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Concentric Pleasures: Moby, Phoenix, Fever Ray and More

2009-07-02T23:00:08Z

Phoenix are a pop band, plain and simple: a little bit Sloan, a little bit Fleetwood Mac and a little bit Daft Punk. At least, it feels like there's an unmistakably "electronic" element to the French band's records, even if it's just something about the goose-pimply detailing of their sound. (That could also describe the Fleetwood Mac influence, of course.) In any case, they take it back to the dance floor with a new set of "Lisztomania" remixes for Kitsune, the French label that recently released Phoenix's odd, appealing Kitsune Tabloid mix CD.

DFA's Holy Ghost! do a kind of chugging arpeggio thing that sounds an awfully lot like their own song "I Will Come Back." (Like their label mates Hercules & Love Affair and Black Meteoric Star, they clearly love old house and disco, but their take on it is way glossier.) LA's Classixx give blips their due on a spacy, slow-motion remix, and Manchester's Der Die Das dig into a gooey techno groove that reminds me the slightest bit of old Laurent Garnier. None of them are a patch on the original, nor for that matter upon Phoenix's recent album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, which is very good indeed, if you like that kind of thing. (By "that kind of thing," of course, I mean sunny-day singalong guitar pop that sounds like it's been squeezed from a tube full of rainbows and honey -- and who doesn't like that?)

In other recent indie/dance crossover releases, Strangelets (Supersoul Recordings' Xaver Naudascher and David Ducaruge) remix two of Sebastien Tellier's recent hits, gussying them up in tumbling, Italo-inspired arpeggios stretched to nearly eight minutes apiece. "Sexual Sportswear" is particularly good: brittle, pumping and moody. And, refreshingly, done without a trace of irony: these bleeps mean business.

Fever Ray's "Triangle Walks" is the new single from the Knife's Karin Dreijer-Andersson, and a diverse crew tests its malleable mettle. Tiga's is the oddball of the bunch, a low-slung electro number with booming 808s and a Neptunes infatuation. Elsewhere we find brooding downtempo (Ben Hoo), steely minimal techno (Spektre, Allez-Allez) and stately synth-pop (Tora Vintner, James Rutledge). Despite the stylistic range, they tend to bleed together under the weight of Dreijer-Andersson's almost overpoweringly processed vocals. Maybe that's why Allez-Allez's remix -- which all but erases them, stripping back the vocal track to a lone, repeated tone -- is one of the EP's most successful.

Finally, Moby has a new album out; following just a little over a year after Last Night, Wait for Me plots a considerably different course. While its predecessor was an uptempo celebration of New York's downtown dance legacy, the new one eases into a cozy, intimate vibe that's flush with guitars and vocals. Angelo Badalamenti, Beth Orton and maybe even Mazzy Star all serve as inspiration at different points across an album whose only real constant is its warmth. Taking a few cues from Joy Division (via Interpol), "Mistake" is fine, brooding guitar rock, while "Scream Pilots" sounds almost as though it might be a Plugz outtake from the Repo Man soundtrack. The album's best moments are its short, spontaneous instrumentals, fleeting moments when a musical idea flashes up in a smoke of tube glow and tape hiss, and is gone.

More Bang For Your Hard Rock Buck

2009-07-02T20:37:39Z

Warning: While you're welcome to try and construct a harder rocking playlist than this one , you'll most likely fail miserably. For one thing, all the selections are from the '70s, after rock got heavy but before metal shot itself in the foot by draining all the boogie out. So most of the songs are very funky as well as very fast, which only makes them rock harder. And best of all, the songs only cost 69 cents each, which means more pennies left in your pocket for beer!

On The Record: Passion Pit

2009-07-02T18:50:53Z

On the Record is a video series where rockstars gush about their favorite records -- in exactly 45 seconds.

ARTIST:
Passion Pit

RECORD:
Untrue

Lemmy on the Beatles and more in the rest of our On the Record series.

Diplo

Deer Tick

Tom Morello

Animal Collective

Rhapsody's Song of the Day - Rob Thomas - Her Diamonds

2009-07-02T18:41:46Z

Song: Her Diamonds
Album: Cradlesong
Artist: Rob Thomas

The happily married Matchbox Twenty frontman croons about the hurt of love on his lead single off new album, Cradlesong. Presented by the U.S. Airforce.

Meet the Devil Wears Prada

2009-07-02T16:00:00Z

From left to right: Jeremy DePoyster, Andy Trick, Mike Hrancia, James Baney, Chris Rubey, Daniel Williams

The Devil Wears Prada are not your average scene band. Sure they have their merch in Hot Topics all over the country, and yeah, their fans average around the age of 16, but in their three-album, five-year-and-counting career, these young Ohio natives have accomplished a lot more than any band with "street cred" (though they have that in their own right, if you want to get technical). Debuting at No. 11 on the Billboard 200 with their latest effort, With Roots Above and Branches Below (see: the same debut Mastodon had with Crack the Skye not two months prior), it's like guitarist/backup vocalist Jeremy DePoyster puts it: "Obviously we're young guys and we're small guys and we wear tight pants, but we can make some really heavy music." So with that "don't judge a book by its cover'" admonishment out on the table, find out what else DePoyster had to say about these young guns' thoughts on their "scene," their success and their goals as a Christian metal band. Forget what you may have heard, and please meet the Devil Wears Prada.

]]> How do describe your sound?
We're a Christian metal band that tries to bring a lot of melodic elements to a really heavy sound.

