It’s near midnight at Joe’s Pub in the East Village and the movement is in full effect. A roomful of twentyish and thirtyish black folk for whom hip-hop has been like a religion most of their lives are cheering as Mos Def, an esteemed rapper, roars through a set of hard rock songs, singing over the crunch of heavy guitars. He launches into a song called “Ghetto Rock.” The chorus goes: “Yes, we are so ghetto! Yes, we are rock ‘n’ roll!” The song ends, and Mos says, “Y’all want some more rock ‘n’ roll?” The crowd screams for more. He tells them: “It’s a whole movement, like Fela with Afrobeat. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. Noah, too.”

There is indeed a movement under way. Rock has long been one of the sounds hip-hop used in its pastiche, but aside from groups like Outkast and GooDie Mob, who drench themselves in funked-out rock, it has consisted of a sampled riff here and there. Now the hip-hop generation is grabbing guitars and making rock ‘n’ roll.

…Corey Glover, the lead singer of Living Colour, added to the thought: “There are some things you’re not allowed to express as a black person. You got to be in your b-boy stance. You’ve got to wear the uniform. If you’re out of the uniform, something’s wrong with you. My whole life it’s been like, `He’s cool, he speaks the language, but something’s wrong with that boy.’ But the freak contingent in the house is bigger than you think it is.”

Living Colour needed not simply to move the crowd, but also to get the crowd to accept the band’s validity, and that demanded changing the perception of blackness for countless listeners, a burden that neither U2 nor Jay-Z ever had to shoulder.

The persistent message of hip-hop and R & B is that working-class life is the most relevant of black American experiences: “keep it real” is often code for validating one set of mores to the exclusion of all others. Expanding the nature of music means expanding the definition of what it means to be black in America. The new black rock movement has talent, ambition, guitars and minds it has to change.

Read the rest in the NYTimes.

Let me just say… finally!. I can’t wait to hear some of these bands.

Disturbed vocalist David Draiman looks like the prototypical guy your parents told you to stay away from. With piercings, tattoos, and a rock star attitude, he appears to have more in common with James Dean than Joseph Telushkin. Few even know about his humble upbringing in Chicago in an Orthodox Jewish home.
“I still walk into a store… Like a Wal-Mart just the other day: I’m in an aisle looking at something, and there’s a mother and her child, and she takes one look at me, grabs her child’s hand and she walks out of the way because she doesn’t want the child to see me.” He sounds genuinely hurt, and although he has some pretty large spikes sticking through his chin, Draiman looks momentarily like the last kid on the playground chosen for the kickball team.

Read the rest in this JewsWeek article. via Holy Weblog!.

That’s the title to this Janis Ian article on music distribution in the internet age. Heavily blogged last week, I’m a little late to the game here.

Shannon I gotta tell ya, every pluck of that guitar, and your voice….

powerful stuff. Everybody go listen now 🙂 Damn that’s beautiful.

Local musician and editor of the Philadelphia Weekly Joey Sweeney recalls 1987 in Salon

In the 1980s, after the “Born in the U.S.A.” juggernaut has run over the entire United States, it is as easy as it will ever be to misinterpret Bruce Springsteen. Although this is probably not what is on my mind when I see Bruce Springsteen in the flesh for the first time. What probably is on my mind is something pretty harsh, for I am now 13 years old, have discovered the willy-nilly world of punk, post-punk and the accompanying disdain for all that has gone before. Karen Akers and I are in the stands at JFK Stadium on a late-September night, tiptoeing on the bleachers so that we can see U2, nearly 100 yards away as the crow flies. Karen is goth before goth is goth — Siouxsie hair, blue-black lipstick and nails, and so on — and this is also that strange moment when U2 are playing stadiums and can still be considered alternative.

