With St. Louis’ Nelly and Detroit’s Eminem topping the charts and Southern rappers such as Big Tymers, Trick Daddy and Nappy Roots ruling urban radio, the No Coast identity of Kansas City’s hip-hop community seems more viable than ever. The past few months, marked by unity among a wide variety of artists and promoters at weekly Oro Negro events, have…
Tech N9ne has nowhere to hide. He crouches behind a speaker stack, catching his breath after a six-song set in 90-degree heat at St. Louis’ UMB Bank Pavilion. This maneuver shields him from the fans still buzzing in front of the stage, but it leaves him in full view of followers who line the diagonal barriers that extend from the…
In Almost Famous two years ago, Goldie Hawn’s daughter, Kate Hudson, played groupie (band-aid, pardon) Penny Lane. Now, in The Banger Sisters, her 57-year-old mother is stumbling down Amnesia Lane. Hawn plays Suzette, an aging groupie too stuck in a gloriously seedy past to join the future. It’s 2002, yet she acts as though it’s 1969 and nothing’s changed. If…
Although his name sounds like an inventory notebook for candy bars, Heath Ledger is presently overcoming this confusion — as well as the plight of the pretty boy — to become one of contemporary cinema’s more vital actors. In The Four Feathers — as in The Patriot, A Knight’s Tale and Monster’s Ball — Ledger plays a sensitive and bewildered…
Taking care of business: Thanks to C.J. Janovy for writing “Yes, Master” (September 5). Too many people have no idea what’s really happening with business and government on a city/state level. Most people have bought into the spin that we need businesses because they provide jobs. Business and government people have used this as a way to take advantage of…
No sooner had Bob Collins announced his early retirement as city manager than rumors of who would replace him began zipping around the old tower at 12th and Oak. Informed speculators had Auditor Mark Funkhouser or Public Works Director Ed Wolf at the top of the list. For their part, Mayor Kay Barnes and various city-council members engaged in the…
Workmen wrestle with a bundle of rebar dangling from a crane at 12th and Oak while their colleagues hammer cement forms into place. A sign displays an artist’s depiction of their project: a $20 million gleaming edifice of glass and steel; the shiniest parking garage Kansas City has ever seen. Its designers want a radical departure from the gray garages…
Early on the morning before his thirtieth birthday, Larry Platt got stoned and fell asleep in the back of an Oldsmobile Cutlass that belonged to a guy he’d met in prison, a 24-year-old named Cornelius Peoples. Sitting beside Peoples in the passenger seat was another ex-con, 34-year-old Xavier Lightfoot. By the time Platt awakened, the sun was up and the…
The Savoy Grill (see review) appears to be the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Kansas City — but there’s always been debate about that. Rivals to the title include the New York Delicatessen (which first opened downtown in 1905, though it’s now at 7016 Troost) and the location at 51st and Main where Joe Accurso runs his namesake deli. (Some…
The best-known table in the Savoy Grill’s main room is Booth 4, the center booth closest to the western wall. This comfortably upholstered nook contained Harry Truman’s favorite table, and to this day it’s the most-requested spot in the restaurant. Considerably less popular is Table 31, the second four-top to the left of the revolving door, close to the bar…
On his way to Pakistan to cover the aftermath of 9/11 for the New York Times, Rick Bragg opened the newspaper to find his grandfather’s face staring back from a full-page ad for Bragg’s newest book, Ava’s Man. “I thought, here I am going to write about this great tragedy, and I still miss this old man,” Bragg says. People…
John Crundall was a designer-clothing guru — until he answered an even higher calling. Now the Australian is a Reiki master. He makes a trip to Kansas City this weekend to lead a series of workshops teaching others about the healing art that uses the laying-on of hands to channel “universal life-force energies.” Crundall became interested in energy healing through…
“Baseball owners were more interested in a settlement than changing the system. There’s nothing in the agreement that requires owners to reinvest shared revenue. What that means for Kansas City fans is more Wal-Marts and fewer wins.” — Tom Shatel, columnist, Omaha World Herald “If you want to say the Chiefs’ draft picks are awful and the Raiders’ are wonderful,…
Sports fans in Kansas City have taken a beating during the past few weeks. The Royals’ best pitcher, Paul Bird, referred to the right-field bleacher crowd at Kauffman Stadium as “thugs” when they protested the players’ union’s declaration of a strike date. Pitcher Jason Grimsley baited the protesters by mockingly tipping his cap toward them as his teammates high-fived him….
Richard Rodgers has an untouchable place in the history of musical theater. The shows he composed to accompany Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics read like a hall of fame: Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music. And though his and Lorenz Hart’s shows are less classic, they’re not exactly hack jobs; consider such songs as…
Did you know Magnum clip rhymes with wig split? Kingpin Skinny Pimp does. The Memphis, Tennessee, gangsta-rap veteran makes ample use of similarly snoozeworthy clichés on his seventh effort, Still Pimpin and Hustlin, a record so steeped in played-out thuggisms that it makes one wonder if Memphis exists in some sort of hip-hop time warp. Pimpin’s artwork features the requisite…
Right now, music critics are trying to invoke the perfect superlative to bestow upon the new Dixie Chicks album. “Stunning,” “mature” and “rootsy” will be popular, but “boring” probably won’t crop up as often as it should. If you haven’t heard, the Chicks cranked things down a few notches on Home, an acoustic affair that’s being touted as the trio’s…
After becoming the first group to make an album available for Internet purchase before its retail street date (2000’s stellar There’s A Poison Goin’ On), Public Enemy now joins a much larger club — acts that issue what should be Web-site-only fan-club freebies as proper releases. Perhaps PE figured no one but its hardcore following listens anymore, given that Poison…
Before his death in 2000, Tito Puente rivaled James Brown as the hardest-working man in show business. According to the liner notes of this collection, he gigged almost every night for fifty years. Not only did he do more than any other single artist to popularize Latin music to a diverse American audience, but his early-’50s Palladium Dance Hall gigs…
Her reputation as critics’ fave well cemented — she writes gloomy and acerbic, sings scornful and angelic, collaborates with Elvis Costello, sleeps with Michael Penn — Aimee Mann needs only to break through to people who actually buy CDs. Alas, peddling depressive-obsessive anthems for Triple-A radio is no way to break into the bigs, so she’s doomed, Oscar nomination notwithstanding,…
Sixer, like any punk band worth a loogie, is full of itself, fiery and self-righteous. Mixing streetwise riffs with blues, country and rockabilly twists, the Richmond, Virginia, quartet makes its living on the road, clearing more than $200 each night at the merch table. Lyrically, the group blends odes to music and romance with personal accounts of adventures fueled…
Though it’s a lovely sentiment, the passage get on the bed and put your bootie in the air and spread isn’t actually included in the Kama Sutra text, as A.I. claims in “Bottoms Up,” the first track from the trio’s debut disc. Siblings Nick and Zack Young — the former on guitars and vocals, the latter on drums and percussion…
Following the release of its 1999 effort, Summer Teeth, and a second full-length collaboration with Billy Bragg, Wilco embarked on its most turbulent period to date, chronicled in the newly released documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (due to hit the KC/Lawrence area in the coming weeks). The film captures the ugly side of the music industry’s art-versus-commerce…
Dwight Twilley, with his Tulsa, Oklahoma, roots and honky-tonk name, was an unlikely bet for power-pop icon status, but as a catalyst for the first real surge of that genre in the late ’70s, he’s still discussed in reverent tones at record collectors’ gatherings. In 1975, “I’m on Fire” threatened to make the Dwight Twilley Band, with Phil Seymour as…
