On Blue Country Heart, Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen goes country, singing heartfelt versions of songs by Garth Brooks, Toby Keith and Tim McGraw. Guest vocalists include Martina McBride and Faith Hill, who help Kaukonen shed his blues-steeped image. Just kidding. Sure, Blue Country Heart was recorded in Nashville, but…
Hip-hop lovers have splintered off into so many different camps and communities, you have to wonder if many of them even love the same type of music anymore. Since we live in America, the props are invariably handed out to the rich and successful, and every now and again, someone…
Record companies specializing in musical subgenres regularly market certain releases to tourists, literal and otherwise. For instance, blues labels tend to balance albums aimed at consumers who know the form well with lowest-common-denominator platters intended for people who think it would be cool to purchase a blues CD once every…
When it was launched in 1995, the Warped Tour was one of many multiband bashes — from H.O.R.D.E. to Lilith Fair — that emerged in the wake of the influential, highly successful Lollapalooza festival. So why, seven years later, are virtually all of these allegedly annual events, including Lollapalooza, either…
Skinny Deville is explaining how his group Nappy Roots managed to emerge from the University of Western Kentucky into the national hip-hop consciousness. “There was no school for music business in Western Kentucky, so we made our own,” he says. He speaks in the same way he and the other…
To fans, he’s the ultimate showman — loud, funny, flamboyant and in-your-face — in both his singing and his desire for your girlfriend. To the hatas, he’s an annoying misogynist well past his sell-by date. Either way, David Lee Roth is co-headlining one of this summer’s more interesting tours —…
Addressing the debate over whether he engineered Phish’s break, soon to enter its third year, guitarist Trey Anastasio says, “I was talking to Brad, our road manager, the other day . . . he wonders if it seems like this hiatus was my idea, because of everything I’ve done. “Being…
Phoenix’s hip-hop scene is running out of excuses. For years, local rappers and producers could blame their abject failure to crack national markets on the city’s B-market status. Hip-hop, the story went, was run by a vast coastal conspiracy that, on principle, shat on artists from landlocked states. Unless you…
It’s a perfect pairing: Johnny Marr, former guitarist for the Smiths, one of the world’s most impossibly melodramatic rock bands, and the Pet Shop Boys, one of the world’s most theatrical pop groups, join forces for a set of fey, delicately heartbroken love songs packed with sophisticated melodies and shrewd…
As mini-trends go, the nü metal fad’s got legs: Korn’s first album came out in 1994, and the band is still rocking adolescent treatment centers across the country. Nü metal is pretty patently mainstream now; the charts are full of Stainds, Nickelbacks, Disturbeds and other monosyllabically named bands for whom…
At last year’s Latin Grammys, Juanes was the artist with the most nominations (seven), eventually winning three trophies. But on the day of his big night (September 11, 2001), the Twin Towers came down, taking the Latin Grammy ceremony with them. Juanes’ title track “Fíjate Bien,” with its prophetic lyrics,…
If there has been a single prevailing premonition over the course of the last 10 months, it’s that somewhere, somehow, everything has gone horribly wrong. The vacant malaise that was the 1990s has given way to white-knuckle terror, and quaint late-’80s boogeymen — hijacking, corporate scandal, nuclear winter — once…
Like so many rock and pop figures, Plaid’s Andy Turner and Ed Handley rose to the top of the electronic music pantheon by paying their dues as members of a (now-defunct) groundbreaking group. Back in 1993, Turner and Handley were two-thirds of the Black Dog, which helped lay the groundwork…
Let’s pretend you’re a club owner — we’ll wait while you yank the necessary hairs out of your skull to make this a more credible performance. And to sweeten this role, let’s say you book the bands at your venue. One day, in walks a representative of Undertoe, a Valley…
In the liner notes for Flogging Molly’s new album, Drunken Lullabies, frontman Dave King thanks all the people you’d expect him to thank: family, friends, contacts, his wife Gina, his son Graham (for making him feel older), all the great people he’s met on the road through the years. He…
Quetzal Guerrero had no choice but to become a musician — as an infant, his parents swaddled him in a blanket of sound. When gigging with their world beat band Zum Zum Zum, young Zirco and Carmen Guerrero would put their son in a basket and tuck him in next…
The sitar is one hell of a difficult instrument to play, much less to master. With up to 21 strings, it is an unwieldy beast; a player must be pretty limber just to hold it properly. Generally, players treat the instrument and its music with deep respect, often announcing pieces…
Afu-Ra sits somewhere in the center of a triangle. Its points are Gang Starr, whose beatsmith DJ Premier exec-produced both of Afu’s albums; his onetime mentor Jeru the Damaja; and the Wu-Tang Clan. However, Afu-Ra brings a versatile, if a bit thin, voice and a good range of flows while…
If Blink-182’s last record, the surprisingly maudlin Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, was like a pinch of novocaine in the Vaseline, the debut from Boxcar Racer (a side project featuring Blink singer-guitarist Tom Delonge and drummer Travis Barker) is even more numbing. Listening to this disc — with its…
Art Techno or Future New Wave? In the past year, many buzzwords have surrounded the underground electronic scene, as analog synthesizers and old-school drum machines have become the norm. The new monikers reek of the same ignorance that surrounded Aphex Twin and Warp records when critics dubbed their sound “intelligent…
Throughout his career, trance-pop producer Brian Transeau, aka BT, has proudly worn an “I AM NOT A DJ” T-shirt. This may lead some to consider his upcoming DJ set at the Cajun House a strange aberration. Just think of it as a reminder of the man’s general influence in shaping…
If rap music is the CNN of black America, dancehall reggae is the equivalent for ghetto youth in Jamaica. Since first emerging in the late ’60s, Jamaican DJs (the reggae version of hip-hop’s MCs) have offered their rude-boy spin on the goings-on of politicians and drug dealers in their communities,…