In the fall night, we are exhilarated — not only by the band, which is already playing stadiums and will soon be even bigger than that, but also by the fact that we were almost crushed at the gates of the show, on the way in, like English soccer fans. We’re happy to be alive, but when Springsteen comes onstage to perform the Ben E. King classic “Stand By Me” with U2, it is like someone has farted in our sleeping bag. For this is the era when as much as he doth protest, the Boss was in his darkest hours of synthesizers (and not even the cool kind that OMD used) and jingoism, mislaid or not. It is all I can do not to boo him, because I am a teenager now, and that vulnerability and sincerity that Bruce so naturally tapped into feels like a kind of death. Everything is affected cynicism now, and I believe that Bruce has no place here, onstage with my avowedly political and anti-establishment Irish band. And playing that corny song to boot! Send him away, the creepy Little Lord Fauntleroy inside me intones.

For me it was 1985. I was thirteen myself then. And listening to Black Sabbath. Ozzy. Metallica. If it had synths, it was compromised. If it was on the radio (like U2), well it wasn’t any good. James Hetfield had scrawled on the back of his Gibson Explorer the words “Kill Bon Jovi”. I understood them 🙂 Back then, I really hated Bon Jovi too. “Pop metal” we called it.

Man was I closed minded! It took a few years but my mind opened considerably. It was probably Guns N’ Roses that did it for me. They were undeniable. And yet, still popular. “Pop metal” didn’t seem so bad to me any more. And I listened with new ears all sorts of music. Bon Jovi especially. I became a fan. As a teenager, the band’s songs had all sorts of relevence to me. Some of their songs seem custom written for my relationship with my wife to be.

Well I was 17, and a new aquaintence of mine, one that would become a good friend (yes it’s you Steve.. if you’re reading this), introduced me to the Springsteen album “Nebraska”. Just like Sweeney, it was my first apartment.

Joey Sweeney is standing in the living room of his first apartment, a hovel in South Philadelphia that is, at this moment, completely dark save for the blue light of the television and the snow reflected in the night outside. He is on mushrooms. Between the TV and the snow outside — from a blizzard that only subsided in the last 18 hours — there is an otherworldly glow and when he remembers this, even to this day, he still cannot remember if he is alone in the room or not. On the stereo is a record he rescued just days before from the dollar bin at the Book Trader — “Nebraska.” And if the cover image of bleak, high, lonely plains beyond a windshield suggests his soul, when he places it on the turntable and turns it up, it sounds like that even more so.

Joey Sweeney has been doing a lot of drugs lately, because it is the early ’90s still (and the late teens, still), and, well, it just seems like that’s what people are doing. He listens to “Nebraska” all the way through. That dull fire-alarm whine of the harmonica resonates with him to a degree that it feels like all he has ever known. When it is over, he just sits in the room, listening to the hail on the snow and the red light changing outside the window and he feels as bleak and as exalted as he ever has.

It had that same effect on me. Thanks Steve.

How freakin’ stupid is this article on Ozzy in Salon? Man, what bullshit.

Let’s get a few things straight…. Ozzy hasn’t changed. The world has changed around him. He was never cool. I got beaten up for liking him in high school. I’m not kidding you. I have a crooked nose from one of those fights.

His music hasn’t changed. It’s wouldn’t be considered pop fifteen years ago. Dare ya to get recordings from 94 WYSP from back then and compare it to today’s. They would never even play Motley Crue, let alone Ozzy. Never man.

Oh, how people forget.

Anyone remember ‘You Can’t Kill Rock n’ Roll’? Ballad. ‘Killer of Giants’? Ballad. ‘Revelation Mother Earth’? Ballad. Shit… he sung ballads with Black Sabbath too. There’s nothing new to Ozzy.

What is new, and truely disconcerting, is that the world has shifted.

You now have a generation in charge that grew up on the Stones. On the Beetles. On the Who. On Black Sabbath, Led Zepplin, Kiss, and Aerosmith.

Howard Stern. Yes. Howard Stern.

That generation took charge in the nineties. Bill Clinton and now George Dubya.

His new music is actually little different from what he was playing back in the early eighties! I’d say it’e even louder. But what we consider “underground”, has changed.

The “underground” of metal must continuously get louder, faster, nastier, in somehope of being different from what has come before.

