Features

By now, hip-hop heads and Bay Area natives are familiar with the eight-man crew Anticon. The collective first turned heads in 1998 with a mildly engaging word battle between Sole and non-Anticoner El-P, as well as a slew of stream-of-consciousness productions — stuff that references the soul but mostly feeds…

Jeff Buckley is a rock ‘n’ roll Tupac Shakur. Like the slain gangsta rapper, Buckley’s posthumous pipeline outstrips his living efforts. Buckley, who drowned in May 1997 at age 30 while swimming in the Mississippi River, lives up to his image as a fragile man-angel on Songs to No One,…

Yes, this is the CD that contains “John Walker’s Blues,” the most misunderstood song since George Will discovered “Born in the U.S.A.” and decided, by virtue of its title, that it was a patriotic anthem. The cut is a first-person account of what made John Walker Lindh forsake America and…

Despite their name, Tokyo noise smiths Melt Banana melt frontal lobes, not fruit. Who knows what it is about Japanese culture that can provoke a response as extreme as that country’s thriving underground noise scene? Perhaps it’s the claustrophobia of intense overpopulation, a strong cultural conservatism, or all the artifice…

It isn’t every day you get to see a band react to its first piece of national press coverage. Oddly enough, it’s in Zia Zine, a free record store magazine and former local institution now assembled in Pennsylvania. After a friend of the band arrives at bass player Anthony Germinaro’s…

Hot Hot Heat, a foppish quartet from the tiny island city of Victoria, British Columbia, finds itself riding the wave of rock ‘n’ roll resurgence t hat thrust the Strokes and the White Stripes into mass consciousness. With a new LP, Make Up the Breakdown, released on the fabled Sub…

The late singer-songwriter Phil Ochs is often quoted as having said that the last real hope America had for a revolution would be if Elvis became Che Guevara. Imagine Elvis as some radical rockabilly martyr who one day decided to turn Graceland into a compound, surround himself with dozens of…

Upon hearing this marriage of band name and album title, folks may ask, “Is this some bizarre combination of goth rock and Brazilian tropicalia?” And the answer would be, well, yeah — and even more. The Black Heart Procession’s fourth full-length album marks an ambitious departure, and not just because…

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…

Born in Tijuana, Fernando Corona lived most of his life in Ensenada, a small port town 80 miles south. He spent his early years playing all kinds of music, from acoustic rock to experimental stuff. Eventually, he became a member of Tijuana’s much-hyped Nortec Collective, that raucous band of musicians…

From Brooklyn to the Dirty South, Fabolous runs the hip-hop gamut with his minimalist East Coast grooves and “gentleman with a touch of street” Southern attitude. Put on the map when DJ Clue signed him to his label Desert Storm, Fabolous filled New York’s need at the time for hip-hop…

There’s a lull in the schedule in Miami, and Paulina Rubio doesn’t like it. “Open the curtains,” she says across the back of the couch. “Let’s do something. Let’s practice yoga. Turn on the television. Anything.” This should have been a good day; the first interview wasn’t scheduled until after…

Hip-hop is dead. So sayeth the aged b-boy, so sayeth the flock. Well, it’s not really dead, just different. Most of the people who pine for the Eric B. and Rakim, KRS-One salad days can’t seem to stomach today’s mainstream hip-hop. “Hip-hop died in the mid-’90s,” they claim. Most hip-hop…

Tom Petty’s as pissed as a millionaire gets, meaning you’d best take this, ahem, concept album about rock ‘n’ roll corruption with a grain of salt the size of Mike Campbell’s hair. What happens when this album, financed by a multinational, gets airplay? Will it be considered victory or surrender,…

Armed with only a battered melodica, Damon Albarn set off from his London digs two years ago on a Malian sojourn. There, in the capital city of Bamako and its satellite villages, Albarn met and jammed with local musicians, both pro and amateur. Eventually, he compiled 40 hours of tape,…

In country music, as in rock, the line between commercial and alternative has become fuzzy, as indie-oriented artists found Nashville hungry for good new songs, and smaller labels strove to grab rising talent. The husband-and-wife duo of Buddy and Julie Miller could be the poster children for this phenomenon. Five…

It’s been three years since we last heard from Underworld, the popular Brits who successfully combine elements of techno and house with vocals and melody. Having a singer (Karl Hyde) out in front of the stage undoubtedly helped them gain a foothold in the United States in the mid-’90s, when…

The Athens, Georgia-based duo Jucifer — an alt-metal combo comprising Amber Valentine on guitar and her boyfriend, Ed Livengood, on drums — mixes up a lethal cocktail of punk, heavy metal and plain ol’ buzz-saw rawk, redefining “Southern gothic.” The couple self-released a debut album in 1998 titled Calling All…

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