to Donny. He was almost always in a work environment … and rarely able to just be his fun-loving self.” Hathaway’s mental illness and early death often and understandably obscure the “fun-loving” Hathaway. But you can hear so much joy in the music, especially when he is playing it live.

One moment will serve as an illustration. It comes from a performance that wasn’t included on Donny Hathaway Live, although it was recorded at one of the sets from which Atlantic drew songs for the album. After his band had left the stage at Los Angeles’s Troubadour one night, Hathaway returned alone to play “A Song for You” as an encore. Although the recording would not be released until after his death, it is one of his most inspired performances.

First recorded by Leon Russell in 1970, “A Song for You” was covered by so many other singers that it became a pop standard by the end of the decade. Yet Hathaway maximizes the song’s emotional and melodic potential so that the original feels like a cover of his version. Russell’s recording is marked by intricate piano, unorthodox phrasings and Ray Charles-meets-Willie Nelson vocal stylings. Hathaway maintains Russell’s complex piano work but recreates the haunting ballad in his own image. This is the image of someone with a deep well of almost ancestral feeling; someone deeply vulnerable to love, struggle and musical beauty; someone who trusted himself as a musician; and someone who can seem, in retrospect, to have sensed that he wouldn’t have much time to do his best work with and for his fans.

His studio recording of the song, which appears on his 1971 self-titled album, features a dramatic string and woodwind arrangement by Arif Mardin — delicate flutes and tremolo strings — and a rather odd structure. That version opens with an intricate glissando down the keyboard, a descending series of minor thirds that scholar Mark Anthony Neal calls a “tear-drop intro.” Hathaway repeats this glissando midway through the song. Then comes a modulation that sounds like a coda but instead moves into a second instrumental section that unexpectedly opens onto the last verse.

Four months after that version was released, Hathaway brought the song to the Troubadour. By now, he had restructured it to intensify its drama. So with this performance he was reinterpreting not only Russell but also himself.

As he starts his encore performance, his piano glissando draws whoops from the crowd. (This was typical, according to Mardin, who says the audience recognized most songs “from the first two notes of the introduction.”) For anyone who might not know it, one man in the crowd shouts, “A Song for You!” until another person calls for order: “Settle down!” Sounding unruffled, Hathaway launches into a performance that embodies transcendence — of his immediate surroundings, with all their distractions, but also of the audience’s expectations and perhaps even of his own.

The whole performance is so stunning that it’s hard to believe it was captured on tape. But it’s the out-of-time interlude that stands out. “And if my words don’t come together,” Hathaway sings, “listen to the melody, ’cause my love is in there, hiding…” As in the studio version, he plays the tear-drop piano line, but he slows it down and draws it into a complex chord that heightens the tension. Then, having set himself up, he vaults into the heart of the song:

I-hiii-iiiii l-uhh-ve you — I love you in a place … where there’s no space or time.

He stretches the “I” up, accenting the lift and the heft of it — “I-hi” — before turning it up and around with an impossibly lovely melisma. He’s at the top of his range but with room to maneuver, so that it seems he could suspend the “I” indefinitely if it were not just as important to sing the words that make the “I”‘s drama make sense: “love you.” The crowd erupts as he completes the statement.

At some point between the studio version and the live recording, Hathaway seems to have realized that this “I love you” was the core of his performance. Whereas, in the studio version, this moment appears as an unexpected verse after an instrumental section, in this pared-down performance it is the crown jewel, set between the piano glissando and the song’s denouement.

Hathaway’s out-of-time delivery of “I love you” brilliantly enacts what the lyrics describe, musically moving the expression of love into a “place where there’s no space or time.” This love is so deep that it exceeds and subtends any one person’s lifetime. But that is not to say it is romantic or idealized. The “love you” brings the suspended “I” back down to earth, into the song’s timing and harmonic tension. And Hathaway sings the phrase emphatically; as in songs like “I Love You More than You’ll Ever Know” and “I Know it’s You,” he sounds like he’s trying to convince someone. (His wife Eulalah recalled, “He would tease me at his shows, smiling at me and saying, ‘You know that’s for you.’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, right!’ He was cool.”) We might view this grounded, ancestral love through the lens of the black blues tradition. In this tradition, with which Hathaway identified, love is devoid of romantic illusions. But Hathaway’s “I” dives down to meet that love anyway. He thus evokes the lover’s willingness to struggle, which is a kind of clear-eyed, illusion-less magic.

