Crabapple, Georgia, isn’t exactly a hotbed of musical inspiration. It’s not crawling with cutting-edge, college-age scenesters pushing the boundaries of modern rock. It’s not flush with fancy country pickers or earthy blues singers. Hell, it’s not even blessed with a decent karaoke bar. But Crabapple does have its merits: It’s…
Jerry Cantrell Boggy Depot (Columbia) After five platinum-selling records with hard rock gladiators Alice in Chains, guitarist/songwriter Jerry Cantrell’s first solo album finds him in the catbird’s seat. The much-publicized drug problems of Chains’ vocalist Layne Staley has resulted in the band losing some steam and touring opportunities in recent…
A lesson from Music Biz 101: Profit margin is not part of the equation when an unknown, greenhorn punk band leaves home for that first cross-country tour. Still, more and more, ambitious young bands are discovering that if they cut out the booking agent, the promoter, and the typically do-nothing…
Public Enemy He Got Game Soundtrack (DefJam/Polygram) Various Artists Bulworth Soundtrack (Interscope/Fox) Rap is dead. It’s tired. It’s wack. It’s no longer phat. The glory years are dead, thanks to the ungraceful aging of early superstars (Run-D.M.C., Eric B. and Rakim, and KRS-One) and the untimely deaths of many of…
California, it would seem, has pulled a Microsoft on punk rock. If punk is your thing, you’ll almost certainly have to buy the California variety, because Golden State bands have handily crushed the competition. Look around. You’ve got your Green Day, your Offspring, your Rancid, and a dozen or so…
The Specials Guilty ‘Til Proved Innocent! (MCA) Go figure: After returning to the revivalist ska scene in 1996 with the listless Today’s Specials, the reunited Specials — the Coventry outfit that started the whole ska-punk thing back in 1979 — have rebounded with an album that recaptures much of the…
Gary Numan Exile (Cleopatra) Gary Numan The Mix (Cleopatra) Synth-crazed robot and occasional musical innovator Gary Numan has been responsible for some of new wave’s most laughably dated moments, from “Are ‘Friends’ Electric” and the massive 1979 hit “Cars” to the dreary, sci-fi schlock typified by “Down in the Park”…
So you wanna be a rock and roll star. You can already see yourself up there trading licks with wailing Eddie Van Halen. Or maybe you consider yourself a silver-tongued rapper — ready, willing, and able to slam some grooves with Puff Daddy. Or perhaps even as an up-and-coming jazz…
Techno-dance junkie, speed-metal maniac, smooth-jazz fan — whoever you are, listen up: Some rainy day the raging inequities of life are gonna come knocking and you will understand, at long last, just what the concept of deep melancholia really means. It doesn’t matter if you’re living the good life out…
Porkpie hats and checkered suits make for great video imagery. So too stretchy-tubed trombones and overamped pseudopunks twisting their wiry frames around the syncopated beats of Jamaican dance music. Ska, the hyped-up progenitor of reggae, is simply made for MTV, its offspring M2, and any other channel that broadcasts music…
Radio Kings Money Road (Bullseye) Dance crazes will come and go. Rock musicians will alternately grow their hair long and shave it off, according to fashion dictates. Entire new genres of music will spring up out of the fertile imaginations of urban youths and various far-flung, style-hopping experimentalists. And all…
Dr. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov could have easily predicted how the tune broadcast from an ice cream truck would affect most people. Let a few bars of that familiar melody resonate through a neighborhood, and everyone screams for ice cream. The brilliant Pavlov collected a Nobel Prize in 1904 for his…
Ted Hawkins The Ted Hawkins Suffer No More (Rhino) Ted Hawkins The Final Tour (Evidence) In many ways the late Ted Hawkins, who spent the bulk of his career singing for tips on the Venice Beach boardwalk just outside Los Angeles, embodies the stuff of a blues romantic’s sweetest dreams,…
