An occasional feature in which esteemed D.C. rapper Head-Roc shares what’s on his mind.
Bruce-Monroe Elementary School, located at Georgia Avenue and Irving Street NW, is now rubble. A school that once educated Chocolate City’s young minds, even in an extremely deteriorated state after decades of legislative neglect, even after a recent $3 million renovation, is now [...]
Most of the time, John Beckham makes music as half of D.C.'s lowercaseletters, a poppy, polymathic neosoul group whose bio lists off a wide-ranging string of influences. One of those, perhaps curiously, is "the DIY mentality." Or maybe not curiously at all. Beckham recently dropped a cache of instrumentals on his Bandcamp page, one of [...]
Certain types of music were born to soundtrack snowstorms—ambient electronica, Japanese minimalism, most songs by Galaxie 500. And of course: shoegaze.
Of course, making music for a snowstorm and during one are entirely different endeavors. For the former, the goal has to be atmosphere, often in the form of noisy, ethereal soundscapes conjured via a critical [...]
Tomorrow, D.C.'s True Womanhood will finally release its debut EP, Basement Membranes, on the Baltimore-based label Environmental Aesthetics. Recorded in at least three different studios—Brooklyn's Death By Audio, Magpie Cage, and at home in D.C.—over the course of a year, the EP's six songs are caked with haunting sonic gloop. Guitars drone, drums pound, and [...]
Bootlegging a concert used to be a real pain in the ass. Well, it was in the mid-'90s, at least. My cousin used to use a pair of stereo microphones that were sewn into the collar of his flannel shirt and then connected to a minidisc recorder (remember those?) stashed in his jacket. This setup–some [...]
Alt-country is when you sing about people who work hard. That doesn't mean you have to work hard yourself, though. Somebody needs to mention this to These United States because, obviously, the band has been mislead. In the last 18 months the These United States–now evidently split between DC and Louisville, KY–has twice undergone the [...]
Given that last night was filled with the kind of surreal once-in-a-lifetime revelry generally confined to History Channel photo-montages–dewy-eyed thug dudes randomly hugging in the street, liberals performing patriotic chants at a drum circle–it's time to chill out a little bit.
Recently a friend of mine discovered this record, Sons of Ethiopia by Bethesda based [...]
The worst thing that's happened to me in months is the Amazon MP3 store, which every day has a "daily deal" that leads to internal dialogs like this:
Hey! Supertramp's Breakfast in America for only $2.99! I should totally get that!
Wait–you sing along with Supertramp on the radio, but there's probably a reason you don't own [...]
From the label's Web site over the weekend:
This Dischord "digital" site offers a unique hybrid of the direct sale and subscription based download services (as well as the usual CDs, LPs, DVDs, etc). Customers have the option to download entire albums for a set price (usually $7), purchase Digital Credits (15 credits for $10) [...]
