Rock isn't dead, it's just playing a bar you've never heard of. I write gonzo dispatches from the gutter where the best music lives. Vinyl collector. Dive bar philosopher.
~Music
The last place you'd expect to find Jon Stewart these days is behind a drum kit at the Stone Pony, but here we are. The man who spent years behind a desk dismantling political theater just dropped back into the New Jersey music scene, and the timing couldn&
~AI
The suits at Warner Music Group just signed a deal with the devil, and the devil's name is Suno. While they're popping champagne somewhere, celebrating their "innovative partnership" with an AI music generator, the rest of us are watching rock and roll get processed
~Music
The suits at OpenAI just signed a deal so fat it could buy every dive bar from here to Memphis and turn them into server farms. They're committing to drop $38 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next seven years—all to build machines that think faster
~Music
Harley Flanagan swung his bass like a medieval mace at CBGB's back in the day, the Cro-Mags tearing through sets sounding like the world ending in a Lower East Side basement. Four decades later, Silicon Valley wants me to believe a neural network trained on Spotify data can
~Music
The best rock and roll happens when everything goes wrong. Not the calculated chaos of smashed guitars or staged dive-off-the-amp theatrics, but the real deal—when blood meets fretboard, when gear gets stolen after the show, when the whole beautiful machine breaks down and keeps grinding forward anyway. That'
~Music
Screamo legends Saetia pulled their entire catalog from Spotify. If you're expecting another thinkpiece about artistic purity and the death of albums—surprise. This story is messier and more interesting. Saetia's taking a stand on ethics and politics. Veteran rockers Tesla are making different calculations about
Lars Ulrich is talking to a bunch of kids who weren't even born when St. Anger dropped, and this isn't some meet-and-greet bullshit where rock stars sign autographs and pretend to care about your demo tape. This is Ulrich—the same guy who took on Napster
The first time I heard Protomartyr's The Agent Intellect, I was standing in a record store on Cass Avenue, the kind where the vinyl still smells like cigarettes from the '80s and the owner keeps a baseball bat behind the counter. The album came on over the
The Federal Trade Commission just dropped a lawsuit on Live Nation and Ticketmaster that reads like a greatest hits album of corporate bullshit. Hidden junk fees, secret deals with scalpers, artists getting screwed while fans get fleeced—it's the same song the live music industry's been
The best rock and roll I ever heard wasn't at Madison Square Garden or some corporate-sponsored amphitheater with $18 beers and VIP sections. It was at a 200-capacity shithole in Detroit where the ceiling leaked, the PA system had more feedback than a Twitter argument, and the bartender
The American music market is a meat grinder that chews up foreign bands and spits out their bones. Ask any European metal act trying to crack the States, and they'll tell you horror stories about empty venues in Omaha, promoters who vanish with the door money, and radio
~Music
The death rattle of another indie label echoes through the gutted warehouses of American music, and this time it's Chicago's Trouble in Mind Records pulling the plug after nearly two decades of fighting the good fight. They announced their closure with the kind of resigned dignity