A Couple of Fascinating Interviews

This first comes from Okayplayer.com and tackles the "Where Are They Now?" question for former Roots bassist Leonard Hubbard. Based on the article, I've got an album and musical to catch up on, plus some more solo material in the future. Good to hear.

The second is this interview with hip-hop artist DOOM, which addresses not only some upcoming material but the controversy over alleged performances by "imposters" instead of the real article. The quote that struck me is:

Impostor would imply that the character. I liken it to this: I'm a director as well as a writer. I choose different characters, I choose their direction and where I want to put them. So who I choose to put as the character is up to me. The character that I hired, he got paid for it. There's no impostor.

So he's not denying that someone else was inside the mask - he's just saying that the act was true to the DOOM character and fit in with the artistic vision. Given that hip-hop is such an individual music live (many times, it's just the artist and a backing track), I found it fascinating that he'd expand the performance aesthetic to include actors playing a role. Not that all performers aren't playing a role in some way (even in hip-hop, where "realness" is prized above all), but that he'd expand it into additional performers for the same role. Definitely a ground-breaking step, at least in theory. Many folks reported that the shows were . . . less than stellar, which is a problem in itself.