Finally, I get to write about music. I’ve been hanging out on the cultural side of the New Times site, Jackalope Ranch, writing a little column called Parent Hood. Not a “how to parent” column, more like a look at pop culture through the eyes of a parent (five kids…
Season 2 of the American version of The Office is my favorite TV show ever, and because I am a glutton for punishment, I’ve been using tonight’s series finale mostly as an excuse to understand how old I and my tastes (and the DVDs I watched all those Jim and…
Taylor Swift has always devoted herself to her fans. Now she has a brand-spanking-new website that allows you to break up with her, perhaps to inspire her next greatest hit! Just point your browser to BreakUpWithTaylorSwift.com, write yourself a tear-jerking Dear John letter, and push play! Wait. Let me redact…
Is it an ominous sign when a band’s first gig is broken up and shut down? For Sundressed, it clearly was inspiration. When the Phoenix quartet’s first performance ended before it began, they went into the studio to record a self-titled EP. Their first official full-length, Whiskey with Milk, is…
It’s been a little more than a year and a half since Crescent Ballroom opened, and about nine months since the downtown Phoenix venue celebrated its first anniversary a little early with the first Los Dias de la Crescent. The second Los Dias de la Crescent is Friday and Saturday…
My Bloody Valentine is headlining — of course you should buy FYF Fest tickets; this is a no brainer. Okay, the decision isn’t necessarily that simple. Backing up: FYF Fest is a two-day festival that takes place in downtown Los Angeles, featuring a variety of indie, electronic, punk, and comedy…
Earlier in May, Justin Timberlake announced he would be coming through Phoenix on his enormous solo tour, which set off a concert-excitement bomb the likes of which hadn’t been seen since — well, since those Prince shows, I guess, even earlier in May. More recently, the Backstreet Boys announced they’d…
Vampire Weekend — the album — sounded a lot like Graceland, inasmuch as most of us hadn’t heard that bright Afropop guitar tone on any other albums in the intervening 20 years, and Ezra Koenig’s lyrics were as epigrammatic as Paul Simon’s, if in a different way. It wasn’t just…
“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?” asks Lana Del Rey in the chorus of her latest song, “Young and Beautiful” — the first single from The Great Gatsby’s soundtrack. Del Rey teamed up with the film’s director, cowriter, and co-producer, Baz Luhrmann, to bring…
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 BesteBURNED BY THE RELATIVE I LOANED MONEY Dear Willie D: I loaned my cousin $500 more…
I have never once been so confused by a song as I was the first time someone told me to listen to “Stick Stickly,” by Attack Attack! All I’d been told was that it was the source of the animated GIFs I’d started seeing all over the internet, in which…
Had Baz Luhrmann decided to take things even remotely seriously in his adaptation of The Great Gatsby, he could’ve just used the Bryan Ferry Orchestra’s 2012 album The Jazz Age in its entirety, instead of merely inviting Ferry to supply two incongruous songs for its soundtrack. But nothing about Luhrmann’s…
Arrested Development ruined the Segway. Lots of things ruined the Segway — don’t get me wrong — but the first time Gob Bluth made his dramatic, perfectly self-confident entrance into the frame on his fanny-packed Segway, he instantly summed up all the worries people had about them. Will this make…
If the recent death of Storm Thorgerson was any indication, music is often married to its album art. All the more reason to take something incredibly iconic in the age of Pirate Bay and iPods and turn it on its head, like the graphic reinventions of Christophe Gowans. The former…
David Dimmick isn’t much of a braggart — at least as far as we can tell — but he’s got every effin’ right to be. Since becoming a DJ in 1996, the dude’s C.V. includes sharing stages with some pretty stellar icons from hip-hop history, like the Wu-Tang Clan, Pharohe…
For decades, punk and metal have been an outlet — a means for fans and musicians to escape reality. For Suicidal Tendencies, that’s changing. With the release of 13, the band’s first album since 2000, singer Mike Muir is looking for listeners to embrace his realities. It has been 30…
Cultural revolutions are so passé these days, right? I mean, all that stuff about radical movements, political upheavals, and melting pots belong to generations past, not our era of interconnectivity and augmented reality. By extension, cross-cultural musical mash-ups are, also, a thing of the past. Aren’t they? Arizona rockers Fayuca…
“The longer that we are a band, I think, the longer that we will be playing music together,” says Jimmy Eat World frontman Jim Adkins. “Because we appreciate the goals that we reach even more the longer it goes on.” Now into their 20th year, the Mesa rockers are expressing…
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…
