Photo by Erik Hess

Danny Brown at Triple Rock Social Club on Friday

Live performance is an incredibly intimate bond between artists and fans, but that intimacy got busted worse than Danny Brown's front tooth during Friday's show on Minneapolis's West Bank. At minimum, the Detroit rapper led several fans at the sold-out Triple Rock Social Club to believe, and many to proclaim on Twitter, that they saw a female concert-goer in the front row performing oral sex on him. At max, the 18-and-up crowd witnessed something that put Brown's evening alongside Jim Morrison's "Miami Incident." Either way, this is one of the most unfun blogs about Brown ever.

City Pages has previewed and reviewed several of Brown's past Twin Cities appearances -- notably weather-torn Soundset 2012 and a slot opening for A$AP Rocky at First Ave. He was one of the paper's Artists of the Year in 2011, and published an interview with Brown last year. The reasons for so much attention are numerous: He's a fantastic dude to photograph, his music is creatively crass, and his live charisma is unmistakable. But the hazy particulars of what exactly happened Friday at Triple Rock, on which the venue itself has declined comment, still stands out as an event that has stirred a less-controllable sort of publicity for 32-year-old Brown. There are some pretty graphic, NSFW stories that follow, so proceed with caution.

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Danny Brown at Triple Rock Social Club, 4/26/13

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Photo by Tony Nelson

In a tale ripped straight from the clutches of TMZ, Journey guitarist Neal Schon is involved in a legal battle with Judy Kozan, who used to be the mayor of the southern Minnesota town of Waseca -- and also used to be his mother-in-law.

The rocker, who assured his place in the annals of gossip blog fodder forever with his brashly public relationship with Real Housewives of D.C.'s Michaele Salahi, accuses Kozan of writing libelous blog posts about his inability to support his 33-year-old ex-wife, Amber Schon, and their two young children.

See Also:
Review: Journey, Pat Benatar and Loverboy at the Minnesota State Fair, 9/1/12
Slideshow: Journey and Loverboy at the State Fair, 9/1/12

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Photo by Erik Hess

Nikki Darlin playing the white Richmond guitar hours before it was stolen from their van.

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Best Coast, JEFF the Brotherhood, and Those Darlins at the Cedar, 7/28/12

Some thieving lowlife swiped a pair of guitars from Those Darlins' tour van just hours after they performed with Best Coast and JEFF the Brotherhood at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis Saturday.

Earlier in the day, the Tennessee cowpoke rockers' social networks were lit up with excitement about the petite Jessi Darlin celebrating her birthday -- but by Sunday a.m., the tone had shifted to disappointment. "MINNEAPOLIS - OUR VAN WAS ROBBED. HELP!" they tweeted. The two instruments in question are a red Fender Jaguar bass, and a white Richmond electric guitar.
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Sami Yusuf this shit is not.

Ostensibly intended as a recruitment tool, these misguided attempts at accessible propaganda are so uniformly awful, unlistenable, and terrifying that you can't help but laugh, or be left in shivers. Sporting eerie appropriations of gangster rap tropes (gunshots-as-ambience, violent braggadocio), footage of marches and infamous mujahadeen, and a truly bush-league Auto-tune, I'm left with the image of the sad sacks sitting solitary, whispering lyrics into a janky Packard Bell, tweaking levels, uploading to Youtube. Gauche.


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You know you're really famous when you get injured on national television and the entire country takes a moment out of their workday to watch a clip of it on YouTube and laugh at you.

At least that must be what Bret Michaels is thinking today, two days after his now-famous mishap at the Tony Awards. In case you haven't seen it -- or actually even if you have, because it's worth watching at least a handful of times -- here's a clip of the incident.
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Cedar Avenue's Global Village outpost, as photographed by tromasbronot.

The news broke in the predawn hours yesterday, in an ignominious, uninformative, but firm statement through their Facebook page-- Global Village, which has been situated on Minneapolis' West Bank for as long as University twenty-somethings can possibly recall, is closing its doors.

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