For a long time, the only hip-hop in Deep Ellum was the odd Young MC or Tone Loc song that would sneak into rotation on The Bone’s roof deck. And, yeah, that didn’t really count. Always been pretty hard to find hip-hop or R&B or even a DJ set between…
You get one disc “for those of us who prefer singles to albums.” (Titled, naturally, “Pop,” and selected by journalist Miranda Sawyer.) Another put together by a man who believes the group to be “touched by the hand of God–not once but twice.” (“Fan,” assembled by journalist John McCready.) A…
Nas runs, it seems, on two themes: loss and the reclamation of former glory. With God’s Son, the Queens rapper–plagued by a lack of focus for years–makes those themes indistinguishable, finally meeting the challenge of Illmatic, his 1994 masterpiece and albatross as he struggled through mediocrity. Conceptually, the new album…
Pink and Shakira made serious inroads last year for major-label pop tarts trying hard to shake up the system. Pink, of course, decided Y Kant Tori Read wasn’t such a bad listen and so toughened up her outré R&B with help from a 4 Non Blonde, of all people. As…
Overheard at a bar in the wee hours of New Year’s Eve: “Well, the thing about the floor is, there’s nowhere left for me to fall.” Eric Bachmann, late of Archers of Loaf and now the Tom Waits-lite croon–er–croaker of Crooked Fingers, might have written that line. As the front…
James Taylor’s stab at “Everyday” was just underwhelmingly twee; Andy Bell makes the Buddy Holly tune full-blown gay, which is precisely the point, since few singers are so loud or proud about their sexuality as the Erasure singer (emoter, really). Erasure’s “Everyday” plays even sweeter than the original, but not…
BLACK We hear someone softly speaking in Italian, then… FADE IN: A HOTEL ROOM–EARLY EVENING The room is in slight disarray. Whoever is staying in the room has been here awhile. A few room-service trays are stacked on a table. The bed is made, but rumpled. A lit cigarette rests…
They’ve arrived like Cubans on the Miami Beach shoreline, those cover-cum-tribute bands that clog the local concert calendar each weekend and push “original” acts further to the sidelines. Not quite sure what it says about the local rock scene when the best new band is the best old band–Queen for…
The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) announced its nominees for the 45th annual Grammy Awards on Tuesday, and it was a pretty sweet day for Dallas acts. Well, kind of. See, Norah Jones and the Dixie Chicks both are up for a handful of awards, and both…
Oleander is a droll name for a band whose lead singer’s last name is Flowers–the Sacramento quartet gets its handle from the ubiquitous, dusty pink and white shrubs that “decorate” freeway medians across the land (and the blossoms are deadly poisonous, how rock and roll). Coming off at first like…
The first artist since Merle Haggard to effectively glamorize California’s dusty honky-tonk corridors, Dave Alvin and his roots-rock cohorts The Blasters fused blues and country with a unique back-street punk edge. Like a West Coast Springsteen for the early ’90s, Alvin’s solo albums showcased his deep, rumbling voice (which sounds…
Well, well, Weller–another album hailed as “comeback” in the U.K., where it’s been available in slightly altered form since September, and another album sure to be labeled “sell back” in the U.S., where a handful of remaining old fans will wonder why they ever bothered at all. You can’t damn…
Sean Paul’s success in commercial hip-hop markets doesn’t make him a sellout–yet. His ubiquitous ganja-burner anthem, “Gimme the Light,” is genuine dancehall reggae, even if backed by Atlantic’s major-label clout. And as with his 2000 debut, Stage One, Paul’s sophomore release, Dutty Rock, collects his biggest–and therefore, some of dancehall’s…
Dot Allison is best known as the ex-singer of Scottish trio One Dove, which quickly came and went back in 1993. One Dove’s detached coolness and dub explorations (courtesy of Primal Scream producer Andrew Weatherall) still generated enough earth tones to keep it grounded in dance-pop. In fact, One Dove’s…
Once upon a time way back in the early 1990s, a clan called Wu-Tang formed, with GZA “at the head.” Two years after its seminal 1993 debut, Enter the Wu-Tang, the Clan issued its twin classics: Method Man’s Tical and GZA’s Liquid Swords. Each album placed urban and kung-fu mythology…
A roundtable discussion of music in 2002, featuring me and two people I made up: Zac Crain: Many have compared these rock-and-roll days to the beginning of the 1990s, when youths in revolt found nirvana in Nirvana. I don’t buy that. Sure, yeah, whatever, the White Stripes and the Strokes…
You’ll love anything you got for free, and if you don’t think that’s true, you’ve never seen a free-pass preview audience applaud a Rob Schneider movie. That’s why Aimee Mann’s tuneless-soulless Lost in Space tops some tone-deaf crits’ year-end lists, why Beck’s Sea Change is praised as a “masterpiece” when…
1. Eminem, The Eminem Show (Interscope) 2. Various Artists, Music From and Inspired by the Motion Picture 8 Mile (Interscope) 3. Linkin Park, Reanimation (Warner Bros.) 4. Dave Matthews Band, Busted Stuff (RCA) 5. Nelly, Nellyville (Universal) 6. Nas, God’s Son (Columbia) 7. Jay-Z, The Blueprint 2: The Gift &…
Top 10 Albums 1. Norah Jones, Come Away With Me (Blue Note) 2. Tom Waits, Blood Money and Alice (ANTI-) 3. Beck, Sea Change (Interscope) 4. Six Feet Under, Music from the HBO Original Series (Universal) 5. N.E.R.D., In Search Of… (Virgin) 6. The White Stripes, White Blood Cells (V2)…
1. Christina Aguilera, Stripped (RCA): Last year was Christina Aguilera’s for the taking: Stripped, the long-awaited follow-up to her smash 1999 debut, arrived just as teen-pop took its first steps into a delicate post-pubescence, with artists making bolder creative statements and listeners actually taking them seriously. But instead of delivering…
Listmaking, especially the year-end variety, lends itself to the careful selection of absolute favorites–picking which albums and singles best articulated a certain idea, emotion, joke or sensation. But 2002, like the past couple of years before it, didn’t yield such easy victors; filesharing, cheap technology and the increased intermingling of…
Slobberbone, Slippage (New West): The best bar band in America–not just Denton or Dallas or Fort Worth–delivers a rock record (“Springfield, IL.” and “Write Me Off”) that knows it doesn’t always have to (“Sister Beams” and “Back”). It’s “classic rock” if you mean “timeless,” “modern rock” if you mean “now.”…
