How's My Living? » News & Links

Kickstarter Project: A New Album from Rocky Votolato

Sarah — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:50:33 +0000

I keep intending to highlight worthy Kickstarter projects here, but always get distracted. Now’s a good enough time to start!

One of my favorite artists, Rocky Votolato, is stepping away from the whole released-on-a-label thing and is looking to self-release his newest album, Television of Saints. He’s aiming to raise $20,000 in the next month. Funds all go towards the expenses of putting the album together: recording costs, paying musicians, mastering, artwork, manufacturing, promotion, etc.

I’ve been lucky enough to see Rocky several times, including at a house party here in Chicago a couple of years ago, and not only is he a very talented songwriter and performer, but one of the sweetest musicians I’ve ever chatted with. He previewed a few new songs whenever I saw him at Lincoln Hall earlier this year, and I’m guessing that Television of Saints is going to be a great album.

Check out his Kickstarter video, below, and chip in a few bucks to help the new album become a reality.

Rocky Votolato: Official Website | MySpace | Facebook | Twitter | Store

Recommended Reading: Lots of the Internet on Odd Future

Mel — Fri, 20 May 2011 01:38:14 +0000

Not to get too detailed, but the extent to which my job is sucking all the joy and energy out of everything I do is increasing and also getting kind of scary. I’ve got a couple of coping mechanisms. First, there’s all the things in Google Reader that aren’t my job that I read on my breaks, and then there’s my best tactic for inducing a haters gonna hate endorphin surge while getting my job done: listening to tapes of Wilco shows, turned up to eleven.

As of this week, these two things have started to dovetail.

Since SXSW this year, I’ve noticed an uptick in pieces about hip-hop collective Odd Future on the blogs I read, and last night I finally read something that gave words to what I haven’t seen in the coverage so far — an absence that’s left me feeling pretty uncomfortable.

Most of the links have pretty graphic and disturbing descriptions of violent misogyny and homophobia, and the rest of the post will touch on that, so I’m going to put the rest of this behind the jump.In chronological order:

3/4/11: Odd Future, Hip-Hop, Misogyny, and the Internet

3/21/11: Wolf Gang, Wolf Gang: SxSW as Spring Break

4/12/11: In Defense of Offensive Art

5/10/11: Not Another Odd Future Think Piece: Rap, the Internet, and Female Agency

5/16/11: With the Ladies in the Back at an Odd Future Show

5/18/11: Tyler, The Creator, Creates 43-Year-Old “Joke”

It’s the last two that really made me start to think about this. I’m the first to admit I don’t know much about hip-hop and rap. I listen to some of it and I like it, but I don’t know enough to say anything intelligent.

The thing is — Emma Carmichael’s “With the Ladies in the Back” was familiar.

This is the paradox of the Odd Future narrative, and of the people who so eagerly consume it. That includes me. The young men rap about bitches, and about fucking them and raping them and rubbing glass on their clitorises, but the “bitches” aren’t in their videos. They’re not onstage in any intentional way, as in an orchestrated moment at a Drake show. Unless their name is Syd and they’re in charge of every song and of the show’s momentum, the bitch in the verse exists in some theoretical plane where anything can be done to her, or it, and no one has to be hurt.

The words don’t match up with the spectacle.

…[Odd Future's] trick is deciding who gets to be in on the joke; for listeners sensitive to lyrics about rape or homophobia, the trick is deciding if you really want to be in on the joke in the first place. Young white men, Tyler masks strapped on, were clamoring for that right on Friday, while the women tried to find a place for themselves. That meant either dancing awkwardly onstage, because that’s what seems true to the form, or retreating to the back, amongst the stripper-bitch-faggot-asses, and watching passively from a distance.

As I was reading Carmichael’s piece, I kept thinking about Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses at the Ogden in February. To be clear: the parallels I see there have nothing to do with Bingham’s songwriting or behavior on stage, but rather the behavior of Bingham’s guitar tech, the Ogden staff, the Ogden setup (and the empty VIP areas), what happened to get the show moved from the Bluebird in the first place, the weirdly riotous crowd including the multiple men on the floor that kept critiquing, verbally and physically, the way my friend and I and others took in Bingham’s performance — all of those factors, in other words, that were totally at odds with Bingham’s music up on the stage.

