Just as with the physical universe, experts these days can’t seem to agree about whether the hip-hop universe is shrinking or expanding. On the one hand, the music and the culture itself appears to be splintering into an infinite number of subgenre atoms that drift farther away from each other…
For every mountain I climb For every river that winds For every wind that will blow I will send out my prayers For the children below. — Bill Miller, “Every Mountain I Climb” These days, it’s hard enough for parents to generate enough moral and ethical background noise to partially…
As two-thirds of the critically hailed, commercially failed Galaxie 500 in the late ’80s, Damon Krukowski and Naomi Wang knew the frustration of having a unique and respected band and helplessly watching it dissipate. Reassembling briefly in 1991 as Pierre Etoile (sans Galaxie 500’s Dean Wareham, who went on to…
Kay (pronounced kai, like sky) — who, like the other members of mostly punk outfit Sunshine, prefers to go by his first name — keeps apologizing for his English. “I’m sorry, it’s very difficult to speak on the phone with me,” he says for the third time. “Many people tell…
Dee Dee Ramone is lucky as all hell to be alive. The rickety timbre of his voice over the telephone bespeaks a man who has repeatedly cheated death. His is a sort of Bronx junkie mumble crossed with the confounded drawl of Tennessee Tuxedo’s Chumley, a disquieting mix of stubborn…
Rock ‘n’ roll is 45 years old. That’s older than most A&R guys. That’s older than the parents who are dropping off their 13-year-olds at the Blink 182 concert. There is nothing new left to do in rock ‘n’ roll. There just isn’t. Those still flogging the expired animal have…
It doesn’t matter what number Wallflowers album this is. You fickle kids can’t keep a band on the pop charts longer than you can resist popping a zit — it seems every follow-up to a debut success is doomed to suffer the dreaded sophomore jinx. And that goes for you…
You know that commercial for the really skinny television? The one that fades out with Gomez’s cover of the Beatles’ “Getting Better”? Did you know those guys were only 11 years old? No. But really, it’s pretty bloody amazing. They’re not terribly old, neither individually nor as a band, but…
Now that Radiohead’s Kid A has topped the pops, it’s tempting to proclaim the long musical drought at an end; for one moment, at least, art rock has mounted the charge and proudly planted its flag, right into (Milli Va)Nelly’s ski vest. Never mind that Kid A is only half…
There’s an almost incomprehensible sweep in the desert landscape that awestruck newcomers often interpret with the word “majesty.” To natives, it’s often just “home,” but it seems rare that anyone besides a native can locate that desert place of mind where the routine of seeing as much of the planet…
Maybe it’s the fact that they’re on Chapel Hill’s Merge Records, maybe it’s the boy/girl vocal interplay, maybe it’s their celebrated and seemingly endless back catalogue of EPs and singles, maybe it’s their penchant for happy melodies and verbal knife-twisters like “We don’t have to pretend we’re married/But we like…
You almost hate saying that Chicago quintet Frisbie is following in the tradition of bands such as Jellyfish, the Posies, Greenberry Woods, Zumpano and the Grays — that’s like condemning them as a brilliant talent and a surefire commercial flop. Big Star drew up the power-pop template for failure two…
The first words Johnny Cash sings on American III: Solitary Man are “I won’t back down”; the last are “I am just going over Jordan/I am just going over home.” In between is a 14-song rumination on death and redemption as uplifting as it is, in places, utterly terrifying. It’s…
Tonight is a homecoming. It’s been three and a half years since Dead Hot Workshop’s classic lineup has played together, more than that since it’s taken the stage at Long Wong’s, the last remaining vestige of a scene it helped create. For a decade it was the most respected group…
“This past summer,” says Andrew Rieger, “we were in Kyoto, Japan, and there was a great crowd came out, they were really into it. And when we were done with the show, they all, all the kids, they grabbed us and made us start dancing with them. For about two…
John Wesley Hall believes justice is a myth taught in classrooms, a fable found in law books, as imaginary as the unicorn and the mermaid. The Arkansas attorney mentions case after case in which he represented an innocent who wound up imprisoned or, worse, executed; in the course of a…
This month Gumbo dips into the mailbox and answers those cosmic questions regarding jazz and blues. But first, a little press for those jazzers whose lives reached the expiration date. From the label that reissued the entire Monkees catalogue comes two remastered John Coltrane albums, Coltrane Plays the Blues and…
As a result of its de-genderizing baggy pants aesthetic and sometimes not-so-tangential connection to the drug Ecstasy, the rave movement has generally downplayed and even ignored the inherent sexuality of dance music. Techno and its often disembodied variants, though, were not able to fully subvert the shallow lustfulness inherited from…
Despite our holier-than-thou attitudes and go-down-with-our-Titanic-size predispositions, we rock critics love to eat our words. Well, as long as it’s us serving our own plates and not some yob bent on humiliation and revenge; the public pillory should be reserved for those musicians with outsized egos who really deserve it…
It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that Joan of Arc mastermind Tim Kinsellas is acutely peculiar, at least as far as his compositions are concerned. A random sampling of songs from Joan of Arc’s past three records would prove as much — from the “too smart…
Tristeza coalesced from the remains of San Diego punk bands that had burned themselves out, just as a black hole comes from a dead star. The sweet, viscous instrumental rock the band produces on Dream Signals in Full Circles, though, is as far from the piercing hard-core of the Locust…
“Kurt. Kurt. Look up, man.” With his dark eyebrows arched beneath a shock of freshly bleached hair, Chicken bassist John White is reprimanding singer Kurt Klinger, telling him to look at the camera. Klinger, quietly fiddling with the label on his beer bottle, shoots a goofy grin in the photographer’s…