The studio version of the song doesn’t prepare you for that “I love you,” which always makes me wonder if Hathaway surprised himself with that one. Did he consider that moment “a moment”? To write about him is to ask such questions, which are not only about his art but about his interior life and wellbeing. Yet Hathaway’s own comments from this period convey his abiding confidence, suggesting that he knew what he could do and that no amount of sudden brilliance would have surprised him. As he told a reporter for the U.K. newspaper Disc and Music Echo in August of 1971 (perhaps during the Troubadour sets), “My ambition is to get standing ovations everywhere I play. I’m working to have a performance so effective as to really carry the audience on a ride.” This is the voice of a young genius with an ego and the skills to back it up. As Atlantic Records publicist Barbara Harris recalls, fans would come up to him after his shows and “people were just kind of … speechless. They couldn’t believe what they had just heard.”

Hathaway used several techniques to elicit that response. A singer who had been working a crowd since his gospel wonder-child days, he was not above using tactics that musicians call “getting house” — what musicologist Aaron Johnson describes as “showy technical devices such as flashy keyboard runs” or “the extension and prolongation of musical cadences to create tension and excitement.” We hear this in “A Song for You” when, in Johnson’s words, “Hathaway milks [the piano glissando] for all the expectation he can wring from it.” What’s more, Hathaway possessed a technique or a gift called “vocal crying.” As Hutson explains, he “was able to make the listener ‘feel his heart’ in his singing and playing” in a way that could make people cry. Hathaway understood all of this.

Nevertheless, live performance always leaves something to chance, and soul music especially embodies a mixture of spirit and craft — long, intensive rehearsal for the spontaneous moment that by definition surprises not only the listener but also the artist. Hathaway “carried his audiences on a ride,” as planned, but he also rode their energy. And what makes his Live album so special is that it records the love he received in the process. What Neal says of his performance of “A Song for You” could be said of the album as a whole: it was “a living testament to the love shared between one performer and his audience.” If it wasn’t enough to sustain him, it’s still good to hear.

Emily J. Lordi is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the author of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature. She is currently writing a book about soul.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Although Hval is a true individual, her own show suggests a version of communion. At last night’s Norwegian live premiere of her sixth album, Blood Bitch, she was flanked by three dancers who undertook a variety of tasks while she worked through the record in order. They enacted a workout routine inspired by b-movie actress Linnea Quigley’s zombie-themed exercise tapes, daubed messy pastel portraits of the gamine Hval on individual easels, and cycled their legs in the air while they writhed in an inflatable paddling pool filled with jelly. Halfway through the show, the cosmic, shadowy music stopped, and the performers climbed out of the glistening slime. They joined Hval behind a table at the back of the stage and enjoyed a lurid pink feast, slurping rosé through straws and munching on hunks of watermelon while chatting unselfconsciously among themselves, paying the crowd no heed. The smell of sugar steadily overpowered the venue’s inbuilt beery hum. After five minutes, the performers resumed their positions and embarked on the show’s more frenzied second half.

Her blonde eyebrows still stained orange from stage make-up, Hval is thrilled with the performance, which is never likely to be repeated. (Even jelly and table decorations stretch the budget.) Despite resembling a staging of the Last Supper by deviant video artist Ryan Trecartin, there was no determined narrative or symbolism; it was just a chance for her and her collaborators to “explore our friendship and the ideas that come about when we hang out,” she says in her Australian-tinged accent, a lasting trace of her time spent studying for an undergraduate degree in creative writing and performance art in Melbourne. She calls being on stage with them her safety net as a solo artist. “It can be really tough to be bold, but working with other people that understand you and give you self-confidence can make things a lot more bold and clear, and that I really enjoy.”

It’s hard to believe that Hval has ever had problems being bold. Her worldview was fully formed on To Sing You Apple Trees, her 2006 debut under the name Rockettothesky, the product, she says, of having honed her voice as a cultural critic for several Norwegian newspapers and author of two novels. Her work has always turned the body and desire inside-out, and no article written about her has ever failed to mention her provocative lyrics: She arrived in town “with an electric toothbrush pressed against my clitoris,” as she sang on “Engines in the City,” the opening track from 2011’s bodily Viscera, her first album under her own name. The title track of 2013’s surface-obsessed Innocence Is Kinky opened with a similar admission: “At night I watch people f****** on my computer.” Amidst critiques of the crooked paths women are offered to so-called empowerment, last year’s comic treatise Apocalypse, girl asked, “What is soft dick rock?”

