This is a pretty big weekend for local and/or indie rap aficionados like yrs truly. As Andrea's made it clear over the week, there's a ton of star power at this Sunday's upcoming Soundset hip hop festival, put together by Rhymesayers and featuring damn near everyone who's released a classic record on the venerable Twin Cities label -- or just about any other self-sufficient hip hop label. The full lineup's on the official Soundset MySpace page, and suffice it to say that I could sit here all day big-upping everyone on that ridiculously large roster. Even the so-called "small-type" acts -- locals like I Self Devine and Kristoff Krane; out-of-staters like Seattle's Blue Scholars and Kentucky's Cunninlynguists -- are cosign-worthy, and once you factor in political firebrand Immortal Technique, a fresh-off-a-new-classic (and hopefully non-impostor) DOOM, West Coast all-star supergroup Haiku D'Etat, the full original lineup of the Pharcyde, and the local juggernauts like Atmosphere, Brother Ali, Eyedea & Abilities, P.O.S. and Heiruspecs, it's like some kind of indie rap Woodstock but with better shoes and people who actually know how to dance. And even if these acts largely fall under the hip-hop-for-college-kids rubic, it's a pretty stylistically diverse lineup -- as personified by four other top-notch artists that also appear on the bill.More >>

photo by bluesmuse

Ever since man first gazed upon the stars and took in the vast, almost infinite possibility of space, he has wondered what it would be like if robots played music. Why this required staring up into the sky, I don't know. History is strange like that. Science-fiction author and speculative robotician Isaac Asimov once said in 1976 that "A robot musician is a certain ideal; its reception to programming may mean that it would require less time to master its arts than a human who requires countless hours of practice to reach even rudimentary skills. As an additional bonus, robots do not smell bad and drink until violent; subsequently the ways and habits of flesh-and-blood musicians of a popular-hits ilk must certainly necessitate an android-based succession if music is to survive into the 21st century." The bitterness in this statement may have arisen from the fact that Asimov lost his coveted Mr. International Celebrity Muttonchop King title to Neil Young two years previous, but one look at the state of the music industry as it stands right now may prove his predictions of a non-robot-based record industry's collapse to be all too prescient. Not that there wasn't a concerted effort to see this glorious vision of automaton-created pop music over the decades...More >>

This has been kind of a Wu-Tang month for me. Not only did I finally get around to seeing the film that gave their classic debut its name (it being one of those odd but great kung fu movies where the training sequences are the best part of it), but I got ahold of Enter the 37th Chamber, an album by Brooklyn funk band The El Michels Affair that replicates (and kind of mutates) classic RZA productions from various famous Wu-Tang group and solo records. Throw in the recent debut of "New Wu", the first single from the long-awaited Raekwon's Only Built for Cuban Linx II (which has a release date of August 11th, thus putting the vaporware-album onus back on Dre's Detox), and it's kind of difficult not to get at least moderately geeked out. So here's a few clips to keep that going.More >>

Photo by dave_7

As if deadly pig-borne murder-flu, Air Force One's 9/11v2.0 false alarms and the continuation of the unfortunate tendency for Michele Bachmann to say things weren't enough, this monumentally stupid and/or shitty week for America has also been accompanied by the death knell of the Pontiac brand. I'm not the world's biggest peeing-Calvin-decal-applying loyalist to any specific make of automobile, particularly one that's perpetrated so many stylistic and engineering atrocities over the last couple decades. But as a pop-culture junkie, there's two permanent losses that come with the demise of Pontiac that'd make my 10 year-old self weep profusely. The first loss is the Firebird, which even the most gearhead-illiterate would recognize as being immortalized in Smokey and the Bandit and Knight Rider, though it's also entured in less-famous fare like Radio Birdman's garage-punk anthem "455 SD" and the not-actually-that-good 1976 David Carradine film Cannonball. The other loss stings just a bit more, though: the GTO, the vehicle that invented the "medium car/absurdly large and powerful engine" muscle car trend that peaked in the late '60s/early '70s, is also no more. And even that model's recent attempted revival didn't manage to capture the American imagination in the same way that the recent retro Mustang, Charger and Camaro did, it leaves behind its own legacy of cool. It's the car Iggy drives in "Lust for Life," the model Kool Keith turns into a hook in his bizarro-rap banger "Keith Turbo," the base for the insane Monkeemobile, and the muse for Ronny & the Daytonas' "G.T.O." (a favorite live-set standby of the Replacements and Alex Chilton). And that's not all.

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Photo by dotbenjamin

Listen: I don't want to encourage any irresponsible alcohol-related behaviors on the part of our readers. Personally, I'm one of those people that enjoys the hell out of drinking but knows well enough to keep it a relatively sporadic occasion and stops drinking when he starts feeling as though his inebriation could lead to awkwardness and social mishaps. (In my case, it's usually after my second Iron Butterfly. That's a White Russian with Bailey's; it rules yr world.) But it remains a solid fact that drinkin' is right up there with screwin', being mad about not screwin', and driving your car really fast as a metaphor for screwin' when it comes to great subject matter for pop music. People drink when they're happy, when they're miserable, or when they're bored; drinking can lead to anything from pathos-ridden lost-love tragedy to crazed fisticuffs to a woozy-headed, giddy sort of happiness; and everyone from the brokest of the broke (Thunderbird!) to the highest of all rollers (Goldschlager!) tends to get tore up every once and a while. So pretty much any genre can wrap itself around the concept of inebriation. Here's a few of my favorite examples.More >>