What I’m trying to get at is that this isn’t an Odd Future problem. It’s not a hip-hop or rap problem. It’s not an East Coast or West Coast problem, it’s not a “heartland” problem. It can happen at the Ogden in Denver at an alt-country show, and it can happen at the Highline Ballroom at a hip-hop show. And it can get perpetuated on the internet.

Because seeing how angry Sady Doyle got about it, in her piece “Tyler, The Creator” –

Because real-live girls were getting harassed, hurt, told that they only had value to the extent that everyone could see their fucking tits, told that they were just a pair of tits to jerk off on or a hole to fuck, unless they don’t want to fuck, in which case fuck ‘em anyway, and bitch DON’T get fucking mad when I hurt you, FUCK YOU BITCH, your body is there for me to do what I want with, and the dudes? The white male blogger music dudes who were covering this? Who were hyping Odd Future and Tyler, the Creator? Who are hyping them still? It was happening IN FUCKING FRONT OF THEM. And it didn’t matter. It didn’t stop them for a fucking second.

It didn’t fucking matter. They didn’t think to factor it in. In point of fact, what much of the criticism about Odd Future has focused on is the idea that their live shows are the best part of what they do; the great, punk-rock, incendiary EXPERIENCE of Odd Future, is what gets discussed. And there are real girls getting harassed, IN FUCKING FRONT OF the white dudes who are writing paeans to and defenses of Odd Future, in front of the dudes who are praising Odd Future shows. And we need to be sophisticated. We need to talk “about” “the” “music.” We need to worry about whether we sound “screechy” or like “scolds,” don’t get too upset, don’t lose your shit, don’t act like this is some kind of litmus test for whether or not you can even vaguely respect a dude as a person. Well, dudes, I have a remarkable new theory for you: When it’s YOUR ass on the line, then YOU can tell ME how upset to fucking be about it, and how I should phrase that. Seriously. When Tyler is using you as a synonym for “worthless,” when Tyler wants to shove broken glass up your asshole, ring me up, and tell me how much I should care. I’ll listen, all you want, when you’re talking about the “sophistication” we should maintain in re: discussing whether or not your asshole deserves to have broken glass shoved up it.

Emphasis is mine.

When I think about how to write about a show, whether here or elsewhere, I consider not just the music coming from the stage, but the performance. This includes the performance space, the audience, the musician or band’s comfort level on the stage, the rapport the musician or band builds with the audience, and a whole bunch of other things. Sometimes I consider what I did just before or just after a show; sometimes I take some time to think about the experience before I write about it.

The point is that a studio album is not a live performance. A live performance works under different rules and should be considered under different aesthetic criteria by anyone writing about it. A live performance reflects more immediately upon the cultures participating in that performance — including everything from regional culture of the audience to the road culture of the band to the culture of the venue, and then some.

It would be great — it would be fantastic — to be able to limit music criticism to what comes from the stage. But we can’t — or at least we shouldn’t. Because when it comes to live performance, it’s not all about the music. Sometimes it’s about standing in the back because you’re not comfortable going up front, because you don’t feel safe going up front. Sometimes it’s about standing there and listening to an artist you admire, maybe an artist you love, tell you that, as Emma Carmichael puts it, you’re among the “stripper-bitch-faggot-asses”.

I don’t know that I’m comfortable seeing things like that happen and not calling them out in whatever way I can. See also: Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses at the Ogden.

And this part’s where Wilco comes in. I see things happen, I call them out. Jeff Tweedy’s still getting an awful lot of side-eye from me these days, and I’m still apprehensive about the album this fall. It was an interesting juxtaposition, going back and rereading all of these pieces (and reading some for the first time) this week, while listening to tapes of Wilco shows I attended and enjoyed, a lot.

Whatever criticisms I have of Wilco these days, I’ll say this much: not once have I ever felt that lack of safety or respect at a Wilco show, whether the shows where I was on the rail or the shows I stayed in the back. I can’t say the same about that show at the Ogden, I can’t say the same about Sixth Street in Austin on a Saturday night, and based on the Odd Future reading I’ve done — and those links above aren’t all of it — I don’t know that I could say the same about Odd Future. The reading I’ve done doesn’t make me inclined to test that, either. And I can’t help but think that if I’m not alone in feeling that way, Odd Future, Ryan Bingham, and anyone and everyone else with this problem (hint: it’s most of us, if not all of us) may want to rethink their performance model. It doesn’t seem to be sustainable for the long term. Or I hope it’s not, anyway.

