Sting Calls For End To War On (Some) Drugs
Sting has released an open letter calling for an end to America’s war on drugs. He claims the failed effort is both a violation of personal liberty and of human rights. How so? In 2009, after Mexican President Felipe Calderon announced he would escalate the country’s drug war, drug-related murders exceeded 7,000. Today that number…
The Life And Times Of ‘Plastic Bag’
Drop whatever you’re doing and take 18 minutes to watch Plastic Bag, an amazing film by Ramin Bahrani that chronicles the life cycle of a random plastic bag. German director Hans Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man, etc.) is the voice of the ubiquitous disposable, which comes to existence in the supermarket before enjoying a robust relationship…
Roger Waters Taking ‘The Wall’ On The Road
The Wall, Pink Floyd’s 1979 double-album mega-ode to teenage sturm und drang, was in large part a Roger Waters solo effort – with ambitious art design to match the Floyd founding member’s arena-ready ego. In 1980-81 the band toured the world, embellishing their music with amazing Gerald Scarfe illustrations, projected onto a 40-foot cardboard wall…
Eric Massa Caught In Riptide of Auto-Tuning
My favorite part of the latest/greatest episode of “Auto-Tune the News” is when Katie Couric sings about wanting to “surf the web without getting caught up in a rip-riptide of lies.” Also: Tickle-happy former congressman Eric Massa describes his fiftieth birthday festivities to Glenn Beck and special Joel Madden appearance!
Eatings With Remarkable Musicians
Released in 1971, the Hampton Grease Band’s Music to Eat is a minor masterpiece of Southern freak-blues. At the time, however, it acquired a probably untrue reputation as Columbia Records’ worst selling album (next to a Maharishi Mahesh Yogi yoga instructional record). The Hampton Grease Band was fronted by Col. Bruce Hampton, who went on…
Marines Fight Taliban With Metallica, Thin Lizzy, Offspring
Everyone knows how much the Taliban hates music – with some exceptions. As I wrote in the Village Voice way back in November 2001: Afghan pop and musiqui (secular instrumental music…have become so proscribed that wary drivers took to jamming tapes of Taliban chants recounting the jihadic victories of Islamist martyrs into tape decks as…
Malcolm McLaren 1946-2010
While nobody appeared to hate classic rock as much as Malcolm McLaren, who died of cancer today, you have to credit him with practically reinventing the stuff in 1975 when he created the Sex Pistols. Perhaps the world’s greatest comedy group, the Pistols were a satanic Monkees. They parodied rock as it was with a…
HeadCount Personal Liberty Issue Update: Lawyers, Guns and Money
What happens when you take a landmark Supreme Court case concerning Chicago’s ban on handgun ownership, then throw the 2nd Amendment and its meaning into the mix? This Personal Liberties Issue blast will cover that as well as new gay marriage laws, drug war violence and marijuana taxation and legalization. But first, we’d like to…
Grateful Dead Archivist Chosen
The University of California, Santa Cruz, has announced the winner of the world’s most-reposted help-wanted ad (at least until that Denver pot-tasting gig opened up). Nicholas Meriwether, an oral historian for the South Caroliniana Library, will be the Grateful Dead Archive‘s first archivist. Meriwether has edited several books about the band – including All Graceful…
Community Question: Issues of Personal Liberty
HeadCount polls the live music community on a regular basis to find out how you feel about some important issues. This month, our Community Question focuses on “Personal Liberty.” [poll id=”4″]