Girls just don’t rock and roll any more, at least not in the way Tina Turner, Linda Ronstadt, Janis Joplin and even new wave hanger-ons Deborah Harry and Annie Lennox did. I blame Madonna. She definitely knew how to get a nice dance beat going but she chose to focus on image rather than actual...

Philadelphia’s Voodoo Economics is a hard act to classify. There are traces of hip-hop, trip-hop, techno, industrial and even goth throughout the tracks on their album titled If: Then:: Iminami. Yet no one genre dominates. In various reviews, the word ‘quirky’ comes up often. The b...

Depending on your perspective, Canadian artist Brian Joseph Davis is either an innovative musical genius, the most original perpetrator of Found Art since Duchamp, or a total charlatan. I’m sure there are no indifferent opinions about the way Davis makes his music. You may hate or love what he...

It’s too early to know or assess the reach and consequences of the worldwide economic crisis. What we have seen so far is frightening and the bad news keeps on coming in the form of massive layoffs, the sharp decline in consumer confidence, home foreclosures, corporate bankruptcies, the near colla...

In my explorations of independent music I have come to the conclusion that Italy may be the next hot spot for innovative rock music. Whether the venue is punk, progressive, psychedelic jam rock or just plain weird, There are more than a fair share of Italian bands that are presently out of the publi...

The Madoff scandal, still in its infancy, will live in infamy. We will be reminded of his record-busting wrongdoing until the end of our days and the story will remain alive in generations not yet born. There is still much to learn and new information will come out, although I expect that unanswered...

There’s something odd and irresistible about Hasil Adkins. I can’t say I ever really liked his music and his amount of talent can be debatable. However there is no debating the sincerity and enthusiasm of this rockabilly outsider. He was essentially a one man band , singing and playing g...

The United States and much of the rest of the world are in a depression, a word that apparently must be avoided, perhaps in the hope that if we do not say it the bad news will go away. Unfortunately, the bad news is all around us in the vast and increasing number of layoffs, the decline in consumer ...

Memory, as we should all know but may have forgotten, plays tricks. It is at once fickle and partisan. Whatever brain matter contributes to the remarkable phenomenon referred to as memory does not always perform well or deteriorates over time or is vulnerable to limitations that make our recollectio...

For all of its importance in our religious life, fundamentally kosher food is a product and like all products it is subject to the vicissitudes of markets and the vagaries of human behavior. Kosher food is a business and there is money to be made, often more money to be made than on similar products...