Author: J T. Ramsay

Wood­stock Jazz Fes­ti­val, 1966.

Son­ic Youth w/ Be Your Own Pet @ Starlight Ball­room, 8 p.m. Tonight! Son­ic Youth’s lat­est, Rather Ripped, does­n’t exact­ly rehash their last two albums, but it’s in the same vein: a mix of the pure­ly poet­ic and the pos­si­bly polit­i­cal. Case in point: “Do You Believe in Rap­ture?” reminds me of how lib­er­als find…

Snort more tour sup­port and then have a drink… It goes with­out say­ing that The Streets’ appeal can be summed up in Mike Skin­ner’s lacon­ic deliv­ery, recount­ing with stul­ti­fy­ing clar­i­ty the banal details of his life as an ascen­dant celebri­ty. Unlike Beck­’s primed-for-prime-time demeanor thin­ly dis­guised by his care­less what-me-wor­ry veneer, Skin­ner engages in auto-cri­tique to…

Dun­gen’s third Amer­i­can tour sup­port­ing Ta Det Lugnt did­n’t go off with­out a hitch. Thanks to an equip­ment fail­ure, we were treat­ed to a beau­ti­ful, stripped down ver­sion of “Du är för fin för mig” with Gus­tav play­ing keys solo. The need for new mate­r­i­al becomes clear­er as Dun­gen con­tin­ue to flesh out the nascent…

Under monop­oly all mass cul­ture is iden­ti­cal, and the lines of its arti­fi­cial frame­work begin to show through. The peo­ple at the top are no longer so inter­est­ed in con­ceal­ing monop­oly: as its vio­lence becomes more open, so its pow­er grows. Movies and radio need no longer pre­tend to be art. The truth that they…