The fourth edition of the recurrent Ska is Dead tour lands at Culture Room on Thursday with a bill straight out of 1997. Ska has been reviled and declared dead for about the last 30 years, but it seems its horn-heavy effervescence just can't be dampened. The genre itself pre-dates reggae, coming out of Jamaica in the early '60s and incubating the careers of later stars. Outside of the island, though, its flickers in the mainstream have, to be honest, come through white punk kids' appropriat
Lansing, Michigan's Cheap Girls sure live up to their name when it comes to music video budgets. We kid, that pig mask wasn't cheap! Even if the lyrics are the most vivid part of "Ft. Lauderdale," it still has all of its power-pop elements as sweetly condensed as vintage Sugar or the Lemonheads. The song sets itself in South Florida, and provides an aspirational tale of young, creative types stuck providing services for the rich. Sample line: "I wanna be an artist/ right now I'm a waitress in F
