Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings made a compelling argument for steering youth in the direction of becoming doctors and lawyers and such with their 1977 cover of Ed Bruce’s “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” They warned about the dangers of letting them “pick guitars and…
“Linden Boulevard represent, represent/Tribe Called Quest represent, represent/When the mic is in my hand, I’m never hesitant/My favorite jam back in the day was ‘Eric B. for President.'” When A Tribe Called Quest MC Phife Dawg dropped call-and-response lines as agile and tactile as the above on “Steve Biko (Stir…
Sunny is hardly the word you’d expect to come out of the mouth of a metal man. You know the type. Erratically long hair. Painted-on leather pants. Studded wristbands. Guitars played while standing with feet as far apart as limbs allow. Names with umlauts over vowels just because it looks…
Contrary to the social mores that marked the era, the British demimonde found a way to take the starch out of its collars with the confessional smut novel that Victorian England perfected. Sure, France likes to believe that its raunch is saucier, but the French are far too sexually comfortable…
It’s possible that a sense of humor has joined common sense on the endangered species list of American foibles. Not that anybody’s noticed, mind you, but when a pair of wise-cracking DJs get canned for a practical joke–and not a very original one at that–well, it may be time to…
Anybody who’s ever spent any amount of time with musicians knows that one of their biggest complaints is finding a place to play live. Certain clubs won’t book their bands because they don’t draw. Petty rivalries get blown out of proportion between neighboring scenes. (Hello, Dallas and Denton.) Rock clubs…
Will Ian Svenonius ever stop? The kicking and screaming former instigator of the fight-this-generation youth revolt of Nation of Ulysses felt immediate and pertinent back on 1991’s punk planet. The desperate attitude that the band wore as earnestly as an Oliver North oath and his chic suspicion of adults went…
Ever since man has been able to commit images onto moving pictures he’s been imaging what it’s like to leave the earth behind for heavenly bodies or galaxies far, far away. Georges Méliès sent a group of adventurers on le voyage dans la lune back in 1902, and though the…
Kathie Lee Gifford must be fuming. Pay some Honduran kids to earn an honest living cranking out clothes for Wal-Mart back in 1996 and you’re called a child-labor pariah. Sign their American counterparts to multimillion-dollar record deals a few years later and make them sweat to canned synth-pop tracks and…
It’s a little before 1 p.m. in Portland when Jise, one of the MCs in the Arsonists, answers the phone in his hotel room. There’s a fog in his voice that betrays that he’s probably closer to unconsciousness than consciousness. “I’m just waking up, man,” he cracks, his voice creaking…
“I’m going to be playing with the Ed Soph Trio down there,” saxophonist Joe Lovano says from New York of his upcoming performance at the Dallas Museum of Art. “I haven’t done that in a long time, go somewhere and play with some local guys. But I’ve known Ed for…
Like the Screaming Trees’ Mark Lanegan and the Afghan Wigs’ Greg Dulli, former American Music Club songwriter and vocalist Mark Eitzel has a husky baritone that gels nicely with his literate lyrics of emotional self-evisceration. Tales of drunken abandon and the inevitable laments that follow after liquor’s cloudy veil evaporates…
During the pre-production of Lolita, enigmatic director Stanley Kubrick made an extremely rare print appearance in the Winter 1960-’61 edition of Sight and Sound, the British Film Institute’s cinema journal. Kubrick had come under fire in the country he left behind, America, as well as his adopted homeland of England…
When New Orleans dirty south B-Boy Mystikal left Master P’s No Limit franchise and returned to Britney and boy-band bopping Jive’s world domination pop machine with 1999’s Ghetto Fabulous, certain critical habitués expressed reservations. Skeptics felt it was the case of a young artist making a play for the show…
That Bill Callahan’s musical pseudonym comes from an opaque cloud of carcinogenic pollution stirred up by the luxuries of modern living tells you what sort of mental state this no-fi nonconformist wallowed in when he started his one-man act back in the late 1980s. Smog’s early cassette releases and Drag…
What happens on December 21, 2012, has–according to the Mayan Calendar–taken a 5,125-year cycle to recur. On that date, a very rare conjunction of the sun with the ecliptic of the Milky Way galaxy happens. (Basically, it’s the coincidence of the winter solstice and the heliacal rising of the galactic…
Were there any justice in pop culture, turn-of-the-century French artists, writers, musicians and poets would be able to return from their graves and proclaim, “Apportez-moi la tête du Baz Luhrmann!” The Australian director’s kitchen-sink musical Moulin Rouge takes more than a little liberty with its subject matter, turning a time…
Before 1999, the riddle “What is the sound of young punks making new wave?” lay somewhere on the unspeakable scale between “Does anyone really think Julia Roberts can act?” and “Will Nader actually run for president?” The proof proved to be not as insincere as the latter nor as impious…
Even though the power-tool bludgeoning of Jim G. Thirlwell’s music may have some contemporary cohorts, it’s his peculiar brand of lyrical ranting that sets the now NYC-based Thirlwell (better known as Foetus, and all of its various permutations) in a world entirely his own. Imagine a crack-powered Eric Bogosian gargling…
A quick glance at Dorothy Antoinette La Selle’s “Santa Cruz Summer” can mistakenly lead you to read something into her work that’s not there. This dense arrangement is formed by geometric shapes that divide up her masonite canvas and are painted in primary and secondary colors. It’s the sort of…
Unless you’ve ever had your clock cleaned by a drag queen, don’t think for a moment that you know what it’s like to be Handsome Dick Manitoba. The Dictators’ charismatic front man got himself entangled in one of the most celebrated imbroglios of the mid-’70s at proto-punk hole CBGB’s during…
Joan Jett has worn her rocker uniform and her tough-girl snarl that betters even Elvis’ confident lip curl for so long now that it makes you wonder if the Philly-born, Los Angeles-raised siren ever suffered from the doubt that seems to wiggle its way under the skin of every rock-and-roll…