Odd Future: Official Website | Facebook | Twitter

Wilco: Official Website | MySpace | Facebook | Twitter

Checking In On The Railroad Revival Tour

Mel — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:12:42 +0000

There’s this Railroad Revival Tour going on next month. Mumford & Sons, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros playing out west. That is going to be a good show.

A friend of mine linked me to Entertainment Weekly’s post on it, though, and that’s where my eyebrows went up. The press release frankly didn’t help much, either.

Winston Marshall from Mumford & Sons is taking a humbled historical perspective on the tour, saying, “To misquote the great Woody Guthrie, this train is bound for disgrace. Glorious disgrace. Woody rode with his fellow drifters around North America; we get to do it with a bunch of other musicians, although not strangers, from different corners of the world. A dream come true to be on tour with them, a privilege we get to do it on a train (one of Britain’s greatest inventions by the way).”

The Railroad Revival train is 1,500 feet long and consists of 15 vintage railcars from the 1950s and 60s, pulled by two locomotives. The bands will eat, sleep, and record on the train as they travel across the American Southwest, bringing their collaborative vision to fans from California to New Orleans. The bands will have equal billing and equal time on stage, in an environment that encourages creativity and cross-pollination. The entire tour will be the focus of a documentary that captures the spirit of the journey and gives intimate insights into the creative process.

When asked about the inspiration behind the Railroad Revival Tour, Alex Ebert of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros commented, “From hobos to the wild west, trains have always been a fascination of mine. This tour is going to be rad.”

But perhaps Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show put it best when describing the tour, saying that “It’s bound to be one hell of a steel wheelin, railroadin good time…while the western country rolls by and the smoke rises blacker than musical notes pouring out of that stoked-up-and-chuggin iron chariot.”

The point of a press release is to drum up excitement and general interest. If they were coming within a day’s drive of Denver, I’d go, no press release necessary. But I look at those pull quotes, and I look at that EW post, and I can’t help but be reminded of something Greil Marcus wrote in The Old, Weird America (emphasis mine):

Art was the speech of the folk revival — and yet, at bottom, the folk revival did not believe in art at all. Rather, life — a certain kind of life — equaled art, which ultimately meant that life replaced it.

The kind of life that equaled art was life defined by suffering, deprivation, poverty, and social exclusion. In folklore this was nothing new. “Thanks to folksong collectors’ preconceptions and judicious selectivity, artwork and life were found to be identical,” historian Georgina Boyes writes in The imagined village. “The ideological innocence which was the essence of the immemorial peasant was also a ‘natural’ characteristic of the Folk and their song.” A complete dissolution of art into life is present in such a point of view: the poor are art because they sing their lives without mediation and without reflection, without the false consciousness of capitalism and the false desires of advertising. As they live in an organic community — buttressed, almost to this present day, from the corrupt outside world — any song belongs to all and none belongs to anyone in particular. Thus it is not the singer who sings the song but the song that sings the singer, and therefore in performance it is the singer, not the song, that is the aesthetic artifact, the work of art. In a perfect world, in the future, everyone will live this way.

That is a leftist translation of what began as a genteel paternalistic philosophy; it is a version of socialist realism. In 1966 folklorist Ellen J. Stekert saw it alive in the folk revival, and traced it to Communist folk music circles in New York in the 1930s. Woody Guthrie and Aunt Molly Jackson, she wrote, celebrated as great artists by their sponsors, were not even good artists, judged either by the traditional standards they were seen to embody or by the urban standards of their primary, political audience, which embraced them for political reasons — because the singers brought authenticity to the politics. “It was a pitiful confusion,” Stekert wrote. “It was monstrous for urbanites to confuse poverty with art.” When art is confused with life, it is not merely art that is lost. When art equals life there is no art, but when life equals art there are no people.

That press release hits all the important checkpoints for something like this: Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, vintage, the Wild West, and hobos.

