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Recent Articles By Randall Roberts

  • Rebuilt to Suit
    SLU won't say what it has in store for the Locust Business District.
  • I Want My MP3
    Digital music just gets better. See ya later, major labels.
  • Horse's Kick
    Monarch, 7401 Manchester Road, Maplewood; 314-644-3995.
  • Lemp Lager
    The Duck Room at Blueberry Hill, 6504 Delmar Boulevard, University City; 314-727-4444.
  • Hendrick's Martini
    Lester's Sports Bar & Grill, 9906 Clayton Road, Ladue; 314-994-0055.

Recent Articles By Daniel Durchholz

Recent Articles By Roy Kasten

Recent Articles By Terry Perkins

Recent Articles By Jordan Oakes

Recent Articles By René Spencer Saller

  • So Long, Saller!
    Radar Station prepares for a regime change
  • Dott Com
    Meet Ahdedott, who just might be St. Louis' next hip-hop superstar
  • Expat Alert!
    The exodus of the creative class continues apace
  • Mix Masters
    These days anyone can make a mix CD, and everyone does. Two local standouts manage to challenge as well as entertain.
  • Public Enema
    For the noble souls of Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center, relieving social constipation has become a real pain in the ass

Recent Articles By Steve Pick

Recent Articles By Jason Toon

Recent Articles By Paul Friswold

National Features

  • SF Weekly
    Viva Farolito!

    Former pros from Latin America help make an "amateur" soccer team unstoppable.

    By Lauren Smiley
  • Village Voice
    The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo

    A nutty polygamist pastor rebuilds his church--with help from New Yorkers.

    By Maria Luisa Tucker
  • Miami New Times
    Love is No Contract

    A Florida man sues his girlfriend-for dumping him.

    By Isaiah Thompson
  • Houston Press
    The Myth of the Bachelor's Degree

    A growing number of educators face a hard truth: not every kid is college material.

    By Todd Spivak

Best Proof that There's Life in Them Old Rockers Yet: Elvis Costello backed by the Beastie Boys on Saturday Night Live's 25th anniversary. It's been about 20 years since SNL was new and exciting, and half as long since Costello buzzed and howled under the influence of heat, but at the tail end of an overlong, self-indulgent wankfest, Declan stepped up to the mic and re-created his own interrupted broadcast of "Radio, Radio" from SNL's glory days. The Beasties rushed the stage and played the part of the Attractions terribly, but it was the terrible that made punk great. They staggered through the song with zest and gusto, and when the instrumental break came, they teetered on the edge of falling apart, but Horowitz's one-finger keyboard technique somehow got everybody back on beat and they galloped to the finish line. Costello has been exploring lush melody and lyricism for years now, and his work with Burt Bacharach is either apogee or nadir, depending on where you stand: Isn't it about time he rediscovered the Attractions for an album or two? And aren't the Beasties due for a return to their punk-rock roots? Couldn't they release an album of power-pop gems instead of another hip-hop history lesson? Please? (PF)

Best reinvention of self: Far Away, Down on a Georgia Farm, Norman Blake (Shanachie). Blake might have called these spare instrumentals and desolate original folk songs Bergman's Bluegrass. Doc Watson's greatest inheritor, Blake has written and played in a lonesome vein before. Now he sounds as if time is running out and he's not about to let it off the hook. (RK)

I love music that's playful, that feels the urge to be mischievous. That's why I turned the radio up every time I heard Shania Twain's "That Don't Impress Me Much." It's full of sass, from the rhythm track on up to her vocal, especially when she stops the music to speak lines like "OK, so you're Brad Pitt" before revving up again to the title chorus line. Then there was Madonna's "Beautiful Stranger," from the Austin Powers soundtrack. This is Madonna, mind you, whose forte has always been contemporary dance music, singing a psychedelic, '60s-influenced pop song that wouldn't have been out of place on a Zombies record. (SP)

