For Rod Piazza, playing the blues isn’t just an ordinary pursuit. The legendary harmonica player considers it to be his life’s calling. “It wasn’t a choice for me. I heard the blues, and it chose me,” he says. “I never looked back.” During his 47-year career in the genre, Piazza,…
Featuring a silhouetted collection of dudes, Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style, in front of videos of white people doing ridiculous, Jackass-style nonsense, Atlanta rapper Rawcus’ “White People Crazy” is the sound of the Internet eating itself alive. Although it remains a little south of viral (still only 253,000 YouTube hits as…
Few bands can straddle the fine line between hard rock and heavy metal — or underground credibility and commercial viability — as well as Stone Sour. The band has released five studio albums, each of which has challenged and exceeded the band’s — and its fans — expectations. Stone Sour…
The Valley’s Latin dance scene could best be described as a melting pot of sound. But while there are dollops of such popular genres as salsa, merengue, bachata, and reggaeton in the mix via the discotecas, more tastemaking Latin-influenced styles such as moombahton and cumbia-crunk also have added distinctive flavors…
Remember your first prom experience? We do, and we’re willing to bet corsages to condoms that it was just as awkward and unfulfilling as ours. So much so that it’s probably something that you’d like to forget. Indeed, lucky are the few who have good memories of this particular adolescent…
Although 2014 has only just begun, it’s already been an epic year for local four-piece rock band KONGOS, and we mean that quite literally. The South African-born brothers have inked a deal with NYC-based Epic Records and will make an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Wednesday, March 5. Oh,…
Local rapper Random (a.k.a. Mega Ran) is nothing if not prolific. In fact, he’s one of the more productive hip-hop/nerdcore artists out of Arizona, consistently delivering top-notch projects like “Black Materia” and “Forever Famicom” to the masses, as well as releasing close to a dozen different jams last year via…
Editor’s Note: Shea Serrano is an award-winning music writer and goofball whose recent exploits include Bun B’s Rap Coloring and Activity Book. In his column, he writes about his life and times. Among many other things, my twin six-year-olds sons think I am Manu Ginobili when the Spurs play basketball…
It’s been said that January is the worst month because of post-holiday depression, having to stick to all those pesky resolutions, or your ass getting dumped. But if anyone was feeling blue during the first month of 2014, they weren’t showing their frowny faces at any of the bars, music…
It can be easy to miss unless you’re looking for it, but there are a lot of metal (heavy or otherwise) in and around Metro Phoenix, thanks to concerts and gigs by locals and touring acts alike. As such, Up on the Sun’s resident metal scribe Lauren Wise is always…
Midwestern indie juggernaut Evan Weiss is a man of many talents, having either played in or revitalized the Chicago emo brand to a huge degree. Weiss rolls into town on Tuesday with equivocally genre-appropriately named support acts The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to…
The last time I told people I was going to ‘Nam, I was actually heading off to backpack through Vietnam for a month with a stop off in Cambodia and Taiwan. And the general reply was, “Why the hell would you want to do that?” However, last week when I…
Song associations are strange, because when I hear “Longview” by Green Day, I think of Rosemarie Sandoval’s hair. We were both sophomores, sharing a table in Mr. Nardinelli’s third-period art class. I think she was almost a year older, and if she wasn’t taller than me anyway, her bangs sure…
So, I know that as soon as the Grammys are over, there is typically an onslaught of heavy metal music journalists complaining about how the awards don’t respect the genre. We all know this, in fact. The heavy metal category hasn’t even been televised in more than a decade. While…
The Waste Management Phoenix Open isn’t so much a golf tournament as it is a seven-day excuse to party. So much so that all the birdies and bogies being unleashed by links legends like Vijay Singh and Mark Calcavecchia on the green during “the greatest show on grass” seem to…
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Getting upset about absolutely anything to do with the Grammys is like finding yourself alarmed by the quality of the food at a Pizza Hut. To expect an organization to do anything other than what it normally does, which is consistently miss…
The Waste Management Phoenix Open isn’t so much a golf tournament as it is a seven-day excuse to party. So much so that all the birdies and bogies being unleashed by links legends like Vijay Singh and Mark Calcavecchia on the green during “the greatest show on grass” seem to…
The music industry is a brutal battlefield. It’s strewn with the bodies of talented artists who were suffocated by success (Kurt Cobain), swallowed whole by indulgence (Keith Moon), or taken by tragedy (Randy Rhoads). No genre is safe: The path to the top of the charts is paved with some…
Editor’s Note: Shea Serrano is an award-winning music writer and goofball whose recent exploits include Bun B’s Rapper Coloring and Activity Book. In his new column, he writes about his life and times. Perhaps you do not know this because you do not follow weather trends of the Southeastern United…
If watching endless hours of Star Trek taught us anything — other than how to proclaim “Qapla!” with the proper Klingon inflection — it’s that there’s infinite diversity in infinite combinations. It’s an axiom that’s most definitely apropos to the music world, whereby mixing and matching different artists and performers…
If you’ve ever been to a show at the Trunk Space in the summer — and experienced all that goes with it, like the heat sticking to your skin — then the venue’s recently launched crowdfunding project should make you happy. Ditto for those Trunk Space fans eager to celebrate…
Something especially malevolent will lurk just beneath downtown Phoenix after nightfall this weekend. But before you ask, it’s certainly not a C.H.U.D., Balrog, or hellspawn. It’s slew of sinister subterranean creatures of a more fetishistic and rivethead bent. Specifically, we’re referring to the mass of pleather-clad freaks and geeks who…
