In the first season of her recording career, from 1974 to 1980, Patti Smith was a raw nerve, blazing behind the microphone on a mission to reinvent rock and roll as a setting for a new kind of feral, literary revolt. She emerged from the first generation of punk rock at CBGB in New York […]
Roxanne Shanté is listening to her Juice Crew partner Masta Ace talk about RZA’s upcoming EP, Juice Crew, when she has an a-ha moment. Unbeknownst to her, RZA had started the project years ago to accompany the 2017 release of the Shanté biopic Roxanne Roxanne. Suddenly it all clicked. Song titles like “Single Mothers,” “Lolita,” […]
Name The Bloody Beetroots Best known for People call me “the baddest man in electronic music.” I answer to Bob. I also cook. Current city I live on the road, but I land in two places: Bassano del Grappa (Italy) and Los Angeles, where my team runs base. Really want to be in One day I’ll open Bob’s—a beachside shack in the Balearics. I’ll serve […]
Long before social media, the multimedia performance poet John Giorno, once the toast of New York City’s underground spanning Andy Warhol’s Factory, the punk rock revolution and the Beat Generation, created a free zone of radical poets and socio-political activists available at the end of a phone line — Dial-A-Poem. Beginning in 1969, Giorno offered […]
One of the most intriguing and unexpected current-day musical phenomena is the popularity of tiki, or exotica, a style of music dating back to the mid-20th century. Exotica is quintessentially American — the perfect soundtrack for cocktail hour. In its original quirky run, exotica’s leading lights included Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, and Juan García Esquivel. […]
Florence Shaw doesn’t tell jokes. As the singer-lyricist for the British post-punk band Dry Cleaning, she speaks in fragments and riddles, in social commentary and startling understatement, mixing serious notions with observations on the human comedy all around her. “We take humor pretty seriously,” says Shaw, whose exceedingly calm sung-spoken delivery is an essential character […]
“My hand broke, ‘coz I was trying to keep my head from hitting the metal,” says Amanda Shires, wildcat of alt-country-rock. She splays her claws and runs a finger up the damage zone. “Feel any different playing instruments after?” I ask. After all, she’s been a pro-fiddler since joining the Texas Playboys at 15. “Yeah, […]
A quarter century since the passing of his father — beloved Cockney poet, punk, and actor Ian Dury — there is much that unites the sound of vocalist-composer Baxter Dury to his dad. And more that does not. Especially now that Baxter’s dry, witty brand of sing-speak is married to the bubbling-over electronic music of […]
Epiphanies come, as epiphanies do, in unexpected and often far-flung settings. For trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, three such horizon-openers converge in his latest album, New Quartet Live at Pierre Boulez Saal. Recorded at the famed Frank Gehry-designed concert hall, it’s a scintillating performance in which he is joined by Ole Mathisen on saxophone, Tomas Fujiwara on […]
I remember the confusion and excitement I felt seeing “Captain” Lou Albano of the WWE (formerly called the WWF) appear in Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” music video when it premiered in December 1983. Why was a wrestling star in a Cyndi Lauper video on MTV? It turns out that Albano and […]