Critics attempted to boil that particular question down into a definitive ideology, flattening and essentializing Hval’s complex work, as if she thought 10 songs could unseat decades of cock-rocking bombast. It changed her experience of the material. “I think it’s kind of unfortunate, but I also think that it’s no single person’s fault,” she says. “That’s how things are reproduced and reduced with how the Chinese whispers of Internet works now. In Norway we call it ‘sharpening’ — like sharpening a pencil, that’s the tabloid way of writing. We need to reduce it in order to really say something because it needs to sell, and I wonder, why do we let that happen?”

Beyond concern for the state of journalism, the prurient attention made her anxious that she would never have had a platform if not for those lyrics. “There are occasions where avant garde art meets tabloid media and it’s a perfect fit,” she says, recalling an Oslo show where the North Carolina performance artist Liv Ann Young pulled blueberries from her vagina — considered the cleanest part of the body — and asked the audience to taste them. “That show was quoted in a tabloid newspaper then it was all over. It’s unfortunate — I’m certainly not writing those lines in order to get recognition in that way. I find it very problematic. I wonder, if I hadn’t said ‘cunt’ even once, would I even be reviewed anywhere? You can do whatever you want as long as you say something that seems sharpened.”

Hval wrote Apocalypse, girl to exploit the spotlight she received following Innocence Is Kinky, boiling the artist down to (what she calls) a one-dimensional political commentator to see how it felt. “What is it to take care of yourself? Getting paid? Getting laid? Getting married? Getting pregnant? Fighting for visibility in your market?” she sang on “Take Care of Yourself,” sounding more ecstatic with every question. Although she still enjoys performing the songs, doing so became harder because it was “so self-conscious” — the writing was always present. Hval pauses to check a text from her partner about the neighborhood drug dealers pulling up outside their place again. “Looking down at them on the street from the second floor, it’s a little bit like being on stage sometimes,” she says. “And that’s an aspect that I still struggle with, this idea that you’re higher.”

With Blood Bitch, Hval wanted to be less present in the music “to be more present in it.” She started writing a month after the release of Apocalypse, girl, using a newly acquired Arp Odyssey synthesizer. Like its predecessor, it’s a collaboration with Lasse Marhaug, a noise artist whose lack of familiarity with the elements of pop allowed them to have more abstract, philosophical conversations about the production. “I really wanted to let the recording process almost dictate what the lyrics came out to be,” she says. “I wanted the words to be lost in the music, and that was something I’d dreamt about making for a long time. I didn’t want to make a commentary; whenever I had to speak something, we decided that I was gonna confide in someone or write a letter, not be the narrating voice of [Apocalypse‘s] ‘Kingsize.'”

The effect is weightless but haunting, like the night sky refracted in the ocean’s depths. “I’m so tired of subjectivity,” Hval sings on “Female Vampire,” her voice sweet and disembodied above the Arp’s flared arpeggiations. Despite Hval jettisoning self-consciousness, Blood Bitch is her most intimate album. The melodies feel as shadowy and precise as a mushroom’s gills, each song working as a complete functioning organism. “Like capitalism/It works like unrequited love that way/It never rests,” she sings on “The Great Undressing,” as a soft techno beat pounds ever onward. In “Period Piece,” greyed-out dub soundtracks the opening of another dimension: “In the doctor’s office/The speculum pulls me open,” she recounts blankly, “spacing the space/Accidental sci-fi/Regulating my aperture.” And a heart seems to beat beneath “Conceptual Romance,” the artery that pumps blood around the album.

That song’s title and chorus — “Conceptual romance is on my mind/I call it abstract romanticism” — both come from Chris Kraus’ acclaimed 1994 novel I Love Dick, which Hval says has been a huge influence since she discovered it in 2012. As she was writing the music, she started reading from the copy she keeps on the studio shelf. (She calls it a “very sloppy version” of Kate Bush’s interpolation of James Joyce’s Ulysses on “The Sensual World” which was part of her MA thesis on Bush’s work.) Initially she intended to rewrite the whole thing, but ended up leaving some of Kraus’ words behind. “To me that’s very personal, because I love her work and there’s nothing that my brain wants to do more than get closer to what I love,” she says warmly. “It’s like a conceptual romance in that way, the song itself.”

The song is as much about her relationship with art as it is romantic love: Both depend on the kind of infatuation prior to consummation, the energy that fuels I Love Dick. “Me being a very shy person, those before-situations have been most of my life, because I was too shy to say something,” says Hval. “So I have this strong connection between the idea of myself and the idea of conceptual romance. Then there’s the idea of Chris Kraus’ conceptual romance with Dick, which is pure rejection, but she keeps going into this really interesting idea: What if it doesn’t stop there, what if it goes on? What is infatuation, and what has it to do with feminism, art, the voice, literature, and everything that we reject because it’s considered poor?”

The thought overhauled and inverted Hval’s thinking, and inspired her obsession with imperfect, “bad” art. On Blood Bitch, she became obsessed by the human feel of the technical failures in Jess Franco’s low-budget ’70s horror films, which she admits are mostly thinly veiled rape fantasies. If she had any worries about the themes, it was that they didn’t affect her enjoyment of the movies. “I think you have to let go of certain things if you can, and that is different for every artist, but to be able to work with art is to be able to see things beyond the political, because if you just see things from the political then quickly your brain becomes about the censorship of many things that actually have a lot of artistic value. And I’m not saying that about the most horrible, racist black metal lyrics, but with these films, it’s a very limited way of watching movies.”

Blood Bitch has been billed as Hval’s “vampires and periods” album, which is admittedly an appealing prospect. Both themes appear — most notably on “Untamed Region,” where she expresses her surprise at awaking to blood on the sheets, feeling ageless: “I feel old in this hotel / As if surprised I still have it in me / And yet so young / Hollow / Unsure if from young or old.” But this time, she’s made sure that the record can’t be boiled down to a single thesis. She’s happy that the word “blood” is in the title, because she thinks of it as an act of giving, though that generosity is counterbalanced by the loneliness in the record, which was partially inspired by her touring experiences. Hval isn’t interested in being part of the mainstream movement to “normalize” menstruation; rather, to preserve the mysticism of the body, “the spirit, the way you hear things, the way you see the world, and that adds to our everyday lives and so many of things we experience, even if they’re trivial, also have enormous power. There’s so much of human experience that’s not possible to contain in sensible language and realistic stories.”

“I need to keep writing because everything else is death,” Hval sings on “The Great Undressing.” With Blood Bitch, rather than forge a conscious theme, she aimed “to make something that creates a state where for a short moment it’s okay to die. So on the one hand, wanting to reach those moments that are a consummation, absolutely, but also there’s this need to long for something in order to write. If I don’t long for a sound when I’m making music I won’t make anything.”

More surprising than anything regarding periods or the undead is the apparent anxiety on the record: Hval’s lyrics repeatedly return to failure, abjection, unrequited love and loss of voice — the antithesis of Apocalypse‘s confident pronouncements. “I must find some kind of art form where I can call my tongue back from the underground,” she sings on “Period Piece,” while the final two songs on the record confront the need for precise language to express desire. Fizzing like a vintage MC Solaar track, “Secret Touch” is a death drive through illicit experiences, “and later we regret it, because we have no language to express that it was both ravishing, destructive, and most of all, absolutely necessary!” Hval sings in raptures. The mood drops with the eerie twinkle of “Lorna”: “No-one ever asked me, how do I desire?” she asks mournfully. “I don’t think anyone ever talked to me using the word desire at all. No-one ever told me or taught me how to contain it. It kept existing, but there was no language / Does anyone have a language for it? Can we find it?”

The lyrics don’t relate to the romantic specificities of Hval’s own life, but her relationship with her work. In an age where we praise the gentle radicalism of middlebrow entertainment like the Kardashians and The Great British Baking Show, and so-called subversion is a marketable aesthetic, where does that leave artists like Hval? “It seems so fashionable to be radical that I don’t understand what it means,” she says. “Now anything can be experimental, it’s not something you are, it’s something you do, so to me it’s very strange to always have to say, ‘No, I do pop music; listen, it has two choruses, it’s amazing!’ But it’s not a very interesting discussion because the words are all gibberish now so I don’t know what anything means.”

Her mission now is to unearth a form of expression that can exist outside of the capitalist machine: Avant-garde art is often censored in its original form, but then appropriated as strategy by politicians: “Untamed Region” features a sample from an Adam Curtis documentary about Putin’s advisors doing just that, to keep the country in a perpetual state of confusion. “What kind of language can we have that is outside, that is our own?” asks Hval. “That could also be on a personal level — how can I say things and it’s really from me? How can I say things and it really represents my desires? Those moments where you say things you didn’t know that you’d say, and you feel like they’re coming from your burning body or something. It’s a moment of wanting uncertainty to discover something that is personal. That, to me, is very much to do with the art that I do.”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

