There were a lot of reasons to think the whole Wesley Willis phenomena was creepy. More than a few stories were written that even on his best days Willis didn’t exactly know what he was doing. Questions about any money he was making and where it went always floated over his releases. That said, his [...]
I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing The Hip perform this live but apparently it’s become something of a signature moment. According to Wikipedia “New Orleans is Sinking” is perhaps the band’s most well-known song. When performed live, Downie often goes off on an ad-libbed tangent. In the most famous such version, a B-side from [...]
One of the great things about the early 90’s music scene was the coming of age of the music sampler. The College Music Journal started distributing compilation CD’s to college radio stations and they were always chock full of good tracks. Even better, a large chunk of those CD’s wound up in used record stores [...]
Back in 1998 I made my first real inroads into the SXSW music festival. It’s trite to say it was better back then but it’s true that it certainly was DIFFERENT. The number of venues was a bit more limited and many of the bands were still the up and coming unknowns from all over [...]
I first heard this track on a mix tape a friend made for me right around 1990. She was in Europe at the time and had access to some great music that I couldn’t get my hands on without spending some serious scratch. I wasn’t necessarily a fan of the “one sensitive guy and an [...]
The fun of listening to the last batch of songs Colourbox made is half about the music, half about identifying the samples they used in their songs. Sampling in the late eighties was still just getting started so hearing stacks of obscure movie samples in with pounding drums and guitars was still very new and [...]
Thinktree were one of those bands that blew everyone away when they appeared in Boston in the early nineties. Their sound was unique and hard to explain by even their biggest fans. I remember copies of their debut disc being passed around feverishly between friends and people cranking the tunes to hear the noises hidden [...]