Clips

The Emotional Connection of Hobo Johnson (Playboy): Frank Lopes paces on stage fitfully while barefoot and wearing brown cut-off pants, the kind you’d imagine Tom Sawyer in as he hangs his feet off a pier for a fruitless day of fishing. His leisurely pants are contrasted with a button-up shirt that looks like a rainbow civil war, as lines and shapes separate battling colors with virtually no logic.

The Jailhouse Blues (The Sun Interview): In 1993 jazz musician Henry Robinett received a call asking if he was interested in teaching guitar to prison inmates. At the time his band, the Henry Robinett Group, had just released their second CD, and he had recently launched his own label, Nefertiti Records, but he was mostly a stay-at-home dad in Sacramento, California. He said yes because he needed the money and also because he was curious. He’d never been inside a prison.

The Unusual, Accidental Pop Success of Portugal. The Man (Playboy): That wasn’t the first time the press misrepresented Portugal. The Man as pretentious, arrogant or out to stir up controversy. I wonder what those writers would think if they saw the band members backstage, feeding the venue staff with their new hot-dog roller.

How Kendrick Lamar Became a Muse of the Black Lives Matter Movement (Good Times, photo by Beowulf Sheehan): “It was a heroic scene, a sea of triumphant Black people walking through the streets, passing police cruisers like they weren’t even there,” he writes in the book. “The Cleveland demonstration was a flash point for the movement overall, and now it had an anthem.”

LA’s Chiptune Scene Is More Than Just Nerds with Game Boys (VICE):What’s happening in LA, though, particularly over the past five years, is something much grungier. The artists have created a scene so diverse that there appears to be no rules. The bands associated with it have a totally different aesthetic. They are punk as fuck, and use the music as an expression of their weirdness and anxiety.

In Defense of Ska is ready for preorder!

In a mix of interviews, essays, personal stories, historical snapshots, obscure anecdotes, and think pieces, In Defense of Ska dissects, analyzes, and celebrates ska in exactly the way fans have been craving for decades. This book will enlist ska-lovers as soldiers in the ska army and challenge ska-haters’ prejudices to the core.