Dan DeLuca's Mix Picks: Deadfellow, Black Pulp! and the Smirnoff Equalizer gender equity test
Plus a Sunday night salsa party and We Were Promised Jetpacks.
Deadfellow, "Millennials in Love." Amusing and heartfelt, the title cut from Philadelphia songwriter Hayden Sammak's forthcoming Millennials in Love (and Other Pre-Apocalyptic Standards) is a recorded-in-Nashville modern romance about intimacy or the lack thereof in an age of text-messaging constant contact. The first date happens "in the neighborhood we gentrified with the brewery restaurant," and the couple grows distant in a lonely apartment "full of crowd-sourced personality." Self-satirizing, but also sweet and sad.
Salsa Nocturna. The second Sunday of the month series in Northern Liberties features salsa band Zapata Viejo with trombone player and bandleader Humberto Alicea, plus DJ Kosherican, a.k.a. Grammy-winning producer Aaron Luis Levinson. A benefit for Puerto Rico hurricane relief. Sunday at Heritage.
We Were Promised Jetpacks. A two-night stand in South Philly for the Scottish rock band whose name is reminder that the futuristic self-transporting predictions of The Jetsons have never been realized and who recorded their 2014 album E Rey: Live in Philadelphia at Union Transfer. Active Bird Community opens. Sunday and Monday at Boot & Saddle.
Black Pulp! The exhibition organized by artists William Villalongo and Mark Thomas Gibson makes connections between artists as disparate as Afro-futurist Philadelphia bandleader Sun Ra and Krazy Kat cartoonist George Herriman. It gathers posters, book jackets, album covers (of Michael Jackson, Donna Summer, and Kurtis Blow), comic books, and work by artists such as Kara Walker and Kerry James Marshall in exploring issues of identity and race in American pop culture. Through April 29 at the African American Museum in Philadelphia.
Smirnoff Equalizer. This clever collaboration between the vodka brand and Spotify pegged to International Women's Day measures the gender ratio of your listening habits and includes a program to create more equitable playlists. (It's also accesses your Spotify data for target marketing purposes.) My listening ratio was an eye-opening 70 percent male artists to 30 percent female. Call me a phallocentric troglodyte if you will, but check your own ratio first. The algorithm informed me my results were more evenly balanced than most. At SmirnoffEqualizer.com