Nowhere in the release do I see any kind of acknowledgment that those checkpoints, and thus the point of the venture from the PR perspective, are founded on history that’s problematic at best. No mention of bank repossession of family farms during the Dust Bowl, of the Great Depression that spawned the hobos (and a significant portion of Woody Guthrie’s work), of the systematic genocide that created the notion of the Wild West. And I don’t expect to see a mention of those things, either — not in a press release, anyway. A press release is going to have to lean on the romanticized history that passes for the mythology of the United States in order to sell tickets, which is what they’re after, especially in light of Ben Lovett’s remarks to EW:

Keyboardist Ben Lovett [of Mumford & Sons] recently told EW, “We have somehow yet to financially profit from what we do,” despite their debut album Sigh No More moving two million copies. Tickets go on sale Wednesday March 9 at noon EST. Here’s hoping that going hobo will push them into the black.

Like I said, I’d go if I could — that’s going to be good music and an excellent show. And I’d like to put some financial support behind those artists — or more so than buying their records, anyway, which I have. But I’d go because of the music, not the concert model. The concert model trades on bad history. ($5 says the documentary doesn’t mention any of that history at all.) These groups have proven they don’t need the romanticized claptrap to get us to buy their records. And I’d just as soon we followed the money, ditched the romanticism, and stopped confusing poverty with art.

No related posts.

Jeff Tweedy, Rahm Emanuel, Live Nation, Etc.

Mel — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 21:19:02 +0000

So Chicago’s got a new mayor — something that doesn’t exactly have a huge effect on my day to day, but I kept an eye on @MayorEmanuel (NSFW for mountains of profanity) like several thousand other people. I noted it with mild interest when I saw that Jeff Tweedy was doing a benefit for Rahm Emanuel, but didn’t think much about it. As we saw last month, my interest in Jeff Tweedy’s politics tends to lie in other directions.

And then on Tuesday, Jim DeRogatis linked to this post in the Beachwood Reporter, in which Steve Rhodes calls out Jeff Tweedy for his support of Emanuel in light of Emanuel’s ties to Live Nation/Ticketmaster. DeRogatis has written about this himself; his post is interesting reading about an issue that’s cause for concern for anyone with an interest in Chicago music. Back to Jeff Tweedy, though: is Rhodes’s virulence justified? Has Tweedy in fact broken our hearts?

I’ve gone through the comments on DeRogatis’s Tweedy-related post, and I’ve spent a few days thinking about Rhodes’s post, and there’s something I haven’t seen anyone bring up yet. In the last couple of years, Wilco has made efforts designed to get away from the Live Nation/Ticketmaster juggernaut. For ticket presales, Wilco has largely moved to independent companies such as Front Gate Tickets and Brown Paper Tickets, and away from Ticketmaster. They also moved their merch store to Kung Fu Nation around May 2009, and away from Musictoday, which was bought by Live Nation in 2006.

So if that’s been the band’s direction in recent years, why did Tweedy put his support behind Rahm Emanuel now? There are several interesting possibilities. Tweedy could have been doing a favor for his friend Rahm Emanuel (though Rhodes’s post suggests otherwise). Billy Bragg’s opinions, as presented in Greg Kot’s 2004 book about Wilco, could be accurate. Tweedy could want to reverse the path the band has been on for the last few years — which is intriguing, considering Wilco’s new label — for any one of several reasons, up to and including Rhodes’s suggestion that Jeff Tweedy’s personal politics may lean anti-union. Tweedy may never have signed on with the idea of moving away from Live Nation in the first place. Tweedy may find himself in need of a favor in a few years. Or Tweedy just may not have done his homework about Rahm Emanuel’s ties to Live Nation/Ticketmaster.

This is one of those things where we’re going to have to see how it plays out before we can conclude anything at all – but Rhodes and DeRogatis have raised a few more concerns in my mind than I had before. Wilco’s next record is going to be their first ever on an independent label. And if there’s one part of Steve Rhodes’s post that I agree with one hundred percent, it’s this:

Is it fair to judge Tweedy for his political choices? As long as he’s using his influence to put money behind those choices, absolutely.

Where Tweedy chooses — and where anybody chooses, because this isn’t just limited to Jeff Tweedy — to put his influence matters. If you’re going to support something, know what you’re supporting, especially when it impacts the livelihood of thousands of people. The connections between Emanuel and the companies that Wilco has tried to move away from can’t really be denied, and as someone who’s a fan of a lot of Chicago artists, I really hope Chicago music won’t suffer as a result of these connections — and should that come to pass, I really, really hope Jeff Tweedy isn’t going to play a part in making that happen. I certainly don’t think Tweedy’s benefit show decided the election, but I also don’t think it hurt Emanuel’s campaign, either.

