Justin Townes Earle
Celebrate Brooklyn! at Prospect Park Bandshell
Thursday, June 30

Better than: Falling asleep on the subway and waking up at Coney Island.

As Justin Townes Earle took the stage on Thursday night, the sun was setting over Prospect Park, the air was cool and thick, and the crowd was liquored up. Earle announced, "This song is about fried chicken and women. I love both," and launched into "Ain't Waitin'" off of his 2010 album Harlem River Blues (Bloodshot).

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Andrew Bird
Celebrate Brooklyn! at Prospect Park Bandshell
Friday, June 10

Better than: Being at a show in a stuffy room somewhere.

Outdoor shows are always a risk. The weather can be a temperamental thing—something that many people in New York received a soggy lesson in last week—and the setting can sometimes swallow the music whole, rendering a concert into a picnic with live-music accompaniment. The violinist/whistler/etc. Andrew Bird's music can, at times, seem delicate enough that the latter could be seen as something of a concern, but on Friday night at the Prospect Park Bandshell it soared above the crowd. (Pardon the pun.)

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Photo via the Rap-Up

​Though Michael Jackson's 52nd birthday would've fallen on this past Sunday, his music was pretty much the official soundtrack for the whole weekend in Prospect Park, blasting out of vendor trucks and ballfields, picnics and stereo-mounted bikes--pretty much everything with a speaker on it. Spike Lee handled the official ceremony; his second annual Brooklyn Loves Michael Jackson Birthday Celebration, headlined by Brooklyn-born Jackson obsessive DJ Spinna ("I honestly feel like while I'm playing, he's living through me and talking to me," he told us last week), took over the park for most of yesterday. Snoop Dogg, already in town for Rock the Bells, decided to drop by, donning a sparkly glove and rapping a few bars from "Gin and Juice." Then he used "Drop It Like It's Hot" to wish MJ a happy birthday:

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Fear them. All photos by Rebecca Smeyne.

​Jack White plays drums in the Dead Weather, but that didn't stop the White Stripes frontman from making his way to the microphone at some point during his band's set in Prospect Park last night and asking: "You probably read Brooklyn Vegan too, right?" He went on to make all the non-vegans in the audience an offer: "Let's kill a cow together!" Local bonafides thus established, White, his dynamic partner, Alison Mosshart, and the rest of the esteemed power quartet blitzed the crowd with the gothy, witchy blues for which the Dead Weather are so adored. They wore all black, of course. Intrepid photographer Rebecca Smeyne was there; her photos of the action are below.

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Sonic Youth's "Express Way To Yr Skull (Live in Prospect Park)" from Big Ass Lens.

There was this terrific moment Saturday night during the encore of Sonic Youth's terrifyingly mobbed Prospect Park show, just after they'd finished Daydream Nation thriller "Silver Rocket" amid a strobe-light finale, when Thurston Moore demanded the band play another song. At this point, Lee Ranaldo had already dropped his hardware and Kim had disappeared into the bandshell's wings, yet there Thurston was, taunting them both, "DON'T WIMP OUT!" Then when Kim didn't reappear immediately, Thurston led a chant to get her back: "Kim Gee! Kim Gee!" It was the sort of teasing that only a sibling or a committed life partner could really pull off, as this is the sort of innocuous, but potentially needling behavior that causes relationships with far less history and more drugs to disintegrate. And after a minute, Thurston too realized he could really be pissing off his wife, and apologized, saying something to the effect of, She could be taking care of business, I shouldn't do that.

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Photos by Puja Patel

​MI21: Mother India 21st Century Remix with DJ Tigerstyle and Falu
Celebrate Brooklyn/Prospect Park
Thursday, July 29

"Some of you already have the Bollywood thing down, wearing your sunglasses at night," teased Falu singer Gaurav Shah, as he donned his own pair. "They're from Bombay," he noted, soliciting chuckles from the audience. The group was performing at last night's "Celebrate Brooklyn" event at Prospect Park's Bandshell, opening for a showing of "Mother India: The 21st Century Remix," a revamped version of the 1957 Oscar-nominated Bollywood film, Mother India.

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The National
Prospect Park Bandshell
Tuesday, July 27

It's great fun, actually, to watch National frontman Matt Berninger get steadily more and more intense during his 90-or-so minutes onstage, pacing the stage manically, jumping up on his monitors even though he's like seven feet tall, wielding his mic stand as though he intends to throw it like a javelin, constantly threatening to jump into the crowd to just wander around, and slowly eroding his dulcet baritone down to hissy-fit shrieks of "MY MIND'S NOT RIGHT!" or "WHY DO YOU DRESS ME DOWN AND LIQUOR ME UP?!" or "I WON'T FUCK US OVER!" or "SQUALOR VICTORIA!" The less sense he makes and the more ridiculous he looks, the better.

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Black Thought greets his (overflowing) public. Photos by Nicole Ankowski, more below.

​The Roots and friends
Prospect Park Bandshell
Sunday, July 11

Welcome to another preposterously well-attended Celebrate Brooklyn! fete, David Byrne-ian in its excess of humanity, thousands upon thousands packed within (and hundreds of bummed-out latecomers turned away without) the Bandshell to celebrate the end of the World Cup (great game, huh?) and the debut of Okayafrica.com. Fela!'s Sahr Ngaujah is our nominal host, while a pack of African hip-hop upstarts warms us up, featuring Brooklyn-via-Ghana MC Blitz the Ambassador and NYC-via-Sierra Leone posse Bajah + The Dry-Eyed Crew, both winsomely manic, a full horn section blasting away. And then, the legendary Roots crew, channeling their inner Axl Roses.

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She's up there somewhere. Pic from @cvbryant

​Norah Jones
Prospect Park Bandshell
Wednesday, June 9

"Let's go get wet!" announces Norah Jones, accepting some sort of award during the mercifully be-tented Celebrate Brooklyn! pre-show gala minutes before taking the Prospect Park Bandshell stage on a soggy, dreary, increasingly chilly, not-quite-a-torrential-downpour-but-close-enough sort of evening, an unfortunate circumstance a CB! bigwig encourages us to regard "in the spirit of Woodstock." Always game, Norah lights her piano on fire and roars through an electrifying "Come Away With Me."

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Pix by Puja Patel, many more below

Thousands of people flooded Prospect Park Saturday afternoon for Michael Jackson's 51st birthday party. Hosted by Spike Lee (who worked on the "They Don't Really Care About Us" video), the five-hour event, held together by an epic, all-MJ set from Brooklyn's DJ Spinna, offered the chance to gawk at the King of Pop's biggest (and most impeccably dressed) fans, as well as myriad impersonators and a handful of celebrities roaming the crowd (we spotted Ed Lover, ex-106 & Park host Free, and Rosie Perez, among others).

Al Sharpton, naturally, kicked things off for those who braved an initial sprinkling of rain: "51 years ago today, history changed," he began, going on to herald MJ's "triumphing over social odds" while shouting out both Ted Kennedy and the four-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Spinna came back on the turntables with "The Way You Make Me Feel," immediately transforming the thoughtful/somber tone into a dancing sing-along.

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