Liner Notes

  1. mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here. In the first ten minutes of watching the 2015 Grammy Awards last night, I remembered why I stopped watching the Grammys sometime in the late 1990s, but there I was. I entered the zeitgeist, attempted to do my part. Stands to reason that a music columnist would write about the Grammy Awards ceremony, one of music’s biggest nights. Still, the pace…

    4 comments
  2. mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns can be found here.   Despite the mythological frenetic pace of life in NYC, much of one's time here is spent waiting. Downtime in motion: standing while the subway train moves from stop to stop, sitting while the cab starts and stops in staccato traffic somewhere in Chinatown or Columbus Circle. You find pockets of time here and if harnessed correctly, you can find yourself doing productive work.

    3 comments
  3. mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns can be found here. “My restlessness is my nemesis, it’s hard to really chill and sit still, committed to page, I write a rhyme, sometimes won’t finish for days, scrutinize my literature from the large to the miniature, I mathematically add-minister, subtract the wack…” --Yasiin Bey, “Hip-Hop” The beauty of writing about music is rooted in nostalgia. Nostalgia means there is always material to be found in the…

    3 comments
  4. There is something about life in New York City which lends itself to mood music, to movie soundtracks. It could be all the waiting; despite the popular notion that NYC residents are always on the move, we are, in fact, always in a type of suspended animation. Life goes on above the surface while sitting or standing in a cramped subway train hundreds of feet below. On the bus, in a taxi, the world passes…

    8 comments
  5. In light of recent events involving the magazine, I am loath to quote Rolling Stone. And yet, for my purposes, the words of reviewer Rob Sheffield sum up quite succinctly what occurred this time last year, in December of 2013: Beyoncé has delivered countless surprises in her 15 years on top of the music world, but she's never dropped a bombshell like this. The Queen Bey woke the world in the midnight hour…

    6 comments