Photo by PETE TROSHAK Ever since he was young Against Me! singer Tom Gabel had a secret: he suffered from gender dysphoria, meaning that while he was outwardly male, he self-identified as female (for more on this see here.) Gabel suffered through 15 years of living a dual life in Against Me!. By day he was a standard-bearer of punk cred in a macho and insular hardcore scene, performing upwards of 200 shows a year. By night, after the show back at the hotel room, lonely but free at last, he would cross dress. In 2012 Gabel made the courageous […]
BEING THERE: Phantogram @ The Piazza
Photo by PETE TROSHAK> On Saturday, Chvrches and Phantogram rocked a gigantic sun-drenched Piazza crowd that included a tsunami-like wave of crowd surfers, a wedding party and two-time Olympic gold medal winning snowboarder Shaun White. The crowd surfers landed safely, the wedding party rocked out on one side of the stage and White was there to catch some good music and to see his his girlfriend, Phantogram singer Sarah Barthel. Those that couldn’t fit in the square took in the show from adjacent building roofs or apartment balconies. Scotland’s Chvrches took the stage first, kicking off their set of sweet-sounding-but-venomous […]
BEING THERE: Slint @ Union Transfer
Photo by JONATHAN VALANIA The really cool kids found out about Slint back in 1989. I found out about them in 1993 (hey, I was stationed at the Antarctic weather station of my own lameness at the time, and the record store there refused to carry Touch & Go shit, OK?!?). In all seriousness, Slint did not make it easy for uncool kids like me. They were always an enigma wrapped in a riddle. They were named after the one dude’s pet fish — Slint isn’t even a real word. They hated every picture ever taken of them and let […]
BEING THERE: M.I.A. @ The Tower
Photo NOAH SILVESTRY It’s still hard out there for a pimp, and these days everybody’s a pimpin’ somethin’. (That’s right, I’m droppin’ my ‘g’s like Obama at the NAACP. Peace out. [I’m bringing it back, OK?]) These are especially hard days for Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A. Dissed routinely by ex-BF/collaborator Diplo, litigiously uncoupled from her billionaire baby-daddy Benjamin Bronfman, publicly scourged by Lynn Hirschberg in a New York Times Sunday Magazine takedown for ordering truffle-flavored French fries while talking radical chic, and sued by the NFL for a cool $16.6 million for flipping America the bird at half time […]
BEING THERE: Mac DeMarco @ Underground Arts
Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ The unfinished basement of a venue that is Underground Arts is the perfect venue to see psych-pop prankster Mac DeMarco, an unfinished basement of a man. Friday night, I found myself packed into a sold-out UA crowd of towering 6ft.-something fan boys and drunken kissy-faced couples. Both seem to be his core demographic. Not that I was really surprised given that DeMarco’s songs are almost entirely about life as a grizzly dude, or about loving his sweetie. Sometimes they are about both at the same time. Looking unkempt as ever with a mane of scraggly, […]
Win Tix To See Cloud Cult @ The Prince Friday!