You can listen to A Seat At The Table below, and check out Microphone Check’s 2014 interview with Solange.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Only Wald didn’t say that rock was destroyed, but that rock and roll was — and the difference is not merely academic. Rock, in the words of critic Robert Christgau, is “rock and roll made conscious of itself as an art form.” Prior to the June 1967 release of The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, “rock and roll” meant any and everything formally tied to the mid-fifties explosion led commercially by Elvis Presley — doo-wop, surf music, Motown, the British Invasion, James Brown. “We were influenced by early rock and roll … which was not black,” Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates told Musician magazine in 1982 (cited in a Stephen Thomas Erlewine piece for Cuepoint). “It was integrated music. There was no difference between black and white.” As Jack Hamilton points out in his forthcoming Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imaginary, the term “rock,” by itself, was almost nonexistent before Sgt. Pepper; afterward, it almost exclusively denoted white men with guitars.

It also denoted an equally important marketplace turn: 1966 was the last year that seven-inch singles outsold twelve-inch LPs, and albums remained king through the digital age, when individual-track downloads finally surpassed full-lengths in 2008. Two new books by British rock critics, each keyed to specific years, act as a before-and-after of how “rock and roll” calcifying into “rock” acted in terms of who had access to it as the primary, envelope-pushing musical form of the moment.

1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, by Jon Savage, author of the definitive punk rock history England’s Dreaming, is a heavily researched deep dive into both the year’s U.S.-U.K. pop landscape and their attendant sociopolitical ferment, keyed near-entirely to a nonstop parade of hits and duds, many first encountered via pirate radio, which bubbled up as an alternative to the pop-unfriendly BBC and was largely gone by 1968. Never a Dull Moment: 1971 — The Year That Rock Exploded, by David Hepworth, veteran of numerous British rock mags (most recently, the late, lamented monthly The Word), is a breezier but still expansive overview of the high-water mark of rock’s album-oriented maturity, a year Hepworth calls “the busiest, most creative, most interesting, and longest-resounding year of [the rock] era.”

Both books are structured similarly: twelve chapters apiece, one per month, keyed to specific recordings but moving well beyond them. Hepworth is a looser stylist; occasionally too loose, as when he correctly cites the November 1971 release date of Sly and the Family Stone‘s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, only to say many pages later that it “had just been released” at the time of the riots at New York’s Attica State Prison that September. But he’s also sharp and zingy. When he notes, “The year 1971 was the age of the Marshall stack, of mutually assured tinnitus,” or observes that Yes’s lyrics “had to be celestial poetry because they clearly made no sense on this earth,” his mix of garrulousness and dry wit makes Never a Dull Moment a zip to read.

Savage is a more careful stylist and fact-gatherer; not only is 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded (we’ll refer to it by its subtitle from here on) twice as long as Hepworth’s book, it’s far more densely packed. “Primary sources have been used wherever possible in order to eradicate hindsight and to reconstruct the mood of the time,” Savage notes — a stark contrast to Hepworth, for whom hindsight is very much the point. “If any of my children were to be cast away in the year 1971, they would be lost,” Hepworth writes. “However, they would feel entirely at home with the records that were made that year.” That couldn’t be further from what Savage prizes — the constant sense of present tense surprise captured by his carefully cultivated archival diggings.

One reason The Year the Decade Exploded is so much longer than Never a Dull Moment is that the latter is primarily fascinated by rock culture — record labels’ marketing plans or lack thereof, the U.K. live circuit, the day-to-day life of the artists behind the classic albums on which Hepworth focuses. Savage, on the other hand, casts his historical net wide, focusing on everything from nuclear paranoia (keyed to Birmingham, U.K., rockers The Ugly’s’ obscure “A Quiet Explosion,” the kickoff of the January chapter) to Vietnam (via Sgt. Barry Sadler’s number-one “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” March) to Andy Warhol (The Velvet Underground‘s “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” June). He links soul music — Wilson Pickett‘s atomic “Land of 1,000 Dances,” James Brown, Motown — to the rise of Black Power a lot more doggedly than your typical highlight-reel skim, and does the same for the still deeply underground gay rights movement by focusing on the Tornados’ archly campy “Do You Come Here Often?” — produced by Joe Meek, London’s kitchen-sink answer to Phil Spector and a gay man who committed a murder-suicide in February 1967, taking his landlady with him.

