Jello Biafra’s scathing brand of political commentary won’t pass for comfort food in troubled times: Gooey, patriotic pabulum is best left to star-spangled yokels like Lee Greenwood or Alan Jackson. But the guy takes his anti-punditry as seriously as any free-speech proponent out there. He also has a knack for…
One of the least-used compliments in the average critic’s vocabulary is the word “consistent”; few scribes come out of a great concert exclaiming, “That was one of the most consistent shows ever!” But consistency is an important artistic attribute, particularly for a performer who hungers for career longevity, and Duke…
When you’re a little kid, cursive handwriting seems like such an arcane, esoteric thing: Its strange and indecipherable loops and swirls reduce words to fluid mystery, some secret code shared by grown-ups. By the time you actually reach adulthood, cursive looks juvenile, even quaint — the hormone-inked scrawl of impetuous…
Her voice is a glass of ice water in your sun-dazed hand. Yet its insistent cool can be a problem. As precise as her diction is, and no matter how refined her tone, their reliability makes many listeners hear her newer records as no more than more of the same…
Minimalism. The term has spawned more run-on sentences by pinheaded writers than any other movement. And yet no written word has ever allayed suspicion in this pinhead that there is little more than shuck involved in any minimal installation. In music, when the dread word minimalism rears its head, it…
Solomon Burke is known by many names: Bishop, Reverend, the Doctor, the King. In fact, his official Web site is www.thekingsolomonburke.com. And he often has been referred to as the King of Rock and Soul, whatever that means. Considering his many diverse business activities, which include a string of funeral…
Must be something about Monterrey. Picture it: Every year, the Mexican soccer league has two seasons, winter and summer, and before each season kicks off, there’s excitement in all the Mexican stadiums. Nowhere, though, is the electricity more palpable than in Monterrey, which puts on a jubilant, colorful celebration, complete…
If sharing is caring, DJ Shadow is a poster boy for restless devotion. In the six years since his seminal Endtroducing album, Marin County resident Josh Davis has collaborated with members of Radiohead, the Verve, and the Beastie Boys on U.N.K.L.E.’s gritty trip-hop LP, Psyence Fiction; produced Bay Area hip-hop…
Bluegrass music is full of hotshot musicians, but only a handful qualify as true innovators. Jerry Douglas, the extraordinary Dobro player, belongs to that exclusive club. He took an ungainly instrument with a relatively limited musical vocabulary and found a way to coax a variety of sounds from it: sweet…
Ground control to Captain Ziggy. Hello, Zig, are you there? It would seem that with Heathen, David Bowie has invited not only old aliases like Major Tom and Ziggy Stardust to the party, but also familiar collaborators like producer Tony Visconti and Pete Townshend. Heathen is Bowie’s most Bowie-sounding album…
Richie Hawtin is central to the canon of Detroit techno. Founding (with John Acquaviva) his own record label, +8, in 1989 at the age of 19, he stamped the template from which legions of youthful DJs/producers would be cast. Now Hawtin has a new toy, an invention called Final Scratch,…
Your practice space is burglarized. All your vintage equipment is gone. You’ve no secure place to rehearse your music. What will you do? What will you do? If you’re Haggis, you grit your teeth, get the story onto some local nightly news programs as quickly as possible, replace your gear,…
As the conversation winds down, drummer Bill Stevenson begins to sound concerned. “I hope I don’t . . . well, just try not to make me sound too curmudgeonly, okay? It seems like a lot of the topics we got on kind of led me in that direction. But I…
The future of music is invariably difficult to see. Mere replication doesn’t do the trick; nothing works as well the second time around. But at the same time, the “experts” — the managers, the booking agents, the promoters and the label folks — put forth enormous effort trying to mold…
If you spend any amount of time in the music industry, you don’t so much work in it as you become it. You assume its bizarre, trend-driven logic as your own, and artistic and commercial motivations intertwine with each other so tightly, they may as well be the same damn…
On Blue Country Heart, Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen goes country, singing heartfelt versions of songs by Garth Brooks, Toby Keith and Tim McGraw. Guest vocalists include Martina McBride and Faith Hill, who help Kaukonen shed his blues-steeped image. Just kidding. Sure, Blue Country Heart was recorded in Nashville, but…
Hip-hop lovers have splintered off into so many different camps and communities, you have to wonder if many of them even love the same type of music anymore. Since we live in America, the props are invariably handed out to the rich and successful, and every now and again, someone…
Record companies specializing in musical subgenres regularly market certain releases to tourists, literal and otherwise. For instance, blues labels tend to balance albums aimed at consumers who know the form well with lowest-common-denominator platters intended for people who think it would be cool to purchase a blues CD once every…
When it was launched in 1995, the Warped Tour was one of many multiband bashes — from H.O.R.D.E. to Lilith Fair — that emerged in the wake of the influential, highly successful Lollapalooza festival. So why, seven years later, are virtually all of these allegedly annual events, including Lollapalooza, either…
Skinny Deville is explaining how his group Nappy Roots managed to emerge from the University of Western Kentucky into the national hip-hop consciousness. “There was no school for music business in Western Kentucky, so we made our own,” he says. He speaks in the same way he and the other…
To fans, he’s the ultimate showman — loud, funny, flamboyant and in-your-face — in both his singing and his desire for your girlfriend. To the hatas, he’s an annoying misogynist well past his sell-by date. Either way, David Lee Roth is co-headlining one of this summer’s more interesting tours —…
Addressing the debate over whether he engineered Phish’s break, soon to enter its third year, guitarist Trey Anastasio says, “I was talking to Brad, our road manager, the other day . . . he wonders if it seems like this hiatus was my idea, because of everything I’ve done. “Being…
