Two things about Son Volt’s new album, American Central Dust, to start: First, there’s little here Son Volt hasn't shown us before. Second, it’s one of the best albums I’ve heard this year.
The record finds Jay Farrar back on the road, searching for meaning beneath America’s fingernails. He gives us grainy portraits of Rust-Belt Americans, [...]

"Where do you get the balls to change your name from Gordon to 'Sting'?" asked the comedian Dana Carvey asked sometime in the mid-90's, when the musician's stage name was still viable stand-up fodder. One might ask the same of John Stephens, who changed his name to John Legend while he was still a small-time act in Chicago. To his credit, Legend's spent the intervening years slowly justifying his ambitious moniker, carving out a niche of the outskirts of pop R&B, not far from its borders with rock and big-band. He brought his horn section, dancing girls, and Clorox-white pants to Merriweather Friday.

I'm pretty much happy to ignore this year's Grammys completely: Kokayi didn't win, Stevie Wonder suffered the indignity of sharing a stage with the Jonas Brothers, and I won't even get started on the bizarre Chris Brown/Rihanna incident that took place the night before the ceremony.
But there's one moment of Sunday's telecast that I just [...]

Some forms of political protest are beneath contempt, and one of them is sporting–sans a shred of irony–a Che Guevara T-shirt. Yet most Che-sporting hipsters don't know that Guevara opposed art forms that carried the taint of "imperialism"–including jazz and rock music. (Uninformed hipsters? Surprise!) My colleagues at Reason produced an eye-opening video about Paquito [...]