Phoenix – Memphis Flyer

Nas

Now gunning for its second year, and rolling with the momentum of its 2017 turnout, the Mempho Music Festival lit up the Mid South some days ago when it announced its slate of 2018 performers. Today, they’ve announced the details of the schedule and are opening ticket sales. The Flyer’s advice: get ’em while they’re hot. This is a lineup of artists that rivals any festival in the business (see below).

Beck

Grammy Award winners Beck and Phoenix will headline on Saturday, October 6. On Sunday, October 7, the legendary Nas, who has just dropped a new album, will headline, along with Post Malone. The festival will also bring us Grammy-nominated funkstress and Prince protégé Janelle Monáe, indie-rock favorite Mac DeMarco, German folk rockers Milky Chance, Atlanta-based rapper Rich The Kid, Danny Barnes’ Space Program, and “Stones Throw”, led by The Rolling Stones’ musical director Chuck Leavell and featuring current and former backing band members. And let’s not forget the brilliant collective that is George Clinton & Parliament-Funkadelic.

Talibah Safiya

First and foremost, the festival lives up to its name with plenty of local talent.

Mempho is fully committed to the #BringYourSoul city branding movement, celebrating the originality, soul, and change that Memphis is known for. Accordingly, we’ll see shows by many a local legend: Juicy J, Project Pat, Lucero, Eric Gales, The Bar-Kays, Don Bryant & The Bo-Keys, Big Ass Truck, John Nemeth & The Love Light Orchestra, Boo Mitchell & The Kings featuring URiAH Mitchell, Lil Al & G Reub, and The Product, Talibah Safiya, and Cory Branan.

Jamie Harmon

The real Lucero

Especially notable will be a tribute set dedicated to Royal Studios. Led by Grammy Award-winning producer Boo Mitchell, the Royal Studios Tribute will feature Grammy Award winners William Bell and Bobby Rush, Oscar Award winner Frayser Boy, and Grammy Award-nominated Hi Rhythm Section.

Also on the local tip, by way of Como, Mississippi, will be Dap-Tone Records’ stars, the Como Mamas.

Como Mamas

“We are thrilled to be back at Shelby Farms Park for year two of the great Mempho Music Festival,” says Mempho Music Festival founder, Diego Winegardner. “We couldn’t be more excited to announce this year’s lineup, which includes an extraordinarily diverse
roster of today’s hottest artists, legends of rock, funk, and soul, as well as a healthy dose of local Memphis talent.”

Big Ass Truck will make a rare appearance

One lesser-known aspect of the Mempho Music Festival is Mempho Matters, a non-profit organization committed to developing “Learn To Rock”, a philanthropy-based arts education and funding initiative. Working with Memphis area businesses and community leaders, the initiative provides Memphis area music teachers and their students admission to Mempho at no cost.

Project Pat

Mempho Music Festival is also partnering with the Memphis Area Women’s Council to promote the Memphis Says NO MORE campaign—aimed at raising awareness for domestic violence and sexual assault—by providing a safe, inclusive, and welcoming environment for all attendees.

Finally, Mempho has teamed up with the Oceanic Global Foundation—a non-profit that educates individuals on issues impacting our ocean through art, music, and emerging technologies. One specific impact of this partnership is Mempho’s pledge to make the festival completely straw-free. Plastic straws, of course, constitute a major proportion of the plastic waste currently accumulating in the Pacific and other oceans.

Love Light Orchestra

This year, Mempho Music Festival has partnered with CID Entertainment to provide VIP and Super VIP experiences, including on-site camping and glamping options.

Janelle Monáe

A limited supply of GA, VIP, and Super VIP pre-sale tickets and packages are available on Monday, June 11th, for returning fans, starting at $79 for Single Day and $139 for 2-Day tickets.

General on-sale begins on Friday, June 15th, at 10 A.M. CT, starting at $89 for Single Day and $159 for 2-Day tickets. Prices will increase on July 13th and September 28th, so reserve your tickets while supplies last.

https://memphofest.eventbrite.com

Phoenix (2014; dir. Christian Petzold)—You haven’t heard this Holocaust story before. At the end of World War II, Nelly (Nina Hoss), a German Jewish nightclub singer whose everlasting love for her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) helped her survive the horrors of Auschwitz, returns to Berlin. Like DC Comics’ Unknown Soldier, her badly scarred face is covered in bandages. She needs reconstructive plastic surgery, but instead of altering her looks, she insists on getting as much of her old face back as she can. She also insists on trying to reconnect with Johnny in spite of some ominous rumors about his role as a Gestapo informant. After some nighttime wandering around Berlin’s Trümmerlandschaft (literally “rubble landscape”; expertly recreated here, the real thing spilled into nearly every frame of such postwar classics as Rossellini’s 1948 Germany Year Zero and Carol Reed’s 1949 The Third Man), Nelly eventually finds Johnny washing dishes at the Phoenix nightclub. When he sees her, he seems to look right through her.

At first, that is. Then Johnny gets an idea. Since this new-face Nelly, who calls herself “Esther”, looks so much like the Nelly he married (because, you know, she’s the same person), he asks her to pretend to be his wife so Johnny can get his hands on Nelly’s inheritance. Never mind that Nelly can’t convince Johnny that she is the person he’s looking for even though she knows things about their relationship she couldn’t possibly have intuited. Never mind that Johnny either has forgotten what Nelly looks like or is submerged in such a deep, stinking cesspool of self-deception that he refuses to see who is standing in front of him. Never mind that describing the plot of Phoenix makes it sound completely crass and insane. It’s insanely and crassly provocative once you half-convince yourself that it could happen somehow. It’s happened before, after all; film critic J. Hoberman saw Petzold’s film as a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. You’ll probably see it as a somber Vertigo riff told from the point of view of the neon-green sign outside Judy’s room.

Petzold has designed a black-hearted wartime fable whose characters are pack mules dumbly hauling along ungraspable, uncomfortable ideas about human need and identity wherever they go. Nasty insinuations about memory, the past, culpability, inaction and imposture flit by in composed medium-long shot after composed medium-long shot. Hoss’ gaunt, knife-cut beauty suggests unspeakable pain and suffering, which she almost gets to articulate when she starts to tell Johnny a “made-up” story about life in the concentration camp. But Johnny cuts her off; the more he tries to control her, the more his firm sadism and imitation-Gable handsomeness slowly come to embody the banality of evil.

The final scene—a musical performance of Kurt Weill’s ballad “Speak Low” —is already famous among cinephiles who worship at the altar of the big finish; it turns on the liberation of a forearm from the confines of a long, bright red sleeve. Catch it on Netflix before it disappears into the night and fog.

Grade: A-