CL’s Chanté LaGon an Chad Radford chat about Bonnie “Prince” Billy and his newest album Beware. Billy plays at the Variety Playhouse tonight, May 29.
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Here’s further evidence that the electronic music scene in Atlanta is surging. Nic Fanciulli, who’s held residencies at Space, the renowned Miami night club, and at Ibiza, the electronic music Mecca, will hold the decks at the Mark Ultra Lounge tonight, promoting his latest release with the famed UK label, Global Underground.
The release, simply titled Global Underground: Nic Fanciulli, is the first in what seems to be a new series of DJ-focused discs put out by GU. Those of you familiar with the GU imprint would know that’s hardly new broken ground. Their original GU series, currently at 36 releases from the likes of Paul Oakenfold, Sasha, John Digweed, Adam Freeland, Nick Warren, Felix da Housecat, et al, has defined the label as top choice for yearly electronic goodness.
This new release doesn’t necessarily present a new direction in sound, but rather adds the newcomer to the extensive GU catalog. Fanciulli’s particular blend of electronic music tends to be on the tech-prog house range, which is essentially what you’ll find on the two-disc release, and what he’ll be spinning tonight.
Tickets are $15 on pre-sale, available through Wantickets.com.
After the jump, listen to Fanciulli’s remix of Mark Broom’s “Jackpot Inc”.
Continued from Viva Señor Selleck — a bar crawl down Buford Hwy., pt. 1
This one’s a bit trickier. It’s one thing to ham it up in a sleazy strip club. It’s another to bounce on foreign turf, while them not get the joke and we not speak the language. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but I wouldn’t suggest bringing a ballpoint to a knife fight. At least, not to a fight you want to live to blog about.
“There’s a group playing tonight,” says the door guy explaining the $5 cover. I like that “groups” play these places, not bands. “Groups” sounds like I’m at least getting choreography along with the retardation. Fuck it, here’s my money.
We’re outside Confetti’s Discotheque and the guy is actually making a couple gringos feel pretty welcome. We talk him down to $10 for all three of us. “The pretty lady is free,” he says smiling. I’d smile, too. She’s a breezy in any language.
He doesn’t even frisk us. No matter. To Slay’s disappointment, I left the rest of my steak for the kitchen staff at Follies to scuffle over.
There’s an eerie feeling as we walk in. That’ll happen when you’re instantly met with about 20 or so señoritas milling about by the front entrance in their Saturday night attire. It’s odd, but I’ll take it. Bienvenido, indeed. (more…)
It’s a wonder why Devin the Dude never ranks higher on those redundant Best Rapper Alive lists. Guess he’s too quirky for the mainstream. Can’t help but wonder, what Richard Pryor would think?
Devin the Dude with 88 Keys, Jaspects, Nesby Phips and Prynce. $20. 10 p.m. Fri., June 5. Ambient + Studio. 678-923-8020. www.ambientplusstudio.com.
Get familiar with the Dude. YouTubage after the jump.
Last night Athens’ much-heralded power trio the Whigs played an unannounced show at the small hometown venue Tasty World, debuting a number of songs off the band’s upcoming third full-length. The sign on the club’s door announced the band as the Bumpkin Café — something the club owner came up with, said drummer Julian Dorio — but text messages and Twitter work fast, and soon enough the club was bustling with a few scene vets and more than a few still-in-town-for-the-summer college kids eager to check out the tunes.
Over the past month the band has been holed up in its Athens practice space working out the new songs’ kinks, and frontman Parker Gispert recently decamped to Newnan, Ga., for a little time among the trees, a little time upon the lake to get some more lyric writing done before heading into the studio next week and out on tour later this summer.
Here, we’ll let Gispert explain it:
How are the new songs? More after the jump:
AUBREY BERRY POSES WITH GRAMMY-WINNING ARTIST NE-YO IN UNDATED PHOTO
The Snellville man accused of murdering Atlanta-based rapper and Akon protégé Roderick Anthony “Dolla” Burton II, in the valet parking area of an upscale L.A. mall last week received a reduction in his bail from $5 million to $2.1 million on Tuesday.
The suspect, who pled not guilty to the shooting outside the Beverly Center, is 23-year-old Aubrey Louis Berry, an Atlanta music promoter, according to the the AJC:
Berry’s attorney, Howard Price, said his client was acting in self-defense when he shot 21-year-old Dolla repeatedly with a 9 mm handgun.
Dolla’s stepfather, George Viera, said the rapper was in Los Angeles planning a birthday party for his longtime girlfriend.
(Photo courtesy SandraRose.com, taken by Prince Williams of ATLPICS.net.)
