Posted on 02/24/2009
If you tuned in this past Sunday, then you were treated to what were probably the flashiest Oscars of the last 20 years or so. Seems like a bold statement, but even with a few undeserving award wins, the show itself was a spectacle. Huge Jackman provided the Oscar audience with a buzz from the opening get-go that, for once, didn’t have to have a punch line. The talent from his onstage acting days was not held short under the beautiful and luxurious awards set and the always glaring and posh celebrity audience. It was going to be a good night, one might have assumed, just from the first 15 minutes.

Posted on 02/02/2009
Remember your highschool's battle of the bands?  It's all so fuzzy but I distinctly remember the #1 hotty in the school crooning what surely couldn't have been a better version of Lou Reed's "Take A Walk On The Wild Side," although at the time it sure felt better. The girls swooned, and as I remember it the band actually kept the beat through the entire song.  Now take this basic band-battle model and interject one of the most powerful and interesting bands in hip-hop, The Roots, alongside the horn-heavy afro-beat outfit, Antibalas.  It's a battle of the bands wet dream.  Redbull had exactly the same thought, and this past Thursday, January 29th, after two full days of rehearsals, The Roots and Antibalas traveled to Boston for Soundclash. 

Posted on 01/22/2009
At first I wasn't going to go.  The cold.  Potential snow.  Below freezing.  And the horror of the massive crowds.  Yet late Monday afternoon I found myself on the Chinatown bus alongside the masses who descended upon Washington D.C. to watch our 44th President be inaugurated.  I was compelled- after watching the HBO broadcast of the pre-inaugural event on Sunday eve, with Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder (to which Obama nodded his head, on the 2 and 4 no less, and sang along), Usher and Garth Brooks, Beyonce and Bettye LaVette, all welcoming this new presidency- this new era- with such excitement and hope, I began to feel the pull drawing me south to be among the people, inside the mass hysteria, so I could feel it the way I saw the sprawl of people on the mall feeling it. Slowly Monday morning I watched as many of my friends and colleagues switched their Facebook statuses and their Twitter updates to "heading to DC" after having sworn off the trip, citing the cold and the crowds as their reason to defect from the journey that lay ahead.  They too couldn't resist the pull.  They knew that this day was somehow too important, a marker in our national history and consciousness, something worth braving the cold for.  Something worth standing in long lines and suffering the claustrophobia of the crowd for. 

Posted on 01/07/2009
A ton of albums pass through my hands during a calendar year.  A lot of those albums leave a lasting impression on me.  But the number that get loaded onto the MP3 player I take on nearly every cross-town bus-ride & walk to the corner bodega and then stay there all year is pretty small.  In fact, only twenty-something artists achieved this feat during the past year.  Their records were the ones that I just couldn't stop listening to. I think it's safe to say this select group of artists made my favorite music of 2008.  Their names, listed in alphabetical order, are...