As the Police reunion tour motorcade slowly makes its way toward North Texas, seemingly lead not by a tour bus but by a giant bulldozer unapologetically scooping up millions of dollars, rock reunions and nostalgia concerts grow as ever more unavoidable precepts of music fandom. Everyone has gone all buck…
Twenty days before his death in 1996, Timothy Leary taped a farewell message disclosing his thoughts on morality. At that point, 30-odd years after his attempts—along with author Ken Kesey and their band of psychedelic sidekicks, the Merry Pranksters—to initiate revolution through the potentially mind-expanding powers of LSD, no one…
So there’s death metal and speed metal, classic metal and hair metal. Bet you didn’t know there’s something called “Southern Metal,” though, didja, much less enough of it ’round these parts to fill a whole three-day festival. Indeed there is, and the genre’s pretty much what you would expect: heavy…
Remember ZZ Top’s early albums such as Tres Hombres and Deguello? This was back when the Texas trio still played creepy psychedelic blues, laden with dark riffs and even darker atmosphere, before they cheesed out with “Legs” and that stupid car. Dallas’ Dragna recovers that era of unique Texas blues-rock,…
Kicking off with the deliciously noisy cacophony of “The Stinger,” Harlem, the debut disc of Denton quartet White Drugs, is such a punch to the eardrums, it makes Iggy Pop seem like a folk singer. Harlem is a witches’ brew of bashing drums, relentless guitars and, of course, singer/guitarist Christian…
Invasion: Polyphonic Spree’s Fragile Army is finally poised to invade the nation. The album is set for release June 19, and if you want you can buy the special edition with a 52-minute DVD documentary (made by Julie Doyle) and a Hal Samples-shot video, along with a Fragile Army patch…
I live in what, upon reflection, is a kind of bizarre part of town. I live in the gargantuan South Side on Lamar building, and I know you know which one that is, because if you are anywhere within a 100-mile radius of the south side of Dallas, you can’t…
I’m not gonna lie: I get all those Live songs mixed up. There’s that “I can feel it…” one. Is that one “Lightning Crashes”? And then “Selling the Drama”; is that the one that says “We won’t be raped like that, no-oh-oh…”?That’s the thing with Live. Chances are you own…
To some extent, the lyrics of pop music are about emotion, specifically of the romantic variety. Oh sure, there are the occasional forays into intellectual queries, or literary ruminations, or mathematical formulae, but truly even the arithmetic boils down to two formulae: 1+1=2 and, more often, 2-1=1. Given the trite…
No Festivus for the rest of us: So the yahoos at Yahoo!Buzz (the Web engine’s pop culture site that keeps track of stuff like who is the most Google’d American Idol performer, etc.) recently tallied up which summer music fests are the most popular, Top 10-style, and guess what? Not…
So, the House of Blues opened this past week, kicking off with Erykah Badu’s solo set, followed by the debut of her seat-of-their-pants soul collective the Cannabinoids (no review available by press time, of course, but hit up Unfair Park for the lowdown). When I initially heard it would be…
Booze? Music? We’re all over it: OK, sure, Billboard magazine wrote up the Good Records/Urbano Restaurant Rock ‘n’ Roll Wine Dinners a while back, but hey, DO broke the news on Unfair Park. But this isn’t about us; this is about Dinner No. 3, which takes place Monday, May 21,…
“My paintings are fun, and they’re supposed to be fun,” says artist Patrick Williams (not to be confused with our very own mad genius managing editor of the same name; ’round here we call him P-Dub) says in his artist’s statement. And with their images of goofy little beings in…
Ange Fitzgerald seems to have a foot fetish. But it’s not what you think. The Dallas-by-way-of-Nebraska-New-York-and-Seattle photographer shoots portraits, mainly, including pairs of tootsies that say more about form and feeling than most folks can from the neck up. Such is Fitzgerald’s M.O. She shoots simple things with a simple—but…
Alexandra Nechita, once a 6-year-old art prodigy dubbed “the petite Picasso,” is all grown up. She’s 21 now, and though she could have petered out as a burned-out has-been back in the day, she instead steadily improved on her early genius and has cranked out artwork for Bill Clinton, George…
Spam-a-lot: If there’s one thing the music staff here at the Dallas Observer can agree on, it’s Vanilla Ice. We love Vanilla Ice. We want to party with him. We want to party with him soooooo bad! So imagine our happy surprise when, upon checking our tricked-out MySpace page, we…
This is a story about Erykah Badu’s newest project, but let’s start with another soul icon. One of the most important—and overlooked—moments in the recent history of pop music—hell, pop culture—occurred at the end of the 2006 Grammys. Just when it seemed the awards ceremony was destined to go down…
Remember that weird time in the ’80s when white people doing blues was all cool? What was up with that? Perhaps the most well-known of the top-40 bluesmen was George Thorogood, who was, indeed, quite thorough when it came to diggin’ out some old-school Delta inspiration and even better at…
Modern rock is plagued by many problems, and two of them revolve around the issue of earnestness. Often musicians suffer from one of two sides of the same problem: Either they, in all their “coolness” and allegiance to all that is affected, worship at the altar of irony with such…
Dallas loves it some lady bloggers. And the ladies show their love back, especially this week, when not one but two estrogen-generated events will be foisted upon the masses by two of our fair burg’s favorites—namely Kittenpants (aka Darci Ratliff, who has expanded beyond the digital realm into that of,…
In rock, there are several classic, iconic poses that have stood as visual emblems of the genre, that have sustained it for years. In this case, the cliché of a picture being worth a certain number of words holds true: The windmill pose of a guitar king—most perfectly personified in…
According to the Internet Movie DataBase, the “plot keywords” for Mike Nichols’ 1967 über-classic The Graduate include “dysfunctional family,” “bus ride,” “alcoholic mother,” “adultery” and “sports car.” Those few words do as much as any others to sum up Nichols’ cinematic portrayal of post-college generation gap angst, confusion and horniness…
