The latest issue of the Believer has an interview with Ian MacKaye; the magazine's Web site has a teaser from it, but Idolator isn't very impressed after reading the whole thing.

Milk Machine, the subject of this week's One Track Mind column, has just announced that they're headlining the Rock and Roll Hotel on August 6. Also on the bill is Sean McArdle, who performed for Black Plastic Bag as part of our short-lived "Live From Our Pretty Much Empty Second-Floor Production Room" series in February.
MP3: [...]

Tomorrow night marks the first night of Moneytown, a monthly at U Street's Dahlak run by DJ Nitekrawler that promises "James Brown, Countless Independent Funk & Soul Monsters, The entire Saadia catalogue, the DC scene from 1968-1976, Women, RAW FUNK." Nitekrawler's bringing in a guest DJ each month, and first up is Dante Carfagna, a [...]

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner died yesterday of natural causes. Anybody who knows about experimental filmmaking knows at least a little about his work; music fans too. Here's the film Conner directed for Devo's "Mongoloid":
And here's his film for Brian Eno and David Byrne's "America Is Waiting," from their [...]

Fela Kuti's youngest son, Seun, headlines the 9:30 Club tonight, with dad's sensibility pretty much intact: On the evidence of the video below, he's inherited the same taste for politicized chanting, dynamic stage shows, and extended Afrobeat grooves. Not as extended as the ones Fela dealt in, though. As he told the Boston Globe over [...]

Congrats to the Web site Fuse for the clever idea of celebrating July Fourth by setting up musical slapfights between acts from each of the 50 states. Did you know that Idaho has bands? It's true!
The fine folks at Fuse forgot about D.C., though, denying locals the opportunity to choose between, say, Duke Ellington [...]

I admire Britannica for doing more online, especially now that the entire world is literally conspiring together to put the encyclopedia publisher out of business. But if it keeps blogging nonsense like Robert McHenry's post today, they get everything they deserve. McHenry is the former editor-in-chief of the encyclopedia—surely the job of a fearsomely intelligent [...]

 
If the band Gestures were an actual physical gesture, it wouldn’t be a come-hither motion, a wave goodbye, or a middle-finger-fuck-you. It’d be one big old shrug that says, “I don’t know what the hell is going on.” The electricity-free, Washington, D.C.–based sextet features two drummers and four horn players—including trombone, flute, clarinet, and tuba—and [...]

Black Plastic Bag is expanding its stable of music writers. We're looking for locals who can riff on albums, give our readers a heads-up on shows, bring the news, tell a good joke, and generally help us tell the story of the D.C. music scene. Interested? If so, show us what you've got—drop a line [...]

Saturday:
There are usually two kinds of band reunions: the kind in which a band plays the hits from its heyday, and the kind in which a band attempts to pick up where it left off, writing new material. Seminal Bostonian post-punk act Mission of Burma is doing a bit of both. Formed in 1979, [...]