From the Beatles to Bruce, from Petty to the Pixies, worthwhile careers and weighty influence begin with songwriting. Musical ability, sonic inventiveness, choice of approach, even appearance all count, but if the songs aren’t there in the first place, the best a band can hope for is a few platinum…
Maybe I’ve got a case of arrested development, but I seem to like a lot of the same things as most teen-agers today. I faithfully watch Beverly Hills 90210 every week and faithfully swoon, along with a zillion teens about ten years younger than I, over its star, Jason Priestley…
Though it’s still being defined, it seems to begin with Bruce Springsteen and it might just end with Michael Molina. The pontifications and delineations are oozing out of the media even as you read this, but the best definition is in the grooves of songs you’ve never heard, such as…
Well, you made it. Bigshot MCA recording artists. Congratulations are unquestionably in order. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch. I always figured that either the Mavericks or I would be the next act to sign a major-label deal. Since I can’t sing a lick and play guitar with such…
The Ramones sell out! We’ve all been waiting fifteen years to say that, never had the opportunity until now, until two Marlboro Men in a beer truck decided to enter an auto race, flipped a switch that turned their vehicle into a Jaguar IMSA race car, and roared into television…
When it comes to crafting original music, no songwriter can match the invention, diligence, intelligence, poignancy, or power of Bruce Springsteen. He encompasses everything in rock while repeating nothing. He is the songwriter’s songwriter. That doesn’t mean he’s beyond covering the work of others. For years he closed his legendary…
A few weeks back we presumptuously told you what are the 40 coolest cover songs of all time. Great songs, and great fun for us. But God put evil in this world so we could appreciate the good, and now it’s time for the flip side of the remake coin…
Ten years ago Virgin Records released The Flowers of Romance, the third studio LP from Public Image Ltd. During its infancy, PiL (fronted, of course, by former Sex Pistol vocalist John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon) insisted that it was not merely a band, but a corporate/terrorist amalgam issuing an ultimatum to…
Imagine there were a scale for calibrating shades of blue (the state of mind, not the color). Losing your woman (or man, the blues being an equal opportunity affliction) to the IRS auditor who just put a lien on your house and ran over your dog while repossessing your pink…
In concert, James Brown may croon “Georgia on My Mind” or punch out “Kansas City,” but the Hardest Working Man in Show Business has a special place in his heart for Miami. Since he escaped from the watchful eye of King Records president Sid Nathan to cut the dance hit…
Using a mix-and-match approach that evokes the deep-voiced, deep-hearted pith and passion of Greg Brown and the full-bodied rock flavor favored by the Canadian Invasion, a band called Crash Test Dummies achieves a uniqueness born of amalgamation. Very cool. Or, as they say in the press, very critically acclaimed. The…
A British pub in the heart of Little Haiti staging distinctly American (and distinctly nonmainstream) rock and roll hardly seems a likely candidate for institutionalization as a cultural treasure. The other type of institutionalization (as in nutsy) perhaps, but appearances always deceive, and Churchill’s Hideaway has watched many a more-typical…
The stereotype of Canadians as beer-swilling hosers seems to have died, but the Great White Northerners are still collectively flawed, and that’s why Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and the other aribiters of arbitrary taste haven’t sent a Trend Alert buzzing through their computer systems and jumped on this like hungry…
Miami’s rock and roll scene has evolved to such a level that pride of purpose – or is it self-consciousness? – assumes more importance than it should. There are so many strikingly original bands, so many passionate stylists, so much variety that the national scene is a flat bore in…
You have to figure that any band with a song titled “Cake and Sodomy” is not likely to be populated with shrinking violets. Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids seek to embody everything everybody’s parents always hated about rock and roll, and in the process they’ve become one of the…
Once you put your hands on KC, Gloria, Luther, Nuclear Valdez, and the man who made Margaritaville, it wouldn’t take much to complete the definitive South Florida record collection. Or would it? Fact is, thousands of albums by thousands of artists could be added to the mix, once you got…
The game is deceptively simple. Musicians and their companies need to spread the word, so they provide the media with advance copies of new releases, photographs, biographies and discographies, anything that will make it easy for some lazy journalist to splash the product name across the printed page. The most…
What is the distinction that makes some mashed animal organs pate de foie gras and others mere liverwurst? Was Robert Mapplethorpe a fine artist or a dangerous dickwad? There’s a thin line separating genius from junk, and sitting on that line (perhaps even defining it) is a local band called…
The underlying cause is obvious: recorded music makes mo-mo-mo money when it receives radio play, MTV screen time, and other hype. Some record companies allegedly cough up more cash to buy airplay for potential hits than they spend cultivating or fostering the talents who make up and make good the…
With the imminent release of the 2 Live Crew’s Sports Weekend and the controversy it no doubt will ignite, it’s only fitting that the men who put rap on the map and blazed the trail that has yielded so much lucre for Luke are generating some controversy of their own…
This Sunday a galaxy of merengue stars will bring to Miami a music rich in history and noisy in sound. The problem is that to catch them all, you’d have to be cloned, because with the Dominican Community Association’s Festival del Merengue, and with Radio El Zol’s counteroffer, Merengue Zol,…
Nice girls don’t listen to death metal. Not one of my friends listens to it. Music for deviants by deviants, I thought. The last stop before your parents’ Blue Cross starts paying your way to the deprogramming center. That was before Sepultura. Death (or thrash) metal has a nasty reputation…
