Recent Features

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Wednesday, February 28 2007

Samba is the Heartbeat of Brazil

By Chris Welsch

Samba, with its distinctive, floating downbeat, is a product of warm, sunny places. At its core, driven by percussion, samba has African roots, but like Brazil itself, samba is a stew of other places.

Such Nice Boys: An Interview With Terry Six

By Jennifer Kelly

Two years after the tragic automobile accident that killed three of his bandmates, surviving Exploding Hearts guitarist Terry Six is back with a new power pop/glam-rocking band called the Nice Boys. "I came to realize that I'm not sure I know how to do anything else but play music and write music and love music," said Six. "That's all I can do."

Tuesday, February 27 2007

Lest We Should Forget

By Chadwick Jenkins

The unanticipated moments, the flickering images of people dying and afraid, make the War Chronicles series a haunting testimony to the tribulations of the individual despite the script's framing narrative depicting the nearly anonymous unfolding of events.

Barbarians at the Gate

By Shaun Huston

In addition to enabling collaboration and sharing, recently developed social open sourcing technologies -- sometimes called Web 2.0 or the read-write web -- make it possible to cultivate communities of interest around a particular film and even short-circuit normal promotional efforts and theatrical distribution.

Monday, February 26 2007

Sister Rosetta Tharpe got rock rolling long before Elvis

By Dan DeLuca

The late, great Sister Rosetta Tharpe was a one-of-a-kind pioneer of 20th-century American music.

Now Hear This: Patrick Wolf [London]

By James Evans

Flamboyant, extravagant, even audacious, Patrick Wolf's public image may have garnered him some notoriety, but it's his skill with songcraft that has won him praise. Now Wolf stands poised to tackle the mainstream with his forthcoming The Magic Position.

Sunday, February 25 2007

Sorting Out Farrakhan’s Legacy

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Farrakhan has been both vilified as an anti-Semite and also deified for championing the interests of the black poor.

Friday, February 23 2007

MacGuffin Pop

By Zeth Lundy

Randy Newman's latest Academy Award nomination makes it easy to forget how truly deceptive his songwriting really is. His music, which rarely wanders far from New Orleans R&B, ragtime, or Brill Building pop, is the stuff of familiarity and comfort, an unassuming foundation of Americana into which subversive (confrontational, even) ideas can be planted.

Thursday, February 22 2007

Beats and Geeks

By Cary Darling

White rappers merge the worlds of hip-hop and computers in an underground scene called 'nerdcore'.

The Bluth Company vs. Dunder Mifflin

By Kristin Boyers

Why couldn’t Arrested Development find a mass audience when The Office is thriving?

Wednesday, February 21 2007

Shallow Graves

By Michael Patrick Brady

Martin Scorsese's hotly tipped Oscar fave, The Departed, plumbs the depths of the psychological and sociological motives of violence, loyalty, and duty.

Pretty Surfaces, Sharp Edges: An Interview With Wet Confetti

By Jennifer Kelly

Wet Confetti's Alberta Poon fronts a three-person band that's drawing comparisons to Delta 5, X-Ray Spex, and the Au Pairs. Funny, though, she says she and her two band-mates never heard of post-punk until after they started making music.

Tuesday, February 20 2007

Dixie-chicked

By Cynthia Fuchs

Introducing the Chicks' Grammys performance, Joan Baez called them "three brave women who are still 'not ready to make nice.'" It may be the long way, but it's the right way too.

Bright Eyes: In Defense of Preciousness

By Sarah Feldman

Despite all the self-absorption, and directly in spite of criticisms about the brittle timber of Conor Oberst's much commented on voice, Feldman lays her love for Bright Eyes out in public to defend the mysterious power of the hope that slips through the cracks in Bright Eyes' usually gloomy demeanor.

Monday, February 19 2007

From Love Songs to the Fake Mafia: An Interview with the Queers

By Matthew A. Stern

After 25 years, Joe Queer has opinions on sex, death, and, more important, punk, but he knows to keep it all in perspective with a sense of humor.

The Redemption of Daphne Rubin-Vega

By Christian John Wikane

On her new album, Redemption Songs, Broadway star Daphne Rubin-Vega provides the antidote to the 24-hour cycle of bad news that framed our worldview in 2006, a collection of songs that stirs the soul and feeds the spirit.

Friday, February 16 2007

Electric Light Orchestra: Too Much at Once Can Blow the Fuse

By Rob Horning

Alone, ELO's pop mini-symphonies are perfect confections that captivate with their careful sonic details and ear-pleasing melodies and hooks.

The Fast and the Curious

By Chip Compton

Media Darling Danica Patrick may never take the checkered flag. But does that matter?

Thursday, February 15 2007

Permission to Follow: Interview with Juliet McMains

By Nona Willis-Aronowitz

PopMatters talks to dancer and author Juliet McMains about how the forces driving DanceSport mirror American national identity: desire for both passionate abandon and steadfast rules, obsession with self-improvement and comfortable gender roles, and craving for a little thing called Glamour.

Wednesday, February 14 2007

Love and Frogs: Dating John Waters

By Michael Franco

The unique filmmaker talks about his sweet compilation, his extreme romantic tastes, and the definitive way to divorce.

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