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…
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…
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…
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…
Motley Crue’s going on tour again, and the band promises it will be its last. Of course, as everyone knows, these hype-inducing, ticket-sales-generating promises are made to be broken. And Motley Crue know everyone knows that. And so, on Tuesday in L.A. they upped the ante with a compelling gimmick:…
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…
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…
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…
The Grammys were last night. Maybe you heard about how the machines are taking over or the flying hair of Taylor Swift. But the most interesting part of the Grammys is everything that happens outside the five or ten most popular categories. Because that’s where people who don’t already hog…
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…
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…
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…
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…
All illustrations Jena Ardell By Jena Ardell Feuding Oasis brothers Liam, 41, and Noel Gallagher, 46, came face to face for the first time in more than a year at their niece’s wedding in Co. Kildare, Ireland, last weekend. The brothers have barely spoken since Noel quit Oasis four years…
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…
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…
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…
Deep inside Spotify headquarters, at this very moment, some poor marketing team is tasked with the idea of making Spotify gift accounts sound like a good idea for a Christmas present. I know this because I am too cheap to pay to make the Spotify ads go away. So far…
If you’re a fan of Sriracha, you’ve undoubtedly heard of the trouble surrounding the California plant that produces the sauce. For those of you who have had your head in a bowl of pho the past few weeks, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ordered a plant that makes…
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…
Reznor at peak anger.Trent Reznor sure is a happy guy these days. In a recent interview in the Fader, Reznor is even shown as chipper when facing a root canal. Reznor’s apparent changed mood is so interesting because he has faced his demons so publicly in his music. Reznor today…
It was cute when it started. Looking for a way to differentiate their table settings, restaurateurs began replacing traditional linen dinner napkins with dressy cotton dishtowels. There had already been a gradual relaxing of rigid dining protocols as a result of the recent recession, and laid-back dishtowels were a logical…