Who do you cite as your influences?
I'd say anybody from Underoath, As I Lay Dying and bands like that, but also stuff like Judas Priest, Motley Crue and metal like that.

You guys have been a band for five years and haven't gone through any major lineup changes, which is a pretty big feat these days. Take us through your history.
When the band started it was called something else, but there were never any shows played, it was just jamming at people's houses. By the time we played our first show it was the same current lineup as we have now, and since we've been touring we haven't changed [it].

But this lineup didn't name the band?
No, we didn't. I thought it was a really cool name when I joined the band, I didn't even know about the book -- that's how small the book was at the time. When I joined, I was Googling, like, "What is this name? Where'd they get it?" And then right after we got signed, it got huge and they were like, "Oh, we're gonna put a movie out," and we were like, "Oh, that sucks!" [Laughs]

Tell us about your rise from the underground, from Dear Love: A Beautiful Discord to With Roots Above and Branches Below.
Well it's definitely all really unexpected; I mean none of us were really thinking we'd be doing this for as long as we have or at any level [such as] what we have. But once we got some songs online it started catching on on MySpace, and then we went on tour after we made a record ... but it was kind of like a small, self-booked, crappy tour. And then we got our booking agent and our manager, and we started getting on bigger tours. We've toured with bands like Shadows Fall and GWAR on [the] Sounds of the Underground [tour], but then we've also done a lot of tours with bands like Silverstein and Underoath and Chiodos and that whole side of things, and we've also played shows with As I Lay Dying and stuff. Between that and the Warped Tour and everything, I think we've really been trying to find our niche over the last couple of years, and I think we found it, but at the same time we're not really ready to be stuck in a rut. We're doing pretty well in the whole, I don't know, "mallcore" scene or whatever, but it's not like we ever planned to be in there; we just try to make metal/heavy music and it just ended up that way, I guess. But I think with this record we really tried to do a lot heavier sound, and just wanted to make it so that somebody that's heard a bunch of crap about the band could listen to it and be like, "Oh, this isn't at all what I heard about them, I guess maybe I should give it a chance." Obviously we're young guys and we're small guys and we wear tight pants, but we can make some really heavy music.

A lot of times critics latch onto a scene having immovable parameters, but how do you work to defy that?
I don't know; obviously it kind of sucks. When we first started playing shows, we were playing with straight-edge hardcore bands and stuff like that, and that was just how it went. We were a local band; we played shows with bands like that -- those were our friends. And then somehow -- maybe just because of the tours we went on or the kids that got into us -- we turned into this "Hot Topic band," but I really don't want to be limited to that. I think we have a lot to offer musically that other metal bands might not have or other emo bands don't have, and so I hope with the new record we can just have a broader appeal. I'd hate for someone to not check the band out just because of whatever scene it's labeled as.

Do you think you're achieving just that with the response you have been getting on this album?
Yeah, I'm definitely really surprised. I've been looking around in some of the forums, and people have been telling me stuff, and one of the biggest things I've been hearing is, "Wow, I thought this was gonna suck, and it actually doesn't suck!" And I'll take that. [Laughs] I'm really stoked that a lot of people have been saying that.

Do you already see the influence you've had on other bands? And do you hope for them to follow your lead and find their own sound?
Yeah, it's weird. When we started playing, the closest thing to us was Still Remains or Underoath, and that was probably our biggest influence. There were bands that were doing keyboards, but they weren't really doing the metal thing -- there was Bleeding Through but that's a whole different thing. But a lot of younger bands, Attack Attack and a lot of bands like that, I don't know -- it's kind of weird. What we tried to do with this record is do something that at least the music can appeal. I know people are gonna look at us like, "Eh," but hopefully the music can speak for itself.

How have you guys been reacting to having that impact on bands like Attack Attack, though?
We've tried to keep our heads way under the clouds as far as a band goes, and being a Christian band, that's something that we've always told each other: to humble ourselves, and that everything that we have is a blessing and something that we got from God. I don't know how secular bands handle that stuff, but that's just something that we've always done. Also, one of the things that sucks is that [success] really doesn't happen [a lot]. My mom was always telling me, "You need to go to college, you're not gonna be able to make it playing guitar," and she's right -- 99% of the time [that's what happens]. And if there's something I could un-influence that we do, it's that I think a lot of bands think that if they go out and start playing this kind of music, that they're gonna have a long career. And it's like, so many of my friends that I would consider having successful careers can't even pay their rent. It doesn't really happen like that, so even for us, it's not gonna last forever, but I don't know -- we're just gonna have fun while it does and hopefully bring a positive message and see what happens. [Laughs]

How important is Christianity to your band and your musical output?
I'd say 100% lyrically, probably not musically at all. It's not like we're sitting here going, "Ok, how can we talk about the crucifixion during this metal riff?" [Laughs] Musically, we just write what we think sounds cool. We try to make the band that we would want to listen to, and then Mike [Hranica] comes in. It was different on this record, because before he always had these poems and lyrics that he would just fit around the music, and with this record, he was there every day at practice. He was sitting there writing to what we were doing, so I think he went along with what was happening with the music rather than make [the lyrics] try to fit. It was just a really cool experience. And at the same time, as far as my singing goes, on the last two records we kind of just took these really long sentences and I had to condense them into singing parts, whereas on this record, because he wrote stuff to us, he wrote lyrics that would fit within where the singing parts would go. So him and I could work really hard together on making the vocals as good and catchy as possible, so that was a big help for me.

