I’ve often quoted my friend and fellow writer Adem Tepedelen as saying that “heavy metal isn’t dead, it’s just wounded and pissed off.” If there’s anyone who would agree and who has set out to prove that adage, it’s Albert Mudrian.

His first book, Choosing Death: The Improbably History of Death Metal and Grindcore (Feral House, 2004), traces the, well, improbable roots and history of two of the most extreme and enduring subgenres of metal, from the teenagers who started Napalm Death and Godflesh to the teenagers who buy In Flames …

Post-rock instrumental bands have been emerging from every crack and crevice of the map the past few years. You can usually tell them by their simmering introductions that build to explosive crescendos and their airy adverb-clause or sentence-length names.
Russian Circles‘ heavy brand of meandering rock leaves lesser bands choking on their smoke. Where amateurs follow the slowly-build-then-explode archetype, Mike Sullivan (guitar), Brian Cook (bass), and Dave Turncrantz (drums) avert cliché, smash expectations, and drive it home clean. It’s a difference difficult to describe but easy to hear, leaving many writers …

Tricia Rose is the O.G. Hip-hop scholar. Her book Black Noise (Wesleyan, 1994) is one of the germinal texts for serious Hip-hop studies. Anyone who approaches the culture of Hip-hop from a serious stance must contend with Rose’s work. Her latest book, The Hip-Hop Wars (Basic Civitas, 2008), is a critical look at the debates surrounding Hip-hop, debates that have largely sprung up in the fifteen years since Black Noise was published. Hip-hop music and culture deserves to be taken seriously and looked at critically, and Tricia Rose is down …

Sean Price is that dude. He is one-half of “Da Incredible Rap Team” Heltah Skeltah (where he is known as Ruck), one-fifth of the Fab Five, and has been in the Boot Camp Clik since day square. All of that notwithstanding, his solo work is where he truly shines. On Monkey Barz (Duck Down, 2005), he proved he could go for dolo and drop ill bars with no backup. On Jesus Price Superstar (Duck Down, 2007), he proved he was one of the best doing it. He is an emcee …

With the slow demise of the compact disc, the music industry’s last physical organizing principle, I thought it appropriate to ask some people inside and on the margins of that industry how the CD’s death was affecting their conception of recorded music. In ironic honor of Record Store Day, this month’s roundtable question is How has the decline of the compact disc affected the way you approach the idea of recording music? I asked producers, musicians, emcees, DJs, and label folks.

Adisa Banjoko deserves to be very famous, if only because he’s diligently spreading so many good ideas. As the CEO of the Hip-hop Chess Federation, which stands tough with The RZA and WuChess, he fuses and uses chess, Hip-hop, and martial arts to teach the youth strong life-strategy skills. Author of the essential essay/interview collections Lyrical Swords, Vol. 1 and 2, Adisa is pushing positive on all fronts.

Melodic punk rock with strong views and a solid spine might not be a rare commodity, but it sure doesn’t come around like this very often. Naked Raygun has consistently taken the punk sound to new places. They are as catchy as they are aggressive, as loud as they are intelligent, and as fun as they are serious.

I am hereby requesting a bandwagon late-pass. Out of nowhere a few months ago, someone sent me the video for “Sharks” by Cadence Weapon (embedded below). Like many who’ve heard the track, I was instantly hooked, and started looking for more. Well, lucky me, Cadence Weapon had just put out a new disc of his glitchy Hip-hop called Afterparty Babies (Anti, 2008). It’s been in or near the top of the playlist ever since.

I can’t remember the first time I heard Gang of Four, but I do distinctly remember a lot of things making sense once I did. Their jagged and angular bursts of guitar, funky rhythms, deadpan vocals, and overtly personal-as-political lyrics predated so many other bands I’d been listening to. Dave Allen was the man behind the bass, and now he’s the man behind Pampelmoose, a Portland-based music and media blog.

In 1959, C. P. Snow lamented a chasm between what he called the Two Cultures: artsy types on one side and stuffy science folks on the other. Well, Jonah Lehrer has been trying to bring them back together. His book Proust was a Neuroscientist (Houghton Mifflin) makes large strides toward their collusion by showing how the insights of several artists, musicians, writers, and one chef were a step ahead of the science of their time. In spite of Sir Karl Popper’s insistence that “real” science be falsifiable (though even …