If university music departments offered a survey course on the history of hip-hop, lazier students would be advised to use the X-ecutioners’ new album, Built From Scratch, as their CliffsNotes. More than a vehicle to showcase the quick hands of X-members Rob Swift, Roc Raida, Mista Sinista and Total Eclipse,…
While this is an essential archive of a key figure in modern rock, what you like of it will depend on how open you are to a woman whose best material — the lyrical “Come Back Little Sheba,” the furious “Pissing in a River” — pushes the rock envelope into…
I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a love/hate relationship as intense as the one I’ve been enjoying/despising with Fermin Muguruza’s Brigadistak Sound System. How could I not love an album with Euskera-language lead vocals, Cuban horns, a reggae dub aesthetic, and a Toots and the Maytals cover? How…
Signing up as a tonosPRO member at Tonos.com — the music biz professional’s hook-up site whose ad banners tease “Got the hit? Tonos has the access!” — is a little like hitmaking as a Blizzard massively multiplayer online game. First, you create your player — in the form of your…
Let’s say you’re a young person, maybe between the ages of 19 and 26, and you’ve finished school and you’ve moved to a new city and you’re happily in the process of finding your way around the world, maybe working a job, maybe not, maybe riding a bike, maybe driving…
Ben Kweller stares at the row of posters taped along a wall inside Fort Worth’s Ridglea Theater, six or seven of the same make and model: an oversize reproduction of the cover of his new album, Sha Sha, a close-up of his face with a red toothbrush jammed in his…
Dan Bryk, a frumpy Canuck who refuses to give his age but looks to be in his 20s, sits on an outdoor patio behind his Yamaha keyboard and sings his ass off, which isn’t such an easy task — the dude’s heavy, literally. It’s 9 p.m. on a Thursday in…
Rob Withem collects song titles. Withem, singer-guitarist for the ’80s-flavored pop group Fine China, spends much of his time conjuring up captivating turns of phrase, storing each new idea in a Word computer file, with the intention of eventually building a song around it. Although it’s a method that John…
For a guy generally lauded as a pop alchemist, Eels leader Mark Oliver Everett (a.k.a. E) makes for a pretty unlikely pop hero. For one thing, behind his thick beard and impenetrable glasses, he looks like a pretty undesirable cross between James A. Garfield and Steve McQueen in An Enemy…
Alanis Morissette’s jagged little thrill has subsided. It’s been seven years since her debut stormed pop airwaves and she was crowned queen of angst-in-her-pants self-martyrdom. The underperforming Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie somewhat dimmed the burnished jewels of her tiara, but not enough to knock her out of the palace. With…
We may never get back the true Mystikal, the real Mystikal, the Mystikal who put his skills on the table first, then looked around for some well-deserved ass. That was the Mystikal of “Y’all Ain’t Ready Yet,” and indeed we weren’t. When the New Orleans rapper dropped that single in…
Once upon a time, in Memphis, Tennessee, there were a couple of brothers, Dorsey and Johnny Burnette. They grew up near Elvis and played the same jumbled Mississippi driftwood music: country, blues, boogie music that was like the covers of 1950s dime-store paperbacks and comic books, colorful and lurid. The…
Believe it or not, there are rock critic circles. That’s where pent-up, penned-in pop music detractors spew their spleens making fun of all the music that you good people manage to enjoy. Mention Chicago™ in such ellipticals and you get a head-for-the-hills reaction akin to Typhoid Mary with horns, and…
It’s a sharp, almost violent drop leading to the back entrance of Beeloe’s bar. Down a steep flight of concrete stairs just off Mill Avenue — currently teeming with baggy-pantsed high schoolers out for some Friday night cruising — past a silver-painted door, and you’re inside the club. Inside, the…
In spite of a half-minded president, a slew of bad haircuts and a Me-centric mindset, a few memorable and artistic things managed to slip through the conservative cracks of the Reagan era. Confoundingly, much of the substantive musical activity of the ’80s came out of Minnesota, a frigid and often…
How can you tell when a jam session is working the way it’s supposed to? Reasonable people might have different opinions about it, but I’ve got a theory. Based on watching the Phoenix Jazz Workshop cast a spell over the Lucky Dragon on a recent Sunday night, I think the…
Just over a year ago, when U2 was in danger of losing its constituency, the group returned to its roots with All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and — voilà! — the pop-music world responded with a spate of ring-kissing that still has cash registers chiming. Today the lads have…
In a world filled with disposable, soulless music and overly slick production, the Mountain Goats are a refreshing antidote. This is about as simple and honest as it gets. John Darnielle, a.k.a. the Mountain Goats, cranks out songs straight from the heart and captures them on a Panasonic boom box…
How do you like your Cash served? Biscuits and sausage gravy, side of grits and hot coffee in some fleabite Southern truck stop? That’s not a bad metaphor, especially since Cash has come to represent almost 50 years of (small case) americana music. Diesel fumes, cigarette smoke, coffee and cooking…
Let’s say you’re a music-biz Dr. Frankenstein. You want to build the perfect beast for the MTV era, an artist equally adept at visual and musical communication, someone for whom a video and song are all part of an inextricable package. Rob Zombie just might be that beast. Sure, it’s…
The question is pretty straightforward, really. It’s the answer that curves away from me. I’m talking to Evidence — a third of the L.A. hip-hop group Dilated Peoples — about the state of the movement, the much-vaunted L.A. underground that flourished back in the early ’90s with a barely-noticed-by-the-mainstream scene…
Post-9/11, Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter infamously (and prematurely) declared the end of irony, and took a media beating for it. Somewhere in Silver Lake, California, though, five guys must have been wondering what all the fuss was about; how could there be an end to something they’d…