What does the title With Roots Above and Branches Below mean?
As far as the title goes, we played around with a bunch of different things, but Mike was really into that, and he had this idea of "and its branches were broken" -- he really liked this tree theme. And I thought it was really awesome. Everybody else wasn't really on the same page with that name, but they really liked that theme, and so we kind of played around with different things within that, and eventually Mike just came in one day and was like, "I got it, I know what it's gonna be. And it's keeping your roots -- the things that are core to you -- on the surface, and the really complicated branches, that mess of things, down under the surface." And I thought that was a really cool idea, like your simple core things up and that's what you focus on. And that kind of turned into the album artwork, and actually we had a couple people that were gonna do it for us, and they didn't really work out, and we were right at the last minute, and I just remember getting this sketch back and it was just like, that is perfect! That is exactly the style of artwork we wanted to have. We always end up with Photoshop copy-and-pasted-together stuff, so this one we really wanted something hand-painted, and that's what we got, so I think it really is a cool record.

How important is the graphic-design aspect? I know you guys offer limited edition T-shirt designs and things like that ...
I think definitely within our whole scene of things, there's a lot of emphasis on T-shirt designs because that's how people see what your band is, so we always try to make fun ones or funny ones. Like on this next tour we have one that's got Dwight from The Office, and we have this shirt with Reptar on it, just crazy funny stuff, and that to me is just what we are. Yeah, we're a really heavy band, and the music should be taken seriously, but we're goofy dudes and we like having fun, and I think all our shirts are goofy and fun, but then the album artwork is really serious, really dark stuff.

And your lyrical messages work the same way: you guys have funny song titles but they're about serious stuff.
Yeah, we kind of got stuck doing that. We kind of just started naming them joke titles just 'cause we thought of real ones and they just sounded kind of cheesy so we were like, "Eh, let's just make them jokes," and we kind of never stopped doing that. [Laughs] But like, people would be pissed if we started having serious ones, so we'll just keep doing jokes.

What do you want people to know about you guys that doesn't come up a lot?
I don't know. I think everyone looks at us like we're rock stars, but we're really not. We just like to play Xbox and hang out with kids at the merch table. Yeah, we have a tour bus, but literally, we hook up two Xboxes -- one in the front lounge, one in the back lounge with a network cable, so we can play eight-person Halo, and we eat macaroni and cheese out of the microwave. I think that's the biggest thing -- we try not to limit that distance between us and our fans, because [we] want people to be able to identify with everybody in our band and we try to do as many videos and DVDs and goofy stuff online for people. It sucks to go to a show and meet somebody [in a band] and they're a jerk -- it's like, I can't listen to this band, it's ruined for me -- so I hope that people can listen to our stuff and be like, you know, those dudes are funny, fun dudes, you know?

Has your success so far changed your goals as a band?
It's definitely been unexpected, that's for sure. It sounds so cocky to say we're doing really well within the scene, but we are. [I want] to see us branch out to other scenes, and especially on the heavier side of things. I hope that if we did a tour with Limp Bizkit or something like that, that would be awesome. [Laughs] No, just a sweet metal band -- I hope we can explore that side of things. We definitely want to keep pushing. We just filmed a music video, and it's definitely one of the coolest things we've done so far with the band. That's our biggest goal: just keep doing cooler stuff. Bring out cooler lights on tour and make it the best show we possibly can. It's like, the more money we get, the more money we can pump into making the show bigger. We're entertainers, that's what we're here to do. We've always been a live band, that's still how we look at ourselves, and I just want the live show to be as crazy as possible. I have some ideas for our next headlining tour, but Warped Tour should be really fun. We're just playing a bunch of new songs, and we've got some cool stuff planned for that. So far we haven't played a single show since the new record came out, so nobody has really seen those songs, and maybe we'll have some other surprises.

25 Great Singles At 2009's Half-Year Point

2009-07-01T22:38:08Z

Believe it or not, the year hits the six-months-gone mark this week. And while there's no point in claiming these are the absolute best singles of the first half of 2009 (left "Boom Boom Pow" and "Poker Face" off, for instance, figuring you already know what they sound like), they're still 25 really good ones. Lots of rap, lots of country, lots of soul. Not a ton of "rock", though -- maybe because most of the non-rock rocks just fine.

single-phile: Michael Jackson's Single Greatest Moments

2009-07-01T22:00:23Z

single-phile: The latest singles, dissected and discussed

When Michael Jackson passed away last week, I think many of us felt like he'd been taken too soon, his life cut short just as he seemed to be poised on the verge of some kind of comeback (although the stress of that may have been a contributing factor in his untimely demise). A lot of that feeling probably had to do with his age: he was only 50, but even that relatively young age seems shocking since Michael often seemed to exist in a state of (largely self-perpetuated) boyhood for us, a Peter Pan figure we prefer to remember as a chubby-cheeked child star or a charismatic teen/young adult. But an important part of Jackson's legacy is his rather prolific professional life -- a career that extended over at least three decades and was often a touchstone for what was (or would soon be) going on in popular culture and music. In honor of the late, great King of Pop, this week's single-phile takes a look at some of his greatest hits, their relationship to the pop cultural climate at the time and their influence on the pop music that was to come.

]]> 1972: "Rockin' Robin." The teenaged Jackson's second solo single for Motown continued developing the bubblegum pop the Jackson 5 helped to create. But it also incorporated funk gestures, subtly candy-coated to make them more palatable to mainstream audiences. Finally, by covering Bobby Day's 1958 hit, Jackson also anticipated the 1950s revival that would soon take over '70s pop culture.

