I’ve never been to nebraska–I don’t think I have anyway–but the place gives me the creeps. Not, as you may have guessed, because I have a fear of small towns or flat land or multi-grain breads, but because all the bands I know from there scare the shit out of…
Honesty can be a tricky or even dangerous thing to possess and to use in your everyday life, depending on how you choose to use it. For example, look at the protagonist of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. He shoots a man–ostensibly in self-defense–during a scuffle, and has enough witnesses and…
You did not grow up in the world over which the Backstreet Boys now reign: Your treacly pop songs didn’t feature cell phones with batteries cutting out, for example, and your teen idols usually included only one “thanks to the fans” number on their albums, not three. One-hit wonders were…
When Kurt Cobain’s mother, Wendy O’Connor, cried to the Associated Press, “I told him not to join that stupid club,” she wasn’t talking about Columbia House. She was referring to the exclusive rock-stars-dead-at-27 fraternity. But membership has its privileges. If you’re one of those die-young elite who lament over a…
Sometimes she tells herself that no one remembers, convinces herself that everybody has forgotten her songs and her three network television shows and every last one of her 84 Top-40 singles. On those days, she’s certain the era of Vic and Frank and long, luxurious gowns and singing in tune…
Jason Ringenberg’s career path has taken a number of detours, no matter how you simplify it on paper or whose side you take. His longstanding band, Jason & the Scorchers, has been an alt-country favorite since its debut in 1981 and has regularly been picked to be the next Next…
To the chagrin of all immediate family members, we voted for Ralph Nader in last November’s election. If we hadn’t voted for Nader, well, we probably would’ve voted for Al Gore. And after Gore, we’d have written in Martin Sheen or maybe Kevin Kline, possibly Harrison Ford or Michael Douglas…
Let’s set the record straight: Despite rumblings from the underground, this disc is not a worthless, sellout piece of shit, nor does it spell the artistic death of New York hip-hop indie powerhouse Rawkus. Die-hard heads may be disappointed over the change in direction from Vol. 1, which almost exclusively…
It may be true that rock critics are a bunch of failed musicians. I wouldn’t know, because the prospect of career musicianship (turned sour for me around Suzuki Book Four, thanks) seems equally depressing as growing old writing record reviews. There’s a difference between a successful musician and a career…
It’s little wonder that Susanna Hoffs got the old band back together again for one last spin down Amnesia Lane; the dormant superstar in her has yet to fully take to the soccer mom she has become. Three and a half years ago, Hoffs sat in a West Los Angeles…
There’s a great scene in Amy Heckerling’s Clueless where Alicia Silverstone’s character is talking with her friends at school about all the guys they know–about their sloppy clothes, their unkempt hair, their unshaven faces. They go on for a bit and then the camera cuts to a slo-mo shot of…
All 12 tracks and 20 minutes of Gop Ist Minee prove that if there’s hope that the Nintendo generation can have a truly mind-blowing rock experience all our own, it rests on the shoulders of five boys from Mobile, Alabama, known as XBXRX. Not faithfully planted in the annals of…
As the main project of K’s resident recording engineer, Phil Elvrum, the Microphones have always been half song and half studio experiment–juxtaposing sweet singing and delicate pop arrangements against blasts of guitar noise and tape manipulation in a way that has drawn inevitable comparisons to avant-popsters Olivia Tremor Control and…
Aaron Blount, lyricist and guitarist for Austin-based Knife in the Water, is but two degrees of separation from president-elect George Dubya, kind of. “He used to be my dad’s next-door neighbor, years back,” Blount laughs. “It’s really weird to see him on TV now. My dad spoke to him a…
Before booking shows that fall through, playing to audiences that don’t get it, or trying to put out records, their own name is often the first struggle the Sacramento band !!! encounters. Their records confuse record store employees on sight alone, and close friends often don’t recognize the band’s name…
The line winding around the auditorium at UC Irvine is a snapshot of all-inclusive hip-hop culture: Asian girls shuffle forward on dictionary-thick platforms; Jell-O-haired white punks with lip piercings scam for tickets; and black couples in leather and braids hold smoky sticks of incense. The large crowd of fans for…
Other than Flag Day, the holiday season is the best time for Scene, Heard because we seem to run into everyone, and since most of the crash sites happen to be parties, more than a few of the people you bump into are in the mood to talk. (What’s the…
The older Frank Black gets, the less he sounds like himself–something that probably happens to everybody at some point. But ever since Pudge let his monkey go to heaven, he flat out refuses to scream at traffic. Or at the powers that be. He’s like a tired prospectin’ punk gone…
Maybe I just can’t handle my Mickey’s Big Mouth the way I used to, or maybe it’s something else entirely, but whatever it is, these three EPs are going a long way toward buoying my spirits through the cold winter weeks, and so I’m recommending them to those among you…
Head to the Bronco Bowl tonight if for no other reason than to witness the two endpoints of commercial pop-punk’s current crop sharing one sweat-soaked, irrelevance-swathed stage. I’d say that’s a fair way of sizing up the graying Green Day and the still-green Get Up Kids, two bands who’ve made…
Who in the hell sucked out the feeling? Four and a half years ago, Knoxville power-poppers Superdrag had a hit single on the radio and a multi-album deal with Elektra to show Mom and Dad. Now it’s 2001 and about six people (the band and, I suspect, Mom and Dad)…
Listening to this new collection of John Prine’s sparse, gravel-and-molasses renditions of his own early material, it brings to mind how popular music has changed during the past three decades. When Prine first recorded most of these songs, serious-minded “singer-songwriters” were everywhere, soothing the battered spirits of aging hippies with…
