These days albums are anointed classics before they’re even released, and artists are deemed legends after partying with Paris Hilton. But jazz bassist Ron Carter has earned the moniker. The National Endowment for the Arts recently anointed Carter as a Jazz Master — a title intended to recognize “living legends”…
Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. There are no displays of bullshit nationalistic pride or messy Christmas trees. And more than just an excuse for children disguised as ghosts, goblins, and so on to case your house and hope for a hand-out, Halloween is about partying. The last Halloween…
A stripper’s ode that slithers like its namesake, “Rolie Polie” won’t land in rap’s lyrical pantheon — “If her ass was a rapper/I’da signed her” is Bun’s cleverest quip. But caught in a seductive collision of synths, slow grinding, and shimmy-shaking on handclaps, their myopic bedazzlement is clear: Dirty and…
Stevie registers his thoughts on our troubled present day with a song that, while blowing up most significantly on the adult contemporary radio stations, has a bop to it that a youthful urban audience would be able to appreciate (if they only had a sense of history). With Prince jamming…
Sex is natural, sex is good, but rarely in pop music is it this fun: Jamie’s sweet nothings put the funny in boning (“I know you’re used to dinner and movie/Why not be my dinner while making a movie?”). Meanwhile, producer Kanye plays bongos naked in the corner and Luda…
Nope, you haven’t been smoking too much sticky icky icky and don’t need to rub your eyes. The members of Korn, who’ve always been hip-hop-friendly, are looking a bit different in their new video. Lil’ Jon, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit, and David Banner have kicked out the regular crew and are…
African music in many ways is like metaphysical poetry: You’ve done well if you’ve read it and even better if you understand it. There are so many subsets to Africana that the term itself is washed out, but the immediacy of Youssou N’Dour’s 2004 release, Egypt, brings an inspiring relevancy…
While his peers from NYC’s Eighties garage/house explosion are busy trying to re-up their ecstasy-drained serotonin levels in rehab centers, Masters of Work superstar DJ Louie Vega is still behind the decks and rallying the faithful at clubs across America. He may have lost the “Little” prefix over the past…
The Orishas story seems like one of those alternative universe episodes from the Twilight Zone where everything plays ass backward. Case in point: The Cuban hip-hop trio drops the usual reggaeton booty-shaking format and adopts a politically conscious style that’s musically miles away from most of the Latin hip-hop on…
Coheed and Cambria’s latest, Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 1: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness, is just the latest in a sci-fi soap opera played out across the New York emo-prog-metal quartet’s previous three albums. Not since Finnegans Wake had a fictional narrative so pretzeled my…
Just in time for fall, Death Cab for Cutie, the Seattle-based four-piece led by empathetic frontman Ben Gibbard, has delivered its first major-label disc, Plans. The release conveniently coincides with the inevitable late-night postmixer fumblings and semisober trysts of college (and high school) students across the country. For those truly…
The scene: a Brooklyn brownstone party circa 1999. Halley DeVestern passes a pound to Metric’s James Shaw, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner totters by the keg, and the Stars’ Torquil Campbell and Chris Seligman are on the stage, playing their first show. Out of the speakers billow pylons of…
Depeche Mode’s 25-year evolution reads like a young woman’s bildungsroman. Over the years, David Gahan, Martin Gore, and company have switched out bubbly, Casio goth for intense, guitar-driven rock. But whatever sound they adopt, they maintain the sort of softly trashy seductiveness that makes a certain type of girl swoon…
Hip-hop collides with Comic-Con as subconscious loiterer/indie-microphone-god MF Doom meets Beatle-plunderer Danger Mouse in the whacked-out and ostensibly weird world of Adult Swim. The gravelly voiced Doom delivers his usual dazzling array of subverted clich’s, multisyllabic rhymes, and bottom-feeder pop cult references — but the MC’s scrabbled word safaris are…
Less like Thomas Mann’s portent tome and more like the Disney roller coaster, Lightning Bolt again lets flail with only bass and drums for its third album, Hypermagic Mountain. While other noise bands (like Hella or Black Dice) have grown more ambitious (or at least climbed up on a stage),…
Certain hip-hop elitists have dubbed Snoop Doggy Dogg the Zsa Zsa Gabor of Death Row Records — well earned, when you think about it. After all, when he first slunk into the hip-pop arena to spit those lax, cagey verses on “Fuck wit Dre Day” and “Nuthin’ but a G…
The three-year war of American teen-pop’s holy reformation (2001-2004) left a scarred countryside of sects, quirks, and “urban” makeovers. Adherents to the faith of absurd gimmicks, crude emotional manipulation, lush overproduction, and shameless naivete have since been forced afield to find music that just feels good. Britain’s Sugababes are most…
For a lady best known as the “baddest bitch,” Miami hip-hop star Trina seems surprisingly demure as she sits down for an interview at the New Times office. Sure, she’s a little grumpy at first — her publicist had given her the wrong address and had not informed her of…
Like a mirage rising from a Deco desert of stars, skin, and heat, Pure Records and its sole recording artist, a 22-year-old R&B singer from Ohio named Na’sha, emerged this past summer as a major new force in Miami’s music scene. Until recently, few outside the industry had heard of…
After a two-year hiatus, the members of local Latin funk fusion outfit Bacon Bits are back and shaking their funky sazón all over Miami’s alternative hot spots. But now the boys have a fuller flavor. Founding trombone player John Speck (a.k.a. Tocino) and his loyal guitarist Kevin Sanchez (a.k.a. Buffalo…
Two things you’ll probably never do: travel to the moon or rap as fast as Twista. The first is a child’s pipe dream, the second a rapper’s gimmick — a parlor trick for the Bathing Ape set. And though Twista’s helix coil flow may have earned him a spot in…
If what defines a pop star is her ability to be consistently bigger than her songs, Lisa Shaw is the anti-diva. As forgettable as she is competent, the anonymously voiced Shaw is happy to fade into the background. And what painfully pretty scenery it is. Producers Jay Denes and Eric…
