Now Playing: June 2020
Summer is finally upon us—and we’re still stuck inside, for the most part. How about some music and TV recommendations? For June’s edition of NOW PLAYING, we have suggestions from contributors Sabrina Hicks, Jason B. Crawford, and Noley Reid.
Sabrina Hicks
“Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of 80s’ music, specifically Tracy Chapman’s debut album, which came out in 1988 and could’ve been written today—taking on systemic racism, divisions in this country, domestic abuse. ‘Across the Lines’ shows how little progress has been made in thirty years between the police and Black lives and the overall racial divides. But now there is an immediate sense of change and possibility in the air, and for that, I’m hopeful.”
Jason B. Crawford
“My current and almost always fandom has been listening to VINCINT’s new album ‘The Feeling.’ Today was a great day to sit on my balcony with a cup of lemonade and cry about all the past relationships I really don’t care about. The album just makes you feel like you were in LOVE and they left you and you will never be whole again. But let’s be honest, that is just VINCINT in general, the vulnerability in his voice, smooth rasp, clinging high notes. By far one of my favorite repeats.”
Noley Reid
“I’m currently watching all the episodes of Parks and Recreation with my husband, our 13-year-old son, and my mother who lives next door. I love the simple goodness of Leslie Knope and the complicated goodness of her staff and bosses. They are all hilarious in their own unique ways, and that’s the great thing about the show. With a pretty big cast, all the characters are different and not just rehashes from The Office, but their own delightfully quirky and interesting selves. In our time of murder, misery, and pandemic—of knees on necks, of tear gas and rubber bullets and white supremacist accelerationists, of governors too scared to mandate masks, of virus cases spiking, spiking, spiking—I’ve been in need of a soft place to land and Parks and Rec. has been it for my family.”