Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize: ‘Oslo Trumps Copenhagen’
According to NPR, that’s what a surprised Barack Obama said to his wife early this morning upon hearing he’d won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. This award is more about idealism than concrete accomplishments; more about “Yes we can” than “Yes we did.” Or as Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa told the Associated…
Interview: State Radio’s Chad Stokes Urmston
When State Radio pulls into town for a gig, fans are likely to find bandmembers working in a food bank, protesting in the streets, or doing something equally decent long before the doors open. Dedicated to human rights and common decency, the trio has created a deep bond between political activism and hard-rocking onstage agitprop….
Hitler Learns Phish’s Halloween Album
John McCain Urges Troop Build-Up In Afghanistan
On one side is a population increasingly uncomfortable with the president’s handling of Afghanistan. (Approval for his policies has dropped from 56 percent in April to 44 percent in September.) On the other side are John McCain and other Republican leaders, who want Obama to as much as double the 68,000 American troops already in…
Tom Russell On Tex-Mex Carnage
Don’t miss “Where God and the Devil Wheel Like Vultures: Report from El Paso,” an amazing essay by artist-musician Tom Russell in The Rumpus. Russell has spent much of his life in Texas border towns, and his writing documents a deterioration from the nostalgic film-noir evoked in movies like Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil…
Interview: Concert Security Pro Marshall Rodriguez Talks About Nitrous Oxide
The battle between concert promoters and the people who sell nitrous oxide balloons has escalated in the last few years to almost an all out war. Standing on the front lines of that battle is Marshall Rodriguez, a fan who launched a security company in 2000 that specializes in festivals and jam band-oriented concert events….
Mercedes Sosa 1935-2009
In 1979, Mercedes Sosa was arrested onstage and subsequently deported by Jorge Videla’s military junta. She was that kind of folksinger, an avowed Communist and a star of the “nueva canción” (new song) movement of politicized folk music that developed in Latin America during the 1950s and ’60s. Dubbed La Negra due to her dark…
Will.i.am To Host ‘We The People Festival’
Suicidal Tendencies, Pepper, Anti-Pop Consortium, Glitch Mob, Flobots, 2Mex, Non Human Intelligence, and Whiskey Pete are among the first wave of acts slated to perform at the We the People Festival. Will.i.am hosts the event, which will take place on three stages at Los Angeles Center Studios on November 21. The conscious hardcore and hip-hop…
New York Philharmonic Cancels Trip To Cuba
The good news is that Cuban musicians are receiving visas to perform in the United States for the first time since 2003. The great singer Omara Portuondo is the latest to be issued a visa to visit. Unfortunately, the New York Philharmonic will not be making its own planned historic visit to Cuba at the…
TckTckTck Campaign’s ‘Beds Are Burning’
Youssou N’Dour, Scorpion, Paul Shaffer, Duran Duran, Bob Geldof, Brazilian Girls, Fergie, and dozens of other musicians and actors you may or may not recognize contributed to Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning,” the climate-change movement’s very own “We Are the World.” Anyone who downloads the overstuffed tune becomes a virtual signer of Global Humanitarian Forum…