The mini-uproar that host Russell Brand generated at the MTV Video Music Awards by ribbing the Jonas Brothers about their "purity rings" has passed. The Jo Bros and their defender Jordin Sparks can go back to "Burnin' Up" while taking love"One Step at a Time" (as their respective singles describe), and Brand can sit back and enjoy the new season of "Californication." I tried to clear my mind the other morning by cracking open a good new book -- only to be reminded that sexual conservatism and pop have been strange bedfellows before, and not so long ago.
Juliana Hatfield, the author of the new memoir "When I Grow Up," was an indie rock star back when that music defined a slacker generation. She palled around with scene hottie Evan Dando (remember the Lemonheads?), wrote great songs about loving Nirvana and going to see the Violent Femmes and, with the band the Blake Babies and her ongoing solo career, helped misfit, thinking girls carve out their own corner of guitar heaven.
Hatfield is gifted with Top Model looks as well as a stunning sense of melody and the chops to play a mean guitar solo when required. Coming up alongside fiercely confrontational artists including Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna, she got a reputation as something of a prom queen. She was just too pretty, too aloof; and she had a habit of getting miffed with interviewers and saying things that sounded downright conservative....
Billed as some sort of mix of music and political consciousness, Saturday's We the People fest at the Los Angeles State Historic Park seemed to still be searching for its identity among this year's swarm of outdoor fests. With its portable toilets and expensive snack food, was it Coachella with more politically minded shout-outs? Most of the artists yelled something to the effect, "yeah, this is about the people...," and the turn-out was decent and varied with hippies and homeboys, but the disorganized festival, with shoddy audio for certain sets and long gaps between artists, clearly has some catching up to do.
Whatever the identity crises, you don't always get to see reggae, dancehall, punk-ska and hip-hop in one place in L.A. Dancehall elder statesman Barrington Levy, dressed in a button-down white shirt and a baseball cap cocked to the side, gave a wonderfully herb-influenced set, skitting and scatting through some of his classic work. A cloud of smoke hovered near the front of the stage for the entirety of his early evening set. With one the greatest dancehall artists chanting "light up the sensi" every few minutes, it was hard to tell if people were lilting and swaying to the beat or just unable to stand.
The right man for the job? For the first half of this decade, the pop music lineup for the Super Bowl halftime show was an even-handed mix of the sexes: for every Phil Collins, there was a Christina Aguilera; for every Aerosmith, a Britney; and for every Justin Timberlake, there was a Janet Jackson. Oh, right. Janet Jackson.
Ever since Jackson's infamous wardrobe malfunction at Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston in 2004, it's been all men, all the time -- and not a spring rooster among them: the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Prince and Tom Petty.
Come Feb. 1, Bruce Springsteen will add his name to the roster of classic-rock stars who have performed during the halftime break with his appearance at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla.
Springsteen and the E Street Band follow all those other Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees who've taken the stage at the Super Bowl, which last year drew 148 million viewers.
The band closed its 2008 tour on Aug. 30 with a show in Milwaukee that marked the 105th anniversary of Harley-Davidson. In honor of the occasion, Springsteen opened with “Gypsy Biker” and concluded his 31-song set with “Born to Be Wild,” the first time he’d played it on this tour.
The Springsteen canon is deep and wide, so anything’s possible for a Super Bowl set, but it’s hard to imagine him not including such gridiron-ready numbers as “Tougher Than the Rest,” “Glory Days” and the slam-dunk choice, “Born to Run.” Or forget the action on the field: in mind of Jackson's faux pas, the show's producers undoubtedly will insist he play "Cover Me."
— Randy Lewis
Photo: Springsteen at the Giants Stadium in July. Credit: Bill Kostroun / Associated Press
Usually we don't cite tabloids around these parts, for better or worse, but InTouch is suggesting that Natalie Portman and L.A.'s beardiest beardo, Devendra Banhart, have called it off.
The two 27-year-olds met on the set of Banhart's video for "Carmensita," which Portman starred in, and she reportedly had moved to L.A. from New York to be with him. Soundboard mourns the passing of yet another indie rocker-dreamy/alt-ish actress relationship, though it appears Banhart's wasting no time in finding new ways to express his spirit of eros (you can find the full album art on your own, as it's NSFW, or safe for anyone, really).
Hey, kids! This weekend offers not just one but two chances for you to ponder the hideous financial situation you are inheriting and will no doubt be fixing 50 years down the road. Oh noes! But the good news is that both events, designed to encourage the already impressive political energy of Gen Y, Z, 2.0 or whatever they're calling themselves, should be genuinely cool.
The first is the well-known, well-publicized We the People festival in downtown L.A. The lineup is nothing to scoff at: Les Claypool, RZA, Shavo Odidjian, Tom Morello, futuristic R&B cutie Janelle Monae, Murs and lots more, but what's really stoking our '90s-loving hearts is LA Teens' Rock the Vote, a five-hour, nonpartisan extravaganza at Safari Sam's for teens only. You totally can't come in, Dad!
For those of you who miss Kevin Bronson’s hyper-local coverage of the L.A. indie rock scene, Buzz Bands is back. The former, longtime music writer for the L.A. Times has resurrected his local music column and is now blogging daily at buzzbands.la. Bronson, a fixture of sorts wherever there's beer, baseball or buzzing guitars, is already back on the scene with local reviews, news, daily concert picks and exclusives. He launched the blog, which isn't affiliated with the L.A. Times, on Sept. 22. Beginning next week, he’ll have M83’s touring keyboardist/vocalist Morgan Kibby filing posts from the road. Suffice it to say, we’ll be checking in.
