Late Sunday night, famed Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert posted one long article. Actually, it wasn’t so much an article as it was a screenplay. Ebert opened his vault and unloaded part of the script he wrote for a Sex Pistols-focused movie. Originally titled “Anarchy in the U.K.” and later retitled “Who Killed Bambi?,” the … [Read more…]
What is one expected to do when the economy’s in the tank and it seems harder and harder to make a decent living in your chosen industry? In music, the route to a sustainable existence appears to be written in the ads. Or, so it seems in the case of the Black Eyed Peas, a … [Read more…]
The Green Day-inspired rock opera, American Idiot, is now open for business. And the reviews are good [via The New York Times]: A pulsating portrait of wasted youth that invokes all the standard genre conventions — bring on the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, please! — only to transcend them through the power of … [Read more…]
Ever since Radiohead released In Rainbows in a pay-what-you-want format, bands and record labels have sought out new ways to use the Internet to their advantage. Often times, this occurs in the form of PR agencies emailing bloggers links to “exclusive” MP3s, which then become recycled throughout the blogosphere. Then there are the Nine Inch … [Read more…]
White Stripes frontman Jack White gets a lot of attention, tons of accolades and his face on the cover of just about any music-related publication he could want. Why? He’s an artist who manages to draw so much sound out of a relatively spare set-up. “The White Stripes sound so loud with just two musicians,” … [Read more…]
Billboard is reporting that Gang Starr’s Guru has died: Rapper Guru has died aged 43 after a long battle with cancer, according to statements published online. The New York MC – whose real name was Keith Elam – suffered cardiac arrest on March 2 and had been in a coma. Guru’s passing is a major blow … [Read more…]
On Monday, Rolling Stone debuted it’s online subscription model, as well as a much-needed website facelift. Unfortunately, it may be too little, too late. In the years Rolling Stone wasted their web-space, with nothing to show but a handful of articles hosted on a domain, music blogs and sites have sped past the magazine (and many … [Read more…]
On Monday evening, Vocalo’s Robert Feder reported that Chicago Sun-Times music critic Jim DeRogatis left the newspaper for a career elsewhere: Jim DeRogatis, co-host of Chicago Public Radio’s nationally syndicated “Sound Opinionsâ€and one of America’s premier authorities on everything that rocks, resigned Monday as pop music critic at the Sun-Times to join the faculty of Columbia … [Read more…]
That whole Insane Clown Posse’s turn towards appreciation of life’s little wonders, aka the “Miracles” music video, just won’t quit. People are loving hating eating it up, and the meme seems endless. Or at least endless on an Internet time-scale. Take the most recent episode of “Saturday Night Live.” The cast and writers did a … [Read more…]
The past few years, one word has come up constantly in conversation about today’s pop music: Balkanization. Be it another teeny-indie scene given the tag “glo-fi,” or another subset of Brooklyn bands revisiting the aural atmosphere of ’60s garage pop, the message remains loud and clear: As micro-scenes develop within pockets of our society, our … [Read more…]