As we walk to conduct our interview at a quieter Marigny bar, rapper Renard “Slangston Hughes” Bridgewater (“The Connoisseur of Fine Rhyme”) discusses the human desire for tangibility. “At the end of the day, a lot of people still want that paper and that ink,” he says, referring to his day job in production at [...]
After the 1999 breakup of guitarist Duane Denison’s very crazy and much-loved band the Jesus Lizard — which pitted the reckless abandon of “singer” David Yow against Denison’s meticulous jazz-punk fretwork — Denison moved from Chicago to Nashville. There he began recording demos that initiated a long-distance musical relationship with Ipecac label founder and equally [...]
In the late ’90s, electronic music was poised to obliterate all real musicians and organic instrumentation. The process has by now been nearly completed, but at one point laptop music fans doubted the takeover would ever really play out, because DJs and their ilk were considered not as marketable as traditional bands. The DJ’s draw [...]
“It’s an entity I put together. We are ready to tell a story,” says Katey Red, the trans queen of New Orleans bounce rap, speaking on her new “Dream Team,” performing at Voodoo Music Experience 2012. Red’s Voodoo gig has become her annual chance to show attendees of the high-profile festival the side of bounce [...]
Voodoo Parents More than the music even, City Park is the reason to attend Voodoo Fest. Especially for parents, the abundant shade and wide open space makes Voodoo a perfect family event. Though it did feel weird to be offered shampoo at every turn, the Garnier hair tent treated my three-year-old to red streaks in her hair that made [...]
For more than 52 years, Edwin H. Hampton taught band at St. Augustine High School, where he created St. Aug’s “Marching 100,” to this day widely considered New Orleans’ best marching band – which is really saying something. In the year of his passing, 2009, the annual Hamp Music Festival was created to celebrate Hampton’s [...]
On Wednesday (August 8), Loyola University in conjunction with investigative news site The Lens, welcomed five dynamic panelists to help a roomful of local journalists and concerned citizens understand the recent, drastic downsizing of the Times-Picayune. They also assembled to ask the community to think about what kind of news it wants, and how it [...]
For seven summers I have taught camp in hot, hot New Orleans. Mostly indoors, mine is a writing class disguised as a music class; students aged five to 12 improve their literacy via songwriting — mostly of the rap variety. We also wrote album reviews which were published in OffBeat and other local magazines that [...]