1979: "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough." The first single from Off the Wall, the album that arguably inaugurated him as the King of Pop, and his second No. 1, this whirling, vibrant tune introduced the world to Jackson's compelling falsetto. It also artfully incorporated exuberant disco flourishes, reuniting that much-contested genre with its soul, funk and dance roots, while mainstreaming disco's sexuality with the song's subtly suggestive lyrics.

1982: "Billie Jean" and "Beat It." These first two singles off Thriller, the biggest-selling album of all time, are arguably Jackson's most beloved and most successful songs. If that weren't impressive enough, they also did a number on the longstanding racial divisions in pop music, bringing together pop, soul, rock and dance music -- and their seemingly disparate audiences: "Beat It," with its Eddie Van Halen guest spot, bridged the rock/metal and dance pop worlds. And "Billie Jean" broke down MTV's "color barrier," helping to transform it from a predominantly white, rock-oriented network into the multi-genre tastemaker it was through most of the '80s and early '90s.

1988: "Dirty Diana." The last No. 1 hit from Bad, an album that sometimes uncomfortably bridged the old Michael (the jaunty, candy-coated "The Way You Make Me Feel") with the Michael that was to be (the adult-contemporary and anxious confessional of "Man in the Mirror"). "Dirty Diana" at once gestures toward the aggressive pop-rock that made Michael king and the guitar-driven turn pop music was taking at the end of the '80s and beginning of the '90s.

1991: "Black or White." This song (from 1991's Dangerous) encapsulates the paradox(es) that was Michael Jackson in the 1990s: undeniably catchy beats in a framework that bordered on cliché, socially minded lyrics that hit way too close to home with their references to topics (like race, bodies and sexuality) that were obviously becoming uncomfortable issues for Jackson at this point -- and then there's that awkwardly rapped bridge, a nod to the changing mood of a pop music landscape that Jackson was not really king of any longer.

1995: "You Are Not Alone." With HIStory, the first album after his 1993 child sexual abuse controversy, Jackson set out to remind us of his legacy. At the same time, the album's new songs, like the treacly "You Are Not Alone" (his last No. 1 hit), voiced his fear (down to the trembling vibrato and the video's cameo by Lisa Marie Presley) and moved him toward the safer, less threatening, less sexually ambiguous terrain of adult contemporary. ("Scream," his aggressive, gender-bending duet with Janet, seemed to do the opposite, on the other hand.)

Deer Tick: Mixtape

2009-07-01T18:47:42Z

We asked John McCauley of Deer Tick to put together his ideal mixtape for us. We took his selections and threw in a few Deer Tick tracks to make it complete. Take a listen to the result.

Rhapsody's Song of the Day - Linkin Park - New Divide

2009-07-01T18:24:41Z

Song: New Divide
Album: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Artist: Linkin Park

Linkin Park provided the theme song for the summer blockbuster Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Download it now before the robots attack. Presented by the U.S. Airforce.

Michael Jackson: The Man, the Music and His Legacy

2009-07-01T05:51:24Z

When Michael Jackson passed away on Thursday, June 25, 2009, there was an outpouring of grief from around the world. We asked our editors to take a few minutes and collect their thoughts about the music and legacy of one of pop's greatest entertainers.

The Man
Michael Jackson never quite seemed mortal until now. He spent at least 40 of his 50 years trying to escape from his past and his fears and his race and his self, and at least 30 of those 50 years singing about it, and last Thursday, he finally found the door out. Michael Freedberg, the great disco critic from the Boston Phoenix, said once that Michael lived Robert Johnson's life in the plain view of everyone on earth, always watching out for hellhounds over his shoulder. And it's true; if you don't believe me, go back and listen again to the paranoia and foreboding in "Heartbreak Hotel," "Billie Jean," "Beat It," "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" ("You're a buffet, you're a vegetable/ They eat off of you, you're a vegetable") "Torture," "Smooth Criminal" ("You ran into the bedroom/ You were struck down/ It was your doom"), "Dirty Diana," "Who Is It," "Give In to Me," and pretty much all of 1997's great, intense, inexplicably ignored Blood on the Dance Floor album, which was almost entirely about being chased, followed, often to the sound of funereal gothic rock: "Susie got your number/ And Susie ain't your friend/ Look who took you under/ With seven inches in." As somebody approximately Michael Jackson's age (I'll be 49 this year, he was 50), also from the Midwest, with a messed-up and sometimes barely existent childhood of my own, I can relate. And so can Axl Rose, I'm sure, and so can Eminem. And so, in their own way, can the millions if not billions of other people worldwide who loved Michael, and probably plenty of the ones who didn't.

