WAR OF DISTORTION Mr. Young Goes To Washington When Stephen Colbert hosted the White House Correspondents Dinner — the annual D.C. puppet show where reporters play pattycake with the Prez — he rode the Trojan Horse of Truthiness right up to the President’s table and unleashed its hidden contents: a disinfecting dose of reality-based reality, thinly-coated with irony for easier digestion, though impossible to swallow for those weaned on Fox News comfort food. Speaking truth to power at point blank-range, Colbert’s barbs essentially added up to: The emperor has no clothes, and all of you, the Fourth Estate, have become nothing more […]
Amazing Grace
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN WE SHALL OVERCOME: THE SEEGER SESSIONS It’s no accident that you don’t really know what Pete Seeger did. That he’s truly larger than life, an American original, the kind that walk out of storybooks, like Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed, but more real. That he more or less singlehandedly carried the burden of pure roll-up-your-sleeves and speak-truth-to-power lefty populism, social justice and humanitarian conscience on his back for the better part of the 20th Century, with amazing grace and without complaint. For his trouble he’s been tarred and feathered, beaten and blacklisted, and officially written out of history […]
At The Twilight’s Last Gleaming
The Lonesome Crowded Death Of Grandaddy And All Who Sailed With It The posthumous album by Grandaddy opens with the forlorn voice of a child simultaneously invoking the album’s title and asking the question innocents invariably ask in the wake of a divorce, fire, flood, hurricane, towering inferno, earthquake or Poseidon adventure: What Ever Happened To The Family Cat? Trust me kid, you don’t want to know. As you have no doubt heard by now, this will be the final Grandaddy album and, really, that should come as no surprise. Most bands have a shelf life of ten years tops — five […]
This Is Where Ilebrity Begins…With A Mix Tape
RHYMES FOR THE DEAF, DUMB AND BLIND CRACKERJACK HIP-HOP JAWN Okay, kids – here’s the deal … I take my hip hop very seriously. Like Chuck D., I, too, believe that it can serve as “CNN for Black people.” But that’s not all that’s at stake these days. Hip hop is the new jazz – a truly American-born music phenomenon/style/genre that has yet to be rivaled by contemporaries in the form of social consciousness, intelligent wordplay and overall swagger. This disc represents what I regard to be the cream of the hip-hop crop as of late (with a […]
Cosmic Americana
THE FLAMING LIPS At War With The Mystics (Warner Bros.) Having become sentient in the mid-’70s, somewhere in the middle of that that vast mountainous Pennsyltucky between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, I had a front row seat to one of the places where the ’60s went to die: the hinterlands. While more cosmopolitan zip codes were sampling disco, cocaine, Members Only jackets and punk, all I could see growing up was ex-greaser shitkickers in dirty bellbottoms, Greg Brady haircuts, faded Dark Side of The Moon T-shirts and knocked-up girlfriends in peasant dresses billowing with pre-natal pulchritude, blasting Zep, Floyd and Yes […]
Come On Feel The Rage
DISCUSSED: IRISH GIRLFRIENDS; THE IRA; RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE; MUMIA; PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN; THE END OF DEMOCRACY; AND JUST HOW AWESOME IS THIS PHOTO OF BRIAN JONES? Five years and three girlfriends ago, Rage Against the Machine was on the FOP shitlist for staging a Free Mumia concert at the Meadowlands. Mumia, as you may have heard, was convicted of killing officer Daniel Faulkner. None of that hubub was much on my radar back then. But my gal at the time, well, she was pretty hardcore Irish, Up The Ra! and all that. Her aunt was a tough-but-sweet old broad […]
Patsy inClined
Neko Case And Jenny Lewis Got Nothin’ On Patsy Montana As of 2005, Patsy Cline’s 12 Greatest Hits sold 10 million copies. Not bad for a ghost. She got on a plane to Kansas City in 1963 — just a couple years into her newfound fame as the sweetheart of the Nashville rodeo — and never came back, disappearing into the ether of immortality like Amelia Earhart in spurs. Her ghost has been haunting American music ever since, and any vaguely countryish thrush will have to suffer comparisons. Just ask KD Lang. Still, Patsy Cline didn’t come from nothing. Her […]
Pussy Galore
Cat Power Purrs! Destroyer Kills! The only drag about living in the Information Age is that there are no miracles, just miraculous statistical anomalies otherwise known as coincidence. True story — happened on November 21st, 2002, 35 miles south of Birmingham, Alabama, according to the New York Times — two sisters decided to make unannounced visits to each other’s houses, at exactly the same time. They both died in a head-on crash — with each other. Tragic? Sure. Freakish? You bet. Impossible? Statistically speaking, nothing is impossible. There are enough people now living on Earth that anything can and eventually […]
Nerds Do It Longer
Stars of Track and Field Still F*ck Like Champs Boy-o-boy, did Joey Sweeney get his underoos in a bunch when I mentioned that a new Belle & Sebastian album was cause for “a legion of cardigan-clad Millhouses to raise their skinny arms to heaven like antennae.” Speaking like a man who’s taken all the locker room towel-snapping he was gonna take for one lifetime, he told me to get my gang together and meet his gang on the playground for a badminton death match. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Sweeney’s shuttlecock, but needless to say I was concerned. […]
The Art Is Deceitful Above All Things
(Painting by Killer Luka) JT Leroy Is A Great Literary Hoax, But A Mediocre Rock N’ Roll Swindle I have a distant cousin who once punked his parents into believing he’d been going to college, when in fact he had been pocketing the tuition dough and playing video games at the mall — for four years! That his parents were divorced and lived states away from each other and the college helped facilitate the deception. He tearfully confessed on the eve of his supposed graduation. There was a big party planned: catering tent, live band, folks flying in from all […]
Time Takes A Cigarette
Discussed: Aladdin Sane (30th Anniversary Two-CD Edition) Detroit circa 1973 more or less WAS A Clockwork Orange, a post-apocalyptic urban dystopia minus the funny Brit accents but with added ultra-violence and racial strife. Bowie channeled the Motor City vibe from the safety of four-star hotel rooms, envisioning a plotless rock opera of leather-clad bully boys and pimped-out thuggery where panic strutted around on platform shoes and you just know somebody was gonna get slapped. Back then Bowie held a cracked mirror up to rock ‘n’ roll and reflected it back as art, trading glittering extraterrestrial personas like spangled jumpsuits, each […]
This Record Is Illegal
Donna Summer This Needs to Be Your Style IRRITANT RECORDS First thing you need to know is that this has nothing to do with disco diva Donna Summer, but is instead an identity-theft/media prank on the scale of the Negativland/U2 showdown in the ’90s. The first hint is the cover, which features a grainy black and white photo of what appears to be a satanic ritual but upon closer inspection is actually some dirtball metal band apres-gig, wringing the sweat out of their T-shirts and getting high in their graffiti-scarred dressing room. The second giveaway comes when you press “play” […]
Furry Blooze
Discussed: Furry Lewis Good Morning Judge FAT POSSUM Sometimes, as the saying goes, having a little luck is the best plan. Furry Lewis was never much for planning, and luck was a luxury he could rarely afford. From the age of 12, he spent the better part of his life as a street sweeper in Memphis or working medicine shows, where charlatans sold snake oil to gullible yokels. When Furry was 17, he lost his leg hoppin’ freight trains. Legend has it that a friend came to the hospital and Furry told him, “It ain’t so bad. I can see […]