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I thought about the Dead Kennedys as I sat silently on the bus. I couldn’t understand a single word the singer was saying, it all just sounded like incoherent babble. He sounded like some kind of depraved nerd. At the end of the day, I shook my head in disbelief about punk rock.
Come Flyer With Me: A rant about DIY advertising, money, art, Facebook and dissapearing public spaces in Denver. Recently I was handing out flyers in downtown Denver and a funny thing happened. Almost everywhere I went, I was asked to leave.
Death In June have been called everything from Nazi-sympathizers according critics to staunch liberals coming from their fans. In reality, the answer is lodged somewhere between the two extremes.
A brief essay on music sales. Recently I went into two record stores in Denver and had drastically different experiences. It seems that in the wake of the economic downtown, independent music stores and corporate chains have a much different philosophy on their customers and what those customers want.
Remember what it was like to be the youngest person at a show, surrounded by people three times your age? With all of those strange tattooed people with their smelly dreadlocks? Lewis Dimmick hasn’t forgotten what that time period was like, and in this book he explores some of his earliest memories of participating in DIY music.
Recently, the filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig (Half Japanese/The Duded) decided to document some originals & cover songs I have been performing on an acoustic piano in a 1983, ford Econoline. It’s given me an opportunity to turn people on to a version of a Velvet Underground song that tends to get lost in the shuffle.
Audio and commentary from a WGTB Benefit Show held in Washington DC on December 4th 1985, featuring Rites of Spring, Dag Nasty, Embrace and Beefeater.
In 2003 an anonymous person uploaded the earliest known recordings of Black Sabbath to a file sharing website. The songs, “The Rebel” and “When I Came Down” quickly spread around the Internet. Both of the songs reveal a young and wildly kinetic Black Sabbath. Both are still technically unreleased.
I’m sure you know that feeling of being totally excited for a show, and then being swiftly disappointed because of just how terribly the sound is handled. Perhaps, it’s because the venue just isn’t that great, but more often than not it’s simply because of the sound guy.
Easily the most dangerous contaminant in music journalism today, after sexism, is some need writers have to single out a band with an attention span as short as their own album reviews.
Can music writers just stop using words like “cute,” “adorable,” or “twee,” to describe a band’s sound already?
He had the ability to touch the hearts of people all over the world, simply by being himself. He loved deeply both beauty and music; his passion was experiencing both of those simultaneously, whether he was making the music or listening to it.
Tom Gabel announces transition to new identity as Laura Jane Grace
Commit internet piracy 3x and you are banned from the internet
The sale of KUSF is neither popular nor moral, but rather another cave-in to the trickle-down supply-side economics that crassly support an anti-humanist and anti-religious notion of “science and innovation” at the expense of the liberal arts. Ultimately, it’s not even a sound economic decision for you or the University.
On December 14th, Epic Records will be releasing Michael, a collection of 10 songs that had to have been unfinished at the time of the King Of Pop’s death. This is a clear case of “can we” versus “should we”.
The song begins, to clapped hands, “Happy new year / my dear / it is time to face our fear”. That’s the line I kept singing, like a mantra. It’s a good alternate New Year’s theme, I think – welcome to a new, fearless year.
A colorful Brooklyn duo with equal parts hip hop and synthpop apparent in their spartan beats are still very much of the moniker, ‘minimal synth’.
For an ambitious, up-and-coming outfit, New York City’s Her Virgins are a typical anomaly, fusing dark pop with a glam aesthetic that runs the gamut from Clockwork Orange to rivethead chic.
“Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.”
So Slanted & Enchanted is not exactly “A tragedy of epic proportions!” More of a problem comedy—too realistic to offer the patriarchal cathartic moneyshot. Or, as Kathleen Hanna puts the wait for the Next Big Indie Thing—“It’s almost like this pregnancy where the baby never gets born. I feel like it’s been as if ‘The baby’s coming! The baby’s coming! And it’s five years later. And the woman weights three hundred pounds…and is not having the kid.”
There’s a growing movement to re-establish connections between the fractalized digital technology and the already established local music scenes. There’s many more money making opportunities if these connections are seen more clearly as a two-way street, especially as the recording and distribution industries have made severe cuts in their ‘regional offices’ (or more autonomous locally-run subsidiaries) in recent years.
“It has become a huge topic lately. Everyone’s talking about what is gypsy music and who has the right to use it, so I think about it all the time.”
I think once having the internet in your car is a normal thing, FM stations will suffer heavily, escpeially if commercial free stations such as Soma FM still exist. I’m pretty sure that college stations will continue to broadcast on line and perhaps having these online station options available in cars will finally pull some of the stranglehold away from Clearchannel….Who knows, it might be just what the music industry needs to recover from this current dire situation it has fallen into.” (Elise Nordling)
Frontman/bassist Michael W. Dean has made Bomb’s rarest recordings available for free from Bomb’s official website.
Montreal’s Xavier Paradis may have the French connection, but is actually a forerunner in the distinctly North American movement of minimal synth that has been seething below the surface since the 1990’s.
Food, Inc. is powerful enough to be to the local/organic/sustainable food movement what An Inconvenient Truth was to concern about global warming.
