Crickets
Friday, March 12, 2010
Posted
by Kevin Warwick
on Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 12:40 PM
South by Southwest starts next week, which means it's time for the always-benevolent crew at
the Hideout to throw its annual SXSW send-off for the horde of Chicago bands making the trip to America's mecca of look-at-me-now music festivals. The all-day concert gets rolling around 3 PM this Saturday and features an impressive roster of locals, several of whom have been praised in the
Reader's pages recently. Set times are after the jump:
Continue reading »
Tags: South by Southwest, Hideout, SXSW, music festival, Mickey, Hollows, Via Tania, Mittens on Strings, Love of Everything, Plastic Crimewave Sound, Waco Brothers, Tyler Jon Tyler, Hood Internet
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Thursday, March 11, 2010
Posted
by Miles Raymer
on Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 12:18 PM
In my current column I
profile heavy-as-fuck local band-slash-drinking-crew Bloodiest, who play Saturday at the Bottle with the excellent
A/V Murder. Normally I'd link to Bloodiest's MySpace page at this point to allow the curious a quick sampling of the band's music, but they don't have one—they're not
these guys. Vocalist
Bruce Lamont has one of the group's tracks on his solo page, but if you really want to hear what Bloodiest is all about you'll have to experience their massive live set. I highly recommend doing so.
Tags: Bloodiest, Chicago, Bruce Lamont, Sharp Darts
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Posted
by Miles Raymer
on Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 1:15 PM
The key to winning at life isn't getting all the toys or outliving all your enemies. The key to winning at life is to doing whatever it is you're doing like it's the best thing in the whole wide world. If every moment of your life totally kicks ass, you are the king of the world even if your job is standing on the side of the road holding signs advertising cheap pizza.
Video evidence after the jump.
Continue reading »
Tags: video, metal, pizza, the Internet, winning at life, Slayer, Video
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Posted
by Miles Raymer
on Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 12:28 PM
It was all the way back in November when word got out that beloved underlit dance-music room Sonotheque was going to become a Chicago outpost of the continent-spanning Beauty Bar chain. Though the building's outward appearance hasn't changed noticeably since right after it closed, when Sonotheque's modernist facade was torn down, the promised interior renovations must be popping off—the Empty Bottle Presents update e-mail that went out yesterday includes a packed schedule of DJs at Beauty Bar starting in just two weeks.
The complete list—including DJ appearances by members of Vampire Weekend, Passion Pit, the Faint, and more—is after the jump.
Continue reading »
Tags: Beauty Bar, Sonotheque, Sharp Darts, Empty Bottle, Chicago, dance music, indie rock
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Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Posted
by Miles Raymer
on Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 3:23 PM
Thirteen years ago today the world lost the best rapper it's had so far. I don't know how times I've listened to Ready to Die, but every time I put it on I come away with at least one more reason it's among the best records of all time.
After the jump, a freestyle Biggie recorded the day of his death:
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Tags: Notorious B.I.G., Biggie, hip-hop, freestyle, Video
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Monday, March 8, 2010
Posted
by Miles Raymer
on Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 5:43 PM
I recently read an interesting book called
Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry. It was written in 1993, when upgrading to CDs was the latest technological advancement in the gray-to-black-market music business. (Coincidentally, 1993 was also the year the first popular graphical Web browser was released, accelerating the mass adoption of the Internet—one of the only enemies bootleggers and legit labels would ever share.) But the bulk of the book's action is set in the 1970s, the golden age of bootlegging. At that time bootleggers actually drove innovation in the straight record business for a while. They created and sustained the massive popularity of live albums in the 70s, and legit labels tried and often failed to match the speed, quality, and popularity of the best bootleg releases. Bootleggers basically invented the B-sides and rarities compilation—along with its even more profitable bigger brother, the rarities box set—and the straight biz later adopted both formats.
A bootleg that became seriously popular would often be bootlegged in turn by another underground label. If it became seriously, seriously popular it would be bootlegged by a legit label. This is how Dylan's Basement Tapes and the entirety of his incredible Bootleg Series on Columbia happened. It's also how the Numero Group's upcoming Eccentric Breaks and Beats came to be.
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Tags: Numero Group, Eccentric Breaks and Beats, Chicago, the biz, bootlegs, Madlib, Mayer Hawthorne
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Friday, March 5, 2010
Posted
by Miles Raymer
on Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 3:22 PM
I was trying to think up a clever way to tell you about the tumblog
Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber, but what's the point? The whole genius of Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber is its haikulike simplicity and elegance, so why mess with that? Can I tell you anything about the site that its title can't?
Is it important that some of the alleged lesbians on the site don't really look that much like Justin Bieber? Not really. What's important is that some of the alleged lesbians look a lot like Justin Bieber, and that is LOL.
(via Fuck Yeah Dykes)
Tags: Justin Bieber, the Internet, lulz, alleged lesbians
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Posted
by Miles Raymer
on Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 11:47 AM
Well damn, it looks like I owe Jessica Hopper a dollar. Back when she and I made our predictions about who would end up playing the Pitchfork Music Festival this year, I brushed off her suggestion that rapper Freddie Gibbs would wind up on the lineup—I figured it was unlikely because he's still relatively underground, without the type of popularity in indie circles that past P4K hip-hop acts like the GZA and Clipse had.
Seems I was wrong, though. The new batch of festival acts announced today does include Gibbs, along with Girls, El-P, Broken Social Scene, Panda Bear, Dam-Funk, Bear in Heaven, Titus Andronicus (whose new The Monitor is worthy of comparison with the Constantines), the slightly surprising Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and locals Alla, Cave, and the Smith Westerns.
Three-day passes for the fest are sold out, but tickets for all three individual days are still available.
Tags: Freddie Gibbs, Pitchfork, Pitchfork Music Festival, Chicago, Girls, El-P, Broken Social Scene, Panda Bear, Dam-Funk, Bear in Heaven, Titus Andronicus, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Smith Westerns, Alla, Cave
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Thursday, March 4, 2010
Posted
by Miles Raymer
on Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 4:40 PM
Last week Maura Johnston—who the Village Voice picked up for their Sound of the City column after the abrupt end of her tenure at Idolator last year—wrote a chart rundown where she wondered how generic post-Nickelback pseudo-grunge bands and terrible neo-Limp Bizkits like the Hollywood Undead manage to place so highly when it seems like no one actually listens to them. The answer, according to dancer/blogger Bubbles Burbujas: strip clubs.
If you only read one fascinating description today of the the godawful music environment in your average strip club written by a dancer who can talk knowledgeably about both Shinedown and Animal Collective, make it this one.
Tags: Shinedown, Hinder, Buckcherry, the Rapture, Animal Collective, Maura Johnston, Village Voice, Bubbles Burbujas, strippers
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Posted
by Miles Raymer
on Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 2:44 PM
In this week's Sharp Darts I profile Robert Manis, the obsessive collector who brought
wild Chicago outsider punk J.T. IV and the significantly more commercially viable Detroit protopunk group Death to
Drag City. Recently he's taken his mission to rescue obscure musical gems solo, starting a label of his own called
Moniker. His first release, by Chicago avant-folkie
John Bellows, comes out Tuesday. After the jump I have some sample songs.
Continue reading »
Tags: Robert Manis, John Bellows, Moniker Records, Sharp Darts, Drag City, J.T. IV, Death, Chicago
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