PREVIOUSLY: Why There’s A Riot Goin’ On THE ATLANTIC: Rioting broke out on Monday in Baltimore—an angry response to the death of Freddie Gray, a death my native city seems powerless to explain. Gray did not die mysteriously in some back alley but in the custody of the city’s publicly appointed guardians of order. And yet the mayor of that city and the commissioner of that city’s police still have no idea what happened. I suspect this is not because the mayor and police commissioner are bad people, but because the state of Maryland prioritizes the protection of police officers […]
THE RENTALS: Time To Come Home
Directed by Daniel Kaufman, the video, part one in a two part series, takes place 50 years in the future, as a group of five elderly Rentals haphazardly go out in search for new, younger bodies to transfer their spirits. Or as bandleader, Matt Sharp told Noisey, “It’s a simple science fiction tale about the quest for eternal life. Imagine if Cocoon starred Gary Numan and Grimes instead of Wilford Brimley and Steve Guttenberg.” PREVIOUSLY: The Rentals play Union Transfer tonight in support of their fuggin’ excellent new album, Lost In Alphaville. The Rentals are for all intents and purposes […]
Win Tix To See Swede-Pop Queen Tove Styrke
It all comes down to this: You want tix to see Swedish electro-pop queen Tove Styrke — think Madonna circa “Borderline” but with a slight Viking aftertaste — at Underground Arts on May 5th and we got ’em. To qualify to win, 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 opportunities like this one! After signing up, send […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: Louis CK LSD
Artwork by CHRIS SPRATT FRESH AIR LOUIS CK: I was in eighth, ninth grade when I started to smoke pot and get high and drop acid and snort speed and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, it was really intense. It was a lot of drugs. I mean, literally, I dropped LSD every weekend, it was crazy. My mother, poor mom, my single working mother of four, didn’t know where I was half the time; I would just disappear and I was barely cognizant of any kind of life. I never went to classes and yeah, I stole triple beam balance […]
WORTH REPEATING: Why There’s A Riot Goin’ On
Photo by SERIOUS_SMOKER USA TODAY: After protests in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray turned violent on Saturday, Baltimore sports-radio broadcaster Brett Hollander took to Twitter to argue that demonstrations that negatively impact the daily lives of fellow citizens are counter-productive. Orioles COO John Angelos, son of owner Peter Angelos, seized the opportunity to respond with a qualified and brilliant defense of those protesting. You can read the whole thing in Angelos’ Twitter replies, but it’s transcribed here for clarity. It’s all here because it’s all so good. Read the whole thing: Brett, speaking only for myself, I agree […]
EXCLUSIVE: The Worldwide Debut Of Sean Rowe’s Rendition Of Cat Power’s “Colors And The Kids”
Bearded, burly, and invariable wrapped in well-worn lumberjack flannel, singer-songwriter Sean Rowe resembles a distant relative of Bigfoot. With a dulcet baritone perched somewhere between the subwoofer-shaking pipes of Mark Lanegan and Leonard Cohen, Sean Rowe commands the kind of gravitas usually associated with fiery-eyed Old Testament prophets or mud-caked Delta bluesmen whenever he opens his mouth. An avowed naturalist who has done monsths-long survivalist stints in the wilderness living off nothing but his wits and fortitude and the fat of the land, Rowe also vibes a certain Thoreau-ian mien that only serves to reinforce his cred as a […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR To mark the release of his seventh album, acclaimed retro-riffic singer-songwriter Pokey LaFarge brings his acoustic guitar to the Fresh Air studio to sing some new songs as well as some of his favorites from the 1920s and ’30s. MORE ROLLING STONE: A Pokey LaFarge concert is something akin to time travel. It’s not because the band and most of the audience wear vintage clothing — that’s pretty common these days — nor because of the throwback Americana lyrics. As LaFarge himself points out, everyone from Sharon Jones to Sturgill Simpson sings songs just as traditionally based […]
COMMENTARY: Vive La Rapprochement!
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY After decades of steady and evermore forceful insertion, America’s resident Cuban expats and their uber-pandering Washington politicos may finally be forced to begin extracting their middle digits from between the cheeks of the 11 million-plus Cuban citizens they’ve been long-distance sodomizing for the past thirty years. And how only-slightly-better-late-than-never it is that a black lame-duck Democrat President would be the one willing to turn away from all the vote-pandering and do for the Cuban people what more than 2 million of their oh-so-more-economically-pampered and politically catered-to stateside countrymen haven’t had the magnanimity, let alone the compassion or plain old […]
This Is What It Looks Like Inside Of An Avalanche
WARNING: Audio is NSFW. Some f-bombs were dropped when shit went down.
CINEMA: High Anxiety
CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (2014, directed by Olivier Assayas, 124 minutes, France) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Where has the time gone? Gazing up at the endlessly beguiling Juliette Binoche I realized it has been over 30 years that she has graced the screen as various intelligent and vulnerable women and yet in each role there was a sense we are meeting her anew. Her latest film, Olivier (Irma Vep, Carlos) Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria reflects on Binoche’s age and sensitivity by teaming her with a pair of acclaimed young American actresses, Twilight’s Kristen Stewart and the cute round-faced […]
ALABAMA SHAKES: Don’t Wanna Fight
From the new and effing excellent Sound & Color. They play The Mann on Sept. 17th with some band called the Drive-By Truckers or somesuch. PREVIOUSLY: After months of avoidance as my generation of relatively hip, middle-aged mouthbreathers raved over the debut album by Alabama Shakes I found myself confronted late one night with a performance by the band on PBS. I allowed myself to watch for a minute, thinking I’d chuckle the righteous chuckle of the dismissive rock snob and then move on. But I was wrong. Rather than the mix of college-boy hoodoo, jive, hokum, and beer commercial […]
MUST READ: The Man Who Broke The Music Biz
NEW YORKER: Who was Kali? Glover wasn’t sure, but as their relationship evolved he picked up some clues. Kali’s 818 area code was from the Los Angeles region. The voice in the background that Glover sometimes heard on the calls sounded as if it might be Kali’s mother. There was also the marijuana leaf that served as RNS’s official emblem: Glover thought he could tell when Kali was high. Most striking was the exaggerated hip-hop swagger that Kali affected. He only ever referred to Glover as “D.” No one else called him that. “He would try to talk, like, […]
WORTH REPEATING: Giving Up The Ghost
THE NEW REPUBLIC: West has repeatedly declared that he did 65 engagements for the presidential campaign in 2008, and was offended when the president didn’t provide tickets to the inauguration. (Obama later told me in the White House that West left several voice messages, including prayers, from a blocked number with no instructions of where to return the call, a routine with which I was all too familiar.) […] This moment for West followed a pronounced and decades-long scholarly decline, something that did not escape the notice of other academics and intellectuals, none more notably than Lawrence Summers, the […]