Like any self-important, one-assignment-away-from-the-poorhouse hack, I get a lot of mail — books, tapes, CDs, and a never-ending paper trail of paid-for plugs — all mercilessly encouraging me to heed the coming of the next Next Big Thing. Over the years I’ve become so immune to the barrage of products…
The members of L7 have exactly one thing in common with the Bangles and the Go-Gos: they’re women — or rather, to filch a description from their press kit, “four talented hags.” This year’s most overworked word in rock criticism, “grunge”, cannot be avoided when attempting to describe the band’s…
Like it or not, as we survey the debris of shattered Dade, we must begin to mythologize the devastation of Hurricane Andrew. In the fledgling years of the next century, our children and grandchildren will clamor for stories of the Great Storm of ’92. And because they’ll be products of…
If you’ve been in line at the grocery store lately, scanning the magazine covers while you wait, you may have noticed a trend. Down below the tabloids screaming, “World’s Fattest Cat Saves Babies From Burning Building” or “Aliens Meet With Ross Perot” are the serious mags. Almost all of them…
Front Line Assembly: Thursday, August 27, the Ambassador Club, 1335 S Federal Hwy, Deerfield, 426-0540. Bloodline: Friday, August 28, Button South, 100 Ansin Blvd, Hallandale, 454-0001. File: Friday, August 28 and Saturday, August 29, Stephen Talkhouse, 616 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, 531-7557. Jackyl: Friday, August 28, Good Food Sports Pub,…
(Cue Twilight Zone theme music. Enter Rod Serling.) “Meet Sophie B. Hawkins, age 25. Ms. Hawkins is a native of New York, the daughter of a writer mother and a lawyer father. At the age of fourteen she began taking lessons on African drums and moved in with her teacher…
They arrive at the New Times music-department office every day, flocks of them. Not pigeons. Press releases. Band bios, newsletters, cover letters, itineraries, unspoken quotes, anything and everything record company publicists can conceive of to sell their bands to the press, who in turn will sell same to the public…
Somehow I don’t think the gentleman with the stocking over his head waving the .38 in my face as he herded my wife and me into the back of our video store and demanded the day’s cash receipts would have appreciated the urgency of my making it to Uncle Sam’s…
My lover stood before me coldly emanating disgust, our relationship hanging on a thread of fear and a memory of passion. Dignified in my pain, I sat in stony silence. Inhaling hatred, I closed my eyes and envisioned my frozen heart. I was beyond feeling. Scorned, I walked numbly to…
So a little trip to Lollapalooza ’92 is in order, is it? Miami wasn’t blessed with the presence of the first Lolla tour, so we have no idea what to expect. But we do know that when you pack tons of live music, art, food, propaganda, and other diversions into…
In 1973 the DEA reclassified methaqualone to Schedule I, pretty much banning it from medical use in the United States. Sold as Quaalude, Sopor, and Mandrax, the sedative-hypnotic at one time had been the sixth-most prescribed drug in the nation. In 1975, 16.9 percent of high school seniors surveyed said…
The obvious and easy argument raised by those dinosaurs tenaciously and fruitlessly attempting to make it worthwhile to own a turntable in the 1990s is the Hip-Hop Equation. Rap-music makers have continued the practice of releasing their material on vinyl, usually one song remixed several ways on the twelve-inch, album-size…
It’s difficult to write about Tori Amos without acknowledging her prodigious talent, and harder still to sanction that talent without serious reservations. Classically trained from an early age to tickle the ivories, the North Carolina-born Amos struggled for years to find her place in the musical food chain. While still…
Some forms of creative expression never receive the respect they deserve. In humor, it’s the clever pun or play on words that, however ingenious its construction, seldom earns more than a begrudging groan of acknowledgment. In the world of pictorial art, it is the caricature that, however penetrating its perception…
There’s a marketing strategy currently faddish among manufacturers of pop detritus that advocates slipping to an unsuspecting public something new, odd, or unexpected during the slow, sweat-drenched summer months, when the brain cells are less alert but more susceptible to manipulation. And while this tactic is usually reserved for debut…
Who’s the hippest DJ in South Beach? Hard to say. What is certain is that whatever your tastes, there is but a handful. A distinct breed apart among record breakers who balance instinct and acumen to make a good night great. A select group who spin at all the right…
No doubt the biggest challenge of Elvis Presley’s remarkable career has been his recent effort to help Bill Clinton get elected president. Whose idea did you think it was to don the shades and jam with the band on Arsenio? Did you think the selection of “Heartbreak Hotel” was a…
Yes, Henry Rollins, former singer for Black Flag and present leader of the Rollins Band, does come off as an angry young man. It’s a description that sounds trite and calculated, doesn’t it? Consider some of the events in Rollins’s life, which he freely reveals: He remembers a man in…
The owners of The Stephen Talkhouse say they will sell their new club to denizens of the heart of the Art Deco district by providing nothing more than “a bar with music.” Good luck. But the music this joint displays won’t come from a jukebox or a going-nowhere bar band…
If working jazz musicians had to depend on audiences consisting of only intensely serious record collectors and historians, professional critics, and other musicians eager to cop their stuff, sit in, and perhaps nail the job for themselves, no one would be able to pay the rent. So it was that,…
So much confusion, so much hype, so much of it old hat to those of us in this hotbed of censorship called Miami. It’s not something that would normally be addressed in this space, but when Florida’s largest retailer of recorded music bowed to a very small minority and joined…
First, there were the Crusades. Then, missionaries tried to spread the Lord’s word to savages in the South Pacific. Two Thursdays ago, a new addition was made to the list of Admirable Yet Thankless Endeavors: Jim Hayward presented the Slammy Awards to South Florida’s untamed hordes. The Slammies — as…
