These days, it's hard to find anyone who just downright hates John Mayer. He is popular enough to be on "Chappelle's Show" and skilled enough to jam with the legendary likes of Buddy Guy, B.B King, Eric Clapton, and Herbie Hancock. Let's face it: the ladies just love to see those faces he makes while playing guitar.
Monday morning: Hair dryers whir, clock radios blare, breakfast pastries are unwrapped and somewhere, someone, hairbrush in hand, is dancing in his underwear in front of a mirror to The Rapture.
Among the museum-going college students, there are those who will become artists and those who will be art historians, but some are so appreciative, so enthralled with the art they see, that they eventually decide to forge their own personal museum to become collectors, surrounding themselves with the art they love.
When I say, "independent rock from Chicago," you think of Wilco, Bound Stems or perhaps even the Smashing Pumpkins - current faces of indie and a genre pioneer, respectively - as bands who procured and continue to shape the current face of the Chicago rock scene. Chicago-bred five-piece Chin Up Chin Up fits right into the distinctive Midwestern niche with a sound directly reflecting the forefront of independent Chicago music.
Bruce Springsteen said that hearing the opening snare shot of "Like a Rolling Stone" was like the door to his mind being kicked open.
Call it art-core, call it post-hardcore, call the genre whatever you want; Omaha's Cursive has been running that drill for nearly a decade.
It seems common to hate country music just on principle these days. The familiar phrase "anything but country" pops up frequently in the music sections on sites like Facebook and MySpace. Indeed, with popular country artists like Kenny Chesney singing a song titled "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy," it's no wonder that music listeners would immediately be turned off to the genre. Fortunately for those listeners willing to seek out better alternatives, there is good music to be found under the label "country."
This is the type of music that makes you want to celebrate its release like it's the coming of the hip-hop messiah, arriving right on time to remind us of the standards of the golden days.
It has been a long road for Boise's Built to Spill. While nearly all of their Pacific Northwest, grunge-pioneering counterparts have either faded into irrelevance or overdosed on heroin, the permanent trio of Doug Martsch, Scott Plouf and Brett Nelson (recently joined by touring guitarist Jim Roth) have remained relevant post-Nirvana on the strength of broken, sprawling melodies and Martsch's confounding, inspiring, utterly incomparable song writing.
People Magazine, move over: The titillating truths of Kabuki theater rivalry and stardom are on display now at the Museum of Fine Arts! Furtive eyes, wicked grins and extraordinary costumes greet visitors at the "On Stage in Osaka: Actor Prints from the MFA Collection" show.
Warning: do not listen to "Sound the Alarm," Saves The Day's new album, while holding any sharp objects, standing near open windows, or taking a bath with a toaster in reach.
Ever since breaking into the hip-hop scene on North Carolina trio Little Brother's "The Listening" in 2003, prolific producer 9th Wonder has been popping up everywhere, laying down his trademark clever soul sample tracks on albums for local and worldwide legends. In the past few years, 9th has produced two new Little Brother albums, along with albums for Buckshot, Access Immortal, a remix of Nas's "God Son" album entitled "God's Stepson LP," and tracks for Jay-Z, Jean Grae and Memphis Bleek. It appears that hip-hop has found another golden producer with a bright future in 9th Wonder, who consistently pumps out Pete Rock-esque beats reminiscent of the sample-heavy sounds of the early to mid '90s. It's no surprise that he's featured in the title of most of the albums he works on, because all he needs is an emcee with a competent, consistent flow to make a hit record.
"Tempo, Tempo!" could not have been a more fitting title for the Marianne Brandt show, which features the compact, visually complex effect of photomontage. On display at Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum through May 21, 2006, the show exhibits over thirty photomontages that strike a palpable balance between the fast, industrial, powerful content of the cut-out images and the calculated deliberateness of their placement.
After a seven-year hiatus and ten years without a relatively acclaimed record, Steven Patrick Morrissey, best known for fronting revered '80s indie band The Smiths, rocketed back into the pop music scene with 2004's "You Are the Quarry."
If you think that techno is a dead letter today, nearly as dated as a circa-1999 Ricky Martin ditty, you're more than a tad off-base. Sure, hip-hop rules the airwaves and many nightclubs, but the sounds of techno and trance still reign at many nocturnal spots.
After a progression from post-rock to mariachi-influenced rock, Tucson-based outfit Calexico has completed yet another transformation: This week's release of "Garden Ruin" is a realization of the band's steady progression from lo-fi experimental to jazz-influenced rock and finally to a more solidly song-oriented Americana sound.
If the future has a soundtrack, the new Flaming Lips album just might be it. Looking from Earth out into time and space and then back at ourselves, these big, cosmic songs ask the big questions but manage to keep it light at the same time. Plus they make a lot of cool noises, too.
After three years in the dark, fans of the NYC rock collective Yeah Yeah Yeahs finally have something to sink their teeth into. After various deceptions regarding the nature of their new record and its title (specifically one rumor that hinted that the project was to be a concept album about lead singer Karen O's Chilean pet cat), their sophomore effort, "Show Your Bones," hit the shelves last week. But don't worry; it's not of a feline nature.
In their breakthrough 2001 album, "Underground Network," Anti-Flag took a solid stance against corporate media and put their ideas to catchy tunes, creating some of the most popular politically-charged music of the last five years; their latest effort, "For Blood and Empire" is more of the same, but under a shiny, new corporate label.
For anyone with more than a passing interest in pop music, it is incredibly difficult to like hip-hop. So much of the genre seems dominated by repetitive, uninspired, homophobic, misogynistic half-wits whose primary interest in making music is making dollars. For many, these qualities make it difficult to reconcile their appreciation for mainstream rap with their appreciation for good music. As a result, serious music fans who also are interested in hip-hop are forced to listen to a tiny group of creatively acceptable, "underground" rappers that too frequently sound stilted, boring and, worst of all, alike. Caught between maintaining their credibility as fans and satisfying their need for beats and rhymes, serious music aficionados who explore hip-hop often end up unfulfilled.
