Carolina Cracker, sans salsa I’ve got good news for people who like southern flavored rap music: Carolina Cracker and his homeboy from Minnesota, Melk Money, are back in town and scheming imminent appearances at local venues. I wrote about Cracker here (halfway down) back in last May, read the piece…
his t-shirt demonstrates the breadth of his linguistics I received the following missive the other day from Marshall “Fucking” Beck, from local metal band Rebirth. Beck and my paper — Michele Laudig in particular — have had some beef in the past year, mostly because he encouraged his fans to…
Sweet Bleeders album Bzzzz. Shit’s gotten a little vitriolic up in this bitch lately, so I’m going to (temporarily) tell you about something worth listening to… I’ve been listening to the grand, expansive latest album from Sweet Bleeders, one of multi-instrumentalist and pop genius Robin Vining’s multiple projects (others include…
A man — let’s call him White Rock Man — slouches in the back of a bus, idling at the side of a steep stretch of road. As the engine cools, the bus sits between two cities and a pair of gigs: last evening in Sacramento and tonight at the…
Matt Hales (better known as Aqualung) made a bit of a ruckus when his debut, Strange and Beautiful, dropped in the U.S. in 2005. A selection of lush, dreamy pop from his first two UK releases, it introduced a voice to be reckoned with — but it’s with his latest…
The first glimpse we get of John Lennon in action on The U.S. vs. John Lennon DVD (Lions Gate) is a rare live performance of “Attica State” at a rally held to protest the 10-year sentencing of John Sinclair, a fellow radical, for offering an undercover cop two joints. Now,…
Xpoz Magazine, mediocrity personified As I told you about last week, I spent this last weekend at the G-Unit/Money Management One Stop Shop producer’s conference, where I ran into a grip of players in various factions of the local hip-hop industry, including local rag Xpoz Magazine. Xpoz, which had a…
Seems a few people took offense at my calling local rapper Cballa a “dumb fuck” for naming his album Blacc Hitla. Marcus Staples, who put out the album on his Clicc Made Entertainment imprint, asked “Do you consider Julius Caesar a tyrant?” (Well, actually he misspelled “Caesar” but I corrected…
wish i had a joint, Fred, but this’ll have to do I’m not proud of it, but I honestly love smoking cigarettes. This post isn’t music related, but the video below is invaluable for historians and future archaeologists alike. If only it were for marijuana instead…..
Due to some alien interference with the blog-ware that I use to compose these missives, I didn’t get to holla at y’all yesterday; then again, I was enjoying perusing what the upcoming weekend has in store for me. This weekend marks a high point for Phoenix — Money Management XL…
The first time I heard of Attack of the Giant Squid, I was drinking whiskey with my friend Rob Birmingham, a.k.a. Fun Bobby, who used to bartend and book shows at Hollywood Alley in Mesa until he left to raise his son in rural Oregon. Rob told me that the…
Few events on the U.S. holiday calendar muster the same degree of cynicism in people as Valentine’s Day, the other notable dates being Christmas and Election Day. Somehow, this tradition that spans more than six centuries is now just as bad as a religious holiday that became a secular merchandising…
Iron Maiden made it into the 1990 Guinness Book of World Records for achieving a sound level of 124 dB (decibels) at the 1988 “Monsters of Rock” Festival. Since the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) claims that 7.5 minutes of exposure to 120 dB can cause permanent hearing damage,…
David Lowery lost his share of fans when he followed his days at the helm of one of independent rock’s most willfully eccentric acts — Camper Van Beethoven — with Cracker, a far more conventional roots-rock band in slacker-rock clothing. Of course, as often happens when your second act is…
If there is a downside to the huge commercial comeback that American Idiot spawned for Green Day, it’s the way that comeback only reinforced the notion that the band had somehow lost its bearings after Dookie sold, like, 40 billion copies — when, in fact, the records from the oft-neglected…
Cballa I’m trying to count the ways that local Westside rapper Cballa annoys the shit out of me. Let’s start with calling your record Blacc Hitla. Because I’m a writer and by proxy an aspiring grammarian, the misspelling bothers the shit out of me. Now, I understand that urban street…
The dorks in Illegal Substance The other afternoon I was sitting in one of my local watering holes and the B-52’s “Rock Lobster” came on the satellite radio. I had to walk outside; that song and its ilk turn my stomach and make me puke a little bit in my…
Smokescreen Just received a CD and e-mails from the local band Smokescreen, and I’m torn between two opinions about its marketing strategy. I like the band; it sounds like lush late-’90s alt-rock in the vein of Radiohead or the Pumpkins, but not too clone-esque. Here’s the strategy though: the band…
I’ve been following hip-hop since I first heard Run-D.M.C.’s King of Rock album when I was 11 years old. I’m not a fanatic, though; my sneering, hip-hop-obsessed DJ friends will tell you that. They just recently schooled me in hyphy, the cartoonish — and kind of silly — Bay Area…
Joe Ely was born along the Rock Island line in Amarillo, three blocks from Route 66. At age 6, he witnessed Jerry Lee Lewis pounding a piano on the back of a flatbed truck. In his early twenties, he picked up a hitchhiking Townes Van Zandt, the now-mythical Texas folk…
When Taylor Swift first hit Nashville, she faced competition from many aspiring female country stars with beautiful faces and large voices. She had bigger ideas. “I had to figure out a way to stand out and be different. For me, that came through songwriting,” she says. As writer of 11…
For all intents and purposes, Mark Linkous is Sparklehorse. And yet, despite a welcome move to a western North Carolina mountaintop and noteworthy assists from Tom Waits, Danger Mouse, and The Flaming Lips’ Steven Drozd, his latest release, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (full of…
