Now is the time when critics grace us with their selections of the year’s best music. Heck, we’ll be telling you what ruled in 2002 ourselves next week (a sample: Wilco, the Streets, Arizona’s Michelle Branch, Johnny Cash). The older I get, however, the more I question the exercise. Are…

It ain’t easy being a second-generation artist, especially when your father is as colorful, prolific and beloved as Mel Tillis, the longtime country star known for his charming stutter. But Pam Tillis, possessor of exotic beauty and gregarious personality traits of her own, has managed just fine. After years of…

What the hell is it? Does it count as blues? Or country-western? Or perhaps it’s all just a put-on? Whatever it is they’re really doing, you can’t accuse Austin’s Asylum Street Spankers of not possessing an overradiating intelligence. The band mixes folk, torch music, jump blues — basically anything with…

The hiatus is over. The world is safe for trampoline high jinks and glowstick wars. The mighty Phish, once burned out and rudderless, has returned to fill the longstanding jam-band hole its absence created two years ago. And what’s a rejuvenated jam band to do but jam hard over the…

Sergio Lombo, suave leader of the 10-piece band Pazport, steps to the mike at Axis/Radius, the pretty-people Scottsdale nightclub where the band plays every Tuesday. The Colombian native, sporting a ponytail, John Lennon shades and a leather jacket, plays percussion and belts out lyrics to the band’s unusual mix of…

Kool Keith is rap’s man of mystery. The near-legendary Brooklyn MC wears personas like jackets, switching from the perverted sex fiend on 1996’s brilliant Dr. Octagon to the section-eight-dwelling cannibal on 1999’s First Come, First Served (released under the moniker Dr. Dooom) to the interplanetary shoplifter on 2000’s Analog Brothers…

Nelly may be the multiplatinum superstar of the moment from the so-called Dirty South, but the evocative Scarface is the man truly representing the artistry of hip-hop’s bawdy hard-core. The Geto Boys pioneer wowed rap and rock critics alike this year with his album The Fix and the single “On…

The old Nita’s Hideaway in Tempe hosts its last show December 15, but lovers of rock’s artistic fringe won’t weep when its doors close for good — and neither will the place’s owner. Mark Covert, 55, surveys the construction site of what will be the new Nita’s, a 14,250-square-foot wooden…

Creed doesn’t really suck. Yes, they are traveling down a galling road many a Journey and Chicago have traveled before. The right combination of showy power-chording, handsomeness and warm, engaging looks into the audience is a time-tested tradition. But the soft mush of the mainstream always cries for the comfort…

The Bronx’s favorite boricua Fat Joe finally saw platinum this year after more than a decade of toiling behind his brand of raw hip-hop. But it took some sex appeal, a pop glossover and some marketing ingenuity to put him over the top in the form of “What’s Luv,” a…

“Does anyone have a joke they could tell while we tune?” asks Andy King, the lip-pierced, blond-highlighted guitarist for Tempe punks Slowpoke at lunch time in between songs in the band’s ska-inflected set. He finds almost no takers, and the one guy who does answer the call, a short chubby…

Theory of a Deadman revels in the powder-keg dynamics of grunge, continuing the string of admirers that followed Soundgarden and Alice in Chains to the FM dial — put Days of the New, Nickelback and this band in a pickle barrel and dare to tell the difference. That’s likely no…

Poignancy, it appears, still has a place on the country music charts. Not the jingoistic type that made anthem-spiked heroes out of Toby Keith (“The Angry American”) and Alan Jackson (“Where Were You”), but the real poignancy of honoring loved ones, making deeply felt confessions of the Merle Haggard variety…

Calvin Johnson is an indie rock legend. Not that casual observers would know it, which is the way the unassuming Johnson seems to prefer it. The singer, songwriter and executive released his debut solo album — the stark, soulful What Was Me — earlier this year after nearly 20 years…

Once upon a time, Pearl Jam seemed to live for a reaction, a trait that catapulted it to the forefront of grunge. The band blazed its brand of arena rock for the sole purpose of shoving it in listeners’ faces. Their faithful hung on every power chord and deep Eddie…

Beck Hansen is now a communicator, a breakthrough that has led to the year’s most startling music. Beck may not stand as the artist of the 1990s. Change that: Some of his music from that decade is unlistenable. To Beck’s credit, however, he was an artist of the ’90s. His…

Floetry is the sound of Great Britain trying desperately to grab onto the burgeoning U.S. neo-soul movement. The work of young chanteuses Floacist and Songstress, as they call themselves, appropriates the languishing rhythms of Maxwell, the Afrocentricity of Erykah Badu, the quieted vocal delivery of D’Angelo, the smooth rapping of…

O.A.R., a five-man band from Rockville, Maryland, by way of Columbus, Ohio, is a jam band for the Napster age. The band, which mixes reggae, folk and agile acoustic rock into what it calls “island vibe roots rock,” arrived at Ohio State in Columbus in 1997, having already attained a…

Throughout his solo career, Peter Gabriel has walked a line ably between the accessibility the pop audience demands and the drawn-out artsiness his inner prog-rocker craves — recall that he fronted Genesis in its pre-“No Reply at All,” Jolly Green Giant-suited phase. His 1986 electronic pop masterwork So continues to…