With all due respect to Cher, it’s Cyndi Lauper who should receive top billing on the pair’s current tour of America. Sure, it’s been more than 15 years since Lauper’s classic debut, She’s So Unusual, made her a star of the pop charts and the MTV generation. It’s now nearly…
The classic American movie Giant is an epic about a Texas cattle baron, Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson), his wife (Elizabeth Taylor) and his family. The film, released in 1956, also features the late James Dean and is riddled with clunky foreshadowing, not least of which is a scene in which…
I have this great idea for a reality television show. Here’s what we do: We round up every single exec, producer, consultant, show doctor, set designer, snotty host, vampiric talent scout, PR monkey and anyone else who had a hand in creating Pop Stars, Making the Band and American Idol,…
Earlier this year, Tony Hajjar was in Vancouver, recording a new album with his band, which is both exactly where he should have been and not where you’d expect. Let’s back up. In 2000, At the Drive-In, an El Paso quintet featuring Hajjar on drums, released Relationship of Command, the…
The word “mature” keeps cropping up in positive reviews of this disc —mature songwriting, mature arrangements, mature subject matter, mature performances — and such references are apt. Unfortunately, maturity isn’t the most scintillating quality: It doesn’t quicken the pulse or trigger the endorphins, and can easily slide into less laudable…
One of the less constructive myths to come from our recent Age of Self-Esteem is that anyone anywhere can be a genius, given the appropriate care and feeding of his or her tender muse. Bullshit. As the Pixies proved, genius is born like Athena, fully grown from the head of…
Even before my first spin of Fed to Your Head had ended, I sensed that the album would inspire strongly contradictory feelings, and a brief prowl across the Internet confirmed my suspicions. An online reviewer at www.ink19.com likened Scorched Earth to “a third-rate Lenny Kravitz” and concluded with comments that…
There is a secret history of British New Wave. Beneath the cosmetic façade of Boy George and Adam Ant lurked a legion of post-punk misfits — champions of cheap guitars, thrift-store glamour and reckless experimentation. Behind every Duran Duran was the spiky funk of the Pop Group; behind every Bow…
Japanese taiko drumming is an art form that is as visual as it is auditory. Kodo’s army of drummers, sinewy and scantily clad in traditional costume, muscle 900-pound drums in perfectly choreographed unison while participating in a complex piece of performance art that is equal parts athletic performance and spiritual…
There very well may be something terribly wrong with the members of Speedealer. “Everybody in this band is pretty pissed off,” says bassist Rich Mullins. “I think our attitude is that, in order for something to rock, you have to really mean it. Jeff [Hirshberg, guitar/vocals] calls it a tremendous…
The trio’s second disc since reimagining itself on 1997’s Zaireeka, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is casually electronic and curiously acoustic. Sounds from both ends of the musical spectrum crash in the middle and collapse into smiling, sad piles of overcast optimism and, as leader Wayne Coyne puts it, “sunshine…
Like virtually all products of American culture, hip-hop has traveled on globalism’s winds to take root in the unlikeliest of places — from Serbia to São Paulo. Africa Raps: Senegal, Mali, and the Gambia, a compilation on German label Trikont, brings rap’s Afrocentric tendencies full circle, collecting recent material from…
If Kruder and Dorfmeister are a blunt before breakfast, then Jazzanova is cocktails after dinner. Stylish and sophisticated, Jazzanova’s debut LP In Between (discounting 2000’s remix collection) is a journey through nu jazz that you’re not likely to forget. The six-man team from Germany has dominated the jazz-dance and down-tempo…
Alicia Keys is so 2001’s Lauryn Hill: a young, beautiful, smart African-American woman with more talent than the white critical community knows how to handle, pushed to the lip of the mainstream media stage by editors and producers grateful for the chance to chip away at their guilt over never…
The first time I ever laughed out loud in a rock club? It was in Manhattan, and They Might Be Giants were playing at a little club called Dr. B’s in Soho. It couldn’t have been more than 1981 or ’82, but they emerged on the scene like a fully…
Fifteen years after the group’s first album, the Goo Goo Dolls name is still good for the occasional line drawn in the dirt. Quite a few haven’t yet forgiven the GGDs for wearing their Replacements jones on their sleeve all the way to multiplatinum status, while Let It Be and…
If Bryan Nesbitt — the super-hot Phoenix-born car designer who gave the world the PT Cruiser before being wooed away from Chrysler by a bigger paycheck from Chevy — had defected instead to Blue Note Records, he might have designed Norah Jones. Like Nesbitt’s instantly iconic car, Jones is a…
They gave each other names. Names that perhaps no other human had ever been given. From now on she would simply be “VV” and he would be known only as “Hotel.” Together they would be The Kills. They would make music, have attitude, and somehow rule the world based only…
Love Jewel. Hate Jewel. Fear her manipulative mom. Laugh at her poetry. Give her props for not fixing that snaggletooth. Marvel at her staying power. Almost seven years ago, I interviewed the fresh-from-Alaska Jewel Kilcher — before she’d sold many copies of her first album. At the time, she’d just…
Imagine, for an instant, that you’ve been granted a wish to vault back in time to that mortifying moment back in middle school when you finally got up enough guts to ask that hottie in Social Studies to your first school dance. Only this time, instead of mumbling some lame…
The premise of the Back to Mine series of dance mix albums is truly innovative. Under the direction of the country’s premier DJ organization, DMC USA, Back to Mine gives featured electronic artists the chance to collect the records — whatever they might be — that they would play for…
Optometry is hardly the first album to mingle jazz, hip-hop and DJ culture. Indeed, it’s not even the first platter to do so on Thirsty Ear. In June 2001, Spring Heel Jack, a London duo that’s rightly viewed as an innovator in the drum ‘n’ bass subgenre, unleashed its own…
