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Music
Never Felt So Much Alive
By Kurt GottschalkTen years and 11 months passed between the Beatles’ famed final concert on the roof of the Apple Records building and the release of the Clash’s double album London Calling, the titular opening track of which found Joe Strummer rasping “phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust.”It’s a fool’s game to compare a band to the Beatles; on iconic standing alone no one else will measure up.
The Girls Can't Help It
By Kate SilverIt’s appropriate that the song to open a collection of female-featured bands should be “The Boy from Ipanema,” a gender-subversion of the casually leering bossa nova chestnut.
Power for Power
By John AmelchenkoYou turn your head, and the best-dressed man in the room is about to puke his guts out right next to you. He hovers over himself as Norman Westberg hovers over his guitar: bored, vacant, and softly angry all at once; a crudely drawn cross on the back of an amber Telecaster catches the light often when he sways.
MAGMA SUN WURDAH, NANSEI HEL MAGMA!
(Magma Is Dead, Long Live Magma!)
By Jamian Juliano-Villani
Imagine a civilization centuries in the future, where society as we know it has descended into nihilistic chaos. In disgust and desperation, a small group of humans flee Earth and seek refuge on the distant planet Kobaïa, where years of conflict from the dog days of Earth are recalled through song in the planet’s native tongue, Kobaïan.
OUTTAKES
By Steve DalachinskyThere are three big birthdays and one anniversary in the music world in November, and all of them will be celebrated with major events.
The Secret Life of Plant
By Julie KocsisAfter nearly 45 years in the music business—from playing God of Rock along with Jimmy Page in Led Zeppelin to winning Album of the Year for Raising Sand, his duet album with Alison Krauss, in 2007—what’s left for Robert Plant to do?
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