David Byrne’s post-Talking Heads career, like that of his fellow Heads, has been uneven, and decidedly low-profile if not strictly uneventful. But you gotta hand it to the guy: Never once does a Byrne album come off like he’s pandering to the popular taste. You might think he fell flat…
Stiv, Johnny, Joey . . . all gone, shuffled off to punk-rock heaven. Who’s gonna be left to inspire the troops? Billy Joe Armstrong? A wimp! Dexter Holland? A poseur! The lead dork from friggin’ Buck Cherry? Surely you jest! The recent VH1-Spin special on punk’s first quarter-century felt more…
Founded in 1994, the Chicago-based ‘zine Punk Planet, which won the Utne Reader Alternative Press award last year, has covered a music scene that’s inextricably bound to a progressive political stance. The voices in this book — musicians, political organizers, artists and filmmakers — make for some of the most…
At the risk of stealing an intro, let me count it off. How it happened was like this: Five years ago there was this club in Los Angeles called the Underground Cafe. The Underground hosted a once-a-week funk night dubbed “The Breaks,” at which a young hip-hop aficionado named Miles…
There are two kinds of people in the world.In the first camp are those who subscribe to the conventional wisdom that a solitary piece of tainted fruit is capable of contaminating an entire load. And then there are Donny Osmond fans, an optimistic (if grammatically challenged) clique who, like their…
If there’s one hard-and-fast rule about music, it’s that most bands simply don’t last. A couple years is an eternity in rock ‘n’ roll time. For a group to remain together a decade or more is a kind of outrageous anomaly. Most outfits either die out or just fade away…
All right, now, this bullshit has to stop. First Joey Ramone dies. Then comes word from E! Entertainment that Duran Duran is re-forming, in its original lineup. And a week after that, New Jersey’s Monmouth University gives Jon Bon Jovi an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. (To be honest, I’m…
The second album of R.E.M.’s Third Phase (end of First Phase: Document; end of Second Phase: departure of drummer Bill Berry) is not much different, and certainly no better, than the first, 1999’s Up, which should have been titled Down. It offers more of the same: pet sounds drenched in…
So, you want to be a rock ‘n’ roll star? No, you don’t. In a post-everything pop culture, in which stardom packs all the allure of a 4 a.m. whore and rock stars come and go with the frequency of a ham radio signal, what you really want is something…
Lurking somewhere in the dusty bins of your neighborhood record store — just after Sade but well before Scritti Politti — is a “new” album by the Sand Rubies called Cuacha — except that it’s really not a new album at all. It is, however, a renamed, repackaged and expanded…
Almost everyone can name some scene in some movie that left such a profound impression on the mind’s eye that it caused him or her instantly to become aware of the overwhelming power of moviemaking techniques, even if it wasn’t realized as such at the time. It’s especially the case…
I think G. Love is high.”What we do is just, like, American music. In this day and age, everything is one, and we just play music, you know what I mean?” Hmm. Correction: I know G. Love is high. “This is what we do, man. We just play this good…
There’s a chapter missing from America’s musical subconscious because we never embraced the Walker Brothers beyond a pair of brilliant ballads. That group’s enormous teenybopper following in Europe made it possible for Scott Walker to release a spate of eccentric No. 1 solo albums in the late ’60s, none of…
When rapper Talib Kweli rolled through Cincinnati a few years back, he met Hi-Tek, a producer who was a member of the rap group Mood. They collaborated on Mood’s full-length debut, 1997’s Doom, and have been tight ever since. Kweli enlisted Hi-Tek for both Black Star’s album and his own…
In the late 1960s, California-born composer Terry Riley went by the sobriquet “Poppy Nogood.”The name sounds far more bellicose than Riley’s soft, almost courtly manner of speech might suggest; but Riley’s work, after all, encompasses a tangle of styles and influences that politely disrespects generic conventions of all kinds, melding…
In much the same way package tours prove it’s possible to see Paris in a day (“People, we’ve got a half-hour in the Louvre, but if we blitz through the Impressionists, we can set aside 10 extra minutes for the gift shop”), Mail or Muse is taking you on an…
For his first album in four years, KRS-One was faced with the same dilemma that his contemporaries from hip-hop’s so-called golden age (circa 1987) have had to deal with, to varying degrees of success. Following the major label A&R line that conscious rap is no longer relevant to the rap-buying…
Emerging from the tactical fumbles of its Frampton Comes Alive! and Blind Faith rereleases, the juggernaut that is Universal Music’s “Deluxe Edition” series has taken a rapid and happy turn for the better. Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On received a loving treatment in February, and now comes 1973’s Catch a…
There’s always been something precious about Nashville folk/alt-country artist Doug Hoekstra. Not “precious” in the cute/pejorative sense; more along the lines of “indefinably rare.” Among American singer-songwriters, he’s possessed of a work ethic so uncommon and diligent it’s likely one could trace his heritage in a straight line back to…
If Greil Marcus, the dean of intellectual rock-as-pop-culture journalists, had grown up in some repressed, oppressive, cold and remote farm town up on the Canadian border, subsisted on tallboys and fried food, read Mad magazine instead of Heidegger, and kept Whitesnake’s debut album in heavy rotation on the boombox, then…
What Life of Brian did for Jesus Christ, All You Need Is Cash does for the more popular Beatles. By the late ’70s there had been other fictitious retellings of the Beatles’ story, such as Mark Shipper’s novel Paperback Writer, which had the group reuniting third on the bill below…
Henry Gray, born in Louisiana in 1925, pulled a stretch in World War II and then migrated to Chicago, which was where Howlin’ Wolf found him. Gray had been honing his piano chops for years in a variety of barrelhouse and back-room settings throughout the South, but it was Chicago…
