Mac Lethal is a pretty mature dude. The Overland Park high-school dropout — a funny, emotional, shit-talkin’ white-boy rapper who’s admired almost as much as he’s despised — has been making a living off his music at a time when it’s hard to make a living, period. He’s doing it in a way that runs against music-industry wisdom, which, given…
Robert Moore has been hosting Sonic Spectrum anniversary parties long enough that he doesn’t remember what anniversary it is. Given that the fourth anniversary was last year, we’re assuming this weekend’s back-to-back shows will toast the fifth anniversary of Moore’s outpost of commercial-radio cool. The fact that Sonic Spectrum is still broadcasting Saturday evenings on KRBZ 96.5 “the Buzz” is…
Railing against what is unfair is primary fodder for rock and roll. Lately, though, we seldom find full-grown men hollering like outraged adolescents. Taking a cue from Marx and Engels, Red Kate hopes to break the chains of oppression for the rocking class. To drive its point home, Kansas City’s newest yell-core band (composed of no members under 30) has…
There’s that music that teenage girls love. It has a pleading voice and earnest lyrics. It’s catchy, and its platitudes stick in naïve minds like Hubba Bubba in braces. The piano-heavy pop on Pardon the Invasion by local four-piece Sometimes Three sounds more like coming-of-age music than slick, super-produced power ballads. On “Fade,” lead singer Chris Accardo’s urgent, heartfelt lyrics…
In 1994, Rancid and Green Day were the instigators of a mainstream punk-rock revival that has persisted ever since. Echoing the spawn of the Clash and the Buzzcocks 20 years prior, the two groups rose to prominence by infusing their bratty and rebellious anthems with irrefutable hooks. Whereas Green Day, some might say, has become a bloated caricature of its…
Metric is a favorite in the star-studded list of Broken Social Scene satellites (a group that includes the likes of Stars, Feist and the Weakerthans, to name a few), successfully orbiting the collective with frontwoman Emily Haines’ particular brand of glossy electro. Metric has been nearly silent since the release of 2005’s Live It Out, but its newest album, Fantasies,…
Part of the likable routine that Michael Keaton brought to his roles in the ’80s was patter — sometimes manic, sometimes balky. As grizzled Chicago hit man Frank Logan in The Merry Gentleman, Keaton lurks under a newsboy cap and speaks sparingly, often with a stagey self-interrupting cough. Frank is the mysterious stranger who helps mousy new-in-town Kate (Kelly Macdonald,…
If it’s true that you’ve gotta live the blues before you sing the blues, 50-something Lucinda Williams makes a strong case with her latest LP, Little Honey. On the record’s final track, she lends her beautifully haggard voice to a country-rock version of AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top.” While, like AC/DC itself, the song has always come…
Don’t we all want to be Jenny Lewis? Whether solo or with Rilo Kiley, the enigmatic singer owns stages with her sassy voice and Grand Ole Opry charm. She also has been lucky enough to play alongside two of the best sidemen in the business: Rilo Kiley’s Blake Sennett and her beau, Johnathan Rice, who co-produced Lewis’ latest album, Acid…
Eddie Murphy is Evan, a Denver investment consultant with a workaholic schedule that leaves little space for 7-year-old daughter Olivia (Yara Shahidi). Adding to his pressures is the meteoric rise of a co-worker, the shtick Native American “Whitefeather” (played by Thomas Haden Church), whose financial consultations come couched in pseudomysticism and PowerPoint razzle-dazzle. Evan’s interest in parent-child bonding spikes when…
In 1974, choreographer Michael Bennett gathered 22 Broadway dancers late one night, set a tape recorder running, and asked them to talk about their lives. They did, telling moving tales of their career struggles, troubled childhoods and sexual awakenings. Those stories, shaped by Bennett and his collaborators, became A Chorus Line, which opened at the Public Theater the next year,…
There are a number of tensions at play in Kate Churchill’s documentary about the proliferation of yoga as both spiritual path and commercial workout culture, and the vigor with which the believers will try to convert the skeptics. What’s frustrating about this otherwise friendly, lightweight look at the diverse world of yoga practitioners is that its director winds up focusing…
Given that MilkDrop is a member of the local Soul Providers Crew, it comes as no surprise that the production on his latest effort, Rise Before the Fall, is soulful. But as a reminder that hip-hop can be as much an extension of Marvin Gaye and Billie Holiday as it is a cocksure, new-school stab at old-school suburban sensibility, Rise…
Jason Beers is everywhere, and that notion is both fun and a little scary. His stamp is on five new CDs that are out now, not counting his online-only, 17-song solo album. That level of output alone might seem crazy, even if all those projects weren’t so unusual. First off, he’s in Wild Chipmunk and the Cuddly Poos, which accounts…
Some day I want to walk into a restaurant with palace in the name and discover that it really is palatial. Something out of a movie, I guess, with marble corridors, dazzling Oriental carpets, beautiful harem girls covered in jewels, music from Kismet wafting through every room. I’ll never give up looking for that exotic place. “You’re not likely to…
Want to know how a city works? Start by watching 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, a primer in which subway hijackers test how long it’ll take $1 million to pass through Gotham’s plumbing. Turns out an hour is just enough time to roust the hated mayor out of bed, convince him that $1 million is cheap for…
A sign outside UMKC’s Studio 116 warns that the urgent, intimate Hamlet inside “contains adult themes and may cause motion sickness.” This isn’t a joke. Just a couple of minutes in, after a prologue of admirable creepiness, a kah-chunk jolts through the four risers of audience seating, and cast members wheel us around the performance space, setting us up in…
The walls of the Capitol in Jefferson City are etched with lofty phrases about liberty and justice. But the quotes from long-buried visionaries aren’t what make Adrain Graham think about Independence Day. Her reason for confronting Missouri’s House of Representatives is etched in the scars trailing down the left side of her body. Last year, Graham was celebrating the Fourth…
Let’s role-play for a moment. You work in a business started by your father. The business prospers. The family diversifies into real estate. An older brother runs for Congress. In 1994, the year you turn 36, you replace Dad as the company’s president. The good times continue. In 2002, the business does $22 million in revenue. Feeling blessed, no? Life…
Dear Mexican: I was riding the local light rail when two female Mexicans sat down and started talking rapid-fire Spanish nonstop for 45 minutes! It seemed as if neither one stopped to take a breath of air. They were loud and could be heard the length of the train. Question: Is this why Mexican men are notorious for beating their…
Letters: May 14 Cows = Firefighters Regarding Jeff Levine’s May 14 letter to the editor: I’d like to point out a few facts about animal agriculture that have been all but ignored in favor of sensationalizing the gloom-and-doom of eating meat. The United States has just short of 100 million bovine animals, and 70 percent of their diet comes from…
This four-minute video was shot by Fader TV in Kansas City at the Power & Light District the night of DJ Jazzy Jeff’s now infamous performance. I can’t make out what Jazzy Jeff’s MC, Skillz, is saying on stage in the video, but backstage Z-Trip says he was told not to play any hip-hop music (a claim Cordish has rebutted…
