Kim Nekroman, bassist and singer for Denmark’s punk oddities Nekromantix, barely seems to recognize the strangeness of the facts of his life. For example, as a former submarine radio operator in the Royal Danish Navy, he used to blast campy-punk icons the Cramps on the job. “It wasn’t that weird…

There are two kinds of cool. First, we have conventional cool — the preening, pouting and posturing that’s more show biz than rock ‘n’ roll. Say what you like about the Rat Pack, Elvis and the Strokes, but this affected cool has as much to do with their schtick as…

The Stylistics’ Airrion Love is recalling Linda Creed, who in her early 20s penned many of the group’s biggest hits, from “Break Up to Make Up” to “La La Means I Love You.” “She was a beautiful girl,” says the soft-spoken tenor. “She had a uniqueness for lyrics. And that’s…

The 1992 opera for which Alice was originally written has yet to reach our shores, but it’s hard to believe it could fulfill the promise of a playwright marrying a musician better than the album itself does. Kathleen Brennan has influenced Tom Waits’ music ever since they met in 1980,…

At its best, the music of Texas has an openness and quiet intelligence unlike any other state’s. These Texan qualities seem unrelated to style or subregion — it’s evident in Doug Sahm’s border rock, Joe Ely’s flatland rockabilly, and Townes Van Zandt’s wandering folk. That same supple wisdom suffuses Jon…

Like all great writers, Jeffrey Hyman used special stationery. “He was always writing lyrics on little scraps of paper — on shopping bags, on cardboard from shirts,” recalls his mom, Charlotte Lesher. “They would be really crazy lyrics.” “Beat on the brat,” he wrote, “beat on the brat, beat on…

“Infectious” is a word whose dark side is rarely evoked when used to describe music. Ordinarily, it’s a commendation that denotes hooky euphoria, the kind only found in pop music. But that same spiritual orgasm was blamed by the late academic curmudgeon Allan Bloom — author of The Closing of…

Prince’s first gospel album might just be his least spiritual work. If media speculation is to be believed, his latest identity switch has been to Jehovah’s Witness. And though he hasn’t confirmed the conversion, the convoluted music and dry scriptural narrative that dominate The Rainbow Children is hard evidence of…

Name something that’s better than the Klassic Kinks. Mini skirts? Not short enough. Cherry-chocolate layer cake? Not sweet enough. Two hundred pages by J.D. Salinger? Ray Davies could paint existential dysfunction as richly in three minutes. The Beatles and the Stones? Maybe combined. In the mid- and late ’60s, Dave…

It’s been a long day at the office, academy, or widget factory, and you’re off to catch some live music. A perfectly respectable local band opens — college guys with cultivated scruff and fabulous vintage-shop couture. They’re followed by a Luvox diva singing about herself in front of video projections…

Does one take seriously a guy in his 60s who claims, “Gonna do it to you baby ’til ya yell for more”? You do when he’s standing on his head and wrenching masterful machine-gun solos from his Strat.Maybe the only person ever to have appeared on The Gong Show who…

According to Nietzsche, “A man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child at play.” Of course, the Übermensch himself couldn’t have predicted youth culture, or that juvenilia would be pored over for things like artistic merit. But if he was right, Bis mastered adulthood…

How do you tell whether you like a band that the entire British press, Rolling Stone and your mother say is going to save rock ‘n’ roll and win the war on terrorism? If you’ve heard the hype, you may already know that the Strokes are New Yawkers, barely drinking…

The New Metal ethos is primal scream therapy. That brawny fella in Drowning Pool yowls, “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor!” — he’s the victim of a harrowing, suburban, latchkey childhood. The problem is, you just can’t trust a maniac who brings his shrink along, and no defense lawyer in…

Dear Eugene Foley, J.D., Ph.D., CEO – Bodyguard Records, Thanks for the free CD. We of the scribbling profession always appreciate good, ill-gotten loot — it certainly takes the edge off the feeling that you should be creating something yourself rather than snarkily assessing the fruits of others. Matt Cheplic…