Eminem has always explicitly played a character on his records, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s playing one on TV now that he’s re-dyed his hair and dumped his earnest Recovery/Chrysler commercial persona. Based on the reaction to his bizarre “high” ESPN interview with Brent Musburger and…
Backstreet BoysComerica TheatreSeptember 5, 2013 The Backstreet Boys have been in comeback mode–yes, I know the album’s called Never Gone–for almost 10 years now. I don’t think we spend enough time thinking about how weird that is. When bitter rivals *NSYNC made their comeback at the VMAs recently it was…
Somewhere just a little downstream of music on my list of socially dangerous interests: Weird, single-use Japanese gadgets. Enter: The Sony Music Video Recorder. The video camera you’re looking at is designed for one thing: Recording music, ideally in the hope that you will someday become YouTube’s best-sounding ukelele sensation…
Lil Wayne Celebrity Theatre September 3, 2013 (View the full slideshow.) Few critically acclaimed artists make critics reevaluate that acclaim as frequently as Lil Wayne. Not in the sense that some of his albums are better than others–in the sense that some of his choices are so strange that they…
I don’t pretend to be a foreign policy expert–I don’t pretend to be a music expert–but it seems like Kim Jong Un has learned at least one important lesson from his father since taking over North Korea: People will basically ignore a brutal autocracy filled with prison camps and literally…
One Direction: This Is Us made $18 million over the Labor Day weekend. That means the One Direction movie did better than the Katy Perry movie and significantly worse than the Justin Bieber movie, which–fanbase-wise–seems intuitively right to me. But it’s not a lot of money for a movie. It’s…
This week’s Lil Wayne show started out weird–in a smaller venue than you’d expect Lil Wayne to play, with less than a month’s notice, for the benefit of a charity–and it looks like it will finish weird, too: Monday night, with fans lined up outside Celebrity Theatre waiting for the…
If you picked up decker.’s Slider when the album came out in March, you might’ve been surprised by the band’s choice of “Shadow Days” — a long, eerie track built around a determined bassline and a guitar that wavers like a far-off police siren — for its new video, directed…
It’s been a quiet year for the Liquid Sol music festival, a “Coachella-like” event announced with some fanfare back in February. At the time, it was scheduled for September 19-21 at Canyon Moon Ranch in Florence, the site of the annual Country Thunder festival. Since then: Nothing. Until Tuesday. The…
The True Music Festival, scheduled for Saturday, December 14, at Salt River Fields in Scottsdale, announced its first five performers on Tuesday, and it’s a solid slate: In addition to noted festival heroes the Flaming Lips, the festival is bringing in Wiz Khalifa, Bassnectar, Capital Cities, and Lord Huron. What…
*NSYNC’s comeback was even more ephemeral than any of us predicted: Not even a full song, just enough of “Bye Bye Bye” to get J.C. Chasez in front of the Popping and Locking Triangle for a few bars. As it turns out, it was enough–people got their chance to gawk…
If you’ve never watched a pro wrestling match before–which is to say, if you’ve never been an 11-year-old boy–it might be hard to understand why people are still watching it now. It’s been almost 20 years since the WWE (then the WWF) began calling itself “sports entertainment,” and winking at…
God, the internet is weird. Also *NSYNC fans, but mostly the internet. Just days after Lance Bass’s non-denial an *NSYNC reunion at Sunday’s VMAs was confirmed, in this order, by Joey Fatone’s dad and the opening of a verified Twitter account in their name. , which immediately drew 67,000 followers…
Tucson’s Human Behavior is in the business of making you feel more uncomfortable while a banjo is playing than you’re typically accustomed to feeling. All the elements are there for a typical banjo experience — close harmonies, light drumming, restrained, quiet peaks. You could assemble a folk-pop crossover band with…
The Senators are aware that their acoustic sound and vest-friendly look create expectations they didn’t even two years ago. “Everyone is wearing vests and suspenders now,” Jesse Teer told us back in December. “That look is just vogue right now.” Their sound is vogue, too — “Cross of Gold,” the…
Sundressed, Diners, Green Line Operator, and Mr. Mudd & Mr. Gold are among the well-regarded local acts performing Saturday at the Rogue Bar, but the headline fact of The Grandest Night of The Season is just what it’s benefiting: the memory of Dan Somers, a local musician whose suicide in…
NSYNC reunion talk has dominated music news this week, because everybody in America really, really misses the ’90s, and despite a non-denial from Lance Bass it seems like there’s still a good chance it actually happens, even if nobody at the VMAs was planning on it originally. (How could they…
I’m going to be honest, here: As a pro wrestling fan who swore off the stuff after WCW hired Vince Russo (come on), I was under the impression that WWE Raw–at the US Airways Center next Monday–was basically a miasma of post-grunge and post-post-grunge and rap-rock at this point, and…
Wooden Indian, Yellow MinuteAugust 29, 2013Musical Instrument Museum Theater Going to the Musical Instrument Museum from central Phoenix feels like an occasion, even when it isn’t–you’re on the interstate all that time, the cars are getting gradually more expensive, and then when you get there, and park your car in…
Yeah Yeah Yeahs were among the earliest members of their particular indie cohort to earn mainstream fame, but they wore it well — aside from the unavoidable song-fatigue side effects of appearing in a version of Rock Band, “Maps” seems to have avoided every possible pitfall on its way to…
If you’re anywhere on the internet today, or within 500 feet of a teenage boy, you’ve probably heard that today marked the official Call of Duty: Ghosts multiplayer reveal. You may have also heard that the trailer contained the world premier of a new Eminem song, “Survival.” That’s right: One…
As a general rule, I don’t like to be lectured by Lady Gaga. This is not to say that I haven’t earned a lecture, since she’s a rich and famous superstar who’s touched millions of kids who feel sad and alone and I’m a guy who listens to episodes of…
