Phoenix’s hip-hop scene is running out of excuses. For years, local rappers and producers could blame their abject failure to crack national markets on the city’s B-market status. Hip-hop, the story went, was run by a vast coastal conspiracy that, on principle, shat on artists from landlocked states. Unless you…
It’s a perfect pairing: Johnny Marr, former guitarist for the Smiths, one of the world’s most impossibly melodramatic rock bands, and the Pet Shop Boys, one of the world’s most theatrical pop groups, join forces for a set of fey, delicately heartbroken love songs packed with sophisticated melodies and shrewd…
As mini-trends go, the nü metal fad’s got legs: Korn’s first album came out in 1994, and the band is still rocking adolescent treatment centers across the country. Nü metal is pretty patently mainstream now; the charts are full of Stainds, Nickelbacks, Disturbeds and other monosyllabically named bands for whom…
At last year’s Latin Grammys, Juanes was the artist with the most nominations (seven), eventually winning three trophies. But on the day of his big night (September 11, 2001), the Twin Towers came down, taking the Latin Grammy ceremony with them. Juanes’ title track “Fíjate Bien,” with its prophetic lyrics,…
If there has been a single prevailing premonition over the course of the last 10 months, it’s that somewhere, somehow, everything has gone horribly wrong. The vacant malaise that was the 1990s has given way to white-knuckle terror, and quaint late-’80s boogeymen — hijacking, corporate scandal, nuclear winter — once…
Like so many rock and pop figures, Plaid’s Andy Turner and Ed Handley rose to the top of the electronic music pantheon by paying their dues as members of a (now-defunct) groundbreaking group. Back in 1993, Turner and Handley were two-thirds of the Black Dog, which helped lay the groundwork…
Let’s pretend you’re a club owner — we’ll wait while you yank the necessary hairs out of your skull to make this a more credible performance. And to sweeten this role, let’s say you book the bands at your venue. One day, in walks a representative of Undertoe, a Valley…
In the liner notes for Flogging Molly’s new album, Drunken Lullabies, frontman Dave King thanks all the people you’d expect him to thank: family, friends, contacts, his wife Gina, his son Graham (for making him feel older), all the great people he’s met on the road through the years. He…
Quetzal Guerrero had no choice but to become a musician — as an infant, his parents swaddled him in a blanket of sound. When gigging with their world beat band Zum Zum Zum, young Zirco and Carmen Guerrero would put their son in a basket and tuck him in next…
The sitar is one hell of a difficult instrument to play, much less to master. With up to 21 strings, it is an unwieldy beast; a player must be pretty limber just to hold it properly. Generally, players treat the instrument and its music with deep respect, often announcing pieces…
Afu-Ra sits somewhere in the center of a triangle. Its points are Gang Starr, whose beatsmith DJ Premier exec-produced both of Afu’s albums; his onetime mentor Jeru the Damaja; and the Wu-Tang Clan. However, Afu-Ra brings a versatile, if a bit thin, voice and a good range of flows while…
If Blink-182’s last record, the surprisingly maudlin Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, was like a pinch of novocaine in the Vaseline, the debut from Boxcar Racer (a side project featuring Blink singer-guitarist Tom Delonge and drummer Travis Barker) is even more numbing. Listening to this disc — with its…
Art Techno or Future New Wave? In the past year, many buzzwords have surrounded the underground electronic scene, as analog synthesizers and old-school drum machines have become the norm. The new monikers reek of the same ignorance that surrounded Aphex Twin and Warp records when critics dubbed their sound “intelligent…
Throughout his career, trance-pop producer Brian Transeau, aka BT, has proudly worn an “I AM NOT A DJ” T-shirt. This may lead some to consider his upcoming DJ set at the Cajun House a strange aberration. Just think of it as a reminder of the man’s general influence in shaping…
If rap music is the CNN of black America, dancehall reggae is the equivalent for ghetto youth in Jamaica. Since first emerging in the late ’60s, Jamaican DJs (the reggae version of hip-hop’s MCs) have offered their rude-boy spin on the goings-on of politicians and drug dealers in their communities,…
Weird things happen around concrete in Athens, Georgia. Last April Michael Stipe caused a stir when he loudly protested the city’s installation of speed bumps on his street, calling them “idiotic, selfish and inappropriate.” Now if he can only get rid of those superfluous stop signs and speed limits, the…
In the past year, many independent record labels have been battling a phenomenon we like to call “emo-profiling.” This sinister cousin of racial profiling involves the assumption by the record buying public and the media that, because a couple of bands on a label sing nothing but breakup songs or…
Mark Covert, owner of Tempe club Nita’s Hideaway, never thought he’d look back with fondness at having a porn shop for a neighbor. He was cordial with the manager of the place, sure, but he threw all-ages rock shows next door — what could be less conducive for business than…
Sharon Jones is the consummate late bloomer. The 45-year-old New Yorker had long since withdrawn her hopes of a career in the music industry, and it wasn’t until a chance encounter with Daptone honcho Gabriel Roth in the mid-’90s that she finally found her way onto wax. Today, with a…
For a white boy, Dan Auerbach sounds as black as Art Modell’s heart. The Black Keys front man sings as if he was sired by Jimi Hendrix, weaned on Wild Turkey in T-Model Ford’s shotgun shack, then mentored by Mountain’s Leslie West. The latter would explain why “Leavin’ Trunk” sounds…
A few years ago, Keoki Franconi took a look around his Manhattan dominion and said, “I’m a superstar DJ,” saw that it was good, and that was that. Having conquered the fickle New York DJ/party scene in the early-’90s heyday of all-night raves and happy hard-core clubs, the flamboyant Keoki…
Illinois Jacquet led the charge of the tenor saxophone freaks of the 1940s. Initially famous for his adrenaline-driven solo on Lionel Hampton’s 1942 hit recording of “Flying Home,” the Louisiana-born, Texas-bred horn blower mixed swing, blues and a hint of bebop into riff-rich improvisations, which, on up-tempo numbers, inevitably culminated…
