Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist and is the author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to…
Sloppy handling of deadly viruses at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, including shipping a deadly virus to a lab by mistake, has spurred calls for an independent investigation of the agency. The head of of it concedes in a New York Times piece this morning there may be a…
At the risk of repeating myself, every time I see, hear or read Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins speaking about the immigrant kid issue, I’m struck by something dramatically new, almost shocking, in the way he frames the question. He starts from the heart. The heart. We don’t get much…
Dallas doesn’t get to call itself home to tons of living legends, but nowhere else in the world has the privilege of calling itself the home of Erykah Badu. As one of the most influential figures in modern R&B and one of the most interesting people alive, Badu is almost…
Maybe I need to do a mid-course correction. Beginning last Sunday, Dallas Morning News City Hall reporter Steve Thompson had what anybody would consider a terrific series of stories in the paper about an ill-fated slum clearance and renovation project on Bexar Street in South Dallas in which the city…
Although Queen has remained hugely popular worldwide for over four decades, the band’s albums have always proved rather spotty. As a matter of fact, it can be especially challenging to make it through any of Queen’s 14 studio efforts. For every great song (“You’re My Best Friend,” “39,” “Sheer Heart…
For six years we have talked about an accusation that Dallas practiced deliberate racial segregation in redeveloping downtown. In the last six months we have talked about City Hall’s absolute defiance of that charge. So, imagine my surprise when assistant city manager Theresa O’Donnell told me the city is no…
First thing, Dallas shouldn’t take its rebuff by the Republican Party so personally, because … because Dallas shouldn’t take everything so personally. Sometimes I feel like we’re sitting at one end of the bus, a woman gets on and sits at the other end, and we shout at her, “What?…
Via Wiki CommonsStopped clocks are right twice a day. Geoffrey Arend is married to Christina Hendricks. Performance artists get federal funding. Canada is south of Detroit. People wear Google Glass and think they look awesome. Some things you just can’t explain, like how really shitty bands occasionally luck into recording…
Doritos come in multiple forms and dimensions these days. There’s the two dimensional-like flat chip option, which have been Street Tacoed, nacho cheese explosioned, Tapatioed, and, more recently, contorted into the taco dimension. On the taco axis, Doritos is often filled with “beef” and sour cream and stuff. Now, 7-Eleven…
Blame cannot be un-owned. Like money, blame has to go in somebody’s purse. It can’t be left on the table. If the responsible person is able somehow to cleverly skate on the blame he deserves, that just means somebody else has to be the scapegoat. Witness the grand saga going…
Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist and is the author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to…
Bruce Dickinson rules. He’s the greatest singer for one of the greatest bands of all time, Iron Maiden. But recently, he unleashed some pretty charged words in an interview with The Guardian. In addition to dropping one of the most incredible quotations ever, “fame is the excrement of creativity,” he…
Let’s say the kids do come. What does that look like on Day 1? Crazy? Or not? It’s all about anger management. Dallas County Commissioners Court Judge Clay Jenkins, with backing from all but one of his fellow commissioners, has vowed Dallas will take responsibility for as many as 2,000…
Seeing that the legendary Willie Nelson is performing at his annual 4th of July picnic this Friday, we at DC9 thought it time to do some wishful thinking about dear Willie. The guy has always loved doing duets. He’s performed songs with (among others) Snoop Dog, Steven Colbert, Julio Iglesias,…
Something recent and specific must be driving the surge of unaccompanied immigrant children across the Texas border with Mexico. It’s reasonable and prudent for government to try to figure out what’s behind it in order to stem the tide. But that’s one thing. The other thing is this: The offer…
One way or another, the Robert Groden situation in Dealey Plaza will fester and erupt again in months ahead. You know who I mean. Groden is the Kennedy assassination expert who sells books and videos there on weekends. The city has been trying to get rid of him forever. Funny…
The big show-and-tell meeting between the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, scheduled for today, has been postponed, according to reliable sources. We have a call in to Price’s attorney, Billy Ravkind, for word on why. Ravkind had predicted previously that the feds would show Price…
Culture is the most confusing thing. In today’s Dallas Morning News, a state representative from a northern suburb is quoted objecting to a proposal for tolled lanes on U.S. Highway 75, the main road north from the city, saying, “We’ll basically be a gated community.” Wait. I thought that was…
When I heard that Kim Kardashian had a new baby collection coming out, I assumed it was a formal announcement that she was about to birth multiples. As it turns out, she is not going to birth a collection of babies, but has in actuality created a line of baby…
Always fun for me to read The Dallas Morning News on Sunday, or, as I call it, Pravda Day. That’s when the big think-pieces come out in the special “Pointy Section” of the paper … oh, ‘scuse me, it’s really called the “Points Section,” but you get my point. It’s…
Courtesy of the label Mainstream country music gets an unfair rap as being universally over-polished and formulaic, a notion that artists like Kacey Musgraves and Eric Church obliterate every time they strap on their guitars. But there’s a granule of truth to the stereotype, and a particularly damaging sub-genre — known as “bro-country” — is…
