Music
The Driskill Hotel, a Romanesque brick and limestone hulk at the corner of Old Pecan and Brazos streets in downtown Austin, is the closest thing the Texas capital has to old-world glamour. The hotel also happens to be haunted, supposedly, by the ghost of the man whose portrait hangs at the stairs to the bar just off the lobby: Colonel Jesse Driskill, a cattle baron who made a fortune during and after the Civil War peddling longhorn to a famine-stricken region. READ MORE >>
In the taxonomy of contemporary music, “alt” can stand for more than “alternative.” For sure, the prefix is commonly used to signify a deviation from a genre’s traditional aesthetics: alt-rock, alt-country, alt-jazz, alt-folk. But “alt” can also mean “anti,” and I know of no instance so extreme as the one of “alt-cabaret,” a genre that has become a sensational vogue in London over the past several years and has recently emerged in New York to attack the entrenched performance traditions of the Great American Songbook. READ MORE >>
The basic premise of One-Man Focus Group is that cultural criticism shouldn't be the exclusive province of cinema, literature, music, and the like. Given the proper perspective and the presence of a reasonably articulate observer, virtually anything can be subjected to insightful, illuminating critique. Or at least that's the idea. READ MORE >>
Yes, it’s a huge comeback. But for whom? READ MORE >>
The facts were sketchy, and that seemed utterly appropriate to Donald Byrd. Last week, a lesser-known jazz-oriented pianist named Alex Bugnon posted on his Facebook page an announcement that Byrd had died on February 4, at age 80. READ MORE >>
Back in December, when Paul McCartney united with the surviving members of Nirvana to play a song at the READ MORE >>
Sing Along with Beck
This old-timey "album" of sheet music isn't worth the gimmick
My grandmother slept with the poultry man to help feed her six children, my mother told me many times. READ MORE >>
Obama's Honeymoon With Hip-Hop Is Over
At a pre-inaugural party three nights ago, rapper Lupe Fiasco lived up to his reputation for stirring controversy when he played an extended, 30-minute version of his anti-Obama track “Words I Never Said.” For this, he was thrown off the stage by security guards. READ MORE >>
The video-game industry, which has been in a fight with the gun lobby to deflect blame for the Sandy Hook massacre, could use some positive press in Washington these days. So Electronic Arts, which makes first-person shooter games like Medal of Honor and Battlefield, did what any company looking for an image boost would do: Get the eminently wholesome John Legend to headline an invite-only inauguration after party on the top floor of the W Hotel, and highlight a game that doesn’t revolve around shooting people.While Legend passed the time with supermodel co-host Malin Ackerman in a VIP section at the rear of the dark room, and the crowd noshed on gussied-up chicken and waffles while glancing surreptitiously at Grover Norquist (who seemed to enjoy the attention), I pursued the ostensible purpose of the event: promotion of the latest edition of “SimCity,” which EA is using as a bridge to D.C. wonks.In a corner of the room, as I peered at a computer displaying a virtual town, a woman asked if I'd had a chance to play it. She pulled over her husband, who'd designed it and flown out from San Francisco to show it off. He asked if I wanted to try it out.I could spend the night gawking at mayors-about-town Michael Nutter, Antonio Villaraigosa, and Cory Booker. Or I could pretend to be a mayor myself. READ MORE >>
Is It OK for White Music Critics to Like Violent Rap?
“It is this which defeats us, which continues to defeat us, which lends to interracial cocktail parties their rattling, genteel, nervously smiling air … Wherever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the tension of a silence filled with things unutterable.” — James Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” 1951 READ MORE >>
