When Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis hung himself, his body was discovered with Iggy Pop’sThe Idiot still spinning on his turntable. The choice made sense, as the record directly inspired the dreary post-punk that Joy Division was beloved for. It’s odd then, that The Idiot was actually a stylistic detour for Iggy, an outlier …
At the rate that they were going, The Beastie Boys were destined to flame out. With Adam ‘MCA” Yauch, Michael “Mike D” Diamond, and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz all doing their best semi-ironic frat boy impressions, their 1986 Def Jam debut, Licensed To Ill, was forceful and blustering, helmed by the meaty guitars and punchy drums …
The story behind Bob Dylan’s masterpiece, Blonde On Blonde, is one of the most iconic in all of popular music. Dylan, coming off of touring for the equally magnificent Highway 61 Revisited, took some of the Hawks, his touring crew, and went into the Columbia Studio in New York to create his next musical work. After frustrations …
Few truly embodied the punk ethos like Richard Lester Meyers did. A high school dropout, he and another friend, Tom Miller, moved to a New York City in the early stages of the punk explosion due to happen in the next couple of years, in pursuit of his passion as a poet. Adopting new names …
The story of Digable Planets begins during the late 1980’s in the culturally rich City of Brotherly Love. Ishmael ‘Butterfly’ Butler was based in Seattle, interning at Arthur Russell’s Sleeping Bag Records in New York, and intermittently visiting his grandmother and father in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, studying at the prestigious HBCU Howard University in Philadelphia, Craig …
I’m Your Man’s cover shows Leonard Cohen, 53 years old, decked out in shades and a suit, eating a banana. Well, it’s more complicated than that. It shows a man who had been at the precipice of collapse, plagued by depression so debilitating he couldn’t even get out of bed. It shows a man who …
The first sound you hear on Hot Buttered Soul is Bar-Kays drummer Willie Hall’s blunt, bodied strike of the snare, followed by two booming kicks. The duration of that sequence isn’t very long; it’s a mere second, maybe a little less, in length. Yet, in essence, those 3 hits of the drumset represent the calm before the …
In 1991, Adrian Thaws, better known as the smoky-voiced Tricky, was at a crossroad in his musical career. His contributions on pioneering trip-hop group Massive Attack’s legendary debut Blue Lines had been an introduction into the potential of his talent and capabilities. However, he felt creatively ignored by his frequent collaborators at Massive Attack, frustrated …
