Halfway through a party thrown by Waylon Jennings’ family at the Rhythm Room in Phoenix last week, I swear the old man’s honky-tonk spirit appeared. Jessi Colter, Jennings’ widow, sat at a white piano. She played Elvis Presley’s achy-breaky blues number “One Night.” “One night with you/Is what I’m praying…
Nas runs, it seems, on two themes loss and the reclamation of former glory. With God’s Son, the Queens rapper plagued by a lack of focus for years makes those themes indistinguishable, finally meeting the challenge of Illmatic, his 1994 masterpiece and albatross as he struggled through mediocrity. Conceptually, the…
So I was in Tower Records the other day, and I saw that System of a Down has a new CD out called Steal This Album!. Since its last one was kind of a letdown, certainly not worth the full $17 list price, I figured, “What the fuck? I’ll crotch…
If nothing else, DJ Quik is responsible for “Safe + Sound,” the greatest, most emblematic gangsta-rap chorus of all time: “Some believe in Jesus/And some believe in Allah/But niggas like me/Believe in makin’ dollaz.” But if you think that’s all he has to say, the rest of this collection compiled…
Damn if Big Silver’s unassuming pub rock doesn’t sneak into your bloodstream and strengthen with each listen, until your head is swimming. And it’s not just the Arkansas quintet’s musical subtlety that makes it seem like an undercover operation: In Bizarro World, their hidden gem of a self-titled 2001 debut…
If Rainville were a place, rather than Colorado’s best alt-country band as voted by readers of the Denver Post it would be warm and familiar, the kind of place where even feeling bad feels good. The four-piece band hauls its “gritty rural rock mixed with swampy blues, old-school country and…
Tucson’s Greyhound Soul has the right to bitch and moan that it’s being passed over. Signed to a small European label, 808 Records, the band has been grinding out bluesy rock ‘n’ roll for years now. Its alternating six-member lineup fills most local stages as its big sound saturates the…
In the aftermath of a national calamity, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that 2002 was a weird year for music. The public wanted to disavow the trends of the past; those, after all, were empty, shallow and indicative of a culture in the dustbin. We needed meaning now…
Ryan Adams had the best quote of the year for elitist tastemakers. “I spent the ’80s looking for alternatives to what was already happening,” he said, atoning for his late-blooming love of Madonna singles and John Hughes flicks. “And now I’m going back and putting together the pieces of what…
2002 was a good year for R&B and hip-hop but only if you shunned commercial radio, corporate music magazines, MTV, BET and all other mainstream media hype-dolloping outlets. If you sought good music on your own, there was a nice bounty there for the taking. 1. The Neptunes ruled the…
Like fellow punk forebears the Ramones last year, the Clash, which dissolved amid drug abuse and splintering musical agendas in the mid-1980s, found itself among the list of 2003 inductees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As part of the March induction, Joe Strummer, his long-estranged songwriter partner…
Chicago-born MC Common (a.k.a. Lonnie Lynn) has been a standard bearer for the Native Tongues’ progressive style of hip-hop for years. During that time, he’s been celebrated for his intelligent lyrics and his rejection of hip-hop’s rampant misogyny, although his occasional incongruous bouts of homophobia have been disconcerting. His 2000…
Once upon a time, way back in the early ’90s, a clan called Wu-Tang formed, with GZA “at the head.” Two years after its seminal 1993 debut, Enter the Wu-Tang, the Clan issued its twin classics: Method Man’s Tical and GZA’s Liquid Swords. Each album placed urban and kung fu…
Cry, the fifth album by country singer Faith Hill, opens with loud drums, throbbing electric bass and a screeching guitar. The song is called “Free,” and it’s about liberating oneself from the chains of the past. The point is obvious: Hill wants to shed her Nashville image out with fiddles…
Mook rock may now have its own Smash Mouth a marginal band armed with buffalo-butt riffs and urban attitude that somehow outlives one-hit wonder and sticks to the roof of radio’s mouth like peanut butter. Crazy Town burst into modern-rock playlist permanence two years ago with “Butterfly,” catchier than any…
Now that they’ve busted up, like pumpkins smashed on curbs the night after Halloween, it’s time to admit that most everything post-Siamese Dream was overrated by the kids who found much meaning in bald Billy’s dreary fart-rock; look, when the words don’t say nothin’, they don’t mean nothin’. Tried giving…
American music magazines suck. Rolls off the tongue, don’t it? Saunter down the length of a magazine rack and scowl at the teen-pop hoochie starlets, the drooling trend-pigism (“The Strokes! The Hives! The White Stripes!”), the vapid rock-star puff pieces, the gutless corporate-hummer reviews. No balls. No brains. No heart…
“That’s just one little facet of what I do, so that’s a bit of a problem,” says Canadian-born guitar god Pat Travers, whose modest place in rock history is welded by his 1980 hit “Snortin’ Whiskey,” possibly the most bombastic hard-rock anthem of all time. Too bad for him, but…
Now is the time when critics grace us with their selections of the year’s best music. Heck, we’ll be telling you what ruled in 2002 ourselves next week (a sample: Wilco, the Streets, Arizona’s Michelle Branch, Johnny Cash). The older I get, however, the more I question the exercise. Are…
Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez are two-of-a-kind polar opposites. Marketed as bronze bombshells, they’ve crossed freely between black and white pop realms like few other stars. Their bastardized African-American music has been partly legitimized, perhaps, by their mixed-race status (Carey is a bit of everything; Lopez is pure Puerto Rican,…
Grant Green recently was featured on the cover of one of the glossy jazz magazines as the most underrated guitarist in the music’s history, according to a critics’ poll. This writer participated in the poll but voted for other musicians, mostly because Green always has been rated quite highly by…
“Nizzle, fizzle. Babizzle!” Yup, big Snoop Dogg’s back. And this time, having sworn off fat sacks of the sticky green and monotonous production tricks, our Dogg is ready to take over the world with a mind-blower of a new album, Paid tha Cost to Be da Bo$$. Long regarded as…
