Stop Snitchin' may be the hidden link between
hip hop and the 1980s alternative rock group,
House of Freaks. According to the New York Post, journalist
Ethan Brown has accomplished
"making the Stop Snitching movement seem reasonable" in his new book
Snitch: Informants, Cooperators, and the Corruption of Justice. Brown argues that harsh
mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses have created a "cottage industry of cooperators" and
informants who fabricate evidence, because
Provision 5K1.1 of federal sentencing guidelines gives leniency in exchange for "substantial assistance to authorities." According to Brown, two of these
criminal cooperators included
Ray Dandridge and
Ricky Gray, the perpetrators of the
Richmond spree murders that ended the life of
Brian Harvey of House of Freaks, his wife, and his two children. On the other hand,
Mark Kleiman argues that the Stop Snitchin' movement has driven
homicide clearance rates so low that, in some cities, "you have a better than even chance of literally getting away with murder."
[more inside]
posted by jonp72
on Dec 11, 2007 -
61 comments
NickCaveFilter: Fifty years ago this very day,
Nicholas Edward Cave [
previously] crawled from the womb and started to plot. At 16 he formed his first band which evolved quickly into the
Boys Next Door [
Shivers]. This in turn mutated into
the Birthday Party (1980) who terrorised the post-punk soundscape in Australia and the UK [
Release the Bats |
Nick the Stripper]. The
Birthday Party relocated to England and in 1984 the band imploded in an orgy of drugs and booze. Shortly after
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were born [The Ship Song -
video &
solo live | The Mercy Seat -
video &
live |
Where the Wild Roses Grow], and 23 years and 11 studio albums later (not to mention a
best selling book, a
great screenplay,
some acting and several soundtrack projects) he is still going strong. But, instead of sitting on his musical laurels he decided to get back to basics and, in 2006,
grew a huge moustache and formed
Grinderman – a four piece with a primeval hybrid Birthday Party/Bad Seeds sound [
No Pussy Blues |
Honey Bee]. Fellow Mefites, I ask you to raise a glass to
Mr. Cave… And, especially if you are not familiar to his work, don’t forget to “look inside” for my primer on the enigma that is Nick Cave, one of the
finest song-writers on the face of this miserable planet.
[more inside]
posted by the_very_hungry_caterpillar
on Sep 22, 2007 -
98 comments
Brad Laidman critiques the findings from the Centre For Public Health at Liverpool John Moore University
report [pdf] 'Elvis to Eminem: quantifying the price of fame through early mortality of European and North American rock and pop stars.'
[more inside]
posted by tellurian
on Sep 14, 2007 -
25 comments
For most musicians, it's difficult to pinpoint a particular event that forever sullied their image and destroyed their popularity. For 80's rocker
Billy Squier, however, the
reason is
clear. [YouTube]
posted by starkeffect
on Aug 11, 2006 -
79 comments
Inner City Youth, London "In 2002,
Simon Wheatley began photographing London's publich housing developments...and was able to obtain a level of intimacy with his subjects that provides a true picture of the daunting project of growing up in the intimate confines of drug use, societal neglect, and poverty."
This (Flash-based) narrated slideshow features Wheatley's work, and is a look at the culture...and also the music (
grime) "as an artistic response to the place and circumstance, an expression of the violence, bleakness, and neglect..." (via
Future Feeder)
posted by tpl1212
on Jul 20, 2006 -
38 comments
"I know these desires could kill me dead, but how you gonna act instead?" So sings eros-haunted Delta-blues-steeped songwriter
Chris Whitley on his superbly dark new album,
Soft Dangerous Shores, and he's not kidding -- Whitley is currently "
very very ill" and receiving hospice care. After Whitley's 1991 debut,
Living with the Law, the slim (drug-addicted?) songwriter was acclaimed by his peers as "the real deal." When he was dropped by Sony in 1998, he released an album of stark poetic beauty recorded in a barn,
Dirt Floor.
Soft Dangerous Shores updates Whitley's coiled-viper resophonic guitars with dreamlike electronic atmospheres (
one reviewer describes it as "a hypnotic wrestling match between juke joint blues and Kraftwerkian beats"). Instead of posting an elegy for another underappreciated self-destructive genius a la
Nick Drake after his death, check out Whitley's music (via
free downloads) while he's still with us on Earth.
posted by digaman
on Nov 14, 2005 -
46 comments
LSD documentary records were a forgotten side-track in the war on drugs, reaching a high point in 1966 with the release of
LSD, an
album featuring interviews with Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsburg, and Ken Kesey, and featuring a live recording (which may or may not have been real) of a kid going on his first bad trip. (Not to be confused with Leary's own record of the same title.) In 1966, with neither internet nor home video, the record album was one of the most sophisticated communications media available, and it was a big year for LSD hysteria, with a
LIFE cover story and a Sal Mineo-narrated LSD version of Reefer Madness called
Hallucination Generation. LSD-related
magazines and periodicals,
reviews of psychedelic music, and more from
lysergia.com.
posted by dhartung
on Mar 20, 2005 -
21 comments
