1°–Bitch Magazine: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, No. 14, The Music Issue Bitch is all caught up in the pleasure and pain of assertion and denial. Taking a “queer” perspective on pop culture, which essentially means attempting to get away from rigid definitions of identity–especially sexual identity–the magazine declares over and over again, “You can’t […]
Michael J. Kramer
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Greg Osby’s Jazz Solution
Greg Osby plays hip hop. He plays funk. He plays Japanese folk music. He plays with a classical string quartet. He writes music for urban street poems. He plays with Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. But above all else, the alto saxophonist plays jazz. And he plays it in whatever context he explores, including […]
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Five Degrees Below Zero
1º – Julien Temple, The Filth and The Fury (Fine Line Features, available at VisArt)This documentary of the Sex Pistols, released on video after a brief run in the theaters, seeks to redress the seminal punk group’s troubled relationship with its manager, Malcolm McLaren, who told his cruelly entertaining side of the story in a […]
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Five Degrees Below Zero
Pop culture is fickle and omnipresent. While its meaning(lessness) evades us, it continues to rain down its barrage of goods and services, sights and sounds, noises and images. This monthly column seeks out those droplets that tasted different on the tongue … observations of subterranean phenomena presumed lost in the thunder-and-lightning show … vignettes discovered […]
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The Butchies
The Butchies, local favorites from Durham and powerful combiners of throttling punk power and women’s protest music, emerge on 3 as perhaps the best purveyors of queercore today. Guitarist Kaia Wilson’s flowing, crystal-clear playing slides its hand into the classic rock toolbox of distorted, hammer-of-the-gods riffs, while her swooping, butterflies-in-the-stomach vocal melodies and smart, passionate […]
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Hitting the Pavement Running
The semi-famous man who wrote the semi-famous Gen-X anthem “Cut Your Hair,” with its semi-famous scream against “No Big Hair!” sports a semi-shaggy mane on the cover of his new eponymous album. It’s a more stylish retro-’70s model muss than an aging-rock star mullet, but still, Stephen Malkmus looks downright dreamy and starry-eyed on the […]
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Momus, Folktronic
“I’ve got that mountain music in me,” sings the wry, eye patch-wearing Scottish expatriate Nick Currie, better known as Momus, “But not since I was born, I learned about it yesterday from a CD-ROM.” Recorded at his own “Fakeways Institute” in New York, Folktronic sends up the whole notion of roots music in a rootless […]
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“Have You Ever Written A Folk Song? I Have, I Have”
Down a dimly-lit aisle at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Southern Folklife Collection, a shelf of frayed, fading reel-to-reel boxes sits unassumingly. It seems like your typical archival jumble of long-lost recordings until you start to look more carefully at the names scrawled in black marker. Paxton. Anderson. Ochs. Seeger. Ian. Dylan. This little local treasure trove of […]
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Tortoise, StandardsThe Sea and Cake, Oui
You are not in a car ad. You are in a city, maybe Chicago … yes, the “city of big shoulders,” as Carl Sandburg called it. You look. You walk. You’re on the train. You sit reading an art book by a clanging radiator, looking out an apartment window. You spot a pretty girl and […]