When Moody Fuqua took over as general manager and talent buyer at Crown & Harp, the Lower Greenville dive bar quickly became one of the most important club venues and cultural melting pots in Dallas. On any given night, you can hear a band making sounds you’ve never heard before…
Being able to predict the future is valuable. Jay Jernigan and Jimi Bowman have the kind of synthesizer collection aficionados like Vincent Gallo or Ryan Gosling could afford. But with most of their collection acquired during the 1990s when pawnshops were full of rare gems, they paid a fraction of…
Desmond Blair didn’t put “born without hands” on his resume back in 2010. On paper, he met the qualifications for the jobs he applied for after earning his degrees in Art and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas. But people acted strange when he showed up to job…
Hip-hop artists come from all walks of life. The notion that any generalizations can be made about their backgrounds is nothing less than absurd. Growing up during a gruesome civil war in Liberia, 7KNUCKLES had a tragic youth. He narrowly escaped death and the life of a kid soldier. Decades…
PS the Rebels call their sound Afro Hop. As the name suggests, it’s a fusion of Afrocentric music with a blend of hip-hop. Think Fela Kuti meets classic hip-hop. But it’s more than a name: Pihon and SumUiLL, the two letters in “PS,” are brothers who migrated from Kenya in…
Even though it’s been serving three meals, fresh coffee and booze since midsummer, people still sometimes call The Heights looking for legal advice. That’s not as odd at it sounds, though, considering that the Lakewood restaurant/bar/coffeehouse/lounge replaced Legal Grounds, the beloved coffeehouse that dispensed caffeine and law tips for around…
Big K.R.I.T. With BJ the Chicago Kid, Scotty ATL, DeLorean and Curtis Mayz The Bomb Factory, Dallas Friday, November 27, 2015 Big K.R.I.T. brought his Kritically Accaimed tour to The Bomb Factory on Black Friday. Many potential ticket buyers could very well have been shopping, recovering from shopping or arrested or…
The last four years have been a wild ride for Daniel Huffman. After getting Wayne Coyne’s attention with hand pour vinyl records that are works of art back in 2011, Huffman spent interminable hours making thousands of records for the Flaming Lips. The Dallas native also spent much of his…
An important part of running a gallery is observing people at your shows, reading the room, noticing who is engaged with the work, and talking to people. You notice body language: the way perspective buyers keep circling back to a certain piece while others are there to appreciate the work…
Bob Birdnow’s Remarkable Tale of Human Survival and the Transcendence of Self is a work of fiction that puts TED Talks to shame. Local filmmaker and playwright Eric Steele has completed The Midwestern Trilogy he started back in 2008 with an absolute gem by adapting this one-man show into a…
Metric With Sarah Jaffe and Hibou The Bomb Factory, Dallas Friday, November 20, 2015 Canadian synth pop stars Metric started their show at The Bomb Factory on Friday night in the dark. The recorded voice of what sounded like a goofy scientist from an ancient educational video said something about…
News of the Dixie Chicks reuniting to go on tour has been some of the biggest news in country music this past month. Easily one of the most important and influential country acts of the past 20 years, their Bush-hating, Earl-killing ways have been sorely missed in the near-decade since…
The Local Yokel podcast started in 2009 with a single microphone hanging from the ceiling in an apartment. Six years and an undetermined number of episodes later, Local Yokel is a video podcast recorded in a professional studio by an eclectic mix of people from the music and visual arts…
It was enough to scare people away. The soft sculptures were looming, abstract but not geometric, elements that were not plain so much as creepy. In the 1970s, Gillian Bradshaw-Smith was living in a New York City loft. Several other artists lived in the building and many of them opened…
Leon Bridges With Wesley Geiger Majestic Theatre, Dallas Saturday, November 14, 2015 Leon Bridges had a triumphant homecoming Saturday night on the last show of his American tour, his first North Texas show (with the exception of a busking performance on a Deep Ellum sidewalk) since his album release party…
Desmond Lehmann remembers being pulled over in Bryan like it was yesterday. The police told him, known to most as local pop singer Dezi 5, he had failed to stop at a stop sign, but he knew this was not the truth. “Do you think I was going to argue…
Fat Pimp received a rude awakening right as he thought he’d realized his dream. It was 2008, and having generated enough buzz as a rapper to be courted by different labels, the Dallas native signed with Warner Bros. But, being young and inexperienced when it came to contracts, he soon…
Arthur Muhammad got to make a movie about what happened to him in high school. Carter High is now playing in Texas theaters and will expand to screens in other cities over the next two weekends. The film tells the emotionally charged story of one of the greatest—and most infamous—high…
The age of 14 was a pivotal year for Dallas rapper Lyrical.She had a poem published after winning a poetry contest, recorded hip-hop music for the first time and met her father for the first, and only, time — and even then it was an accident. It was a year…
Bentley Green is not a kid rapper; he is a serious hip-hop artist who happens to be a kid. After putting out YouTube videos that millions of people watched when he was 6, he appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and The Maury Show. After appearing in a few commercials…
Frank Campagna gives a quick description of Deep Ellum ten years ago: “Dead.” This is when he opened Kettle Art Gallery in Deep Ellum, which celebrates its double digits birthday Thursday. But he’s been involved with the neighborhood since 1981 and knew that it falls and rises. He opened…
When Ron C was a teenager, he started making big bucks selling drugs in South Dallas. But he also learned how to rap and started writing lyrics that accurately depicted his street life. He applied the business skills he learned from being a drug dealer into successfully selling records independently…
