Category: Music Review

If you want to talk contributing factors, the Public Enemy mess has three of them. Those who would participate in the debate about the group ignore them at their peril, so it’s probably worth spelling them out at the beginning: (1) Professor Griff, the group’s former minister of information, is an anti-Semitic dickhead–a somewhat tragedically […]

The 80s was the decade of the anthem. Springsteen started it, of course, but between feel-good cheerleaders both passable (Peter Gabriel) and intolerable (Sting) and a wheelbarrow full of long-haired singers with their chins jutting out, from crazy Bono to the clowns in the Alarm, we kind of got our fill of prancing guitars and […]

Silos leaders Walter Salas-Humara and Bob Rupe closed their recent show at Cabaret Metro with a strange cover–a thumping, cheerfully undifferentiated take on “One After 909,” the very early (1963) Lennon-McCartney composition the Beatles disinterred for Let It Be. A lot of what the Silos are about these days is the Salas-Humara-Rupe partnership: their rhythm […]

In his current engagement at the Goodman Studio Theatre (which is not entirely sold-out despite reports), Mandy Patinkin redefines the musical-theater concert from the moment he walks onstage. Dressed in black slacks, a loose-fitting coral-colored T-shirt, and gym shoes, he pops out from the wings carrying two pots of flowers with which to decorate a […]

It’s always interesting to see how musicians who’ve been successful on record come off live. The transition between bandstand and studio can be tricky, and some of our most important blues artists have had trouble with it. In some cases–Howlin’ Wolf comes to mind–an artist’s stage presence has an excitement or intensity that can’t be […]

“Forget about punk. Forget about the new Mods marching to the beat of ‘My Generation.’ In the England of 1980, ska is the word.” That’s how Rolling Stone critic David Fricke began his March 23, 1980, article on ska, the latest music craze to sweep the U.K. A decade later, the record label most responsible […]

There’s a famous film clip of Billie Holiday toward the end of her career singing with tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Holiday’s not doing well: her voice is ravaged, she looks haggard and hollow-eyed, you wonder if she can even finish the show. But at one point, when Young takes off into one of his dreamlike […]

Despite the much-vaunted universality of blues expression, the grafting of disparate blues styles into a coherent whole can be a tricky business. In the prewar Chicago days of Lester Melrose’s Bluebird label, the work of artists like Memphis Minnie and Big Bill Broonzy was sometimes diluted by producers attempting to enhance their sounds with trumpets […]

The Silver Beatles became the Beatles in mid-1960, as John, Paul, George, and their drummer then, the hapless Pete Best, went off to Hamburg for the first time. Almost exactly ten years later, Paul McCartney left the band via a rather churlish “interview” (he apparently wrote the questions himself) included with the English version of […]