If one of the key tenets of rock is that singles are kids’ stuff while albums where the real meat is, The Year the Decade Exploded wipes away that silly myth repeatedly: Savage’s 45s have as much vaulting, widescreen ambition as the albums Hepworth valorizes. (Being British, Savage uses “pop” rather than “rock and roll,” but the meaning is basically the same.) Take The Who, a band that in very different ways is central to both Savage and Hepworth’s books. In the mid-sixties, The Who were London’s archetypal singles band — by choice, not happenstance. “Before we even approached the idea of making an album that was an expression of our own feelings . . . we believed only in singles,” Pete Townshend wrote in Rolling Stone about the band’s 1971 45s compilation Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy. “In the top ten records and pirate radio. We, I repeat, believed only in singles.”

The February ’66-released “Substitute” remains the band’s masterpiece. “At the start of the instrumental break — which, against type, features only John Entwistle’s bass guitar — [drummer Keith] Moon wallops the hell out of the floor toms in a performance so manic, or drug-deranged, that he had no memory of it after the event,” Savage writes. “I like the blatantness of pop, the speed, the urgency,” the band’s manager Chris Stamp said in a March 1966 quote that Savage cites: “There’s either success or failure — it’s no use bollockin’ about.”

By contrast, Hepworth lauds the band’s 1971 album Who’s Next for being ambitious but not getting carried away. The album’s songs had been intended for an amorphous epic Townshend called “Lifehouse”: “[It] was supposed to be a film, a multimedia epic, a unique collaboration between performer and audience, and, on some level, a ‘crowd-sourced’ piece of art in which the band would facilitate the audience in reaching a new level of consciousness,” Hepworth writes. To him, the secret hero of Who’s Next is associate producer Glyn Johns, who convinced Townshend to abandon the cumbersome, formless “Lifehouse” and instead concentrate on the songs he’d written: “One of the things that made Glyn Johns a production genius was his lack of interest in how things were supposed to work and his readiness to understand how things did work.”

If the kind of runaway ambition of a “Lifehouse” was a path to potential incoherence, though, the type of if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it clamping down that led to Who’s Next also lay the groundwork for a wholesale rejection of difference on the part of the largely male, working class rock audience. True, the “heritage rock” industry of Britain (of which Hepworth is part — he helped launch Mojo, the UK’s heritage-rock house organ, in the mid-nineties) isn’t quite the monolith of American classic-rock radio, particularly in the country’s middle, whose flat lands are rendered even flatter thanks to forty ceaseless years of programming the exact same records. But for a Yank, many of the albums Hepworth rightly celebrates — Led Zeppelin IV, The Rolling Stones‘ Sticky Fingers, Jethro Tull‘s Aqualung — can nevertheless be difficult to hear freshly, even aided by a sympathetic reading of his insightful contextualizing. By contrast, the fabulous double-CD 1966 soundtrack Savage compiled for Ace Records never stops surprising, not least due to the sequencing — mostly chronological, but not always. Yes, “Baba O’Riley” is still amazing, but somehow less so on the 1,001st play, especially when roughly 900 of them weren’t voluntary. By contrast, Savage’s inclusion of “Substitute” can still feel revelatory — not least because the song gets extra ballast by Savage leading into it with New Orleans R&B singer Robert Parker’s horn-led party jam “Barefootin’.”

The advantage of the albums central to Hepworth’s book is that they could provide their own context, not to mention that their subjects were hardly shy of vaulting ambition. Led Zeppelin, for example, would have been unimaginable in 1966; it was barely imaginable five years later. “It was customary in 1971 … to release an album as soon as humanly possible,” Hepworth writes. “There was no machine to prime, no marketing scheme to be perfected, no budget to be hammered out, no accompanying image to be developed … no complex hullabaloo to be orchestrated.” Zeppelin didn’t operate that way: Hepworth notes a November 1971 issue of Billboard featured a four-page ad for fellow hard rockers Grand Funk Railroad’s E Pluribus Funk that included “color portraits of all three members of the band,” which compared to the mysterious, band-less cover art of Led Zeppelin IV made Grand Funk appear “gauche and needy.”

The sheer size of the band’s sound was made for arenas and high-end stereos, not transistor radios. When the band was booked to play Madison Square Garden (which it did for the first time on September 19, 1970), Hepworth notes a fellow musician’s double take: “He simply didn’t believe bands could play venues that big.” A festival like Woodstock was one thing; but for the most part, selling out large halls was a rarity in this era, never mind arenas. In the U.K., college halls were the venues of choice (in particular, the University of Leeds, as in the Who’s 1970 Live at Leeds), and as Hepworth points out, drugs were difficult to find and pubs shut down well before the concerts did: “Hence, audiences were overwhelmingly sober.” Merchandise — the full lines of T-shirts, buttons, canvas bags, and other branded gewgaws that now make up so much of the touring musician’s bottom line — basically didn’t yet exist.”