We’ll see where we are later with Jeff Tweedy, his political connections, Wilco’s new record and label, etc., but I’m a little less optimistic about it all than I was at the beginning of the week. Further updates as events warrant.

Jeff Tweedy/Wilco: Official Website | MySpace | Facebook | Twitter | Shop

I’ve Got Reservations About Wilco’s New Record Label

Mel — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 06:13:05 +0000

An announcement I’ve been waiting for hit today: Wilco is definitely starting their own record label. This news doesn’t come as a shock — last July brought the news that this was something they were looking at doing, because the band was not planning to renew their contract with Nonesuch Records. In a lot of ways this seems like a logical move: they’ve got fifteen years’ worth of name recognition and fan base, they’ve got contacts, and they seem to be open to experimenting with nontraditional business models. From that perspective, I’m looking forward to seeing what they do and how they do it.

Like a lot of people in the vicinity of my age, I’ve done a lot of growing up with Wilco as my soundtrack. Tweedy’s songs have seen me through four years of college, two deaths in the family, jobs I hated (and jobs I loved), a cross-country move, a failed relationship or two, and a whole lot of solo travel all over the United States — much of it to see Wilco. It’s not a big stretch to say that Jeff Tweedy’s work helped me learn how to be independent, and it’s no stretch at all to say that his work made me fall head over heels for the country I grew up in. I do what I do because of Wilco, and Wilco is what it is because of Jeff Tweedy.

However. In the last year and a half, I’ve noticed some trends in Jeff Tweedy’s approach to his brand — and this is an important distinction: not his music, but his brand — that I don’t much care for. It’s not like he has any reason to care about my opinion, of course, but I’ve been a fan for a while, and his music means a lot to me, and I pay attention to what Tweedy does. The first time I heard “Wilco (The Song)”, I had to take a moment, because that song, self-titled, off their self-titled album, said what I’d been wanting to hear, and what I was sure I’d known for years: they’re my band, and they’ll be there when everything else sucks. The problem is that out of the studio, Tweedy doesn’t seem to want to back that up — or rather, it’s not as universal a sentiment as it looks on the surface.

Check the album art for Wilco (The Album); it’s the first thing that gave me pause. The photography inside consists mainly of shots of Wilco’s nudie suits, custom-designed by Derek Welch of UNKL. Nudie suits are their own kind of cultural code; when combined with the specific imagery on the suits, as well as the way the suits are portrayed in the photography, they send a powerful message. The suits don’t just hang out on display on mannequins in a store window. Men wear the suits at work, with their children, running errands. Wilco’s suits are your suits, the photographs say, and the album says, Wilco is there for you. They have branded themselves with this, in the song and the album named for their band.

What I noticed as I looked at the photographs is that women don’t get to wear the suits. Women don’t even get to be in the pictures at all.

And I asked myself: after everything I’ve been through, with their records beside me the whole way, does this mean Wilco is there for other people, but not for me?

On one level, it’s a stupid question. Jeff Tweedy and company don’t know me, and I don’t know them. But on another level, when put in context with the way Wilco has been attempting to write their own narrative since the release of the Ashes of American Flags DVD, their lack of recognition that their audience isn’t only made up of mostly white men in their twenties and thirties doesn’t sit well with me.

Put more simply, when the point arrives that your band gets called out on primetime TV as a comparison point for lack of diversity — namely, a network described as “about as diverse than a Wilco concert” (6:00) — that might be the time to start questioning how you’re portraying yourself, and how you’re constructing your brand — especially when your latest efforts at branding yourself mean casting yourselves as guardians of the flame of American musical tradition. Ashes of American Flags is the best and most blatant recent example.

Through the band’s (and the editors’) careful selection of venues, including Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa (pictures of long-gone and forgotten country stars on the walls), Tipitina’s in New Orleans (historical anecdotes from John Stirratt and Pat Sansone, both of whom grew up in the area), and the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville (the Mother Church of Country Music), as well as various members of the band talking about their views on rural America and its music over shots of lonely stretches of interstate in the American South, Wilco shows themselves to be an American band with a long pedigree that crosses decade and genre.