If he did anything wrong in his life -- and part of me doesn't ever want to know if he did -- he certainly also did more good than any of us can ever conceive of. He was easily the greatest dancer of the past three decades, probably the greatest singer, and quite possibly the greatest songwriter. Which adds up the greatest entertainer, period. "I can guarantee you one thing: we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis," Lester Bangs wrote in Presley's obit 32 years ago, only a couple years before Michael Jackson definitively proved him wrong, emerging full-blown into adulthood as the world's most popular musician by presaging generations of young people who would celebrate their adulthood by refusing to grow up. And he emerged, of course, with some of the most celebratory music anybody from those generations will ever hear. But always, in the middle of that celebration, and not always submerged, there was dread. If anybody deserves to finally rest in peace, it's him. -- Chuck Eddy

]]> What has always moved me the most about Michael Jackson -- what I always found most compelling about him as both an artist and a person -- is his incredibly ambivalent position as a cultural icon. Here is an artist who is at once one of the most universally beloved icons in all of popular music history and one of the strangest and least "normal" public figures ever to capture the world's interest. He managed to move beyond child stardom (a feat in and of itself) to a solo career that began by breaking MTV's color barrier and translating niche genres like disco and funk into something a broad, mainstream audience could get behind and get down to, but he could never seem to find a way to feel comfortable in his own skin -- literally and figuratively. In large part, his ability to remain beloved, despite his quirks and idiosyncrasies and even potential criminality, has everything to do with his incredible, undeniable talent. But I also think that something about his apparent alien-ness, his simultaneous ability to appeal to the whole world and inability to relate to it in a conventional way, made him more human to us. Maybe it's overstating it, but it's like he somehow embodied both everything we thought American popular culture should look like -- and all the weird parts of ourselves we cast away or hide to create that image. That's a lot of pressure to put on one person, and the stress was legible on his strange, ever-mutating body. -- Rachel Devitt

The Music
I always remember the Jackson 5’s fantastic single “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” as being on Off the Wall, which not only remains his finest album but actually proved that disco wasn’t dead. The songs on that album thrived throughout the '80s and sound even better today (thank you, Quincy Jones). Michael’s voice was different -- he now sang really HIGH (when the wretched Wiz movie came out, the once fun-loving Michael Jackson seemed completely devoid of all charisma).

With Off The Wall, Jackson wanted to make a great record; with Thriller, he wanted to rule the pop world. Nothing on the record topped “Billie Jean,” which may just be the defining single of the 1980s. The Thriller album has a little of everything except New Wave -- R&B rock, ballads, rap (Vincent Price, we miss you, too), even world music. It also had plenty of old-world showbiz hokum, which rock people slammed him for at the time. But it was exactly this classic Hollywood-style razzle-dazzle that was sorely missing from his post-Thriller work. He was still a vital performer, but a different one; as a kid, the joy on his face as he performed was his meal ticket. During the Thriller era, his amazing dance moves became his hallmark -- he was sometimes lit so you couldn’t really see his face. His body replaced his rapidly morphing face.

The amount of hidden, backstage work he put into being a star must have been extraordinary. I can’t think of another rock-era performer who pulled off those choreographed dance moves -- they were closer to Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire or (one more time) Sammy Davis, Jr. But Sammy loved an audience and kept performing even when he was clearly not making too much money from it -- he had to do it. Maybe Jackson got so big he couldn’t perform. Maybe as he aged he couldn’t keep up anymore. Maybe he was so rich and so famous he lost sight of the need to have a career. His sister Janet successfully used his playbook in the 1990s, but she added sensuality and the (broken?) promise that she wasn’t anywhere near as weird as Michael was.

After he got to the top, all the joy went out of his work -- even if it was manufactured showbiz joy. Bad has some good songs on it, but if you are old enough to remember it coming out, you probably remember being hugely disappointed by it. Jackson was already tabloid fodder by this time, but it quickly came to define all that he was. What did Michael Jackson think, feel, like? Who knows, but I miss the time when his life was defined by making other people happy. “Billie Jean,” a heap of Jackson 5 songs (like "Never Can Say Goodbye") and the Off the Wall album still make me happy. I’d prefer not to think about the rest. -- Nick Dedina

His Legacy
In 1996, while I was traveling by bus through Chile and Peru, I spent four or five days in the Chilean border city of Arica, a strange, hazy place tucked on a desert plateau between the ocean and the Andes. There on a central shopping plaza, a man (or boy?) would turn up in the afternoons: slim, clad in skinny black pants, loafers and a zippered leather jacket, with long curly hair snaking out beneath his black fedora. He seemed to materialize out of nowhere; I don't recall ever seeing him arrive. He'd hit play on a boombox, and heads would turn to see this figure morph into an almost uncanny embodiment of the American pop singer. He had all the movements down pat -- moonwalking, dancing on tiptoe, twirling, pirouetting. He had the Jheri-curled ringlets just right, and given his Mestizo coloring, when he cocked his hat at a certain angle and skulked just so, it was possible to imagine, at least for an instant, that this was the real thing. He must have done well for himself, because he came every single day. I wouldn't be surprised if he's still working the same beat today, 13 years later -- assuming his knees haven't given out.

I've since seen other Michael Jackson impersonators in other cities in the world, though I can't recall where -- Greece? Turkey? (Oddly, in my three years in Barcelona, I never saw a Michael Jackson amidst the characters and "human statues" of the Ramblas, but I'm sure there will be one there soon.) If the busker singing Bob Marley songs is a staple of city plazas around the world, I suspect that the Michael Jackson impersonator is as well.

