If Shakedown Street is the sketchiest block in all the neighborhood, then Sesame Street is clearly the funkiest. The kids are pickin’ up what Stevie’s layin’ down… I’m not claiming
You know they gettin’ down in heaven or hell tonight. They makin’ it funky. You know, man, movin’ it, doin’ it. God of Our Souls, meet the Godfather of Soul.
The hardest working man in show business succumbed to heart failure early Monday morning, leaving behind a legacy as the funkiest bastard that ever lived, and the funkiest dude to throw a back-handed slap at someone with fallopian tubes. His transgressions off the stage aside, James Brown did more to till the cultural landscape of music than most who’d came before him. For that, he’s a national treasure.
The good people at Yahoo! have done my work for me, supplying youse with full coverage of the man in death as he was in life. So with my job done already, there’s only one thing left to say to the guy that made us all wish we’d been born with that kind of innate ability to move rhythmically through this world: May you get your young legs back now and do the splits for all eternity. Good god.
Related audio: If you’re feeling like today would be a fantastic day to stream some JB, check out The Godfather & The Dreamer, a solid collection of 27 tracks from 1966-68 that’ll remind you why he’s the greatest. (SugarMegs)
Related video: Just a quick search on YouTube can bring the greatness back to life: some old school sex machinin’, some gettin’ up offa that thing, some feelin’ good and a touch of superbadness. YouTube can also bring back the hijinx and hilarity: the TV interview that confused the world.
“As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from indie purgatory springs.” –J. Tetzel The Arcade Fire announced today it will play five nights in Greenwich Village’s
It’s the end of another year, another revolution. So far we’ve abstained from posting the usual Best Ham & Swiss Sandwiches of 2006 type of lists that most bloggers employ this time of the year, but that all changes today.
After checking out MSNBC’s Year in Pictures, I felt a pang of motivation to scramble through my own photo archive and pick out the 10 best shots I took this year. This exercise taught me that I’ve got an unsteady hand and I’m not a great photographer by any means, but I still think there’s a bumper crop for youse.
Let’s start with the best, and nothing tops the most inconceivable happenstance of a photo I’ve ever taken in my life. I figured my first trip to San Francisco would be a smashing success after bumping into the former keyboardist for the popular rock band Phish and a former geographically excitable presidential candidate: Page McConnell and Howard Dean, Chairman of the Boards and Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, standing there like tourists waiting to be photographed together like old chums. Dean likes Page’s new shirt:
You never know what you’re gonna find in Washington Square Park. Sometimes it’s the acrobatic and comedic black twins doing flips and jumps and jokes simultaneously, sometimes it’s the French juggling unicyclist in the unitard, and sometimes it’s the old hippies that all meet up to sing Teach Your Children Well and pine for the days where longhairs ruled the world. And sometimes, or maybe just one time, it’s former Spin Doctors frontman Chris Barron belting out Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong with Buzz Universe (click that link for a video):
Read on for the rest of My Year In Mostly Crappy Photos (w/ a few gems)…
Update: Click here for some video and photo sets from the Pelosi Jam Anybody got a thousand bucks for a heady heady trade, brah? The new Speaker of the House
We don’t plug shit from the parent company often, so when we do youse should all probably assume it’s something special. Read the fucking book. Glide Magazine today published its
By now I’m guessing Jerry Garcia’s corpse is pretty well decomposed. But his skeletal remains must be rolling over in the grave today. His famous “When we’re done with it,
Let’s pull right into the interstate weigh station with this heavy haul of videos… I spent almost every summer from 1986-2001 up at one of those Northeastern sleepaway Jewcamps. As
Talk about flying totally under the radar. Last year at this time the Noodling Community was abuzz with pre- and post-show chatter about the Warren Haynes Xmas Jam. And maybe it’s strictly the result of the lack of an exotic and limitless Serialpod debut, but this year’s event didn’t even register on most Google calendars, message boards or any of those newfangled “blogs.”
Did a subpar lineup keep the avalanche of buzz at bay? Was it Warren’s refusal to add any acts to the bill after the initial announcement? Or have people grown a bit weary of Haynes’ overexposure? No matter the reason, the 18th Annual Xmas Jam still managed to sell out 7,200 seats and provided the paying audience with hours of music. The Asheville Citizen-Times, not surprisingly, wrote a glowing recap of the event, the only media outlet to cover it apparently.
Branford Marsalis joins a strange balding dude and some homeless guy on stage on the 18th Annual Xmas Jam — credit: Paul Balicky (Asheville Citizen-Times)
Make sure to check out the Citizen-Times article, which contains a ton of multimedia from the show and the first ever Xmas Jam podcast. And read on below for the setlists from each band, many of which include Marsalis, middle-aged American Idol winner Taylor Hicks and Umphrey’s McGee geetarist Brendan Bayliss…
I’ve always been a big fan of incorporating mainstream popular culture into the not-so-mainstream culture, counter- or otherwise. In fact, I thought it was a grave misstep when every so-called