And you know, that’s cool. It’s a big part of why I like them. I like that Tweedy writes simple songs — which is hard to do — that can turn into monster noise vehicles, both live and in the studio. The problem is that they’re perpetuating a view of American music, and American culture, and Americans, that’s awfully narrow. American popular music isn’t, and never has been, the sole province of those same mostly white guys in their twenties and thirties. They’re not the only ones who get to wear the suits.

This and the record label announcement wouldn’t have bothered me as much were it not for the fact that they’re using a very specific word when their press releases talk about their Solid Sound Festival, and that word is ‘curate’.

Because a curator, one who curates, is a gatekeeper. A curator gets to decide what’s worthy of preservation, and what — or who — gets left out of a collection for education, and for posterity. The items we see in museums are there because somebody decided they were worthy of being there, that they’re important enough to be there. The criteria for determining worth and importance aren’t always clear-cut, and it’s impossible to put everything on display at once. Decisions have to be made. The process of making these decisions will always involve leaving something, or someone, out.

The word ‘curate’ is a big red flag for me as it pertains to Jeff Tweedy, and it’s not because I think he doesn’t know what he’s talking about or because he doesn’t have the authority to be a tastemaker. It’s because with authority comes responsibility, and because I’m not sure his ideas of what’s ‘worthy’ for preservation and promotion are going to enhance American music by promoting groups that fall outside mainstream demographics. And a record label is a different prospect than a three-day festival. More money, effort, and long-term investment are involved. A record label means more promotion and more support. And while I’m sure Jeff Tweedy isn’t going to be personally overseeing every decision dBpm Records makes, the fact is that this label, from the start, is billed as “Wilco’s label”. And Wilco, for better or for worse, is Jeff Tweedy.

Tweedy is also nine studio albums (counting the Mermaid Avenue sessions, leaving out Kicking Television) into his career as Wilco’s frontman. It’s not unreasonable to start contemplating what kind of legacy Tweedy is going to leave, and what impact Tweedy wants to have, on music in the future. A record label can be a big part of that. The question is whether that legacy is going to involve shaking up, or at least shifting, the status quo by advocating music by artists who don’t fit a mainstream mold.

Tweedy’s work with Mavis Staples gives me a glimmer of hope, and I think we’ll know more once we see Wilco’s next album in late 2011, as well as who the first non-Wilco artist signed to dBpm Records is. Wilco’s last two studio albums were similar enough sonically that I’ve wondered if Tweedy and company weren’t in a creative rut; whatever we’re supposed to be getting this year will give us at least a partial answer to that question.

Meanwhile, Jeff Tweedy is broadening his scope on the back end of the musical process. I wish him luck. More, though, I wish he’d recognize the rest of us who don’t fall into that male, mostly white demographic, but who love his stuff anyway, and — in the case of the folks who could get signed to his label — want to work with him. We’re here, too.

I saw Tweedy twice at the beginning of this month at the Boulder Theater; now that life’s slowed down a little, I’m hoping to write some about what I saw. It touches on some of this label stuff, but a lot of it is just plain glee at getting to hear “Radio King” live and in person, among other things. It sucks when the context gets in the way of the music. But that’s Jeff Tweedy’s gift to me, even though he doesn’t know he’s given it — for me, in the end, past all the politics and other contextual contention, his music is worth it.

Jeff Tweedy/Wilco: Official Website | MySpace | Facebook | Twitter | Shop

Tweedy is doing a fundraiser for Rahm Emanuel tomorrow night at Park West. If you’re politically inclined that way and you’ve got the cash to drop, it’ll be a good show.

How's My Living? » News & Links

Kickstarter Project: A New Album from Rocky Votolato

Recommended Reading: The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Baghdad

Recommended Reading: Lots of the Internet on Odd Future

Recommended Reading and a Mother’s Day Message

Recommended Reading: Darren Hanlon on Billy Bragg, and the International Sweethearts of Rhythm

Checking In On The Railroad Revival Tour

Jeff Tweedy, Rahm Emanuel, Live Nation, Etc.

Recommended Reading: The Worst Gig

Recommended Reading: Presidential Campaign Songs, Reviewed

I’ve Got Reservations About Wilco’s New Record Label