Most megastars have a touch of the unreal about them. The more they're filmed and photographed, and the more their private lives are turned inside out for our consumption, the more they seem to be figments of our own imagination. (Just think of The Truman Show or, more disturbingly, South Park's Britney Spears episode.) With Michael Jackson, that sense of unreality was exponential, and not just for his fans. Jackson's surgeries, his eccentricities, his scandals and his retreat into Neverland suggested that even he didn't believe he was real any more. He died before he was forced to prove just that with a grueling, almost unthinkable 50-show run in London, which was to begin this summer. (I can't imagine how, in the end, that episode would not have somehow, irreparably, diminished him.) No matter. Legions of Michael Jackson impersonators around the world are stepping up from the understudy's role. His transformation is complete. Finally more than real, he's become universal, ashes to ashes and dust to a dust of pollen: long live the King of Pop. -- Philip Sherburne

There was always something about Michael Jackson that reminded me of the General of the Universe, the central character from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness epic, Autumn of the Patriarch. The general is the dictator of an unnamed Caribbean country who was born to a bird woman and with a grossly enlarged testicle that hums songs. He lives to be between 107 and 232 years old, sires 5,000 children, orders time altered (after all, aside from the General of the Universe, he is also the undoer of dawn, the commander of time and repository of light), and sells off the Caribbean Sea to the United States (which then transplants the sea, along with “the reflection of our cities, our timid drowned people, our demented dragons," to barren Arizona).

Toward the end of his life, he becomes overtaken by illusions, unable to distinguish reality from fiction. He becomes unduly paranoid and never appears in public anymore, preferring instead to deploy an army of body doubles. When one of the body doubles is killed, the General doesn’t clarify, and instead orchestrates his public resurrection three days later. When his own death finally comes, the countrymen find him in a dilapidated mansion, a "rotting grandeur" of corpses. No one can process that the dead man lying before them, infected with parasites from the deepest depths of the sea, is the General of the Universe.

Of course, M.J. never killed 2,000 children and dumped them in the sea, as the General does, but he seemed touched by a similar sort of madness and magic. He built his own private Disneyland. He defied physics with the moonwalk. He married Elvis' daughter. He bought the Beatles. He planned to live to be 150. He cavorted with Ronald Reagan. When he visited Africa, he was greeted by 100,000 people. He performed for over a half million people in just seven nights in London. He sold 100 million copies of Thriller. He erected a giant statue of himself that floated down the river Thames. For years, he dressed like a cross between Liberace, a Martian general and an Egyptian pharaoh. He made a complete mesh of race, gender and sexuality. He befriended a pet chimpanzee called Bubbles, who shared his toilet and cleaned his bathroom. And these are just the confirmed facts -- never mind the rumors and accusations.

All of which made it difficult for me to truly believe that he was dead. I spent Sunday halfway expecting that he would pop up on CNN, with a twisted angelic smile, and in a fey voice announce that he had conquered death. But it’s Monday. He’s still gone and the reality of his death is beginning to set in. -- Sam Chennault

The Memories
I was working nights on the radio in Washington, D.C., campaigning for the hearts and minds of teenagers, seducing them with the hottest hits between 6 and 10 P.M.

“The Real Doctor McCoy operating on you tonight!”

It was 1982, the year of Michael’s Thriller album, and needless to say I was playing at least one cut from his pop masterpiece every hour. The station request lines blinked all night long, and whenever you pushed a button there was another teenybopper requesting “Billie Jean” or “Thriller.”

Like every DJ in America, I had my usual suspects who called me religiously -- teenagers who would pour their problems into my ear. I was their surrogate older brother or missing father, the cool guy on the radio who had all the answers.

There was this kid named Michael who was a regular caller that I took a liking to. I looked forward to his calls because he was smart and had his finger on the pulse of the musical trends swirling around his suburban high school. He was my own personal focus group, but better.

Michael called one night very depressed. He’d been taking a lot of heat from his friends at school for his outward devotion to Michael Jackson and his music. He was confused and a bit scared. It was his first time experiencing, or being the brunt of, the fevered anger and putrid smell of racism. His classmates were calling him a “nigger lover.” The peer pressure was intense. He was a white kid in an all-white private high school, and if you weren’t into rock you weren’t in. What is a white kid with rhythm to do?

I suggested he go underground. Keep his Michael appreciation under wraps (“down low” wasn’t in the vernacular yet). No more wearing white gloves and socks to school, and definitely cease and desist the moonwalking. Michael agreed to become a Rolling Stones and Aerosmith fan because we both felt they had more rhythm in their rock 'n' roll.

He would only talk about Michael Jackson to me.

A month later, the King of Pop was coming to D.C. to perform. My Michael confessed nightly how desperately he wanted to go, but he was being questioned about it at school, spied upon. They were watching to see if he would fall off the rock wagon and go worship Michael Jackson in concert. Well, the tickets sold out in hours, and so his decision was made for him.

My station was giving away tickets to the show. I literally had the last pair of tickets in town. I asked for the 96th caller (we were 96.3 on the dial). Long story short, I cheated and said some fake name on the air, but I wrote down Michael as the winner. When he called that night he lost his mind! He got his dad to bring him down to the station to pick up the tickets.

You must remember that back in the day (before Google or Facebook), radio listeners rarely knew the true identities of radio personalities. So when I walked into the lobby to hand the tickets over to Michael and introduced myself, he saw that I was African American (that phrase had just become popular). He was surprised, shocked really … then delighted, as he started to laugh. We both laughed loudly, and his dad just stood there, clueless about our private joke.

