Blue Ridge and Red Clay
THE NEW self-titled album from North Carolina’s Mount Moriah announces in its instrumental introduction on the first track, ‘Only Way Out,’ that its roots are planted firmly in the red clay of the American South. …
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Blog Posts
Punk Rock’s Pitcher of Spitballs
IF YOU’RE LIKE ME and are occasionally presented with lists of the most influential gays and lesbians in popular music, you may have found yourself wondering: what about Bob? Best known as the lead singer of Hüsker Dü in the 80’s and Sugar in the 90’s, Bob Mould is a founding but often forgotten father of American punk rock.
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k.d. lang Has Never Gone Away
SHE DAZZLED just about everyone when she performed live at the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Now fifty, Alberta native k.d. lang still has what it takes to bring an audience to its feet. There’s no denying the power of that voice and lang’s unrivaled range.
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Queen for the Hardcore
In Is This the Real Life? Blake doesn’t seem to have missed a single event in the lives of the men who were Queen.
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Short Reviews
Reviews of the books: Beat Atlas: A State by State Guide
to the Beat Generation in America, The Fish Child, and I Was Born This Way: How About You?and Animal Prufrock’s album: “congratulations; thank you + i’m sorry”.
Out All Night
WHEN DID Camille Paglia become so old-fashioned? Last summer, the famed feminist and Sexual Personae author decried the death of rock music in a painfully unhip piece published in The New York Times (6/25/10): “Rock music, once sexually pioneering, is in the dumps,” she lamented, since “step by step, rock lost its visceral rawness and seductive sensuality.”
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When Gay Culture Ruled the World
COMPARED TO MOST musical genres, disco ascended, flourished, and fizzled in a remarkably brief period from roughly the mid-1970’s until the early 80’s. It’s fair to say that disco didn’t even enjoy a solid decade of widespread popularity. Of course, those dates are debatable, and it all depends on how you define disco. And while disco’s reign was quick and fleeting (not to mention conflicted) in the U.S., it fared much better overseas. Alice Echols’ Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture offers a history of the disco era, but as the book’s title indicates, it’s more an interpretive, cultural history than a “who-what-where-when” catalog of disco’s origins, performers, and songs.
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Out as Adam
Newcomer Adam Lambert, meanwhile, needn’t worry that the vacuum of doubt will sap his career of any strength. At 27, he raked in nearly 100 million votes as the runner-up on the eighth season of American Idol, and this was after photos of Lambert kissing an ex-boyfriend came to light. He acknowledged the pictures as authentic at the time, but waited until after the show’s finale to confirm the rumors.
MoreExclaim Yourself!
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD famously remarked that over-using the exclamation point is like laughing at your own jokes. If so, singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright is often guilty of such self amusement: On the heels of his 2007 DVD Rufus! Rufus! Rufus! Does Judy! Judy! Judy!,Wainwright’s latest is another live album entitled Milwaukee At Last!!!
MoreLavender Women
TOGETHER, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers form the Indigo Girls, the Grammy-winning folk-rock act whose new album, Poseidon and the Bitter Bug, marks the pair’s return to an independent label-their own, in fact, which they dubbed IG Records-after releasing eleven, major-label studio albums since their debut in 1987 (with Strange Fire). The homecoming must have been catalyzing, because they recorded Poseidon in just three weeks inside an Atlanta studio.
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