Speaking of Usher, here’s his latest on the music front. From So So Def:
MEDIA ALERT: MUSIC MOGUL JERMAINE DUPRI INTRODUCES SUPER-CREW ‘OCEAN’S SEVEN’ TO THE WORLD
WHO: Jermaine “JD” Dupri and ‘Ocean’s Seven’ Members Nelly, Usher, Bryan Michael Cox, Trey Songz, Johnta Austin, Tyrone Davis
WHAT: Jermaine Dupri will release the much-anticipated Ocean’s Seven: The Mixtape exclusively online this Friday on Global14.com, JD’s entertainment and lifestyle website. The mixtape features the singles “Vegas Baby” and “So So Much Swagg.” Guest appearances by Bow Wow and Q Da Kid. All production done by Jermaine Dupri and Bryan Michael Cox. The Ocean’s Seven concept was born a few months ago while JD and Bryan Michael Cox were in Las Vegas working in the studio with Usher. Inspired by the popular film Ocean’s Eleven, Dupri and his colleagues, similar to Brad Pitt and George Clooney, have come together to establish a modern day Rat Pack and illustrate to the world, not just a music project, but a way of life.
WHEN: Friday, May 29, 2009
WHERE: www.global14.com
Apparently, it’s some “3000 and 9 shit.”
Looks like Atlanta’s R&B/pop prince Usher Raymond IV is serious about this grown man business.
First marriage, fatherhood, philanthropy, and now this: The Woodruff Arts Center has elected the “artist, actor, media mogul” to its Board of Trustees, according to a recent press release.
Here’s hoping all this civic responsibility won’t negatively impact his music. Remember dude, your fans prefer the salacious, fictional, cheating boyfriend stuff a la 2004’s Confessions to the real life, reliable husband material you bored them with on last year’s Here I Stand.
Few embody the mantra of Hip Hop Appreciation Week (”Rap is something you do, hip-hop is something you live”) like legendary MC and Temple of Hiphop founder, KRS-One.
His May 21 performance at the Loft highlighted a week of wide-ranging cultural events (from concerts to ciphers to community service efforts) conceived and/or promoted in part by HHAW organizers Ms. Dia (host of “The Show” on 89.3 WRFG-FM), Angie the HipHop Angel, and Minister Server of HipHop Ministries, Inc.
As he passed the mic among an overflowing stage of true-school Atlanta MCs — including an impressive Killer Mike — KRS-One’s set resembled a progressive rap revival more than a traditional concert. His own freestyle flow took on a metaphysical air when he began to rhyme about his spiritual self occupying a different dimension of time and simultaneously meditating on the present moment as he acted it out live onstage. The show concluded with Ms. Dia and others awarding KRS-One a plaque in honor of his life-long service as hip-hop’s revered “Teacha.”
Five hours earlier, while holding court with local media, the 44-year-old was asked to tell the story of his life. The following, in his own words, recounts how he met his eventual DJ Scott La Rock in a homeless shelter in 1986, how he got his big break in hip-hop via the Bridge Wars with MC Shan (who popped up backstage near the end), and how he continued on with Boogie Down Productions after Scott La Rock’s murder in ’87.
KRS-One: I was born August 20, 1965, Brooklyn, New York.
Back then it was the ghetto — little small town, working-class people. Today you can’t even buy a condominium there for a million dollars. Gentrification at its best. However, we did move around. I moved from Brooklyn. My mother, single parent; my father I never met. He was actually deported, he came from Trinidad. Him and my mom hooked up, but then he got deported and we never saw him again. And so I was raised then by a single parent, single mother. And she started in Brooklyn, like I said. Moved to Manhattan. I went to the Charles B. Russwurm (sp?) School. Lived in Lenox Terrace at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. Spent several years there. But then around 1972-1973 — really it was from ’72 to ’74 — I moved to the Bronx, to a place called 1600 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. And why would that be across the hall, across the way a park, from Kool DJ Herc. Kool Herc lived at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, and it was there that he first brought his system out at the request of his sister, Cindy, brought his turntables out, started playing music for me and other six and seven and eight year olds, and teenagers of the neighborhood.
I saw a lot of jams go on in that park and the surrounding area. We didn’t know it was early hip-hop. We had no idea. We would just call ’em jams, block parties. You just hear the music and you went to the block party and that was it. Years later we learned that was Kool DJ Herc, Pebbly Poo, Coke La Rock.… We were in the birth of hip-hop, we didn’t even know it. (more…)
DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS SONGWRITER PATTERSON HOOD RELEASES LONG-AWAITED SOLO ALBUM.
Now that Drive-By Truckers songwriter Patterson Hood has settled back into Georgia after touring with Booker T. Jones and lecturing at Princeton, he’s ready to set the stage for the release of his long, long, long-awaited solo disc Murdering Oscar (and other love songs).
