DJ Name: World Famous Rani “g.”Real name: Rani GharfehGenres spun: House, global soul, afrobeat, ancestral soul, jazz, hip-hop, rap, R&B, funk, worldbeat, disco, indie dance, UK garage and whatever else feels right at the moment.Current residencies: Mabel’s On Main on Friday and Saturday, Retro Hi-Fi [at] Sidebar with fellow residents/co-founders…
Could there be any better Halloween gift than to wander around in Alice Cooper’s brain for an evening, watching him teeter on the edge of sanity, just about to fall off? Proooobably not. That’s why this year, Halloween Horror Nights 2011 at Universal Studios Hollywood will veer from its traditional…
Did you get that memo? Not the one about the TPS report, but the one that says fluorescent hues slowly drain the light out of your eyes and that desk jobs are hazardous to your health. Saddles frontman Charles Barth did not did get that memo, but he was recently…
Over the past couple weeks I interviewed key members of the early ’80s Phoenix skate punk scene. The results, printed in this week’s issue, coincide with this weekend’s JFA 30th Anniversary show at Hollywood Alley. Everyone I spoke to was funny, insightful, and a genuine lifer; people doing it because…
The band’s new album, Vice Verses, recently debuted at number eight on the Billboard charts, and it’s definitely worth a listen even if you abandoned your Switchfoot fandom years ago. Lead singer Jon Foreman spoke to Up On The Sun about life versus death, hiding music for people to find,…
We pretty much crowned Sam Beam, the songwriter who leads Iron & Wine, “King of Octobeard” last week (okay, he came in behind Zakk Wylde, but still). I know a lot of people who thought that Iron & Wine’s last record, Kiss Each Other Clean, was too much of a…
Weiss is a fine art photographer with Candid Landscapes and executive director of No Festival Required Independent Cinema, a four-time Best Of Phoenix winner. Weiss will be doing film programming for Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s new SMoCA Lounge in November.When you put your key in the ignition and turn…
In one of my favorite pieces he wrote at New Times, former music editor Martin Cizmar argued that Wilco, one of my favorite bands, was, for all intents and purposes, no different than Dave Matthew Band, a group I don’t like. (Anymore, at least. I was a pretty big fan…
Here at Up On the Sun, we have a whole lot of faith in the local scene. So much so, we try to devote at least 50 percent of our daily blog space to it. We’ve been hyping Stateside’s Crescent Ballroom for the past few months. We’ve even touted it as…
Be sure to join Street Eaters, Yeah Great Fine, Fountain, and Porches for rip-roaring good time and some good ol’ pop as well as indie punk rock. Maybe there will be some crazy small-scale indoor ramp sledding if we’re lucky.It’s all going down at the Trunk Space on Monday, October 17 at…
What’s better than a rock show and a costume party together under one roof? How about an ’80s slasher costume party benefiting pets of the homeless with The Jack Rollers. AZ Retro Rescue is hosting the fright night at The Rogue Bar in Scottsdale this Saturday, October 22. TJR are…
I really think so. It’s been a busy year for Mesa’s leading reggae/punk export, Authority Zero. The band is in the midst of a national tour that includes a date at Marquee Theatre on November 5, which will be a hometown sendoff of sorts before the band heads to Japan…
This week’s print edition of Phoenix New Times features a little slice of Phoenix skate punk history, with key players in the early days of seminal band JFA discussing Phoenix, skating, and the punk scene of the early ’80s. All four original members of JFA play Hollywood Alley this Saturday…
Linsdey Buckingham Celebrity Theatre Wednesday, October 12 “The small machine.” That’s how Lindsey Buckingham described his solo work, comparing it to the “big machine” that is Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham was about halfway through a kind of extended monologue about the differences between his massive, stadium-touring collaboration with Stevie Nicks, Mick…
This week, New Times ran a list in our print publication highlighting some of the most interesting posts published at Up On The Sun over the past week. Here are links to those posts. What spooky songs are featured on the Holy Page Records Halloween compilation? What is Andrea Beesley-Brown…
If you were to look at Chromeo’s online diary, you’d find it’s less about collected, coherent thoughts than it is about posting random photos of The Bee Gees, Seinfield’s puffy shirt, and Bill Clinton playing sax on The Arsenio Hall Show. You can’t help thinking that’s exactly how their songwriting…
Local boys Ross Andrews and Wally Boudway are very open about the love-hate relationship they have with Phoenix. “The only thing we love as much as we hate Phoenix is Phoenix,” the two quip on their Facebook page. The tug-of-war between love and hate seems to drive the duo’s music…
Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl is pretty much the epitome of a rock ‘n’ roll veteran. The dude doesn’t coast despite having been in two of the biggest bands of the ’90s. Wasting Light, the latest album from the Foos, finds the group joined by on-again, off-again guitarist Pat Smear,…
If you become the soundtrack to FX’s Portlandia, you’ve reached a new kind of hipsterdom. Or is it meta-hipsterdom? The semantics boggle the mind. The show satirizes the many eccentric personalities you’ll find in the “keep it weird” Oregon city, all of which could be considered hipsters on the sliding…
Do our rappers need a long-term view? Are they shooting themselves in the foot by devoting their albums to the nitty gritty of the day-to-day? Take Keith Richards, for instance. It took him half a damn century to air his dirty laundry: the ladies on the tour bus, the squabbles…
In 1981, Phoenix punk band J.F.A. (a.k.a. Jodie Foster’s Army) released the Blatant Localism EP on Placebo Records. Remarkably brief — the entire record clocks in at six minutes, 34 seconds — the record defined the burgeoning skate punk scene. Though not Phoenix’s first punk band, JFA introduced, with Blatant…
The best kinds of music — power pop, Americana, garage rock, R ‘n’ B — are often defined more by what the bands playing that kind of music don’t do than by what they do. Garage rock, for example, requires very little in the way of a formula: steady backbeat,…