Destiny, Tamaryn, Zohra, Anastasia: New York City’s rising coven of seductive sirens, ladies of the new church of post-apocalyptic song.
Joe Stumble’s Last Days of Man on Earth blog contains some real treasures while retaining a respect for the artists and their music.
Here are six of my favorite Gayle albums. Most are imports, out of print, poorly distributed, or combinations of those states, but a look at Amazon shows that they can be found.
After 18 years, I’ve finally found the album that changed my concept of music forever.
The Nuggets of punk rock is better than ever in its expanded online format.
Shadowrun is a gritty, cyberpunk epic, while Starflight is an otherworldy space opera.
A science fiction radio show from the 1950’s remains as fascinating as it must have been when it first aired.
The loss of long-time member and impressive guitarist Christopher Kleinberg has not slowed mewithoutYou down at all. In attempts to end the show on time, they simply pulled their shirts over their faces while the crowd screamed for one more song. They finished with the highly energetic “January 1979” and ended with a new one called “God, God, God.” / Just a reminder, too, if you haven’t listened in yet, my radio show for BreakthruRadio.com successfully launched, and again, here’s a good chance to hear a good bit of what I/we have been writing about in our issues these last 28 years.
The loss of long-time member and impressive guitarist Christopher Kleinberg has not slowed mewithoutYou down at all. In attempts to end the show on time, they simply pulled their shirts over their faces while the crowd screamed for one more song. They finished with the highly energetic “January 1979” and ended with a new one called “God, God, God.” / Just a reminder, too, if you haven’t listened in yet, my radio show for BreakthruRadio.com successfully launched, and again, here’s a good chance to hear a good bit of what I/we have been writing about in our issues these last 28 years.
A recent trip to LA rekindled my love of Sega games. Now I’m playing those games on my PC.
Since they haven’t played the East Coast in two decades, needless to say I am really excited to get another chance to see the fantastic Chicago punk/post-punk rock band The Effigies this weekend. They play D.C. on Thursday, and New York on Friday and Saturday, and if you’re not in the East Coast, they’re live on the radio on Saturday!
In the new issue #62, I promised to let you know when my radio show for BreakthruRadio.com launched, so let me do that now since it launched at noon yesterday. Here’s a good chance to hear a good bit of what I/we have been writing about in our issues these last 28 years ** In other news, we are proud to note that none other than R.E.M. has seen fit to run an excerpt of our current issue 62 cover story on them on their website, and also included some highly flattering and appreciated remarks (“inimitable, must-read!!!!!!!”) on the quality of our publication. ** Over the past 25 years, Band of Holy Joy have put out several LPs on Rough Trade Records and have earned the reputation of being one of the UK’s top underground live acts. These are the band’s first-ever American tour dates and they and have cut a self-released seven-song EP that will be for sale only at these shows to mark the occasion. ** Reminder: Big Takeover #62 with R.E.M. on the cover is on the stands! Look for it in your favorite store near you that carries good music magazines!
So the baby boomers are trying to put it into the 1960s paradigm map again. BEWARE THESE BABY BOOMERS!! This is my shtick. Yeah, we need the baby boomers, and Hillary Clinton supporters. They still have a huge demographic—but it’s been about them them them for so long—-I think that might explain some of the pent up resentment, or sheer catharsis of “Generation X-ish” (a generation that never really had the demographic numbers by itself), and the under 30 *MARK RISTAINO” (MUSIC FOR AMERICA) crowd—-who, now, finally had a way to speak, and be heard, not just by the older people, but BY EACH OTHER.
A film that I’ve been dying to see since the trailer showed up on Youtube last year: You Weren’t There: A History of Chicago Punk 1977-1984. Clubs like Oz and O’Banions stayed just one step ahead of the law (thanks in part to likely payoffs to the man) and managed to host many classic shows by the likes of The Effigies, Naked Raygun, and Strike Under. The live footage shown was just stunning: The Effigies at OZ in all their boots-and-braces glory, for instance. Early incarnations of Naked Raygun playing loft parties!!!! Amazing stuff. I can’t say enough about how good this film is and it how it succeeds on so many levels. A must see…
Ultimately, this groundbreaking song (which is nonetheless deeply rooted in traditions) helps rewrite the mystery of love (and the more than love that is really part of love).
Scottish born, English artist ASTRID WILLIAMSON is a longtime favorite of The Big Takeover, and she rarely plays in the U.S. This week brings three chances to catch her awesome set of pipes (two gigs in New York, both of them free admission, as well as Grand Rapids, with one in Philly a few months later) / “Day three of Noise Pop (day two for me, as I missed out on Thursday’s debauchery with a headache, alas), has me biking to Bottom of the Hill (BOTH) in the Portrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. BOTH has been my frequent destination for live music over the 11 years I have lived in The City, and I could get here with my eyes shut. The mid-size club (capacity being 300) has great sound and a decent layout. And I can’t help but feel very comfortable as I walk through to door at 9:00 sharp. I’m here to see VEIL VEIL VARNISH, WHITE DENIM, A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS, and HOLY F**.”