Here we go again: The Cuban-exile community has snapped to attention in anticipation of their latest battle, next weekend’s concert featuring a double bill of Cuban chanteuse Rosita Fornes and that island’s famed performance poet Luis Carbonell, scheduled for a Miami Beach location that was undisclosed as of press time…
Where have all the Mohawks gone? If you’re looking for the perfect symbol of the aesthetic denouement of the underground punk scene, you don’t have to search too hard. The icons of that movement’s mid-’80s subterranean flowering are in plain sight, circa 1999. Sonic Youth’s scowling siren Kim Gordon now…
It seemed absolutely fitting that the Los Van Van concert took place during the same week that the Justice Department finally released the 1948 grand jury testimony of Richard Nixon’s crusade against Alger Hiss, an event that had served as a catalyst for the McCarthy era’s anti-communism hysteria. After all,…
I was playing a show in Miami in the theater of divine comedy…. — Bob Dylan, “Caribbean Wind” A tailgate party with teeth is the best way to describe the protest of more than 4000 Cuban exiles, all screaming themselves hoarse outside the Miami Arena, while many of their fellow…
Jazz is a word currently being thrown around techno circles, primarily as a way of defending the merits of the form to incredulous critics. For sneering rockists who dismiss techno as either disposable Muzak or numbingly abstract because of its largely instrumental nature and failure to revolve around easily digestible…
“I feel sorry for the Cuban community in Miami. Because they have imposed on themselves by way of the Right, the same condition that Castro has imposed on Cuba. Total intolerance. And ours is worse. Because it is entirely voluntary.” — Bernardo Benes Another week, another round of Los Van…
Quaaludes, the aardvark of the drug world. — Angela Carter There’s a theory that the counterculture of the moment is defined by its drug of choice. Thus as the heady utopian urges of the late ’60s gave way to the malaise of the early ’70s, decent acid became scarce, the…
Once again, the cultural commissars of Miami’s Cuban-exile community have cracked their whips. The result: the embarrassing spectacle of city officials falling all over themselves in their quest to cancel the first local appearance of legendary Cuban timba outfit Los Van Van. Of the group’s 28 tour stops around the…
Miami finally received a tangible expression of the economic aftershocks of Ricky Martin mania and the newly ascendant Latin chic with the opening of the second Café Nostalgia, this one on Miami Beach. The club’s location inside the venerable Forge restaurant — a world away from the original site’s funky…
Electronic dance music never completely conquered the United States, in part because the electronica revolution could not be televised. Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands, better known as the Chemical Brothers, are a case in point. Their music has plenty of personality and bravado, but the pair are hardly seen in…
It’s not easy being a hardcore punk band in Miami. Just ask Jason Deucifer, drummer for the local outfit Where Fear and Weapons Meet. “People are scared of us,” Deucifer says with frustration in his voice. “We draw 300 kids to our shows but we get no press, no nothing…
I am the creator and this is my house, and in my house there is only house music. But I am not so selfish, because once you enter my house it then becomes our house and our house music…. You may be black, you may be white, you may be…
Politics and pop music are rare bedfellows these days. Instead social consciousness finds itself comically channeled into spirituality, where today’s young activists can adopt a rebellious stance without having to tackle the thornier issues of class and power. Thus, Lilith Fair audiences can coo about what passes for premillennium feminism…
Some music genres measure success with hit records, others with critical kudos. But in the world of bass, the sound of breaking glass can be the ultimate compliment. “A guy came up to me at a car show when he found out who I was,” recalls Neil Case, better known…
For anyone pondering the explosion of interest in Brazilian pop — particularly David Byrne’s tireless stumping on behalf of tropicalismo — last month’s concert by Brazilian superstar Caetano Veloso at the Jackie Gleason Theater explained it all. It wasn’t just Veloso’s ability to meld gorgeously lilting melodies with ferocious blasts…
In true South Beach style, no matter how heated a recent three-hour meeting of the Washington Avenue Task Force got, few of the local club owners in attendance stopped answering their cell phones. Instead they simply got up from their chairs at the tightly packed conference-room table inside Miami Beach…
Think of Miami’s current hip-hop scene and bass-influenced figures such as Trick Daddy and the expatriated J.T. Money come to mind, with their machine-gun snare-popping rhythms and over-the-top braggadocio. Still, other styles do percolate around town, albeit with far less attention. MC Kenyatta raised more than a few eyebrows with…
There’s no official word from the Phish camp yet, but the band’s singer Trey Anastasio let the cat out of the bag onstage during a Columbus, Ohio, show this past week. The group will be performing a millennium New Year’s Eve blowout at the 2000-acre Kirton Ranch, northwest of West…
“We really wanted to revolt against conventional music, against things that had a real flow. We wanted to take the template of dance music and see what new directions we could go with it,” explains Josh Kay, who along with Romulo Del Castillo make up the Miami electronic outfit Phoenecia…
“When I first read it, I just couldn’t even believe it. That story is the definition of bad research,” says Marc Christopher, director of Miami Beach’s electronica-focused internet radio station the Womb (www.thewomb.com). The story in question was a recent Herald profile of the Beach’s EyeQRadio (www.EyeQRadio.com) and its founders…
Disco music is a disease. I call it Disco Dystrophy. The people victimized by this killer disease walk around like zombies. We must do everything possible to stop the spread of this plague. — Steve Dahl It was with those words that Dahl, a Chicago FM radio DJ, opened a…
“Electro and bass is Miami, whether we like it or not. You can’t get away from it,” says Seven, the elusive figure behind Chocolate Industries, the local record label famed for bringing experimental sounds to the world and in the process putting Miami on the map as a hotbed for…