We have a pair of tix to see panoramic sunny pop experimentalists Cloud Cult — think Arcade Fire, but less disco and Grammy-winning and more Eno Another Green World/Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy and Midwestern Burning Man pagan-folk-baroque — at the Prince Music Theater on Friday April 18th. To qualify, all you have to do is sign up for our mailing list (see right, below the masthead). Trust us, this is something you want to do. In addition to breaking news alerts and Phawker updates, you also get advanced warning about groovy concert ticket giveaways and other free swag […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To RISK! @ Underground Arts
Shocking! Shameful! Outrageous! Scandalous! Possibly even against the law in some countries! On Friday, host Kevin Allison of MTV’s The State, Reno 911, and Flight of the Concords, brings together a cast of leading storytellers — Thomas Dixon, Kitty Hailey, Alex Kacala, and Teresa Marquard — to tell jaw-dropping stories in the nude they never thought they’d dare share in public on the theme of “Revelation” at Underground Arts. Phindie called it “The undisputed G-spot of the First Person Arts Festival.” We’d argue that it’s the undisputed wet spot of the First Person Arts Festival and somebody’s gotta sleep […]
LISTEN: The Flaming Side Of The Moon
THE FLAMING LIPS new digital release, FLAMING SIDE OF THE MOON is live now in digital form. Designed as an immersive companion piece to the original 1973 album, DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, listeners are encouraged to listen to the new LIPS album while listening to DARK SIDE at the same time. FLAMING SIDE OF THE MOON was also carefully crafted to sync up perfectly with the 1939 film, THE WIZARD OF OZ. For ideal listening conditions, fans are encouraged to seek out the original Alan Parsons’ engineered quadraphonic LP mix of DARK SIDE, but it will work with the album on any format. Available now through all participating digital outlets. […]
Win Tix To See Bradley Manning Ryan Hamilton
No that’s not Bradley Manning. Bradley Manning can’t come out to play — he shared his father’s dirty pictures with the other kids and now he’s grounded for 30 years. Nor is that Kenneth Parcell, beloved bumpkin/NBC page of 30 Rock fame. His name is Ryan Hamilton and he is a master of the dying art of being funny without ‘working blue,’ as we used to say back in the Vaudeville days. See above for absolute proof that even a hot air balloon ride can be funny as shit, even without f-bombs or dick jokes. Which in part explains why, […]
WORTH REPEATING: David Lynch Tells British Hipsters How He Left His Santa Claus Heart In Philadelphia And Then We Threw Snowballs At It
Illustration by moonaniteone DAVID LYNCH: Every film has its story. It has to be a certain place, with a certain light, with certain things said by certain people. Then you make a world in cinema that didn’t exist before. The world of Eraserhead was inspired by Philadelphia, a bit of an industrial city. I fell in love with Philadelphia for its architecture and mood. But now all the cities are looking more and more the same. The real treasures are going away; the mood they create is going away. Graffiti is one of the worst things that ever happened to […]
BEING THERE: Gary Numan @ The Trocadero
Photo by PETE TROSHAK Gary Numan will always be best known for his 1979 hit “Cars,” but his blazing, 19-song set of electro-rock heaviosity at the Trocadero on Sunday night made it abundantly clear that he is not living in the past. Last year, Numan released Splinter, his 20th album and one of his best-received to date, and he is currently touring support of it following a buzz-generating performance at the SXSW 2014. The irony of a man best-known for pioneering electronic music strapping on a Les Paul — in a hail of blinding strobes and industrial bleeps and blips […]
Win Tix To See Gary Numan At The Troc Sunday
Readers of a certain age will remember Gary Numan‘s “Cars” as easily the coolest song of 1979 — the nearest competition was The Knack’s “My Sharona,” and catchy as it was/is it was essentially retrograde, guitar-based power-pop. Nothing wrong with that, in fact some of my best friends are retrograde, guitar-based power-pop. But where “My Sharona” harkened back to the past, to some mythical coked-up episode of Shindig!, “Cars” was prophetic, a harbinger of things to come in the impending ’80s. And many of it’s quirky tropes remain the building blocks of pop culture: robotic anomie, cinematic synthesizer washes, […]
Win Tix To See Desert Blues Mystics Tinariwen
Illustration by ADRIA FRUTOS Tinariwen was founded by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, who at age four witnessed the execution of his father (a Tuareg rebel) during a 1963 uprising in Mali. As a child he saw a western film in which a cowboy played a guitar. Ag Alhabib built his own guitar out of a tin can, a stick and bicycle brake wire. He started to play old Tuareg and modern Arabic pop tunes.[citation needed] Ag Alhabib first lived in Algeria in refugee camps near Bordj Badji Mokhtar and in the deserts around the southern city of Tamanrasset, where he received […]