What piece of art changed your life? How did it affect you?

In 1976, the American Folk Life Festival lasted all summer on the mall. My mother (Bernice Johnson Reagon) produced a section called the African Diaspora. There was a church building with open sides; a front porch—Florida Ave Grill prepared the food; a winding lane, like a train of booths; and the booths had chefs cooking food, people doing hair, basket weavers, sculptors, and Flora Molton, the most amazing street singer, had a booth. I saw Black Music from all over the world: blues, jazz, folk, fife and drum, musicians and dancers from Ghana, Senegal, and Nigeria, and pop-and-lock contemporary dancers. Sweet Honey In The Rock sang on the front porch. You could see this every day. It was incredible.

It let me know I was incredible. The sky was the limit. I learned the amazing ways people figured out how to live and how to craft a necessary thing—a basket, a stew, a...

Okayplayer recently posted this video of Nardwuar presenting ?uestlove with a Motortown Revue poster by Globe, the legendary show poster firm that operated in Baltimore for 80+ years. As you can see, it's a direct hit. I'm not surprised, because a) ?uestlove is such a music geek and b) I pretty much did the same thing in 2006. At the outset of an interview prior to a Roots show at Ramshead, I gave ?uestlove an Otis Redding Globe poster, and he was truly awed by it—as in jaw dropping, "where did you get this?" awe. And like in this video, he immediately began riffing about one of the obscure opening acts.

If you'd like to check out more of these amazing and awesome posters, head over to the Creative Alliance and see their current Globe exhibition—it includes the Motortown poster!—curated by MICA grad student Chloe Helton-Gallagher.

And here's that Nardwuar vid...

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Kix, Baltimore's best-known "hair metal" band, kicks off the M3 Fest at Merriweather Post Pavilion this evening. WASP co-headlines tonight's show, while Bret Michaels, Twisted Sister, Great White, and many others are on tomorrow's bill. Although Kix got lumped with all the hair metal groups in the 1980s, that wasn't entirely fair, because Kix had enough punk intensity, Stones swagger, and good humor to transcend that limited genre. The band's new Live in Baltimore CD/DVD convincingly drives home that point, and you can check out my review in our May issue. The M3 Fest also promises two days of amazing people watching! 

CenterStage’s The Raisin Cycle is already getting national media attention, in today’s New York Times and on PBS. An ambitious undertaking by the theater’s artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah, it nods to Lorraine Hansberry’s classic A Raisin in the Sun with rotating repertory productions of the Tony-winning Clybourne Park, written by Bruce Norris as a response to Hansberry’s play, and Beneatha’s Place, which Kwei-Armah wrote in response to Clybourne Park.

“I find Clybourne Park to be a brilliant play, all that we want a modern play to be—a magnificent catalyst for a debate,” Kwei-Armah told The Times. “However—and I don’t think Bruce set out to do this— but connotationally, the play says that whites build and blacks destroy.”

The piece praises Kwei-Armah for taking such a bold artistic gamble, noting that it’s possible because his...