Hip-hop’s history a dialectic forged by battling, boasting and street-corner besting is a tug of war between MCs and producers. Throughout much of the late ’90s, the lyricists had the upper hand, prompting the British label BBE (short for “Barely Breaking Even”) to launch The Beat Generation, a series of…
Ballistically speaking, there is no equivalent to 50 Cent. 50 thug’s thug was shot nine times in a single evening and survived, qualifying him for ‘hood sainthood. That assassination attempt came on the heels of a stabbing, which occurred shortly after the release of “How to Rob,” in which the…
Since the demise of Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age have been stoner-rock standard-bearers, the lit Beatles to everyone else’s dim Dave Clark Five. On its 1998 full-length debut, QOTSA demonstrated Josh Homme’s desire to move beyond Kyuss’ lengthy song cycles and craft heavy but hooky rock that at times…
Hot Rod Circuit moved from Auburn, Alabama, to New Haven, Connecticut, in a day. They may not have arrived dressed like the Blues Brothers looking more like a union of displaced roadies in tee shirts, jeans and tats but back in 1998, Hot Rod Circuit was certainly a band on…
Life was cool for Brendan Benson back in 1996. He had a record deal with Virgin Records. His connections enabled him to write and record with Jason Falkner, bandleader of sweet-pop revivalists Jellyfish. He lived in San Francisco just as the Internet was booming and twentysomethings were fancying themselves as…
If anything irritates Fred Sargolini, half of the hip-hop/electro duo Ming & FS, it’s artists who force themselves to color inside the lines. “They say they’re open-minded, but they’re really puritans,” he says. “And people in drum and bass and all kinds of other stuff do it. It’s like they’re…
Two recent developments have me thinking about the Davids of the music industry and whether they have any chance going up against Goliaths, both local and national. First, two local promoters have joined forces, and you can blame it, at least partially, on the Format. The local pop duo scored…
Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the first full-length release from rapper 50 Cent, isn’t so much a debut as an entry wound. Having been shot nine times, 50 Cent is plenty familiar with the latter. But despite all the spent rounds, death and suffering that serve as this album’s very…
Chan Marshall, known to the rock ‘n’ roll world as Cat Power, is a painfully shy woman with a lot to say. You Are Free, her new album and first since 2001’s bleak The Covers Record, is the least self-assured-sounding self-assured record in ages. “Don’t be in love with the…
Contrary to popular belief, the Spanish word puto doesn’t mean “fag.” Only a homosexual who also happens to be an asshole is really a puto. Puto, though, is anything that’s bad, or wrong. For example, if you accused Molotov of homophobia for its 2000 hit “Puto” (which repeated a “Puuuuuto-Puuuuuto”…
Loose Fur is not a Jim O’Rourke album but that’s only true in the sense that Magritte’s famous painting The Treason of Images (which features the line “This is not a pipe” written in French below an obvious pipe) is not a pipe. After all, everything the guitarist, tape splicer,…
No stranger to venting his personal unease upon the world, Henry Rollins has sat confidently behind the wheel of his own company truck since 1986, the year he formed his vanity publishing company, 2.13.61, and launched a solo career as a spoken-word artist. The ferocious mouthpiece for pioneering hard-core outfit…
Media descriptions of Dead Prez concentrate on their black nationalist agitprop, even while there’s ample evidence that Stic.man and M-1 have more generous souls and broader minds. On 2000’s Let’s Get Free, they championed a vegan diet (“Be Healthy”), lauded the wonders of good conversation (“Mind Sex”), and on “Happiness”…
Before the Heartgraves had a name, and when they were just five guys in search of a little alchemy, they were having an early Friday evening practice in member Jonny Bionic’s duplex apartment. Bionic’s neighbor had become accustomed to music from next door; Bionic would often practice with other musicians…
February 3, 1967. Eccentric U.K. record producer Joe Meek, said to be the British equivalent of genius pop producer Phil Spector, takes a sawed-off shotgun and shoots his landlady down a flight of stairs before turning the gun on himself. February 3, 2003. Phil Spector, from the looks of things,…
Pokafase knows he’s in for a geographic challenge in the coming months — and relishes it. “I blew from Phoenix/Only shit harder than that/Is leaving the club without getting martyred and back,” rhymes the local rapper on “Gangsta Alone,” a vintage West Coast G-Funk track from Mastermind, his major-label debut…
With luxurious piano, brooding vocals, and an absolute certainty that death and/or heartbreak are lurking behind every door, Nick Cave fashions bummers of impeccable taste. It’s easy to sniff at his affected air of sophisticated Halloween dread, but he consistently digs deeper than detractors will admit, which he documents again…
“Try, try, try,” Billy Corgan moaned shortly before his Smashing Pumpkins turned to mush. If history is any indication, he was most likely imploring the Little Mermaid’s dad to turn him into a dolphin, but he might well have been talking to his future self: “Billy, when the Pumpkins break…
A classic of the early ’90s, possibly of the same stature as Nevermind, Primal Scream’s gorgeous acid-house/hippie rock remix album Screamadelica revealed that rockers and ravers could hang at the same party. A few years later, such a revelation would come to influence countless acts, especially the Chemical Brothers and…
To be a Breeders fan during the band’s first go-round — as who among the ’90s indie-rock set wasn’t? — was to live in a perpetual state of frustration. Following a knockout debut, 1990’s Pod, the Breeders took four years to deliver the slightly less impressive but no less enjoyable…
Astute listeners with ears to the ground have called Rilo Kiley one of the best new American bands. The group’s reputation is ever-growing. Music journalists, having dragged their sprezzatura out to analyze the Breeders, Superchunk, or Weezer, have been known to skip all the way home to write reviews that…
Finally, there’s an album where getting religion and getting pissed off aren’t mutually exclusive. Songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and onetime Peter Gabriel discovery Joseph Arthur has made a treatise on faith and salvation that gives his demons their equal time with Redemption’s Son. Rarely proselytizing, Arthur seems angry and confused that he’s…
