American music magazines suck. Rolls off the tongue, don’t it? These days it’s rolling off everyone’s. Saunter down the length of a magazine rack and scowl at the teen-pop hoochie starlets, the drooling trendpigism (“The Strokes! The Hives! The White Stripes!”), the vapid rock-star puff pieces, the gutless CD reviews…
How difficult it is to type the words: Joe Strummer, songwriter-singer-guitarist for the Clash, is dead at the age of 50. The stomach dropped at the sight of the words coming across the CNN crawl early Monday morning; impossible so vital a musician and so vigorous a man could disappear…
So I was in Tower Records the other day, and I saw that System of a Down has a new CD out called Steal This Album. Since their last one was kind of a letdown, certainly not worth the full $17 list price, I figured, “What the fuck? I’ll crotch…
The oddest mash-up of the year, discounting that Missy Elliott-Joy Division joint (roach, actually) that hasn’t left the 10-disc changer since May: Paul Young (yup, that one–no parlez?) fronts a Tex-Mex confab consisting of Brits, which rhymes with “shits” and with good goddamned reason. The road to hell is paved…
Saint Etienne traffic in opposites: A product of dismal Thatcher-era England, the trio buried its late-’80s angst in candied dance-pop that conflated disco’s feel-good throb with girl-group élan and ’60s-pop melodies, only to go live-band for 1998’s sparkling Good Humor, hooking up with Cardigans producer Tore Johansson at the exact…
The New York-based dance label Ultra excels at neat summations of current electronic-music fads: Its recent electroclash compilation pitted young nü-wavers like Chicks on Speed and Fischerspooner against their stalwart ’80s antecedents, and its new trance set, though by definition creatively atrophied, condenses all the big-room exhilaration that scene has…
With their powerhouse chords and heavy riffs, the Toadies still evoke nostalgic memories of the musical ennui and confusion of the mid-’90s, when cries of “sellout!” reverberated loudly through the rarefied air of certain punk and alternative-music circles. As avaricious radio programmers co-opted punk and sold it to a mainstream…
Precisely why Guns N’ Roses’ North American tour came to an abrupt end last week, days before it was scheduled to hit the American Airlines Center on December 19, may be a mystery never totally untangled. Sure, there have been hints and rumors: Front man Axl Rose insisted the New…
Electric Circus, the new album by the Chicago-bred rapper Common, is a late contender for hip-hop album of the year: It’s a wildly textured, lovingly drawn tapestry of urban psychedelia that, like Meshell Ndegeocello’s recently overlooked Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, imagines the form as a febrile mixture of funk, soul,…
I know, I know–you fell in love with Watermark, fell in love to Watermark or maybe just heard Enya while walking around the mall and thought she was singing to you even though you don’t understand Latin and can’t tell the diff between Gaelic and Elvish. At this very moment,…
Now that they’ve busted up, like Pumpkins smashed on curbs the night after Halloween, it’s time to admit most everything post-Siamese Dream was way overrated by the kids who found much meaning in bald Billy’s dreary fart-rock; look, when the words don’t say nothin’, they don’t mean nothin’. (Yeah, yeah–God…
Whitney Houston’s return after an eight-year absence, 1998’s My Love Is Your Love, should not have worked as well as it did: Houston had firmly entered her career’s second decade, so hiring R&B’s hippest producers to modernize her sound seemed like a last grasp at the credibility younger, edgier singers…
No. 17 on my List of Things I’d Like to Someday Know: why every other band of young British guys partial to swirly guitars and with a thing for groove eventually ends up aping Exile on Main Street and wearing too much denim. Primal Scream, the Jesus and Mary Chain,…
For true, hip-hop has put its head to many strange bedfellows as it continues to grow in size, stature and power. Ghetto celebrities and unrepentant criminals share the stage with enlightened truthsayers and silently extraordinary designers and technical innovators, and everyone is scheming for a piece of the power and…
Last week, the Star tabloid and New York Post, ahem, “reported” that Burleson native and American Idol Kelly Clarkson wasn’t the “doe-eyed amateur she appeared to be” when she was crowned Queen of Crappy Pop in September. Yeah, and Michael Jackson used to be black, Chevy Chase used to be…
I hate pretentious album titles that try to sell you Impending Doom. Are these guys fortunetellers? What do they know that we don’t? If we’re all gonna die soon, anyway, why are they even charging money for the CD? Why not just give it away free as a public service?…
Otherwise known as Phil “Homer Henderson” Bennison and two other guys (Paul Harrington on harmonica, Stan Ridgway-style; Dick Cordes, brushing drums and ringing bells and shaking maracas), the Starlings come bearing a Yuletide EP that clocks in at just more than 11 minutes–perfect, I’d say, given my Jew attention span…
We are white. We long to be funky. We want elasticity; we want the rubber knees, the fluid flow, the boiling blood, the innate understanding of the rhythms we pine to create. We want the funk, are willing to give up everything for the funk. But it remains buried by…
I began hating Christmas albums around the same time I figured out there was no Santa Claus: a long time ago and well before my parents knew any different. In both cases, I played along for as long as I could. Well, OK, that’s not quite true. As far as…
When Chomsky played The Door on November 23, singer-guitarist Sean Halleck announced that it was officially the group’s final show supporting last year’s Onward Quirky Soldiers. They weren’t going to play another gig until they were finished with a new record for a new label. But that’s all he said…
Near the end of The Roots’ sixth album is a song (the 10-minute-plus “Water”) that underlines, italicizes and bold faces the problem that has always plagued the group: They are too smart, too thoughtful, too much for hip-hop. Sliding over drummer ?uestlove and bassist Leon Hubbard’s stuttering strut, head voice…
In the early 1990s, Richard Buckner detached himself from his longtime band, the Buckets, to become one of alt-country’s rising stars. Although steeped in traditional country and old-timey lore, Buckner opted for a spacey folk sound closer to Tim Buckley and Leonard Cohen. A major label contract with MCA resulted…
