EXPLAINER: How To Use Phawker Radio

The beauty of this modern world is that you no longer have to be just a newspaper or just a TV channel or just a radio station. You can be all three! For the audio part of our hat trick, we will now pull a radio station out of our asses! Don’t worry, we washed it off. It’s located UPPER LEFT. Yeah, there…where it says PHAWKER RADIO. Just click on the icon that looks like a little antenna with the radio waves beaming out of it (innit that just cutest thing?)…go on, we’ll wait…YOU DID IT! We are so proud […]

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HEAR YE: Oh You Pretty Things!

NOW PLAYING ON PHAWKER RADIO: S.F. Sorrow By The Pretty Things By 1967, Swingin’ London had gone mad — bathed in strobing mod Technicolor, drunk on the Day-Glo ambrosia of psychedelia and frugging to the blare of maximum R&B. Rock ‘n’ roll was reaching critical mass, outgrowing the three-chord friction of teen angst and expanding into the realm of art and religiosity. Pop stars, the newly minted aristocracy of turned-on English youth, were now expected to be poets and seers, and the race was on to find strange new sounds to telegraph this strange new state of mind. — The […]

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HEAR YE: The Son Of Dave

Dear Audience, I’m obliged to do the rounds again in the form of a U.K. tour, and between you and me, my back hurts and I will need many helpers to move things from dressing room to stage, stage to strange woman’s afterparty, party to hotel room and hotel room to train station. I will carry the vodka and portable gramaphone, you can carry the ice and blankets. Its going to be a nasty autumn. Don’t sit and wait for the bomb to go off, people. Get out and raise Hell for God’s sake. Let’s celebrate the separation of church […]

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HEAR YE: Arthur & Yu In Camera

“I ran into an old acquaintance (well, “old”) at SXSW this year, and she had some good news — she just got a new gig as the general manager for a new label which has some ties to Sub Pop but not really. It wasn’t really a stretch because Sarah had worked for Sub Pop before this, but I was still intrigued because I hadn’t heard of the label, Hardly Art. To make it clear, it’s NOT an imprint label and it’s technically a separate enterprise (I think), but, well, it is still connected to Sub Pop. “Hardly Art was […]

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HEAR YE: White Stripes Icky Thump

“Somehow the fake-brother-and-sister/ex-husband-and-wife duo of John Anthony Gillis and Megan Martha White, aka Jack and Meg White, has managed to transmute gimmick into mystique, to create a shimmering garage mirage out of little more than trashcan drums, greasy geetar and a natty tricolor fashion palette, and sell it to 4 million people. Having proven time and again that less is more, the White Stripes remain adamantly reductionist about everything, from their music to the truth about their lives. They are masters of illusion via subtraction. And the less they give us, the more we want.” — Jonathan Valania, A Long […]

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HEAR YE: Spoon Ga Ga Ga

NOW PLAYING ON PHAWKER RADIO The new songs sound of a piece with the recent old: a boom-boom-THWACK drumbeat, some White Album-style piano chords, and a spare, hypnotic guitar chug not heard since the “Peter Gunn Theme,” singer Britt Daniel’s husky Lennon-esque bleat, and all manner of bubble-gum hand-claps, Josie & The Pussycats tambourine slaps and gang vocal sha-la-las. A typical Spoon song is usually one part ’60s AM radio nugget, one part ’80s British art-punk artifact and one part musique concrete wall of sound. Mmmm. That’s good cracker! [JONATHAN VALANIA]

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