Most Unlikely (Yet Successful) Mack Daddy: Beck, whose Midnite Vultures, though ridiculous and derivative, was gloriously so. It's the best funk album of the year, a blast of party music crammed with whim and wham, drivel ("running buck wild like a concubine/whose mother never held her hand") and gold dust. This is the shit, filled with Paisley Park punch, West Coast bounce and Detroit dirt. Who cares that Beck's white and his music is black, that his pose is a bit too postmodern, that his funk is bunk? Pop this fucker on in a crowded room and step aside, Junior. The room lights up. Oh, and it also contains the nastiest/sexiest line George Clinton never wrote: "Keep your lamplight trimmed and burning!" Had I a lamplight to keep trimmed, it'd be burning for Beck. (RR)

Best old discovery: Os Mutantes, a Brazilian band from the '60s whose retrospective compilation CD Everything Is Possible disorients and delights. (RSS)

Best "This Is on a Major Label?" Record: Mexico City's Cafe Tacuba generously offered us the transcendent, genre-splitting double CD Reves/Yosoy. Released on Warner Bros., the damned thing is a study in sound, one of those records on which every song sounds like a different artist. Actually two records -- bound, it seems, only by the shrink wrap -- Reves is the more "accessible" of the two; it's got actual songs and singing on it, pop melodies and masterful hooks. Yosoy is the masterwork here, though, an instrumental excursion that moves from freaky acoustic examinations to electronic beat-based poundings to gorgeous string-quartet compositions (the best of which is performed by the Kronos Quartet). (RR)

Best Release by a Washed-Up Has-been: Neil Diamond's Neil Diamond Collection. For years, Neil has been tagged "the Jewish Elvis," but let's lay it on the line: Elvis never wrote a song in his life; he stank up the screen in a slew of terrible movies; and he was Michael Jackson's posthumous father-in-law. Neil, however, wrote a passel of great songs, only starred in one terrible movie and had nothing to do with Michael Jackson. So who's really the pretender here? Shouldn't Elvis be known as "the Gentile Neil Diamond?" It was Elvis, after all, who covered one of Neil's songs ("And the Grass Won't Pay No Mind"), not the other way around. "Grass" is included here, as are a bunch of Diamond classics. You get "Song Sung Blue," "Sweet Caroline" and his masterpiece, "I Am ... I Said." Laugh if you will, but stay up all night and then listen to "I Am ... I Said" when you're tired and alone and your defenses are down, and try not to cry, tough guy. You also get some pompous liner notes and some hot photos of Neil from his mid-'70s hair-farming days. Ah, it was a very good year. (PF)

Best overall achievement: The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs. This sprawling, sordid three-CD spectacle aims high and doesn't disappoint, dissecting loves unrequited, loves defeated, loves virtual and real -- love as a language, all the glittering fraud and AM-radio poetry of it. Who but Stephin Merritt would care enough to indulge in the exercise 69 times? Who else could reference Ferdinand de Saussure and Holland-Dozier-Holland in the same song? (RSS)

There were the retro-rock stylings of Lenny Kravitz on "Fly Away," and Counting Crows with "Hangin' Around." There were the classic, pump-up-your-fist-as-if-we-never-went-away riffs and hooks of Def Leppard's "Promises." There was the soaring melody of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Scar Tissue." There was the hard-rock/'80s dance blend of Orgy's cover of New Order's "Blue Monday." There was the ultimate bounce of Jay-Z's "Can I Get A ..." There was the lighthearted, wispy "Kiss Me" by Sixpence None the Richer (the same wispiness that failed them on their cover of the La's "There She Goes"). (SP)

Most exquisite genre blur: "Time After Time" from Traveling Miles, Cassandra Wilson (Blue Note). In his late performances, Miles Davis frequently offered up a version of Cindy Lauper's ubiquitous hit. Wilson is the only singer alive who can do with her voice what Davis did with his horn: In the deepest secret of a hushed lyricism, pop and blues and country and soul and jazz really are one. (RK)

Most persuasive argument for the existence of God: Speaking in Tongues, David Murray (Justin Time). Murray has worked with St. Louis R&B and gospel legend Fontella Bass before: Her voice graces the World Saxophone Quartet's funkiest album, Breath of Life. Here, Murray and Bass collaborate more fully, finding the occult and holy place where contemporary gospel and free jazz speak a single, irresistible language. (RK)

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