After last year's Afropunk Festival got cancelled due to Hurricane Irene, organizers are bringing the festival back to Ft. Greene's Commodore Barry Park this weekend with a stellar lineup that crosses the hip-hop/indie/soul divide. Highlights from the two-day festival include everyone from megastars such as Eykah Badu and Janelle Monae, to upstarts like Das Racist and Spankrock. There'll be a skate park, food court, market, even a bike show. And, it's FREE.

Daily lineups after the jump.

by Laura Wasson

Oakland-based MoeTar’s Sunday performance at the new LES venue Spectrum perfectly illustrated the highs and lows of the current DIY scene. Pros: Soaring, beautiful songs, which felt intimate and vital. Cons: An hour-late start and a small, increasingly restless audience. It seemed like every time something great happened, something weird occurred almost immediately afterwards, giving the whole evening a discombobulated, start-stop feel.

Spectrum’s owner, Glenn Cornett, effusively introduced the band, explaining that he had organized the entire weekend-long NYX Festival of Experimental and Prog Music around them. Even with the late start, MoeTar didn’t seem to be in any rush to get things off the ground as they eased into their first number, “Butchers of Baghdad” from their most recent EP, From These Small Seeds. While the instrumentalists were certainly accomplished, vocalist Moorea Dickason was the real star: Walking the line between operatic highs and sultry torch-singer lows, her soaring, transcendent voice filled the small space and gave me goose bumps.