San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
NEW ALBUMS
Rina Sawayama, “Hold the Girl” (Dirty Hit)
If you were lucky enough to catch Rina Sawayama’s set at the recent Outside Lands festival, you’d have seen the next big indie pop star spreading her wings mightily.
The Japanese-British singer has already collaborated with Elton John and Charli XCX on two tracks featured here as Songs of the Moment, and now her sophomore album arrives filled with songs forged in prevalent dance music styles. “This Hell” leans into rhythmic hyperpop tropes, but with crisper melodies as Sawayama belts, “This hell is better with you!” Meanwhile, the title track spins a drum and bass beat into a choral arrangement that feels indebted to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.”
She’s set to return to the Bay Area on Nov. 21 at Oakland’s Fox Theater.
Megadeth, “The Sick, the Dying ... and the Dead!” (Tradecraft/Universal)
The longest drop-off between Megadeth albums (it’s been six years, for those keeping track) is over as the storied thrash metal band has just released its 16th album. 2016’s “Dystopia” was one of the Los Angeles band’s most commercially successful releases and for “The Sick, the Dying... and the Dead!,” the band led by singer Dave Mustaine is aiming high once again.
Lead guitarist Kiko Loureiro brings some serious ax wizardry on “We’ll Be Back,” and again on a wicked solo on “Soldier On.” Rapper/actor Ice-T guests on “Night Stalkers,”
a ripping song about Black Ops army helicopters that features breakneck drums by the band’s new drummer, Dirk Verbeuren.
On the album’s CD edition, a cover of Sammy Hagar’s “The Planet’s on Fire (Burn in Hell)” appears and even features the former Van Halen singer and
By Alexis Burling
In some families, there is nothing stronger than a mother’s bond with her daughter. All those hopes and desires. All that need for guidance and protection. All that poured-on unconditional love. But what happens when a mother’s well-intentioned aspirations for her offspring conflict with her daughter’s ever-changing vision of herself ?
In Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s showstopper of a third novel, “On the Rooftop,” this theme is explored with compassion, clear-eyed perception and been-aroundthe-block delivery. And when placed within the context of racial segregation and prejudice in midcentury America, the results are soul-shaking.
Set against the backdrop of the Fillmore, a Black neighborhood in gentrifying 1950s San Francisco, where the likes of Sam Cooke and Sarah Vaughan grace the stages of Bop City and other local music venues, “On the Rooftop” turns its spotlight on one family’s quest for musical stardom.
At its center is Vivian, the stalwart matriarch — “more lioness than woman” — who turned her back on her Southern roots to move with her soon-to-be husband to the Bay Area from Louisiana 25 years earlier, after the Ku Klux Klan murdered her father. Since her husband’s untimely death from a heart attack, Vivian’s sights have been set on getting her three daughters’ singing act, the Salvations, signed by a deeppockets talent manager so they would no longer have to live “a finger-snap away from poverty.”
But as Sexton slowly reveals over the course of this
On the Rooftop
A Great Good Place for Books presents Margaret Wilkerson Sexton in conversation with Jasmine Guillory: In person. 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 9. Free. Masks required. Montclair Presbyterian Church, 5701 Thornhill Drive, Oakland. www.ggpbooks.com
Book Passage presents Margaret Wilkerson Sexton in conversation with R.O. Kwon:
In person. 4 p.m. Sept. 18. Free. 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. 415-927-0960. www.bookpassage.com
Litquake and KQED present Margaret Wilkerson Sexton in conversation with Mina Kim:
In person. 7 p.m. Oct. 7. $18. KQED Commons, 2601 Mariposa St., S.F. www.kqed.org expertly paced novel, Vivian’s daily rehearsals with Ruth, Esther and Chloe on top of their building and the girls’ weekly sold-out gigs at the Champagne Supper Club just might not be enough to make the long-standing dream a reality.
As she did in her previous books — the National Book Award-longlisted “A Kind of Freedom” and the equally stunning sophomore novel “The Revisioners” — Sexton makes the smart choice to tell the story from multiple perspectives, each with its own history-proven lesson to impart.
In addition to the story of Vivian, whose struggle-laden arc takes her from aggrieved widow to myopic stage mother to exhausted matron faced with the prospect of new love (hint: Vivian’s late-stage romance with the much-soughtafter Preacher Thomas, though totally foreseeable, is right up there in literature’s greatest), there’s the trajectory of 24-year-old Ruth. Her story jumps from her place at the center of the Salvations to marriage to early motherhood. A telling quote here: “There was the waking and the feeding and the shushing and the rocking and the laundering and the folding. … There was a fist in her chest that compressed tighter over the course of the day, and Ruth was waiting for it to reduce its pressure.”
Esther’s story, filled with fiery outbursts about her mother’s viselike control and episodes of “feeling like worse than invisible” next to her talented older sister, is the most textbook, though no less compelling, of the three. Through Esther’s move to forgo her singing career in order to use her voice to protest the redevelopment of the Fillmore and elsewhere, we witness firsthand the fundamental need for empowered Black female voices in racial, class and gender movements.
But it’s 20-year-old Chloe’s coming of age, from naive ingenue to fully formed leading lady, that calls for a standing ovation. Sexton’s deft handling of Chloe’s secret courtship with a white boy named James — and her slow reveal of James’ connection to the changes happening in the Fillmore — demonstrate not only how far we’ve come in terms of racial politics since the 1950s, but the distance we have yet to travel.
“On the Rooftop” is a powerhouse novel that reflects both how high we can fly and how quickly we can be knocked down. But Sexton’s message is clear: “Oh, yes, change (blows) in like the wind,” she writes. The best we can do is lift our arms up, steer when we can, and make the most out of the ride.
By Reyna Grande
In “Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life,” disability rights activist and organizer Alice Wong chronicles her life as a disabled Asian American woman. Through powerful essays, blog posts, interviews, photos and art, Wong offers an intimate and illuminating account of the challenges, joys and frustrations of living in a world not made for people like her.
Divided into seven sections — Origins, Activism, Access, Culture, Storytelling, Pandemic and Future — “Year of the Tiger” weaves together Wong’s personal story of growing up physically challenged, her journey to embracing her identity as “unapologetically disabled,” and the broader social and cultural context of her activism and advocacy work.
Wong’s memoir is full of wit and humor but also frustration and rage, and she doesn’t hold back in exposing the systemic oppression and inequities faced by disabled people in an ableist society. “I refuse to apologize or feel shame about the way my body works and how I navigate the world,” she writes.
Diagnosed with muscular dystrophy as a toddler, Wong stopped walking at 8 years old. Doctors didn’t expect her to live past her 18th birthday. “Time and biology shaped my body into a gnarled, knotty driftwood sculpture, marked by the elements and forces of nature into an abstract masterpiece. Joints contracted, muscles atrophied, sinews snipped and stretched
Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life to the brink. Great art comes at a great price.”
Wong writes powerfully about the financial pressures faced by her family to provide the care she needed, the vulnerability of depending on public programs, and the many forms of discrimination experienced by those who aren’t as physically mobile. The COVID-19 pandemic was especially brutal on the most vulnerable, and Wong exposes how our government has treated high-risk people as disposable. Determined to fight for some measure of independence while at the mercy of caretakers and a broken health care system, she advocates for a stronger social infrastructure: “I’d like to imagine a time when disabled people do not have to prove their humanity and defend their right to exist.”
Wong is quick to call out an ableist society that sees