Stories and blogs about music and the musicians who make it
A film about the Clash frontman includes all the little people that Strummer befriended, inspired, and pissed off along the way. My motherjones.com review of the film lives HERE.
Try to imagine a combination of early Sonic Youth mixed with some Bauhaus and a lot of sarcasm: These Are Powers is is loud and creepy, and I mean that in a good way. My mother jones review is HERE.
Henry Rollins is best known as the frontman for the hardcore punk band Black Flag and later for his solo project the Rollins Band. He performs regularly as a spoken word artist and a comedian, and has written and published books of prose and poetry. Rollins is a radio and TV personality, actor, and...
Twenty years ago, Chuck D unapologetically announced that he was the “poetic, political, lyrical son” in the rap song “Public Enemy No. 1.” The front man for the rap group Public Enemy has sent shockwaves ever since, through his lyrics on nearly 20 hip hop albums, as a composer, actor, author, political activist and...
Skerik stands outside San Francisco’s famous blues club, the Boom Boom Room. A saxophone player from Seattle, Washington, he’s playing here tonight with one of the dozen or more independent, underground or alternative bands he either fronts or is a key member of. He kicks ass on his instrument, and he is the horn...
It’s an hour before the show, and violist Charith Premawardhana is bowing and plucking his way through rigorous music arrangements that he’s just now seeing for the very first time. Pushing dark-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose, he leafs through a thick stack of sheet music labeled with song titles like “The...
It’s been more than twenty years since Frank Portman went to high school. As he walks into the Capuchino High School cafeteria in San Bruno, Calif, guitar case in hand, he has a flashback. “I was a weirdo, an outcast, a misfit, an army jacket-wearin’-walkin’-around-doin’-nothin’-kind-of-a-guy. We went around with magic markers, tagging up the...
Some musicians call it East Bay thrash core, others call it punk or hardcore. Livermore area teens who play and listen to loud, aggressive, fast music don’t much care what you call it. They’re not trying to create a big music scene. For many of them, the music and its accompanying lifestyle are about...
Why the Bay Area is going dumb with their thizz face on. A podcast for Pop and Politics: