Review Playboy.com July 2007 Link The Pitchfork Music Festival embraced its music snob roots by booking iconoclast Yoko Ono. But the three-day celebration of sonic diversity — which spread 39 acts over three stages in Chicago’s Union Park — was more populist than its reputation suggests. Nothing made that more clear than Saturday night’s closing […]
Review Playboy.com July 2007 Oxnard, California producer Oh No is no stranger to the offbeat concept album. His previous, well-conceived full-length was made entirely of samples taken from the music of Hair composer Galt McDermot. The instrumental Dr. No’s Oxperiment was constructed from a similarly limited, unlikely and exotic source. All the samples originated from […]
Interview XLR8R July 2007 Link You might call the lush, liberal landscape that stretches from Portland through Seattle and British Columbia the “Pacific Northwest.” But to some it’s Cascadia–a name that is both a reference to the region and a part of a shorthand, half-joking slogan (Free Cascadia!) for a particular state of mind, if […]
Interview Playboy.com May 2007 A former punk rocker from Ottawa who sports a bushy beard and an undisguised Canadian accent, 35-year-old Shane Smith has become an unlikely media mogul. While far from a Murdoch-like figure — for one thing, Smith actually does some reporting himself, including trips to Chernobyl and Darfur — the one-time Reuters […]
Feature Playboy.com May 2007 Link Men often view beer the same way they view sex: As long as you’re getting as much as you want, everything is okay. But what’s the point of a large quantity of anything if you’re not also getting high quality? Fine beers, like gorgeous women, should be savored and enjoyed […]
Review Playboy.com May 2007 Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar By Dori Hadar Princeton Architectural Press, 192 pages, Paperback $24.95 Record collectors live for the moments when obsessive hunting for rare vinyl unearths an undiscovered treasure. Dori Hadar, a Washington D.C. criminal investigator and DJ, discovered a different kind of rarity […]
Interview XLR8R April 2007 Link In their prime, Bad Brains was transcendent. In 1979, these four African-American punk pioneers from D.C. stormed the music world. They were Rastas capable of rattling your skull with intense rock, then seamlessly shifting gears into loping reggae rhythms and positive vibrations. The recently released concert DVD, Bad Brains: Live […]
Interview Stop Smiling April 9, 2007 Link As a high school student in California, Chris Manak wrote an essay about starting a record label. It’s difficult to imagine that Manak, who would later emerge as Peanut Butter Wolf, had a clear vision even then of how his quixotic label, Stones Throw, would operate. One thing […]
Review XLR8R March 2007 Link The history of the Black Panther Party is filled with the bold-faced names of key leaders, martyrs, and political prisoners. But as Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas (hardcover; Rizzoli, $35) demonstrates, those images of raising fists and black berets wouldn’t have become such iconic images of black […]
Interview XLR8R March 2007 Link Expanding upon the themes of the primarily instrumental Since We Last Spoke (Definitive Jux), The Third Hand finds former sampling maestro RJD2 doing his own drum programming, instrumentation, and vocals. “It got to the point, with sampling on the MPC, where it just got stupid,” RJ says of his new […]