Niela Orr

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time show was a magic trick that revealed what those who refer to other people as ‘illegal aliens’ would prefer to keep hidden or otherwise misrepresented: the contributions made by people of colour to America’s national story.

The percolating instrumentation of ‘New York’, Ja Rule’s piercing 2004 posse cut, was playing on my TV, and Zohran Mamdani strolled out to deliver a rousing victory speech: ‘New York City, breathe this moment in. We have held our breath for longer than we know.’ 

D’Angelo, that Pentecostal preacher’s son, the man Robert Christgau called ‘R&B Jesus’, has died, and, with him, a way of seeing and interpreting the world has been withdrawn. Every one of his records was rapturous. There are few people with a singing voice as sensitive, as patient, as sensuous. 

Kendrick Lamar, who calls himself a ‘certified boogeyman’, is a contemporary Dracula guy, wending his way onto the dance floor; he’s someone who ‘wiggled through that sentence’, as he puts it in one of his new songs, then into your subconscious. Lamar’s latest album, GNX, released unexpectedly on Friday, 22 November, is both a music box and a jack-in-the-box in the tradition of ‘Bad Times’: a forum for groovy, spooky, electro-influenced West Coast sensibilities and a meditation on ego death, false humility and braggadocio.