Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Hélène and Célia Faussart were surprised with their American success in 1999. Their record, Princesses Nubiennes, became the best-selling French language record in a stateside decade, even though it did poorly in France. The amazement, Célia says, came with American audiences […]
Chris Toenes
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Veronique Diabolique
Durham’s Veronique Diabolique claims it’s from France, sings in French and dresses in fetish gear and makeup. Its members romanticize dark poets and the spooky side of ’80s New Wave. If it all sounds so contrived, it is. After all, Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil has already spawned too many undergrad, black-clad bands around the […]
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Spark Con 2007
Richard Florida’s ideas about the vaunted creative class have been lauded, just as they have been criticized. Good reasons abound on both sides. But, if Florida’s 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class … And How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community & Everyday Life, has one cross-spectrum benefit, it ignited communities like our own […]
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Greil Marcus and The Handsome Family meet at UNC
• Read an excerpt from Greil Marcus’ The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. “Pretty Polly” is a murder ballad about a woman with a ruthless mate who becomes her killer. In a genre full of tough […]
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The Jack and Jim Show
Iconoclasts, by definition, don’t fit in, but the mainstream sometimes peaks around the corner to embrace their contributions. Not looking for acceptance, though, the pioneers have often moved on by then, miles away from their former way of thinking that’s finally settling into the fold. Dr. Eugene Chadbourne is no exception: An electric rake-playing protest […]
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Steel Pulse
When reggae and punk butted natty dreads against spikes in England in the 1970s, the relationship ranged from contentious to passionate. In the middle of it all was Steel Pulse, the Birmingham group formed in 1975. While most punks spewed a splintered rage, Steel Pulse had activism at its center. Bands like The Clash and […]
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Joe Jack Talcum
Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Satire, if done well, knocks its target down a notch. Since some musicians will always interpret their music as Shakespearean drama, humor is direly needed to lighten the emotional load. The Dead Milkmen, the band Joe Jack Talcum formed with friends […]
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Chuck Johnson heads west
“We practiced religiously,” remembers Matt Gocke, Chuck Johnson’s partner in Spatula, a duo that formed when the ’90s Chapel Hill indie rock scene was booming. “I thought his work ethic was prodigious. But I learned that when I wasn’t around him, he was practicing more.” Music practice isn’t a bad way to describe Chuck Johnson’s […]
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The Ex-Members
Listen! Listen to The Ex-Members’ “Into the Nite” from the new xoex_ep. If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Whenever folks think of Gerty!, the trio that spawned The Ex-Members, they think of new wave. As loaded as the ’80s are with cultural baggage, Gerty’s unflinching fandom for that […]
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Dan Melchior
Moving South doesn’t have to mean your plans go south, too. Garage rock impresario Dan Melchior settled in Durham from New York City last year, having arrived in America from his home turf of London in 2000. But, even in the slow South of the summertime, Melchior can’t be accused of slowing down. He’s got […]