Michael told me later it was a performance he would never forget. I wonder, and I hope he’s told this story many times and that it was a small fulfillment of Michael Jackson’s quest for unity. -- Quincy McCoy

My favorite M.J. memory is of my sister, who'd been learning the "Thriller" dance in her spare time (she envisioned all of her siblings learning it and taking over a dancefloor one day, but the rest of us were lazy), performing what she knew of it for my 87-year-old grandmother -- who requested it and grinned the whole time. -- Rachel Devitt

Every Friday, my second-grade teacher would bring in her record player, as well as her Prince and Michael Jackson albums, and, for an hour at the end of the day, we'd listen to music and dance. Thriller was the first album I remember owning, and it seemed that everything sprung from that. I grew up in a small town in Louisiana, but I'm sure that most people around my age have similar memories. -- Sam Chennault

I was obsessed with the werewolf transformation in the "Thriller" video myself, not to mention the whole storyline of the "Beat It " video. I was 12, and this skinny dude with the sleeves of his leather jacket rolled up scaring off knife-wielding hoods with his ability to dance-fight made him hands-down the coolest person ever to me, even before he turned into a werewolf a few months later when "Thriller" was first aired on MTV. That premiere itself was practically a holiday -- my father (who was a Teamster for crying out loud) even watched it -- and stands as one of the few times in my life an event actually lived up to its attendant hype. -- Mike McGuirk

After Thriller, I followed his triumph over pop culture with the singular devotion of an obsessed 8-year-old: in a jean jacket covered by buttons of his face, a hawkish eye on the tabloids and a dog-eared copy of Thriller that I played again, and again. (To really dig the grip that Jackson held on my household, it's important to note that mine was one of THREE Thriller LPs in our house; the other two belonged to my older sister and my brother.) When my great-grandmother's black-and-white television showed his hair on fire during a Pepsi commercial, I cried. Today, looking at the pictures of Michael Jackson wallpapering CNN -- most of them showing cadaverous images of his decline -- I want to only remember the warmth of his greatness and the rapture that accompanied it. -- Nate Cavalieri

I grew up in the '80s and '90s in Southern California -- Disneyland country. So for me, my biggest, fondest, funniest, warmest etc. memory of M.J. was the 1986 premiere of Captain EO, for which I waited a good six hours in line on the weekend of its release. It's possible not all of you remember Captain EO -- it was pulled from the theme parks around the mid-'90s and there was no accompanying soundtrack (though its two original songs, "Another Part of Me" and "We Are Here to Change the World," found their way onto subsequent Jackson releases, Bad and The Ultimate Collection, respectively). Directed by Francis Ford Coppola and filmed in 3-D, the sub-30-minute flick starred Jackson as the titular space captain, on a mission to a rotted-out netherworld to deliver a package to the evil Supreme Leader, played by Anjelica Huston. Joined by a crew of alternately furry, frumpy and robotic misfits ("Hooter!"), EO touches down on the junkyard planet, finds his way to the queen's lair, and drops the bomb on her -- his song. Overcome by the goodness of his music, the queen is transformed from a cackling H.R. Giger-like witch into a beautiful empress as Captain EO and his cohorts rock out on instruments seemingly picked up at the Mos Eisley Guitar Center. The rest of the planet and its inhabitants follow suit, morphing from Stormtroopers into Care Bears, mechanized detritus into vibrant flowers, etc. The moral of the story is pretty straightforward: Michael Jackson's music can transform a planet made of crap into a magical wonderland of color and light. Now who could argue with that? -- Garrett Kamps

Q&A: Laura Izibor

2009-07-01T05:50:30Z

Laura Izibor's story isn't the typical neo-soul narrative. Born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Nigerian father, Izibor grew up poor. Eventually, music was her salvation. At the age of 13, she submerged herself in classic soul singers such as Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack and Marvin Gaye. And then, at 15, she won a national talent contest and was subsequently signed to a record label. By 17, she had begun recording her debut, Let the Truth Be Told. It would take four years, but the wait was well worth it. In the album’s dusty grooves, you can hear the ghosts of soul’s past delivered by one of its most promising young stars. We recently caught up with Izibor and spoke with her about growing up in Ireland as well as her new album.

]]> So why did you call the album Let the Truth Be Told?
Well, I was able to write the whole album, and in that I think you have to be honest, and I think the songs are my truths of my life and my experiences and it just adds a bit of strength to it -- a little bit of preach. I like the way it sounds. I like the way it felt, and I thought it represented what I’m doing with this record.

How long did it take you to complete it?
Well I signed at 17, started recording at 17 and by the time I was 19 I pretty much had half the record done. And then it was a crossover in record labels; I transferred to Atlantic, and then finished the album around 20 so it was a good three and a half years in total.

So you wrote all the songs between the ages of 17 and 19, was it?
Fifteen.

Okay, so between the ages of 15 and 19. Is it ever difficult putting yourself back in the shoes of the 15- or 16-year-old you were when you are singing the songs?
No. It really isn’t. I don’t understand; I think I just add a little bit to the songs, the topics that I wrote about, and they are recurring issues that don’t seem to go away. It’s not talking about you and your boy or your high school or anything like that -- they are real issues.

So you are glad you left all the songs about Friendster off the album?
[Laughs] Yes.

You have toured with a lot of great artists. What was it like opening for James Brown, for example?
That was crazy. It was brilliant because I didn’t have enough time to think about it. I was literally in school, I was 15 and my manager rang me when I was in class and he said, “There’s an opening here, a slot just before James Brown.” I was like “Who’s James Brown?" because I didn’t think it was the James Brown. I was like, “Oh, is this some sort of folk singer or something?” He was like, “No, it's, ‘Get up, get on up.’” I was like, “Are you serious?” So I left geography class, teachers calling me. I didn’t hear a thing; just walked out that door, got up on stage and rocked it. His audience was just amazing -- they wanted to have a good time, and I think as well it was one of the first opening gigs I had done in Ireland, and I think they were really tripping on the fact that "Oh she’s black and soulful and she’s one of us. She’s Irish! Wow, this is crazy!" So it was a real experience.

