Young Jeezy rapped it best: “It’s the recession — everybody’s broke!” That being the case, South by Southwest, Austin, Texas’ annual orgy of music and networking, is beyond many of our means. While catching local SxSWers, Dear and the Headlights, Kinch, The Love Me Nots, The Maine, Miniature Tigers, and…

Romans 8:31 says, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” If the “us” is the average Christian songwriter, then we’ll say that God is probably not for songs filled with clumsily rendered metaphors or music that is as restrained as a Van Halen cover band. Luckily, Bradley…

Oh, Canada. Thank you for being so much more than America’s hat. In recent years, the indie-rock pantheon has surged with maple leaf-laden entries, such as Montreal’s Plants and Animals. The band was formed by Nova Scotians Warren C. Spicer and Matthew “Woodman” Woodley, who started playing together way back…

Some rappers lean on Phil Spector-like gun shenanigans and run-ins with the law to boost their cred. Not so with Los Angeles spitter Aceyalone, who takes it back to where it belongs: the music. Born Eddie Hayes, the emcee was a member of the legendary Freestyle Fellowship and co-founder of…

It’s home-tour season in central Phoenix, and our historic neighborhoods are putting their best feet forward. In our book, Coronado takes the lead thanks to its Celebrate Coronado Historic Home Tour & Twilight Festival, which combines local music, food, a petting zoo, live art, and a beer garden. The stops…

With Alan Moore’s Watchmen – the most lauded graphic novel in history – finally translated to the big screen and Dr. Manhattan’s junk burning your retinas, we can now close that chapter on pop culture. So what’s next? Well, “The Panelists” exhibit at Pravus, 501 East Roosevelt Street, might be…

With the economy kinda dumpy, you might want to get away from it all. Adding stamps to your passport, though, doesn’t seem practical right now. Cheer up, buttercup, because Phoenix Sister Cities has your back with its annual WorldFEST celebration, which features a full weekend of transnational cuisine, drink, entertainment,…

A rose by any other name . . . you know the rest, Shakespeare dude/dudette. Detroit garage rockers Tyvjk know the quote and its meaning perhaps too well. You see, the rockers started as Tyvek, only to be endlessly hassled by DuPont, which owns the registered trademark for the synthetic…

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a documentary about 1,000 journals being filled with words, art, and ephemera by strangers around the globe might be a black hole of a cliché collapsing in on itself. Catch the humanity behind the paradox when the film 1000 Journals. Inspired…

There are some folks whose life journeys manifest in the timbre of their voices, each uttered word wrought with equal doses of joy and pain. Exhibit A is Alejandro Escovedo, a troubadour who has spent his days traveling from punker to prominent alt-country figure. He hails from a family that…

Valentine’s Day can be as dry and dusty as those little candy conversation hearts that we will inevitably choke on. Since when does being struck by Cupid’s arrow mean allowing flowers, chocolates, and a fancy dinner to get in the way of the fun stuff, such as passionate sexiness festooned…

If the godfather of Phoenix poetry wanted you to co-host a show with him, would you turn him down, even though you weren’t really into the whole co-host thing? Heck no, according to Shawnte Orion, who had previously turned down collaborating on any and all poetry gigs. “When Jack Evans,…

Christopher Pomerenke is a Valley music veteran who has always had a gift for grounding fun and funkiness with plenty of heart via projects like Less Pain Forever and Runaway Diamonds. As director of the documentary The Heart Is a Drum Machine, he shines the spotlight on other musicians and…

As people’s papers dwindle, up jumps the swindles. You see, Wu-Tang affiliate Killah Priest was supposed to stop in Tempe this week while on tour. Thing is, the tour didn’t actually exist. It was just a scam propagated by some random schemers hoping to game on the promoters’ up-front money…

If Portland’s not the next Seattle – the sonic boom town of the ’90s – then the Oregon town is at least the next Phoenix, considering all of the Valley musicians who have relocated there in the past few years. The latest defectors-to-be, Teague Cullen and Bri White, are about…

Laying outside in a T-shirt and shorts in the dead of winter is one of the benefits of surviving Phoenix summers. One downside? Unless you want to drive for six hours, there isn’t a wave-worthy body of water around. Instead of being bummed out, hit the beach, at least sonically,…

The subtle beauty of the Sonoran Desert’s gradual fade into the northern high country has no doubt been muse to many an art lover. But how many female Arizona artists can you name who have painted such stirring scenes? Get schooled when distinguished art collector Fran Elliott spreads the Copper…

Hip-hop’s been taking existing works and weaving them into new shapes and sounds since DJ Kool Herc extended breaks at South Bronx park jams. Expect a similar energy in Revenge of a King, a Black Theatre Troupe/BlackPoet Ventures co-production that puts a hip-hop spin on Big Willie Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The…

Two days into the New Year and you already feel your commitment to those resolutions slipping away. You’re still justifying using leftover holiday snacks to lard your body (you can’t just toss them!) and you haven’t yet started your running regimen (it’s chilly outside!). As for your goal of being…

English, bafflingly enough, is the official language of Arizona. Luckily, the political shenanigans seem to have little effect on the dance floor, especially when DJ Fuego plays his role as ambassador of Ritmos Latinos each Friday during Viernes Latin Night. Born to Dominican parents in New York City, Fuego rose…

The Rod Blagojevich Senate-appointment-for-dollars ruse, though way controversial, may not come close to the uproar the Illinois governor caused two years ago. In 2006, he appointed Sister Claudette Marie Muhammad — a representative of the Nation of Islam — to his commission on discrimination and hate crimes. Think of today’s…