Feeling like a Man

Interspersed with what I took to be actual reported dialogue from interviews with her, Kenny Melman delivered a morosely exuberant suite of Grace Jones' signature tunes last night at the Starlight Lounge in the East Village.

We were treated to only one of his song-montages, a mash-up of I Need a Man and Send in the Clowns (a song I was surprised to discover Jones had once covered. I need to track that down).

As Melman searches for signs of intelligent life in the wake of Kiki and Herb's departure, he discovers new and fresh meaning in the lyrics to songs like "Walking in the Rain" and Mevlin van Peebles "The Apple Stretching." A friend of mine once speculated that New York in the 2000s would be more like New York in the 1970s, not in terms of disco and glam, but in terms of urban decay, crime, and squallor. Perhaps this part of that zeitgeist.

Anyway, the performance was a model for how to an homage to do a black performer without retaining any of the imitative and insulting shtick of blackface. Shirley Q. Liquor take note.