Available right this minute for pre-order at Hood’s personal site in digital, CD and vinyl incarnations, Murdering Oscar’s also available in a pricey deluxe package too: a limited edition featuring special artwork from longtime Trucker artist Wes Freed along with some other shiny bonuses. Tuesday, June 23 is the album’s official release date.
As for touring to support the release, Hood wrote this on his MySpace page:
Due to the logistics of touring with a band comprised of members of various other bands (plus David Barbe’s studio schedule) there will only be a limited number of shows initially, but we are hitting Chicago and both coasts this summer and hope to do some more dates later in the year.
Backing Hood on this current outing will be David Barbe (Sugar), Will Johnson and Scott Danbom (both of Centro-Matic) and regular Drive-By Truckers John Neff and Brad Morgan, playing collectively under the name The Screwtopians.
Tour dates and more Truckers news after the break:
Our cover story on Gucci Mane this week is generating a lot of buzz, including a post on Vibe magzine’s number one hip-hop blog, Nah Right.
Unfortunately the commenters there aren’t focusing on all the scoops in the story — about how Gucci spent his time in jail, about his upcoming album, or about his recently-settled lawsuit.
Instead, everyone’s making fun of his haircut and his skin:
there are coded Mayan 2012 prophecies hidden on his scalp ….
[he] was trying to freestyle while getting his hair cut
Thats a scripture in OJ Da Juiceman’s [II] native language
Gucci looks like he’s cryptic member of the Komodo Dragon family. Like special edition Indonesian version….weird
He is a Komodo Dragon, period.
Gucci the only human being with pixels in his skintone
In his defense, the image posted on Nah Right is a bit pixelated. The one here should be a little better.
The good folks over at Drive A Faster Car are giving away a pair of tickets to see Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy play at Variety Playhouse this Friday night. To win tickets just enter via e-mail with your full name and an explanation as to why these tickets should be yours.
One winner will be chosen at random and will be notified via e-mail by noon on the day of the show. After being notified the tickets can be picked up at will call.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy plays at the Variety Playhouse with Lichens on Fri., May 29. $16-$18. 8:30 p.m. Variety Playhouse, 1099 Euclid Ave. 404-524-7354.
(Photo by Adm. Wiley Balls)
BLOWBACK: Scotty Barnhart
On a summer night in 1982, trumpeter Scotty Barnhart saw his future. Then a senior at Gordon High School in Decatur, Barnhart journeyed downtown to the Fox Theatre to see the Count Basie Orchestra perform. He came away from the concert dead-set on becoming a professional jazz man.
“From that time on, I knew I was going to be in the band one of these days,” he says. “I didn’t know how; I just had that feeling.”
Barnhart currently plays lead trumpet in the Basie band and has just released Say It Plain, his first CD as a leader. The album features pianists Ellis Marsalis and Marcus Roberts, trumpeters Clark Terry and Wynton Marsalis, and drummer Herlin Riley, among others.
Continue reading “Scotty Barnhart brings jazz to the King Center”
(Photo courtesy The Bloom Effect)
THAT RETAIL CHICK: Desiree Williams (right) and Anthony David at Sound Shop
It’s been over a year since we featured Desiree Williams in Creative Loafing. At the time, she’d just played an integral role in helping Atlanta soul mainstay Anthony David garner commercial radio spins on V-103 (WVEE-FM).
Since then, Williams, who manages Sound Shop at the Mall West End, has been extending her retail/industry expertise beyond the record store via her funny-as-hell, informative column, That Retail Chick, in which she dispenses priceless advice to unsigned artists.
Check out several of the tips from a recent post — Top 20 reasons artists don’t make it in the music industry — on her newly established blog, That Retail Chick:
3. “I’m from OHIO and I moved to ATL to break my music because OHIO ain’t feeling me???”
- If you can’t make a name for yourself in your own city, do you really think it will be easier in ATL? If you just moved to Atlanta thinking this is the place to make a name for yourself in the music industry, take a number. Because you just got in line with a slew of other folks that came here to do the same.
7. ”Artist development…man f–k that, I got SWAG!”
- For all of the artists out there, that have deals, songs on the radio, reality TV shows, or the ones that have no buzz at all; Swag is no good without PERSONALITY and media training is a must! Fans want to see a STAR! And grabbing your pants to hold them up while try to walk or acting stand-off-ish around fans will not work! You may have swag on a record or in a video, but your personality is at Level Zero in person! (more…)
A sold-out crowd of 16,000 packed Atlanta’s Philips Arena on Sunday, May 24 to bid rapper T.I. farewell before beginning his 366-day prison sentence
“What I need y’all to do is pray for me while I’m gone,” he told the audience.
