Lewis Black, Syl Johnson, and Annie Hart

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Still Fuming: Lewis Black on Drama School, New York, And Why He’s Still Fired UpNo comedian is angrier than Lewis Black. For the past 25 years, America has been infuriating him, and he’s been on-stage telling us why.

After graduating from the Yale School of Drama in 1977, Black spent ten years as a playwright at the West Bank Cafe Downstairs Theater in New York. He transitioned to stand-up comedy in the late 1980s and has been regularly featured on The Daily Show’s “Back In Black” segment for the past 16 years.

Lewis tells us about nearly getting expelled from Yale, why he loves performing in Bismarck, ND, and how theater is like heroin.

Lewis Black’s most recent special, Live at the Borgata, is available now in digital formats. This interview originally aired in August 2013.

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Hip Hop with Andrew Noz: DJ Quik’s Pacific Coast Remix and Rammellzee’s Beat Bop
Hip hop blogger and Pitchfork columnist Andrew Noz joins us with a couple of his all-time favorite hip hop tracks. His first recommendation is Pacific Coast Remix by DJ Quik (featuring Ludacris), a track devoted to sunny Los Angeles’s dark side. He also suggests checking out the 1983 track Beat Bop by Rammellzee and K-Rob. It’s a song from an era where the uptown and downtown communities mingled in a way that the rap world would rarely see again. This segment originally aired in June 2013.

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“The Song That Changed My Life” with Annie Hart of Au Revoir SimoneAnnie Hart of Au Revoir Simone grew up in the suburbs of Long Island. As the story goes for a lot of teenagers, she didn’t quite fit in. The kids at her school wanted to spend time at the mall. They weren’t interested in making stuff, shooting videos and writing zines.

Annie found a whole new world, and a whole new group of friends, through music. The song that changed her life is “Knew Song”, by the Long Island hardcore band Silent Majority.

Au Revoir Simone‘s most recent album is Move In Spectrums. This interview originally aired in January 2014.

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The Enigmatic, Grammy-Nominated Syl JohnsonInspired by the sounds of Jackie Wilson, Little Walter, and Muddy Waters, Syl Johnson set out to make his own mark in music in the 1950s. His own gritty, bluesy voice and funk rhythms earned him a place in the Chicago soul and blues scene. Over the course of a career on Chicago’s Twinight and Memphis’ Hi Records, Johnson released several singles that climbed their way up the pop and R&B charts (“Different Strokes”, “Come On Sock It To Me”, “Is It Because I’m Black?”) and but never attained the smash success of contemporaries like Al Green or James Brown.

He found ubiquity later in life, when dozens of hip hop artists from Run-DMC to Kanye West dug into his catalog to sample his sounds (perhaps foremost his signature scream on “Different Strokes”). Johnson found himself in the spotlight again a few years ago when the archival label Numero Group assembled a Grammy-nominated boxset of his early cuts, titled Syl Johnson: The Mythology. This interview originally aired in October 2012.

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The Outshot: “Coney Island”Jesse recommends a portrait of an American caught in between its past and its future in Ric Burns’ documentary Coney Island.

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