Modern rap beefs may be played out behind the security of dis tracks and radio interviews, but true-skool enthusiasts know that hip-hop in its rawest and most directly aggressive form can be found only at an MC freestyle battle. If you’ve never seen one in person, they are at turns…
Buju Banton’s evolution as an artist is as evident on his album covers as it is in his music. Mr. Mention features a narrow-eyed gangsta clad in a leopard-print chiffon-sleeved shirt. Til Shiloh shows the first dreadlocks unfurling from his head like a flower’s petals. His most recent album, Friends…
Check this Crescent City six-string slinger’s CV and you’ll find him backing some of the most iconic performers of the past 30 years: the Neville Brothers, Bob Dylan, Dr. John, the Funky Meters, and literally hundreds more. Dylan even gave the man props in his biography: “The other guitar player,…
Ask around about who is the next Miami MC to transition from a local talent to a national force, and chances are you’ll hear the name Garcia pop up more often than not. With a battering-ram flow as terse as it is rhythmic, and a sense of street bravado that…
Sick of new-school rockers whose grasp of music history begins with the 1977 release of the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks and ends with Gang of Four’s 1981 album Solid Gold? If so, we suggest you check out pop blues group Spiritmachine. There’s a hint of Keith Richards’s bluesy…
It’s only fitting that Miami, the Jamaican music mecca of the U.S., would host a reggae festival that transcends the typical concert parameters. The South Florida Family Reggae Festival will feature your usual procession of stalwart supergroups such as Third World, Marcia Griffiths, Chrisinti, and the Fourth Dimension Band. But…
With more than 60 bands and DJs spread over thirteen hours and six stages on Bicentennial Park’s waterfront site, Bang! is the largest show to hit South Florida in some time. Taking a cue from recent festivals such as Coachella and Los Angeles’s Nocturnal Wonderland, the Bang! lineup includes a…
In recent years fans of hardcore have suffered from too many frilly pseudo acts lauding their supposed “skills and technique.” But don’t despair, young thrashers, help is on the way. With a lineup of artists that stretches from coast to coast, and with each act supporting recent recordings, Street Brutality…
Although The Experience might be Jimi Hendrix’s more famous backing crew, few would disagree that Band of Gypsies was better. Hendrix provided the Gypsies’ six-string pyrotechnics, but the heart of the group was Buddy Miles and his supremely in-the-cut drums. Miles wrote and sang the classic “Them Changes” with Hendrix…
Erick Morillo has achieved a level of success usually associated with big-time rock stars and 50 Cent-like rappers. He is one of few DJs who can go from spinning the soulful and sexy house music of Miguel Migs to the deep and funky house music of Armand Van Helden. He…
Brazilian composer and saxophonist Livio Tragtenberg has reassembled his Nervous City Orchestra and is set to take Miami audiences on a second trip around the world. And though Nervous City may ostensibly be dubbed world music — for lack of a better description — Tragtenberg’s project has more in common…
Leslie Hall is the reigning female geek of 2005. A graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the 23-year-old rapper is riding the crest of a dork-chic phenomenon that began with Napoleon Dynamite and will inevitably end with an entirely new generation of system administrators. And…
Life is more than poppin’ bubbly, clockin’ on the corner, or even riding on dubs. Life is gray days you can’t put on a billboard, capture in a video, or corral into a four-second hook. And since the sudden seclusion of Lauryn Hill, you’ve been hard-pressed to find this side…
In the increasing conceptual and spectacle-laden world of indie music, few bands are willing to simply succeed or fail solely on the strength of their songs. Sybris, a strangely average-looking quartet from Chicago, breaks from its contemporaries on its self-titled 2005 debut with a batch of songs drenched in Smashing…
Since its inception in the Nineties, Converge has been on a path frequently dotted with the telltale signs of your average American aggro-hardcore band: blood, sweat, broken instruments/ bones, and a rabid testosterone-fueled following. Taking cues from the finest punk, metal, and hardcore, Converge continues to produce solid albums and…
Go ahead — roll your eyes at Bono’s persistent messianic complex. But maybe the guy’s got good reason to think he’s bigger than Jesus. Don’t forget, Jesus has had 2000 years to firm up his reputation, while the U2 singer has only been alive since 1960. And — sorry, Pat…
The misunderstood phenomenon of XBXRX is best explained after a large glass of tequila and a handful of barbiturates. Imagine the creative noise manipulations of mid-Nineties anarchic noisemaster Flammable Child thawed by the artistic impulses of Melt Banana and finally tempered by the technological misuses of the Residents. XBXRX has…
On Carnaval Eletronico, Brazilian Daniela Mercury commissioned electronic DJs to retrofit classic compositions such as Gilberto Gil’s “Amor de Carnaval” with snappy, electro beams. The songs manage to balance sensuous rhythms with complex modern arrangements. “I have always been eclectic,” Mercury says. “Axé is still a genre in development, and…
Los Lonely Boys are a trio of brothers — Henry, Jojo, and Ringo Garza, Jr. — rocking out of the great state of Texas with a tornadolike twist of classic American rock (the Chuck Berry kind), conjunto, country and western, Tex-Mex, and classic Latin American rock (the Carlos Santana kind)…
Think about South Florida’s intimate relationship with Cuba and the Caribbean and the influence it has had on our indigenous music scene. The same sort of cross-cultural, stylistic leg-humping goes on in Southern California across the Mexican-American border, and there’s no better example than L.A.’s Ozomatli. The bilingual, genre-smashing, Latin-funk-rock-rap…
These days albums are anointed classics before they’re even released, and artists are deemed legends after partying with Paris Hilton. But jazz bassist Ron Carter has earned the moniker. The National Endowment for the Arts recently anointed Carter as a Jazz Master — a title intended to recognize “living legends”…
As hard as we may wish and pray for it to happen, Alicia Keys will probably never serve any of her acolytes a steaming cup of hot chocolate (made with cream, not water). It’s something we dream about every time we hear her cell phone conversation in her current chart-topper,…
