Music-discovery apps like Spotify and Pandora are free, but they have social costs. Among them: Every six months or so, we get an open letter from an artist who is being cut comically tiny checks for thousands of plays on one service or another. This week, it’s musician and label-owner…
Until very recently, it was not necessary to point out that the Beach Boys who were on tour were not necessarily all of the surviving Beach Boys. Alas, we’re spoiled: Last year’s totally unexpected new album and tour brought the warring Beach Boys factions together for some extremely poignant (and…
If you and I visit the same Weezer forums, you’ve probably had Rivers Cuomo’s J-Pop album — okay, Rivers Cuomo and Scott Murphy of Allister’s J-Pop album — for a while now. If you don’t visit the same Weezer forums I do, now’s your chance: It was released Monday on…
Welcome to Ask Willie D, where the Geto Boys MC answers reader questions about matters, in his own words, “funny, serious or unpredictable.” Something on your mind? Ask Willie D! Photo courtesy of Peter BesteREPULSED BY A CO-WORKER’S BAD BREATH Dear Willie D: I am a female working at the…
This week, let’s shine the spotlight on a brother-and-sister team from the Valley who are doing something pretty dope — especially considering they’re 8 and 12 years old. I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with Cody and Chloe, who are quite possibly the Valley’s youngest-ever DJ tag…
Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience tour will be coming to Phoenix on December 2. Tickets will be available May 17, which gives you 11 days to figure out how you’re going to get tickets, and then six months or so to figure out how you’re going to camp in front of…
So, my girlfriend and I just broke up. Coincidentally, or maybe because April is just a shitty month, the inverse happened to Camille Standen, who wrote a piece for Noisey about how her shattered relationship ruined all the songs she used to love. I can relate, but I wouldn’t say…
Of all the bands that managed to go diamond (that’s 10 million albums sold) back in the mid-’90s, when conditions were right for it, Matchbox Twenty looked the most like one-superhit wonders. It wasn’t their fault; it just seemed like there were 10 million themselves-or-someones-like-them doing similar (if less effective)…
Legendary film composer John Williams is scheduled to appear at a benefit performance by the Phoenix Symphony on September 28. It’s not like he needs to tour to help raise money for his kids’ college fund, and he’s probably busy with the Jurassic Park IV and new Star Wars soundtracks…
I don’t want to bury the lede, here: There’s a video, in this post, of Go Daddy founder and local philanthropist Bob Parsons making a smoke-filled introduction to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” next to a bunch of scantily clad dancing girls, getting a big round of applause for saying, “Nuke the Chinese…
Sporting a scraggly beard, greasy hair covering his eyes, Vancouver’s Stephen McBean could almost be the last living member of a tribe of garage-rocking, psychedelic-stomping, hippie-prophet nomads who once wandered the woods. As the frontman of four bands, each steeped in different angles of the future and present, but especially…
The first thing most people heard from Rehab probably was its breakout single, “Bartender Song (Sittin’ at a Bar).” The grit in singer Danny Boone’s tattered voice had listeners singing along by the second verse. “It’s been a breadwinner for a lot of years,” says Boone. “It’s crazy, ’cause you…
As guitar maestro and frontman for Built to Spill, Doug Martsch has developed an instantly recognizable sound — soaring, layered guitars, pounding rhythm section, quirky lyrics — that often builds into a psychedelic frenzy. At least, that much characterized the band’s earlier output. For the band’s last two albums, You…
The Monkees are coming through Mesa — it’s called “A Midsummer’s Night with The Monkees” — which should not surprise anybody who’s ever heard an Arizona stereotype. The show’s on August 9, at the Mesa Arts Center, and it will (for obvious reasons) not feature the Davy Jones, the group’s…
Twitter #Music — the music-discovery service from the people who brought you #SomaliDirectionersLoveZayn-style declarations of collectivist fandom love — rolled out this week, and people are . . . not especially happy with it. A blunt summary of the problems with it was passed around among tech-liberal-arts-blog types over the…
On Saturday, I had the pleasure of returning to one of my favorite events of the year: the Mesa Super Show! Just when you think the lowriding lifestyle might be fading away, I am here to remind you that it is alive and well. The culture, the cars, the food,…
So what didja wind up doing last weekend? Get drunk and act the fool at a club, perhaps? Or did it involve sacking out in front of the latest episode of Game of Thrones or Mad Men? We’re willing to bet it was nowhere near as pimp as how Valley…
Black Sabbath — that is, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, and Geezer Butler, for the moment — have been teasing a summer tour of North America for weeks, and when they finally announced the full tour on Thursday it came with an August 30 performance in Phoenix, at US Airways Center…
The Flagstaff Hullabaloo is not a big festival — 2013’s June 1-2 event in Wheeler Park is the first time it’s stretched to two days — and because there are a lot of big festivals in and around the Phoenix area, that might seem like an unbeatable disadvantage. But they…
When someone tells you that life can change in an instant, chances are they’re trying to sell you typhoon insurance. But one particular life-changing instant has lasted for nine years and counting. It’s the second in June 2004, with a video camera rolling, in which Glenn Danzig murmured, “Fuck you,…
Electrical currents and water don’t mix — just ask ’70s-era singer Claude François, sometimes lauded as the French answer to the Beatles, who died trying to fix a defective light bulb while in the bathtub. But don’t let that mishap spoil your fun this weekend if you’re planning on getting…
In February, after nearly 22 years of delays, My Bloody Valentine released a follow-up to their genre-defining 1991 LP, Loveless. In light of that, it’s tempting to declare 2013 the Year of the Shoegaze Revival. There are signs all over: Coachella’s lineup boasted fresh-faced dream-pop acts like DIIV, Wild Nothing,…