The problem with being a big-time pop music junkie and taking in just about everything you can is that sometimes it's easy to take obvious, familiar greatness for granted. If I had to rattle off a list of my 50 or even 100 favorite musical acts of all time, I'd probably wind up omitting the Who -- not because I don't like them, but because... well, for one thing, they're another generation's band, so I didn't experience them firsthand (unless vague memories of hearing "Eminence Front" on the radio when I was five counts). More specifically, they're so heavily ingrained in the rock'n'roll consciousness that at some point I got tired of hearing about them, even though I haven't gotten tired of actually hearing their music, and so sometimes I get a flash out of nowhere, like "damn, Who's Next really was wall-to-wall great" or "Entwistle-Moon might be the greatest rhythm section in rock history". Or, better yet, "they really used to tear shit up on TV, didn't they?"More >>

picture c/o John Pham on flickr

First off, my apologies for the unannounced hiatus -- not only have things been somewhat unexpectedly busy in my day-to-day life, but I accidentally lost my bookmark to YouTube and forgot what the URL was. But I'm back into this now, albeit as a once-a-week feature, to keep from stretching myself thin. And as it turns out, there's a video I absolutely had to break my silence for ASAP, though it requires a bit of an explanation.

Ever since he started distributing self-released albums out of Houston under the mysterious 'Corwood Industries' label some thirty-plus years ago, Jandek has proven to be one of music's most enigmatic outsiders. Until he made his live performance debut four and a half years ago, nobody really knew what he looked like; he rarely included photos of himself in his album art and even the pictures that could have been speculated to be him were largely unverifiable. But his mysterious identity, prolific output (some 55 albums and counting) and haunting, surreal interpretation of country and folk-blues made him a cult hero, possibly far further than he even realized. He had already been noticed as a bit of a cult artist by 1985, where he was interviewed for the first issue of Spin, and he eventually inspired -- directly or otherwise -- a number of similar home-taped efforts by artists like John Darnielle and Beck who would later go on to bigger, more accessible things. I admit to being less up on Jandek's material than I should be, though I've been told that his 1987 album Blue Corpse is a good entry point.More >>

I gotta admit, it's been a shitty time to be a Minnesotan. We still haven't figured out the whole Coleman/Franken mess, and if that wasn't enough political embarrassment, we've got Michele Bachmann trying to foment some sort of dimbulb insurrectionary movement because the President wants to spend money on something besides Bibles and border-fence razor wire. Weather-wise, we're used to it being a gruesome ordeal, but we endured a winter with several consecutive days of 20-below weather only to see spring arrive under the kind of overcast cloud cover that'd have Seattleites feeling sorry for us. Sports? The Wolves are monstrously bad, the Vikings are their usual underachieving selves, the Wild are just on the edge of being mediocre and the Twins, well, they could be pretty good but who the hell knows when Mauer's coming back. Unemployment's at its highest since the last time Mary Tyler Moore had a sitcom, the Red River Valley's getting flooded, and some snack-food manufacturer thinks we're a bunch of baby-assed lightweights. Still, you know what? That's all depressing as hell, but you can't take away the Suicide Commandos from us.
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Old-school funk revival's turned out to be one of this decade's most rewarding genres, one of those rare Brooklyn-based music scenes that hasn't actually wound up getting all self-indulgently smirky on its way to disappearing up its own coke-strewn nostril. And if you asked me which five groups best represented this scene, I'd rattle off four: the '60s-soul reconstructionist Dap-Kings, who've backed up Sharon Jones and other, lesser lights like that Amy Whatserfacehouse; the El Michels Affair, who take a hip hop cratedigger's approach to vintage soul stylings (their spring releases include tribute albums devoted to both Isaac Hayes and the Wu-Tang Clan); Antibalas, who play their own punchy, high-energy update of Fela Kuti's Afrobeat sound; and the Staten-by-birth/Brooklyn-by-proxy Budos Band, who cover all those bases and throw in a bit of Latin soul for flavoring. As for the fifth, I'm not entirely sure the Menahan Street Band counts -- primarily because they're comprised of musicians from those other four bands. When Daptone first gathered together this gigantic Afro-Latin-soul-funk-b-boy supergroup, the result was a knockout 7" (yes, this is the kind of label that still presses 45s): "Make the Road By Walking" b/w "Karina," which came out in 2006 and eventually somehow found its way into the hands of the biggest musician to claim Brooklyn as his turf.More >>

I know, I know, this column's kind of slipped into a nostalgic holding pattern: check out how people used to dance back then, this currently-embarrassing artist used to be good, music video special effects were cheap-looking a decade ago and super-ridiculous 25 years ago, etcetera and so on. But let's look at now, at least via a couple years back and a couple months into the future. I was in the midst of a musical discussion with some of my friends recently about the band Phoenix -- a French four-piece rock band that's had a modest following in the United States -- and the feeling persisted that, as good as they are, there isn't exactly a reserved place for them in whatever passes for mass pop culture these days. I have a couple vague theories as to why:

-Americans aren't big on continental European pop acts, especially French ones, unless they are cleverly disguised as ro-bots and conduct mind-boggling house music from atop a magical glowing pyramid
-"Phoenix" is not only a fairly indistinct-sounding name (although not as distinct as it'd be if they called themselves "Crystal Phoenix" or "Phoenix Wolf"), as well as a google-mishap-prone one, it was already claimed by another band or two
-US distribution of their first few albums was handled by Astralwerks, who seem to have given up on appealing to the American zeitgeist once our critics (wrongly) declared Moby more cool than the Chemical Brothers ten years ago

But above all else, the one theory that comes close to explaining this phenomenon can be outlined thusly: pop success, or lack thereof, doesn't have to make any sense. If the Killers and Franz Ferdinand can get themselves noticed, why not Phoenix? It is a mystery.More >>