Music

So, you want to be a rock ‘n’ roll star? No, you don’t. In a post-everything pop culture, in which stardom packs all the allure of a 4 a.m. whore and rock stars come and go with the frequency of a ham radio signal, what you really want is something…

Lurking somewhere in the dusty bins of your neighborhood record store — just after Sade but well before Scritti Politti — is a “new” album by the Sand Rubies called Cuacha — except that it’s really not a new album at all. It is, however, a renamed, repackaged and expanded…

Almost everyone can name some scene in some movie that left such a profound impression on the mind’s eye that it caused him or her instantly to become aware of the overwhelming power of moviemaking techniques, even if it wasn’t realized as such at the time. It’s especially the case…

I think G. Love is high.”What we do is just, like, American music. In this day and age, everything is one, and we just play music, you know what I mean?” Hmm. Correction: I know G. Love is high. “This is what we do, man. We just play this good…

There’s a chapter missing from America’s musical subconscious because we never embraced the Walker Brothers beyond a pair of brilliant ballads. That group’s enormous teenybopper following in Europe made it possible for Scott Walker to release a spate of eccentric No. 1 solo albums in the late ’60s, none of…

When rapper Talib Kweli rolled through Cincinnati a few years back, he met Hi-Tek, a producer who was a member of the rap group Mood. They collaborated on Mood’s full-length debut, 1997’s Doom, and have been tight ever since. Kweli enlisted Hi-Tek for both Black Star’s album and his own…

In the late 1960s, California-born composer Terry Riley went by the sobriquet “Poppy Nogood.”The name sounds far more bellicose than Riley’s soft, almost courtly manner of speech might suggest; but Riley’s work, after all, encompasses a tangle of styles and influences that politely disrespects generic conventions of all kinds, melding…

In much the same way package tours prove it’s possible to see Paris in a day (“People, we’ve got a half-hour in the Louvre, but if we blitz through the Impressionists, we can set aside 10 extra minutes for the gift shop”), Mail or Muse is taking you on an…

For his first album in four years, KRS-One was faced with the same dilemma that his contemporaries from hip-hop’s so-called golden age (circa 1987) have had to deal with, to varying degrees of success. Following the major label A&R line that conscious rap is no longer relevant to the rap-buying…

Emerging from the tactical fumbles of its Frampton Comes Alive! and Blind Faith rereleases, the juggernaut that is Universal Music’s “Deluxe Edition” series has taken a rapid and happy turn for the better. Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On received a loving treatment in February, and now comes 1973’s Catch a…

There’s always been something precious about Nashville folk/alt-country artist Doug Hoekstra. Not “precious” in the cute/pejorative sense; more along the lines of “indefinably rare.” Among American singer-songwriters, he’s possessed of a work ethic so uncommon and diligent it’s likely one could trace his heritage in a straight line back to…

If Greil Marcus, the dean of intellectual rock-as-pop-culture journalists, had grown up in some repressed, oppressive, cold and remote farm town up on the Canadian border, subsisted on tallboys and fried food, read Mad magazine instead of Heidegger, and kept Whitesnake’s debut album in heavy rotation on the boombox, then…

What Life of Brian did for Jesus Christ, All You Need Is Cash does for the more popular Beatles. By the late ’70s there had been other fictitious retellings of the Beatles’ story, such as Mark Shipper’s novel Paperback Writer, which had the group reuniting third on the bill below…

Henry Gray, born in Louisiana in 1925, pulled a stretch in World War II and then migrated to Chicago, which was where Howlin’ Wolf found him. Gray had been honing his piano chops for years in a variety of barrelhouse and back-room settings throughout the South, but it was Chicago…

“Two nights ago in Manhattan, I was onstage thinking that there’s something very cheap about this job,” Rhett Miller says, via phone from the roof of a nightclub in Baltimore. Miller, singer-guitarist for the Old 97’s and band-proclaimed “face man,” is loading in for a show at the beginning of…

How do jazz players come up with the bucks to pay the rent? Do they sell plasma? Stuff envelopes at home? And was that famed jazz saxophonist Jackie McLean Gumbo saw selling tokens to kids at Chuck E. Cheese’s? If 95 percent of all albums made sell less than 2,000…

In Native American folklore and art, the circle often illustrates the continuum of life (What? You were thinking of The Lion King?). So it’s only appropriate that the Native American blues-rock band Indigenous would title its sophomore effort Circle. Released last year on Pachyderm Records, the album has garnered a…

There’s no greater compliment a fan can pay an artist than to confess that he reaches one’s most private core. Alejandro Escovedo has done so in the past for this writer, most notably on his ’93 epic Thirteen Years, a stark chronicle of tragedy, serenity and bloody-minded resolve (much of…

April 10, 1985, Hampton, Virginia: I’m sitting on a dressing-room sofa, somewhere within Hampton Coliseum, passing a bottle of red wine back and forth with Bono. A few hours earlier, U2 had flawlessly executed a show on the Unforgettable Fire tour; now, the singer is holding forth animatedly on the…

For the listener, it’s a genuine high finding a ferociously creative talent that few of your friends know about. You fetishize the records, play them for your friends (“You gotta hear this”), and, if God is good and the ferocious talent rolls through your town, you drag all your like-minded…