-- Charlie Amter
Photo of Kevin "chillaxing" at a past Coachella, courtesy of Kevin Bronson's award-winning Myspace page with permission from the man himself.
CORRECTION: The original post stated that M83's touring keyboardist/vocalist's name was Morgan Kilby. It's Morgan Kibby.
It's not often that “live performance” and “music-making” are actually one and the same — rarer still to witness when they come together in a public setting.
Rickie Lee Jones showed how it’s done Thursday with an unusually chatty and exceptionally illuminating night at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.
She’d played a series of solo shows back in February at the Echoplex in a residency that let her follow her muse on the turn of a dime. This time she was accompanied by a five-piece band including some old collaborators (guitarist David Kalish) and new ones (drummer David Leach and impossibly young-looking keyboardist Wyatt Stone).
It was clear from her steady stream of questions and requests to her cohorts on stage that this was anything but a meticulously rehearsed machine re-creating in public what had been perfected in private.
Rather, Jones is one of those true artists who strives to make music come alive at the very moment she plays and sings it. You couldn’t for an instant call what she did with “Nobody Knows My Name,” from last year’s “The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard” album a “performance” or “rendition.” The better term would be “delivery”: the process of giving birth to something suddenly alive in a new way.
What do Jennifer Hudson and David Cook have in common, besides attention-grabbing new singles and an "American Idol" past? They're famous -- fashioned into celebrities before our eyes within reality television's metamorphosis machine -- and yet vividly human, with edges most "Idol" alums lack. Their charisma comes from a rare combination of assertive vocal talent and an underdog mystique.
You root for Cook and Hudson because they are Little Engines That Can: imperfect, homey people with extraordinary gifts. Cook, triumphing over the disturbingly adorable David Archuleta last season, came off as the show's first truly accidental winner, a fashion-clueless barkeep-for-life whose competitive streak developed in tension with his desire to maintain a nerdy notion of rocker cool. And "Idol" turned Hudson into everyone's favorite outsider. Eliminated from the show far too soon, she found her role of a lifetime as Effie in "Dreamgirls" -- an earthy accidental rebel whose beauty radiated from her throat and her heart, and whose success was a form of Everywoman's revenge.
When these singers really let go, their voices smash through the limits imposed by their bodies and personalities, making them golden. That's what we once wanted from great singers -- fat or scrawny, pimpled or aging, they could blow away our prejudices. Imperfection is highly discouraged in corporate pop now, but for Hudson and Cook, it helps; more glamor would dampen the wonder of their performances. That's why it's sad to encounter so much airbrushing in the new musical products meant to secure their places as pop stars.
The 78-year-old chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway will bring his beloved four-string Uke and join his son, musician Peter Buffett,
on stage for a number during the younger Buffett’s scheduled concert at
the broadcasting archive, museum and seminar hub. The younger Buffett
has just released a new album, “Imaginary Kingdom,” on Tuesday, and his
recording career reaches back to mid-1980s. He scored the memorable
“fire dance” sequence in “Dances With Wolves,”
which won the Oscar for best picture of 1990, and Buffett himself won
an Emmy for the soundtrack he contributed to another Native American
project involving Kevin Costner, the “500 Nations” documentary miniseries from 1995.
And so we awaken to a new Britney Spears single (here's the best version we've found so far on Youtube) to distract us from the collapse of yet another major financial institution. (Shout out to all my peeps in the "Washington Mutual" state!) "Womanizer" is just the shot of Jolt Cola pop fans need right now: It's mechanical as heck, sure, and predictable too, but somehow it still draws you in. More like grabs your collar, forces you down onto a cane-back chair and yanks you in. Oh, wait, that's the choreography for the upcoming video.
The good: Retro-futurism takes a roller coaster ride via the snappy staccato beats crafted by the young Atlanta-based production team the Outsydas. It's clean and contemporary but also invokes the quick-witted style of vocal groups like the Andrews Sisters -- a style Brit's rival, Christina Aguilera, has mined to great success before. The highly manipulated vocal complements Brit's Mississippi Valley Girl diction; though she's been turned into a robot (again), she actually sounds engaged. And the lyric, about the kind of girl power that's focused on besting one obnoxious man, is also vintage and contemporary at the same time -- more feminism as individualism, which we all know is hot at the moment.
The bad: This song most emphatically does not swing. The very things that pull in a listener -- the song's jerky repetitiveness, the catchy staccato elements, Britney's voice pushed against your ear -- are going to get really irritating after three days of this song being everywhere.
The mini-uproar that host Russell Brand generated at the MTV Video Music Awards by ribbing the Jonas Brothers about their "purity rings" has passed. The Jo Bros and their defender Jordin Sparks can go back to "Burnin' Up" while taking love"One Step at a Time" (as their respective singles describe), and Brand can sit back and enjoy the new season of "Californication." I tried to clear my mind the other morning by cracking open a good new book -- only to be reminded that sexual conservatism and pop have been strange bedfellows before, and not so long ago.
For those of you who miss Kevin Bronson’s hyper-local coverage of the L.A. indie rock scene, Buzz Bands is back. The former, longtime music writer for the L.A. Times has resurrected his local music column and is now blogging daily at 
It's not often that “live performance” and “music-making” are actually one and the same — rarer still to witness when they come together in a public setting.
What do Jennifer Hudson and David Cook have in common, besides attention-grabbing new singles and an "American Idol" past? They're famous -- fashioned into celebrities before our eyes within reality television's metamorphosis machine -- and yet vividly human, with edges most "Idol" alums lack. Their charisma comes from a rare combination of assertive vocal talent and an underdog mystique.
Warren Buffett, 