Did your high school teachers believe you that you were actually opening for James Brown?
No, I don’t think so. To be honest with you, my geography teacher’s a bit of a knob; I don’t even think he knew who James Brown was. [Laughs]

You began playing piano at the age of 13. What was the impetus for you starting?
Well, there was a piano room in school, and first we started having lunch there because it would be quiet and we didn’t want to go home, and then we started messing around. I had a friend who played, and I used to watch her and I was like, “That looks kinda easy,” so I started mimicking what she was playing, and then next minute that was the spark. That’s where I go on my own, and I just started playing and writing, and then I played self-taught for those two years. Then I started getting piano lessons, but then I wanted to stretch as far as I could go.

Well, were your parents supportive?
Yeah, my mother is my No. 1 support, life coach, fan, everything.

I love how strong and self-reliant and resilient you sound on tracks like “Don’t Stay” and “The Worst Is Over.” Are those values that were ingrained into you as a child?
Yeah. My mom always said that was the one thing that she was most proud of: that she raised somebody that could really listen. [My mother] is somebody that's been on this earth 40 years more than I have; maybe it would be a good idea to listen and take in [her] advice. So my mother told me to have dignity, to love myself, respect myself, to know that I deserve standards of being treated on a friendship level, on a relationship level, and it’s just something that has always kept. It’s easy to fall back every now and again; we’re all human and we find ourselves in situations. But that’s the beauty of music: it can be stronger than any words said to you. You can just listen to a song and feel it and go, “You know what? This is what I need.”

Killswitch Engage: Starting Over

2009-06-30T23:00:00Z

Killswitch Engage have been growing in strength since their first self-titled album was released a decade ago. Now, as they unveil their fifth album, they find themselves at the top of their game. Co-produced by Adam D. and Brendan O'Brien, the second coming of Killswitch Engage displays the powerful combination of technical musicianship and catchy melodies that these frontrunners forged and cultivated. Listen to the new record here, plus take a look at our thoughts on the album, read our Q&A with members Mike D'Antonio and Justin Foley, dive into Mike D's top 10 essential albums, and listen to playlists featuring the best of Killswitch and their Massachusetts contemporaries.

BROWSE: Check out Rhapsody's review of Killswitch Engage (II).

INTERVIEW: Check out our exclusive chat with KsE's Mike D'Antonio and Justin Foley.

EXPLORE: Dig into Killswitch's "Top 10 Essential Albums"

HEAR: Listen to a playlist of essential Killswitch Engage jams.

PLAY: Blast this Massachusetts Metalcore playlist.

RADIO: Hear what's new and awesome in metal with "Fury".

Rhapsody Reviews: Jazmin Lopez

2009-06-30T22:10:05Z

Ms. Jazmin Lopez is an up-and-coming star of duranguense -- the Mexican regional music that is a kissing cousin of the Southwest's brassy banda and the accordion-driven norteño, but also grew up in Chicago. Even this early in her career, however, Lopez's resume is already impressively diverse: She also hosts MTV Tr3s's ReMexa and is a connoisseur of both the regional Mexican music that program showcases and the urban dance and hip-hip sounds on rotation at MTV Tr3s's parent station. Her self-titled debut is a tribute to her wide-ranging interests and experiences:

Jazmin Lopez: Jazmin
Banda and duranguense have always seemed like long shots for breaking Mexican regional into the pop mainstream. And yet the oom-pah-ing horns and synth beats of these genres share a common ground with the dance beats of the pop charts -- and Jazmin Lopez may have homed in on it. Jazmin is ebullient and infectious, like both good banda and good dance pop are. But like her paradigm-challenging predecessor Yolanda Perez, the savvy Ms. Lopez also manages to work in more mainstream pop elements, intertwining her husky "Oo! Oo!"s and throaty vocals with R&B flourishes ("La Carcacha") and hip-hop beats ("Tu").

Further Listening
Playlist: Jazmin Lopez Picks the Hits, a playlist of her inspirations and favorites

In Memoriam: Michael Jackson

2009-06-30T21:05:10Z

Michael Jackson passed away on Thursday, June 25, 2009, at the age of 50. The monumental loss has been felt around the world. Jackson was a prodigiously talented singer and dancer -- an icon that transcended borders, race and age. Beginning in 1969 with the Jackson 5, Michael Jackson loomed over the pop landscape like no one before. Thriller, Off The Wall and Bad rank as three of the greatest pop albums of all time. But more than just the music, Jackson understood the value of spectacle in pop entertainment, and his own life took on a mythical quality. Sure, the fall in the '90s was fast and hard, but Rhapsody would like to take this moment to remember the numerous career highlights from the King of Pop.

	LISTEN: Michael Jackson’s pinnacle, the unforgettable Thriller		PLAY: MJ’s best songs not on Thriller
	REMEMBER: Our Editors reflect on the man, the music and his legacy		FAMILY: The greatest music from the Jackson clan
	DISCOVER: Songs from Aaliyah, Jay-Z, Kanye and Bjork that sampled MJ		READ: The Top 25 Pop Albums of the 1980s

On The Record: Deer Tick

2009-06-30T19:29:34Z

On the Record is a video series where rockstars gush about their favorite records -- in exactly 45 seconds. Born On Flag Day was released on June 23rd.

ARTIST:
Deer Tick

RECORD:
In Utero

Lemmy on the Beatles and more in the rest of our On the Record series.

Diplo

Tricky

Tom Morello

Tori Amos