For its 13th-annual edition, the Ultra Music Festival has expanded to three full days of electronic excess with a 200-plus-act lineup that’s just as stacked as ever, featuring dance music legends like Underworld, Carl Cox, and Moby as well as crossover stars like Crystal Castles, Jinder, !!!, Cut Copy, Röyksopp,…
Right now, if we were to play a game of pop-culture free association beginning with the ever-infamous name Bobby Brown, our minds would probably wander off in the following direction: Whitney Houston, cocaine, reality TV. But there was a time, circa 1989 (an era of Brown’s life also known as…
The human body is an amazing biological machine. You can try your damnedest to irreversibly damage its every last cell by subjecting it to a sleepless six-day Winter Music Conference spree of ass-pounding party music, 36-hour dancing blackouts, and a diet consisting of Red Bull, vodka, and miscellaneous pharmacological products…
Bad news, lazy hipsters: The inaugural Bruise Cruise is sold out. You literally missed the boat. Departing this Friday from the Port of Miami and stopping over for some nefarious Saturday action on the former pirate paradise of Nassau, Bahamas, this floating music festival will take place aboard the Carnival…
Most of your American friends don’t know composer Yann Tiersen by name. But play a couple of ten-second clips from songs like the melancholy accordion-and-piano piece “La Dispute” or the waltzy whirlwind lament “J’y Suis Jamais Allé” and your test subject will almost immediately identify him as “that guy who…
Have you ever visited Little Dragon land? It’s a magical musical netherworld located halfway between creepy and cutesy, where the wind whispers and rages in strange songful bursts of art rock, R&B, and electro-pop. If you wander its caves long enough, you’ll inevitably find a bunch of hipsters making out…
Go ahead, lie. You might manage to persuade a clueless acquaintance or airheaded first date that you’re some kind of enlightened and worldly art lover with an underground bunker stuffed full of priceless avant-garde treasures. But we’re too wise for that line. Face it: You’re broke. So this week, when…
After a three-decade career providing percussion and other background sounds for iconic artists such as Ike and Tina Turner, Bill Withers, and John Prine, Big Poppa E felt a change coming. Thus, in 2000, he switched tracks, returning to his roots in the blues with the release of his second…
Social Distortion has a pretty messed-up face. Not literally, of course; Social D’s middle-aged frontman, Mike Ness, is surprisingly well-preserved despite a receding hairline and some deep creases across the forehead. Like any punk crew that spent a good chunk of 31 years in the gutter, rocking recklessly, shooting heroin,…
Unlike Live Nation or Grand Central, the annual Miami Music Festival failed to make an immediate impact. Now in its second year, it has the potential to overhaul a slice of South Florida’s music calendar, turning the second weekend of November into a free-for-all of live tuneage, booze, and industry…
Back in the early 2000s, cool kids everywhere became obsessed with all kinds of lupine creatures. You had Wolfmother and Wolf Eyes and Aids Wolf. But only one furry, fanged crew — Montreal’s Wolf Parade — really seemed to possess the cunning, coyote-like survival skills to live on that skinny…
San Diego fuzz freaks Crocodiles don’t make Arizona immigration zealot Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s playlist. He hates them. Ever since the duo released a feel-good, anti-SB 1070 single titled “Kill Joe Arpaio” last month, the Maricopa County law enforcer has been bashing the band via Twitter, television, and any other mediated…
On May 25, 2009, French foursome Phoenix launched a midnight sneak attack on the American indie scene. Like the blue, red, and black bombs on the cover of its new album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, the band came screaming from the sky, out of some unseen nowhere, and detonated in a…
With your anemic attention span fed on endless helpings of Adult Swim, Count Chocula, and hot chronic, maybe a night of partying alongside Brooklyn rap punks Ninjasonik doesn’t sound all that exciting. Well, you need to get off that jaded hipster ish because these three cross-genre scientists are the real…
Sure, we all know Miami-Dade public libraries are packed with freeloaders getting their Tom Clancy fix, trawling YouTube for funny crotch shot videos, or digging through art book stacks and back issues of National Geographic for X-rated peeks at the female anatomy. But there’s also another kind of library patron,…
When Carlos Mencia first brought racist road signs, Peter Boyle reading hate mail, and terrorist snacks to the American television audience in July of 2005, certain critics slagged him as Comedy Central’s cheap replacement for Dave Chappelle. No doubt, there were a few too many similarities between Mind of Mencia…
With the brutally beautiful swells of “Siegfried’s Funeral March” swooping around inside your skull, it can be easy to forget composer/philosopher Richard Wagner’s less glorious moments. For example, there was the time his second wife, Cosima, caught him saying: “All Jews should be burned at a performance of Nathan the…
The perils of fighting for your rent money are legion — scar tissue, shattered bones, blood loss — but none is worse than defeat. Even though you might still score a paycheck, there’s no glory in getting dragged back home, unconscious and beaten, after a brutal third-round KO. Witness life…
On your bedside table, there’s a fat stack of auto porn — Hot Rod, Lowrider, Super Street, etc. — and a half-used bottle of motor oil because you are a gearhead, a car junkie, a donk devotee. Out in the garage, there are several modern-day muscle cars stripped and laid…
Surrounded by steaming swampland rife with 20-foot pythons, man-eating gators, and marauding skunk apes, our station at the end of the continent is a certified hot spot for the dangerous, deranged, and bizarre. We’ve already had sex offenders under a bridge, cat killers in our midst, and tar balls on…
Hipsterism is a devilishly tricky game. It’s all about transforming your day-to-day life into an almost unmanageable mountain of MP3 mixtapes, limited-edition T-shirts, social networking, and 24/7 self-promotion. And besides your cherished laptop, the best portal to this kind of advanced 21st-century living is the über-hipster club night Misfit Fridays…
We all know that the grand old U.S. of A is just as green as it is red, white, and blue. Money is green. Fatigues are green. Sweet kush is green. And believe it or not, the White House will turn green if you look at it long enough. One…
