“On Thursday night at Nationals Park, a brief storm had passed, leaving the sky a deep burnt umber. A few thousand people covered the outfield, with tens of thousands more in the stands, a home run away from the stage. And just before 8 o’clock, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band opened their set with “New York City Serenade.” The Boss playing a baseball stadium in the last days of summer: Could there be anything more American?”
“Thirty years ago, Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith teamed up for “Walk This Way,” proving to the mainstream that hip-hop and rock-and-roll had more commonalities than contrasts. The song also paved the way for three decades of rap-rock collaborations, with very mixed results. For every “Judgment Night” soundtrack there’s an album like Lil Wayne’s “Rebirth.” For every Rage Against the Machine, there’s a Limp Bizkit. And while Banks & Steelz — the pairing of Interpol frontman Paul Banks and Wu-Tang Clan mastermind RZA — never reaches Fred Durst and company’s repugnant lows, it will probably go down as a misstep for both artists, an answer to a question nobody asked.”
“During the day, the wholesale warehouses around the oasis of gentrification that is Union Market bustle and brim with commerce and action. At night, it’s a different story: Heading northwest on Morse Street NE leads to an abandoned market and bare loading docks surrounded by panel vans and off-duty food trucks.
One night in July, I headed towards one of these warehouses for a party. I felt lost amid this industrial and commercial decay until I turned a corner and heard the bassline and patois of reggae gradually getting louder. This must be the place. Past industrial mixers and slop sinks is a dark room strung up with Christmas lights, a DJ table butted up against a speaker cabinet that measures 10 feet tall.”
“A Paul McCartney concert is the most perfect expression of baby-boomer nostalgia. Which isn’t to say that there weren’t young people in the crowd: McCartney brought one 20-something signholder onstage and autographed a “Hey Jude” tattoo on her ribcage, joking that “you never know what you’re going to get up here.” That sentiment isn’t exactly true, but who needs surprises when you have a half century of memories to rely on?”
“I’ve been trying to interview Alexandria and Ethereal since coming across Rebirth while researching Awful Records in the fall of 2014. But scheduling Skype time when the pair are working in the studio proved difficult – it made more sense to do the interview when we were all in Atlanta.
I met them at a quaint bungalow on a tree-lined street in a quiet, residential area of Atlanta’s East Lake neighborhood. Along with Ethereal and Alexandria, the house is home to Awful founder Father and “Awful Madre” Dash Romero (“Everybody else camps out,” Ethereal adds). It’s the latest in a long line of Awful group houses, and it’s exactly what you’d expect: cluttered and unkempt like a frat house, a handful of people come and go and weights and Chick-fil-A bags are scattered about. It’s the type of place that hosts house parties on weekends, but as the unofficial headquarters of Awful, it’s also where some of the best rap and R&B is made. We head to Ethereal’s bedroom studio to finally get Alexandria’s story.”
“There is something strangely familiar and comforting about Technophobia’s debut album Flicker Out—especially if you’ve ever gone long stretches wearing only black or stayed up late watching John Carpenter films just for the soundtracks.
As Technophobia, Katie and Stephen Petix craft darkwave dirges full of icy arpeggios and pneumatic death marches, their analog synthesizers and drum machines battling as Katie unleashes operatic vocals, incanting gothic poetry. The duo’s music draws from the tried-and-true tropes of synthpop and industrial, connecting the dots between early Ministry and Pretty Hate Machine–era Nine Inch Nails to contemporaries like Cold Cave and Light Asylum.”
Since breaking through in 2011 with her debut single “212,” Azealia Banks has been better known for what she does on social media than on SoundCloud. That buoyant kiss-off introduced listeners to Banks’s deceptively sweet rap persona; she would ruin you with a smile before dancing on your grave. But for Banks, it’s been difficult to keep that persona from cropping up in “real life,” and she’s feuded with label bosses, producers and other artists at a head-spinning rate, often resorting to misogynistic and homophobic insults.
For an artist defined by being outspoken, Banks let the music speak for itself on Tuesday night at the Black Cat, where she made her Washington debut after canceling two previous concerts. In a spiked collar and a skintight, rainbow-striped get-up, Banks was flanked by a DJ, a drummer and a pair of yellow-clad dancers who accompanied her through a set list heavy on songs from her 2014 album “Broke With Expensive Taste.” But aside from a few “make some noise” entreaties, Banks didn’t banter with the crowd or offer notes about her songs. Perhaps she finally learned that old lesson: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”
“If you look at all the greatest artistic and technical achievements in the world, they’re usually driven by one mind,” says Sinjin Hawke. “With Zora [Jones] and I, we have a dual-mind – we’re almost the same person.”
That “dual-mind” was in full effect when I spoke with Hawke and Jones via Skype from their Barcelona home, especially since they often finish each other’s sentences. But even though the co-founders of Fractal Fantasy – the creative platform that houses their audio-visual work – are romantic partners in addition to creative ones, it’s not a rom-com cliché. It’s more like a never-ending relay race of information – a race that has taken them from mashing-up their club constructions with film snippets to launching an interactive audio-visual platform to (in Hawke’s case) collaborating on Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo. When I mention a clutch of Hawke’s bootlegs that surfaced in 2011, the pair laugh at how long ago that was. “A lot has happened since then,” says Hawke, who doesn’t feel like five years have passed. “But when I look back at how much stuff has been done, it makes sense.”
“On June 12, 2015, YG was shot in the hip at a Los Angeles recording studio. The injury was not life-threatening; he was treated and released on June 13. Hard at work on what would become Still Brazy, YG hit the studio and recorded ‘Who Shot Me’ later that day. The story is a familiar one for rap fans, immediately bringing to mind the November 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur at Quad Recording Studios in Manhattan, the incident that spawned Notorious B.I.G’s ‘Who Shot Ya’ and Shakur’s ‘Hit ‘Em Up’.
But while those songs added fuel to the fire of the East Coast-West Coast hip-hop rivalry, YG isn’t waging war against other rappers or an entire coast. He’s turned his focus inward to tell the next episode of his story: If YG’s My Krazy Life is the chronicle of a day-in-the-life of a Compton gangbanger, Still Brazy is its aftermath (no pun intended). The album is also the latest evolution of the man that, in terms of staying true to a traditional West Coast sound, has defined this decade of California rap more than anyone – even Kendrick Lamar.”
“On a video screen, Ellie Goulding materialized, her clothing white and her visage virginal. But as the music crescendoed, the pristine image dissolved into fragmented cuts of Goulding in black, her fingers extending from cut-off gloves. This yin-and-yang theme played out several times over the course of Goulding’s Monday night concert at Merriweather Post Pavilion — in the costumes of two dance-fighters, in lyrics like “Tell me, black and white, why I’m here tonight” — but for Goulding, the duality isn’t a Jediesque question of light vs. dark.
It’s between being a traditional singer-songwriter and a modern-day pop star, and more than any of her millennial peers, she balances both sides with aplomb.”
Postcultural 