The kind of hard rock Led Zeppelin (and Grand Funk) embodied engendered a hard retreat, both into softer music — such as Carole King‘s Tapestry, 1971’s commercial behemoth and, as Hepworth points out, one of the only big albums of the era selling in large quantities to young women — and the past. One of Hepworth’s key arguments is that in 1971 the marketing of the musical past, in the form of reissues and concerts full of old material, was something “the record business hadn’t yet woken up to,” though that would change in short order. Hepworth’s prime examples are Elvis Presley, already retreating from his 1968 comeback, and The Beach Boys, whose 1971 album Surf’s Up featured a title track that added new overdubs to a Brian Wilson solo-piano performance from 1966; Hepworth calls it “probably the first case of a band making a tribute album to itself.”

Only five years earlier, The Beach Boys had been in rock and roll’s first rank, thanks to the critical (and, in the U.K., commercial) success of Pet Sounds but even more so to “Good Vibrations,” a single that many considered 1966’s most forward thinking. “It was technological yet emotional, sensual and spiritual, with an immediate physical impact and a deeper metaphysical meaning,” Savage writes. But as he also points out, the heady futurism of 1966’s pop incurred its own reactionary streak: Savage’s nostalgia-themed October chapter is keyed to the New Vaudeville Band’s Dixieland throwback “Winchester Cathedral,” which the Grammy Awards naturally named Best Contemporary [R&R] Recording in 1967, beating among others, “Good Vibrations.”

Savage notes that The Beach Boys’ record “spanned both R&B and psychedelia — the biggest new trends of the year.” The Year the Decade Exploded spends lots of time on soul music, particularly its emergence in the U.K., but it could have spent lots more. (Savage notes that he left Jamaican music out nearly entirely for reasons of focus — and, no doubt considering how much research he already did here, sanity.) By contrast, Hepworth doesn’t write enough about R&B because he doesn’t. He does offer a long consideration of Motown, keyed to Marvin Gaye‘s What’s Going On (a good album, not a great one, he says, and I agree), but it feels very surface-level; there’s an uncomfortable component to a line like, “There was nothing Berry [Gordy] did that didn’t have at least some element of social climbing about it,” even though at root it’s basically correct.

What’s more amazing — suspicious, even — is that Hepworth merely grazes some of the most important soul of not only the year but the entire decade. Al Green didn’t release an album in 1971, but “Let’s Stay Together,” issued that November, ahead of the 1972 album of the same title, was a key component of the overall sweetening of R&B then occurring. At the other end of the spectrum, in 1971 James Brown left the indie label King for multinational Polydor, founded the People Records label, and that March lost his band that was anchored by Bootsy Collins and hired another that was led by trombonist Fred Wesley. With the latter unit Brown recorded this third live album at Harlem’s Apollo, Revolution of the Mind, shelving a Bootsy-driven show taped in Paris (eventually issued in 1992 as Love Power Peace). And he churned out no fewer than five R&B top-ten hits. Surely this is worth more than an aside that one of them, “Hot Pants (She Got to Use What She Got to Get What She Wants),” “encapsulates his trademark marriage of carnal and mercantile” — not to mention that both Revolution of the Mind and the Hot Pants album deserve a place on Hepworth’s listing of 1971’s 100 crucial albums far more than, oh, the self-titled debut of soft-rock simpletons America.

And what about Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, which also makes Hepworth’s 100 album listing but is otherwise absent from the text, one of Never a Dull Moment‘s most curious omissions. (To be fair, both Green and Brown have tracks in Hepworth’s chapter-ending suggested playlists.) Maggot Brain‘s title track has one of the most legendary backstories of 1971 or any other year: George Clinton told guitarist Eddie Hazel to “Play like your mother died,” and Hazel responded with a ten-minute psychedelic blues solo as searing as Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner.” Also, Oedipal psychodrama from a disintegrating counterculture by a bunch of African-American hippie rock and rollers who’d go on to be the most sampled band of all time — how much resonance do you want, anyway? That’s the problem with “rock”: Once seemingly expansive as the sun, with time it’s become clearer how limited a worldview it ultimately is.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Commissioned by San Francisco Tape Center in the early 1960s, the Buchla 100 was an attempt to make music accessible to everyone, allowing participants to pick and choose parts of the instrument (“modular”) to create sound. Morton Subotnick’s 1967 masterpiece, Silver Apples Of The Moon, was arguably the first electronic album, breaking from academic tradition to anticipate techno with something rhythmic and tuneful, all performed on and made possible by Buchla’s inventions.

