As music snobs well know, music awards shows generally don’t do the best at showcasing a genre’s most promising talent. If anything, they’re prone to rewarding the same boring, mainstream pap that makes record executives millions of dollars every single year. This year’s CMA Awards, though, looked particularly promising. Among…
White privilege has a central part of the rap music consciousness from the very beginning. At least as long as “The Message,” if not longer, depending on how far back you want to go. So, particularly in the politically charged days of 2015 when an album like Kendrick Lamar’s To…
It’s been a big month for pop music in Dallas. A lot of that has had to do with homegrown talent, thanks to no fewer than three artists with local ties all making it to the top of the Billboard Top 100 chart: In back-to-back weeks, Selena Gomez and Pentatonix…
Josey Records had a hell of a first year. The massive Farmers Branch record store opened with a DJ booth and art gallery; then they quickly added a stage with a state of the art sound system and a second location in Kansas City. But at the one-year mark they…
If there were ever a misleading headline, Things We Can Expect From Erykah Badu’s One-Human Show is it. We have no idea what to expect from Ms. Badu’s one-human show. Reason being? The artist herself isn’t sure of the show’s content just yet, as of a press conference she held a…
Performing under the name Left/Right, producer and DJ Chris Lund has established himself as one of the more prolific electronic artists in Dallas over the past decade. Lund recently added his own label BRØKEN to his list of musical responsibilities. Over the course of 19 releases (around 50 Tracks) Lund has…
Everyone’s favorite former-Disney-star-duo-turned-record-label-business-partners are going on tour together next year and we are pumped, you should be too. If you’re older than 17, there’s a good chance you aren’t aware who we are referring to, but Nick Jonas and Demi Lovato announced on Good Morning America on Monday that they…
Every season on The Voice, it always seems like there is plenty of talent from Dallas and the surrounding areas. We’d like to think that’s because people who live here are just better at singing than everyone else, but that’s probably not true. This season, as Guidelive notes, three of…
It’s been a long time since the Dixie Chicks have made headlines in country music, but maybe that’s because they got tired of all that attention. You might recall a teeny-tiny, pretty minor little incident where Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines criticized then-President George W. Bush while performing in London,…
As a member of the Our House Crew, Jason Ramirez is a major cog in the Dallas house machine. With two decades of experience behind the decks, he brings a depth of knowledge to his mixes. Ramirez has had a front seat to the highs and lows of Dallas DJ…
Once he starts singing, it doesn’t take long for Dallas-based country singer-songwriter Troy Cartwright to sink his artistic simplicity into the listener’s consciousness. In his excellently galloping country noir tune “Next Flight Home,” the Berklee College of Music grad offers a simple, heartfelt image of longing. When Cartwright sings “I’ll…
Before the original members of the Alice Cooper Group took the stage together earlier this month for a surprise reunion at Good Records, it had been 40 years since they played together. So when some high quality footage of the performance appeared on Rolling Stone’s website last week, the whole world was…
If you maxed out your credit card or sold your firstborn to buy tickets to Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour stop at AT&T Stadium, don’t feel too bad about it. It turns out you’re not alone. Apparently Dallasites are willing to do just about anything to see the reigning queen of…
David Bikowski produces and DJs under the name Hands Free and has caused quite a stir with his releases on labels like Audiophile Deep, Faceless and Motek. Part of a long tradition of punk rock ex-pats that find their way to dance music, Hands Free is a standout artist amongst…
With the 27th annual Dallas Observer Music Awards just around the corner — in fact, voting is open right now at 2015musicawardspoll.dallasobserver.com — we’re looking to spend the next several weeks taking the opportunity to highlight some of the nominees for this year’s awards. And when we say these artists…
Look, if we’re being real about the 2016 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominations, there’s probably no one more deserving than Chic, if for no other reason than that this is the disco superstars’ 10th nomination. Of course there are many other reasons — chart data, importance to a…
A project to bring some color to the streets of Deep Ellum has created murals of a dozen elephants, jacks and rubber balls, iconic scenes that are representative of contemporary Dallas, a mural based on a 1938 picture of downtown Dallas, what looks like the child of Andy Warhol and…
Bryan Gonzalez DJs under the moniker B3. B3 is part of a small number of musicians in the area who play in bands in addition to DJing. He plays in the Dallas-based and Dallas Observer Music Awards-nominated band Mayta. Gonzalez’s DJ game is a whole other ball of wax. His…
On Monday morning, superstar Kendrick Lamar teasingly posted a photo on Instagram of a flier for the 1st Annual Kunta’s Groove Sessions tour. It was accompanied with a caption that read, “8 cities. 8 nights. 8 intimate shows.” Speculation swirled as to which eight lucky cities would be treated to…
We’ve all had those nights in college that get a little out of hand, but in Denton recently, a seemingly minor drama during a show at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studio got real-world serious pretty quick. Like, with lawyers and everything. A disagreement between the venue owner and Denton creative group the…
It’s hard to say where St. Vincent is going to pop up next these days. Chances are, it’ll be somewhere that makes us jealous if it’s not Dallas. Last we heard from the artist otherwise known as Annie Clark, she jumping onstage with Taylor Swift in Los Angeles to do…
Here we go again, Dallas. For the 27th year running, the Dallas Observer Music Awards are on their way. Each year, the Observer throws a big-ass party to help celebrate all the hard-working musicians of the Dallas music scene. Two of them, in fact. And we even hand out a…