In order for Ozzy to be underground today – he’d have to be more controvercial then Marilyn Manson. And that’s hard to imagine really.

I used to get beaten up for Metallica too.

Then something funny happened.

“One” by Metallica made the mainstream setlist of radios.

The next album would popularlize them with the exact same crowd that used to put the fans of metal down. And so came the nineties.

Man it sucked. Metal became to be looked at as more and more, the defacto standard of mainstream rock. It lost what made it special. Suddenly, you could hear Ozzy on the radio! Like – ten years after the fact! I remember staring at the radio and wondering what the hell was going on when I heard a new single by Ozzy on the radio. Man that was freaky.

Metal was taken over by preppies and jocks. The whatever bands. Limp Bizkit. Crap. The climax of which was Woodstock 99.

At least the nineties had grunge. A metal offshoot that didn’t like to mention it’s heritage. Much cooler to say that Neil Young was an influence then Guns N’ Roses ya know. But grunge spoke with one, long, depressing voice. It never let it’s tounge get in it’s cheek. It never realized it was only rock n’ roll. It took itself too seriously as a genre and burnt out.

Is he cashing in? Certainly! But can you blame him? What’s occuring now is actually kind of refreshing. The grandfather of metal is getting his due. But I do want it to go away.

Makes me feel old.

This interesting article at NewsForge covers mp3.washingtonpost.com and mp3.boston.com. Two awesome sites that make sense for newspapers and for local musicians. Here goes the SlashDot thread covering the story.

This is an old song me and my brother wrote during a terrible night, in a terrible neighborhood, in Philly.

Here is the MP3, right click and download. Warning. It clocks in at just under five megs.

Here go the lyrics to Kensinton.

Still learning my the ins and outs of my home recorder. It’s a little strange being a one man band. I even have a drum track. Need to work on my mixing skills.

Gotten some good feedback: Drums a little too busy and I need to do some mixing to get a fuller guitar sound. Probably some panning and level adjusting.

For the holiday weekend we traved to the Poconos for a concert at Montage Mountain Ski Resort.

Poison was headlining with Cinderella, Winger, and Faster Pussycat opening.

Wow, what a show. A great crowd and a fun night. Cinderella rocked, it was great seeing them after such a long time. Poison’s been coming around the last few years and they always put on a great show. Winger and Faster Pussycat were impressive as well.

You know what music is missing these days? Bands that inspire loyalty. Or is it marketing? It seems to me that most music I hear these days is disposable. Precious few bands make me want to buy their album, simply because I loved their last one, and then determine how well the band did at living up to my expectations. I now need to sample it first no matter what. Gone is that experience of buying an album the first day it hits shelves, anxiously waiting for what a band has created this time around. Being a fan of a band was kinda like being a programming language geek who swore by his favorite language and has to download the latest releases before the bug fixes come out.

Now I really, really need to be sold before I part with my cash.

Anyway, it was great to finally hear live a song that back then comforted me, House of Pain by Faster Pussycat:

A little past suppertime
I’m still out on the porch step sitting on my behind,
Waiting for you.

Wondering if everything is alright.
Momma said, “Come in boy, don’t waste your time.” I said, “I’ve got time.
Well, he’ll be here soon.”

Five years old and talking to myself.
Where were you? Where’d you go?
Daddy, can’t you tell?

I’m not trying to fake it
And I ain’t the one to blame.
There’s no one home
In my house of pain.
I didn’t write these pages
And my script’s been rearranged.
No, there’s no one home
In my house of pain

Wasn’t I worth the time?
A boy needs a daddy like a dance to mime and all the time
I looked up to you.

I paced my room a million times.
And all I ever got was on big line, the same old lie.
How could you?

Well, I was eighteen and still talking to myself.
Where were you? Where’d you go?
Daddy can’t you tell?

I’m not trying to fake it
And I ain’t the one to blame.
There’s no one home
In my house of pain
I didn’t write these pages
And my script’s been rearranged.
No, there’s no one home
In my house of pain

on the new Springsteen album.