See the T.I. concert photo gallery.
About three hours ago, he reported to the low-security federal prison in Forrest City, Arkansas, according to the AP. If his sentence gets reduced for good behavior, he could be released in 10 months — not two, as the AP mistakenly reported last week.
(Photo by Alan Friedman)
DANGER MOUSE, SPARKLEHORSE AND DAVID LYNCH GO GUERILLA
Based on Google analytics:
1. Danger Mouse + David Lynch + Sparklehorse + Georgia = Get it while you can? (Get a clue, EMI.)
2. T.I. appeals prison location, throws Final Goodbye Bash before sentence (All the Feds are sayin’ is give Arkansas a chance.)
3. Mastodon frightens David Letterman (Brent Hinds strikes again.)
4. Atlanta’s top 30 list of old-school rap songs (7 months and counting…. Booty shake, bounce, and OutKast for that ass.)
5. Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament robbed outside Atlanta’s Southern Tracks studios (A post about Ament’s recent robbery veers into a conversation on Atlanta crime, gentrification and race.)
I really had to fight back the urge to to shudder when I asked the woman behind the safety glass at the ticket booth at Midtown Art Cinema for two tickets to see Anvil The Story of Anvil on Memorial Day. When she lazily replied, “$20.” I thought yikes! Really? That’s $10 a piece. …I wouldn’t pay that much for an Anvil album if I found one in the used record bin. …Or at least I wouldn’t have before watching director Sasha Gervasi’s documentary film about the Canadian metal band that soared to metal heights in the mid ’80s, but has persisted in obscurity over the decades that have followed.
The band’s 50-something frontman Steve “Lips” Kudlow still beams with childlike excitement when talking about achieving success as a rock star, which has cruelly taunted the band for more than 30 years.
Lips and his childhood buddy and drummer Rob Reiner fight a Melville-esque battle that threatens to destroy their friendship at nearly every bump in the road.
The truly brilliant tension in the film arises in the sacrifices they make and in the dynamics of every relationship the band’s members share with their wives, children, siblings and fans.
The film beautifully synthesizes This Is Spinal Tap with a reality TV-like flair, but these are by no means the guys that you love to hate. Visual clues that allude to the Spinal Tap parallels are none-too-subtle either, as we see volume knobs cranked to 11, and the boys in the band even pay a visit to Stonehenge when they travel to the U.K. to record with producer Chris Tsangarides.
Read this week’s CL cover story: Fresh from jail, Gucci Mane’s star has peaked. Can the combustible rapper take advantage?
Download Writing on the Wall, Gucci’s latest mixtape.
Listen + download a plethora of Gucci Mane mixtapes.
Gucci’s beginnings with Big Cat Records:
More of the Guc:
At home with Gucci, from Shawty Lo’s Raw Report DVD: The Real Bankhead Story:
ON THE GRIND: Only hours after being released from jail in March, Gucci Mane hit the recording studio.
DOWNLOAD Gucci’s latest mixtape, Writing On the Wall
During his latest stint in jail, Radric Davis spent much of his time contemplating how he could change his life. The veteran Atlanta rapper known as Gucci Mane had built a tremendous regional following based on his oft-autobiographical songs about partying, drug trafficking and street conflict. But the same lifestyle he rhymed about had repeatedly landed him behind bars, ironically stifling his hopes for national fame.
“I got a lot of ideas together,” he says of the six months he served for violating the terms of his probation, stemming from a 2005 incident in which he beat a promoter with a pool cue. “It was a time for me to refocus. I took it and made the best out of a bad situation.” He devoured all of the inspirational material he could get his hands on, he says, from the Bible and rap magazines to a title from the Chicken Soup for the Soul series.
Continue reading “Fresh from jail, Gucci Mane’s star has peaked”
(Photo by Donna Permell)
SMILES AND CRIES: Bonnie "Prince" Billy
Despite the foreboding title and bleak black and white cover art — a curious nod to the first Danzig album and Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night — Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Beware is an inviting entry into Will Oldham’s haunting repertoire.
But a closer look reveals the layers of dark imagery hiding inside some of Oldham’s most gorgeous, complex songs about the nature of love, happiness and existential rumination. Each song serves a cautionary tale, arriving as a Trojan horse that charms with a comfortable glow before opening up to expose its damaged character. The bucolic, acoustic strum and declaration — “I want to be your only friend” — that opens the album on “Beware Your Only Friend” suggests something more destructive than the naïve affections evoked by Oldham’s words and sweet voice.
Continue reading “Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy sounds hauntingly happy on Beware“
(Photo by Adm. Wiley Balls)
