In any city, but especially one that’s transformed as rapidly as Durham has over the past 15 years, IYKYK-type nostalgia is an easy shorthand for assessing local bona fides, based on what bulldozed landmarks or shuttered watering holes someone is rooted enough to remember. Here’s one I like: whether or not a person is familiar with themusic video for “Hulk Smash,” by the rapper then known as Professor Toon.
Shot in 2011 by Jason Ho and Saleem Reshamwala and set mostly on the Surf Club/MotorCo block between Rigsbee Avenue and Foster Streets, the video is not just a litmus test for whether you remember today’s slick ax-throwing bar as a cavernous depot that sold huge giant antique pots and Persian rugs, or can recall a version of Liberty Warehouse Apartments that was actually just… a big warehouse. It also suggests your fluency with a time in which Toon (later renamed Lord Fess) came to be synonymous with Durham hip-hop, filling a void after many of the luminaries of a previous generation had drifted away.
From event organizing (including, with The Real Laww, the multi-year DURM Hip-Hop Summit), to his own electric performances, to his arsenal of over 75 secret handshakes, few can claim to have poured more of themselves into the scene than Fess, and few know the kind of near-unanimous intergenerational respect that he enjoys as a result. Still, for all his good works and dedication, a culminating and substantial artistic statement befitting that legacy has never quite arrived. In recent years, as he’s delved further into the world of film and media production, his musical output has slowed to a trickle, amounting to just a handful of singles over the past few years.
That now seems poised to change with an upcoming album release party this Friday, announced alongside aset of IG posts that nod at an artistic reset, and a project more comprehensive and focused than anything he’s released in years—maybe ever. It’ll be a special night for the “Hulk Smash” crowd, to be sure, but not only for them. Because Fess’s greatest achievement isn’t what he did back in the day; it’s that he’s still here, still at the center of culture-making moments in Durham, all these years later. —Ryan Cocca
Secret Monkey Weekend is composed of musician Jefferson Hart and his stepdaughters, Ella (bass/vocals) and Lila Brown-Hart (drums/vocals). The tight-knit band makes music, Jordan Lawrence wrote in the INDY in 2022, that is “polished and potent” and works equally well as “enjoyable, lightweight bop or as a means to process anxieties bred by recent insurrections and Starbucks union-busting.”
Several years later, we’ll add the addendum that there are even more anxieties to process and perhaps tunes penned by teenagers, like “Fascist Blood Baby,” may hit even harder. In June, Secret Monkey Weekend put out a 10-track sophomore album, Lemon Drop Hammer, impressively produced by REM/ Smithereens producer Don Dixon. Catch the band at the Cat’s Cradle Back Room this weekend, accompanied by the meditative music of Jphono1 (John Harrison, the founder of Potluck Records) and Durham indie rock trio The Mad Starlings. Doors open at 7:30; tickets are $14.07.
—Sarah Edwards
The story of Rachel Crook, a 71-year-old Chapel Hill graduate student who was murdered in 1951, has resurfaced and traveled widely this past year, thanks to an excellent podcast series produced by Hillsborough’s Elizabeth Woodman. Still technically a cold case, the story is one of those pieces of haunting lore that holds so much within it—misogyny, seemingly random violence, bizarre legal proceedings, a compelling character, and even the legacy of a beloved restaurant (Crook’s Corner, which opened at the site of Crook’s home). Now it takes on another life as a radio play, with a script by Woodman and a cast full of local luminaries, including Nancy Demorest, Jane Holding, Tom Rankin, Jill McCorkle, and Frances Mayes, alongside others. The runtime for the reading is 75 minutes. —SE
Travel in time to the future with this season stage preview, organized by the Triangle Friends of African American Arts, that draws together seven local performing arts organizations to “showcase the wonderful African American plays and musicals that will hit the stages in 2026,” per the event page, for an evening of “dramatic readings, songs, and scenes from upcoming performances.”
Featured organizations include the Agapé Theatre Project; Black Poetry Theatre; Burning Coal Theatre (which will be debuting its much-anticipated rendition of Tyrell Williams’s Red Pitch, a coming-of-age play about soccer in South London, on February 5); North Raleigh Arts & Creative Theatre (the revue-style Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope); PlayMakers Repertory Company (Primary Trust); Pure Life Theatre (Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, by famed playwright August Wilson); and The Justice Theater Project (Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline). Tickets are $25. —SE
In a recent interview with the music show Track Star, harpist Brandee Younger effortlessly embodies cool. Wearing an “Alice Coltrane for President” T-shirt, a swoop of blue eyeshadow across her eyelids, Younger sways as she handily identifies every ‘70s soul track—Marvin Gaye, Ann Peebles, Al Green—the interviewer plays for her. A harpist, composer, and faculty member at New York University and the New School, Younger’s music builds on the spiritual jazz traditions of artists like Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby, leading to accolades, including a 2022 nomination for a Grammy® Award for Best Instrumental Composition—the first Black woman to be nominated in the category. Now she ushers in the Hayti Heritage Center’s 2026 season with a transportive performance that incorporates Coltrane’s very own harp. Tickets start at $25. —SE
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