The Top 10 Metal Love Songs

In honor of St. Valentine’s Day, we wanted to offer you a list of love songs. But, these aren’t the ordinary love songs about boys falling in love with girls, or girls getting their heart broken. The following heavy metal songs represent the madness and chaos of love’s firm grip…

Should Rap Lyrics Be Used in Criminal Trials?

Legions of angry parents were already up in arms when gangster rap arrived on the scene. After the 1985 PMRC Senate hearings helped institute “Parental Advisory” stickers, albums by Ice-T and N.W.A. were among the first to be branded. Since then, rap as a musical form has continued to take…

On Pop Music and Violence Against Women

Jaime LeesMy R. Kelly necklaceI can’t stop thinking about Rihanna. Her single, “Stay,” came out a year ago this month and it’s still omnipresent. I’ll hear it on the radio, in the grocery store and played on the jukebox at a bar by some sad bastard with no concept of…

Stephan Pyles Says Goodbye to Samar and Hello to More Boring

Well this sucks. It hasn’t even been a year since I wrote about the temporary closure of Samar and its potential impact on the sandwich scene here in Dallas. Samar earned four stars in the Dallas Morning News, and it was arguably one of owner Stephan Pyles’ most exciting restaurants…

33 Ways to Tell You’re Spending Too Much Time in Oak Cliff

In many ways Oak Cliff is the soul of Dallas — home to several of its best restaurants and most vital residents. Its finest music venue, The Kessler, is the great counter-argument to all those who would accuse Dallas of worshipping only the new and shiny. The theater is an…

The Five Types of ’90s Pop Songs

I should begin here: During the actual ’90s, I was much too busy listening to Japanese videogame soundtracks (educate yourself) to actually enjoy ’90s pop music. My first-hand memories of most of it are hearing it in a car, at a skating rink, on somebody else’s Discman, and shaking my…

Why I Still Love Green Day’s Dookie, 20 Years After Its Release

Song associations are strange, because when I hear “Longview” by Green Day, I think of Rosemarie Sandoval’s hair. We were both sophomores, sharing a table in Mr. Nardinelli’s 3rd period art class. I think she was almost a year older, and if she wasn’t taller than me anyway, her bangs…

Which Rock Star Are You? Take the Quiz!

By now you know which Game of Thrones character and politician and root vegetable your Facebook friends would be, or at least which one they would like people to think of them as. And we appreciate that sort of information here at DC9 at Night. After all, that’s why we’re…

It’s Time to Say Goodbye to Flameless Candles

I’m not a designer. A glimpse inside my own home would reveal that while I may have amassed a collection of relatively nice things, they in no way work well together. It’s as if a half dozen furniture catalogues were tossed into a blender and my living room was constructed…

Why Beyoncé Could Be a New Leader for Texas Hip-Hop

Last summer, Houston’s one-woman pop monopoly Beyoncé Knowles introduced the world to one of her grittier alter-egos with the unleashing of Third Ward Trill. With chopped-and-screwed rap deliveries, à la promotional single “Bow Down/ I Been On,” fans received a taste of the hip-hop influences to follow on Jay Z’s…

A History of Terrible Band Names

It’s widely known that band names, which once were mainly nouns and sometimes even gave you a sense of what the artist’s music sounded like, have devolved into an apocalypse of in-jokes, cleverness, punctuation and strange capitalization. It’s almost impossible these days not to look at a festival lineup without…

Grading the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Class of 2014

Artwork by Tatiana Craine A few weeks have passed since we found out who will be officially inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April. Which means enough time has passed for the migraines and projectile vomiting to have subsided. Here’s a scorecard for the inductees of…

In Defense of Schwag Weed

This is a big week for weed, with Colorado becoming the first state in the nation to have legal recreational marijuana. All across the Centennial State, fluffy buds twinkling with crystals are being loaded into swirled glass pipes and sparked in celebration. There is no pretense of medicine. People are…

I Pretended to Be a Jimmy Buffett Fan for a Day

Tony Nelson for City Pages: Slideshow. Beginning the night of December 2, 2013, the day before a Jimmy Buffett show, I embarked upon a foolhardy and ill-fated mission to spend 24 hours straight converting myself into the biggest Jimmy Buffett fan imaginable. For the uninitiated, Jimmy Buffett is the undisputed…

The Dumbest Questions Asked in Song Lyrics

Screenshot from video.Foxes actually make a kind of high-pitched bark/scream sound. You would’ve known that if you just searched the Internet for, like, ten seconds. Music, as a largely subjective medium, lends itself to some thought-provoking questions: What is the best concert you have ever seen? Which is the better…

The Ten Most Ridiculous Metal Album Covers of 2013

Do the people who conceived and designed these metal album covers just not give a fuck, or do they give too many fucks? The answer is not entirely clear, but that’s what makes them so awesome. Behold, the ten most ridiculous metal album covers of the year. By Jason Roche…