Skip to main content

Lauryn Hill at Glastonbury 2019 review – late and breathless but ultimately uplifting

Pyramid stage, Glastonbury
Hill left her biggest hit mostly to her backing singers, but she saved the best for last with a singalong

Every time Lauryn Hill is booked to play a gig, one question arises: will she show? And if she does, how late will she be? To her fans, just the virtue of her turning up seems enough to justify the ticket price. Yet when she does show and she’s feeling the performance, the result is often mesmerically energetic, as she hurtles through double-speed renditions of her Miseducation hits, as if barely suppressing an appetite large enough to devour her own back catalogue, and to devour the audience and her own precision-commanded band in the process. In these moments, we see testament to Hill’s much-lauded status as one of hip-hop’s foremost lyricists and one of contemporary soul’s most passionate vocalists.

So, on the Pyramid stage, 10 minutes after the scheduled start, there was a palpable nervous energy that rippled through the gigantic crowd. Hill’s tour DJ valiantly spun the classic pre-gig fillers: Drop It Like It’s Hot, et al but the audience was beginning to reckon with another disappointment. Happily, though, five minutes later and Hill appeared resplendent and imperiously hatted in black, backed by three singers and a five–piece band.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/31ZCLex
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more