Chika: U Should

Premiering as a live performance on Showtime’s DESUS & MERO, Chika’s  slow-burning “U Should” is drenched in confidence. The Montgomery, Alabama-born artist’s track begins with a sung introduction—which repeats in the chorus—and Chika (aka Jane Chika Oranika) unpacks a lot in her subsequent verses. From love to her career, confidence and perseverance, her verses play with the track’s title, leaving the listener wondering whether Chika …

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Jubilant jazz, tantalizing Yoruba Tech Soul, experimental music and a farewell to Eddie Van Halen

Eli Fola: Midnight Fall Nigeria-born, NYC-based artist Eli Fola champions Yoruba Tech Soul—a genre that fuses “traditional Nigerian sounds, electronic, jazz, house and classical music”—through his self-produced music, saxophone performances, DJ sets and beyond. Most recently, he dropped Soundscape To Freedom, a five-track EP that comprises “soundscapes for a Black person living in America,” he explains. A groovy, hypnotic single, “Midnight Fall” embodies all of the …

Van Halen: Jump

Guitar virtuoso Eddie Van Halen (born Edward Lodewijk Van Halen in Amsterdam) passed away yesterday aged 65 years old. Most of American rock band Van Halen’s songs begin with Eddie Van Halen’s soaring, spectacular, immediately recognizable guitar sound. He wrote the majority of the band’s bangers and performed as lead guitarist—adulated for his incomparable (sometimes inconceivable) guitar solos, which involved plenty of tapping the fretboard. …