While arena-rockers used Robert Moog’s synths to excess in the ’70s, those drawn to Buchla’s instruments understood these were not only machines to make sound but also a way to understand the world. Just released on Friday, Sunergy pans generations of Buchla synths between Suzanne Ciani (Buchla 200e) and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith (Buchla Music Easel). The former studied with Buchla in the ’70s, while the latter is still relatively new to the instrument, discovering new and exciting waves to ride. They share not only their memories of the man but also how Buchla’s creations guide their lives.

Suzanne Ciani

He has been an integral part of my life for almost 50 years, so you can imagine the sense of loss I’m feeling now. From the time I first met him in Berkeley in 1969, his vision of a performable electronic music instrument guided and inspired my artistic and professional life. I worked at his “factory” after graduate school and my only goal was to own one of those expensive machines. I went to NYC in 1974 specifically to perform a live Buchla 200 concert and stayed for 20 years, using the Buchla on Madison Avenue to make the money I needed to launch my recording career. The “Coca-Cola Pop ‘n’ Pour Logo” sound was pure Buchla.

His instrument gave me wings in all directions. After I moved again to Berkeley in 1992, we reconnected as friends and tennis partners until he tempted me once again to get re-involved with the Buchla, this time the 200e. I’ve dropped everything these last several years to once again perform on the Buchla, feeling a sense of commitment to his vision, which I represented and worked to communicate for a dozen years in the early days, until the impossibility of fixing it brought me to the brink of a “breakdown,” so identified was I with that instrument.

So now my mission is to carry on his vision, which I have long-shared, and to make sure his legacy is kept alive. I loved him dearly.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

Don Buchla made it possible for me to share the way I hear and connect with the world using a language that I couldn’t find in any other instrument. His instruments have life in them. They are breathing electricity that you can sculpt. What makes his work so special and different from others is that every instrument he designed presents an opportunity to create an ecosystem. You can watch its behavior unfold the way you would craft a terrarium and let it have a life of its own while simultaneously being the observer and the creator. They talk back. They are conversational and offer the same mental stimulation any good friend would — engaging you to be in the moment and ready for spontaneity.

Even after months of working on a composition, or performing it hundreds of times, the wild Buchla continues to surprise me and give me the rare sensation of being an audience member to my creation. There is never a dull moment when I am in front of one of his instruments and I never feel at a loss for creativity or inspiration. I enter a space where I am comfortably riding the line between logic and emotion, listening and communicating from both the brain and the heart.

I find meditation with his instruments. They have taught me patience, inspired me to seek innovation, and to persist in problem solving when faced with challenges. These lessons have translated into my daily life and have taught me to seek to understand something first before asking for something from it.

I didn’t get the chance to know Don in depth personally. I met him a few times. From what I did gather, he seemed to be as thoughtful, witty, playful, and full of potential as his instruments. A genius to say the least. I am forever grateful to him.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“Freedom Sounds: A Community Celebration” is a free, three-day concert taking place on the grounds of the Washington Monument from Friday, Sept. 23 to Sunday, Sept. 25. Co-produced by the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the event ushers in the opening of the Smithsonian’s newest museum Sept. 24.

President Obama is expected to preside over the opening ceremony on the 24th, cutting the ribbon for a museum that was established as an Act of Congress in 2003.

Other performers on the bill include Stax Music Academy, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, 9th Wonder, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Josh White Jr., Dom Flemons, the McIntosh County Shouters and Jean Carne. D.C.-area dance groups the National Hand Dance Association and Urban Artistry also appear on the bill.

“The themes of the festival highlight the social power of African American music as a communicator of cultural values, challenges, aspirations and creative expression,” concert co-curator Mark Puryear says in a press release.

“Freedom Sounds” will run Friday, Sept. 23 from noon to 5 p.m. and the following Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. and 6 to 9 p.m. Complete lineup and schedule information can be found on the museum’s website.

More on the National Museum of African American History and Culture:

• WAMU’s interview with Founding Director Lonnie Bunch
• Lonnie Bunch on the Kojo Nnamdi Show
• How The Smithsonian Is Building Its New, Sweeping Collection Of Black American Music
• Death Has Been Called the First Punk Band. Now They’re in the Smithsonian
• Smithsonian Acquires Collection of Classic Hip-Hop Photos
• J Dilla’s Gear Is Headed to the Smithsonian
• Inside the Creation of the Smithsonian’s African American Museum