HANDSOME FAMILY My generation: While Cracker’s David Lowery wastes everyone’s radio time every day hating it, Chicago’s Handsome Family try like hell to ignore it, exploring instead the deep, dark poetics of America’s folk and country past. They draw on a legacy of liquor, madness, and death, writing songs about people like crazy Aunt Barbara, […]
Author Archives: Sarah Vowell
Posted inArts & Culture
Young Fresh Fellows
YOUNG FRESH FELLOWS Rippling through the beer-drinkin’, wisecrackin’, “Louie Louie”-lovin’ grapevine in late 1994, this news: Scott McCaughey, musical guest on Saturday Night Live. Sure, he was playing guitar with some band called R.E.M. instead of his comrades in Seattle’s long-beloved Young Fresh Fellows. But after a year on the road playing “Everybody Hurts,” McCaughey […]
Posted inMusic
Sleater-Kinney
SLEATER-KINNEY No one’s going out of his way to find out what ordinary white girls from the middle of nowhere are thinking. Not that they’re waiting around to be asked, especially in Olympia, Washington, where punk rock has been pulling feminism’s pigtails the past few years in a scruffy, adolescent mass ritual called riot grrrl. […]