“It was difficult to get them to believe in me … I mean, Southern rock is by nature a very white, very male-dominated genre.”
Remembering Michael Jackson
A decade ago this year, Michael Jackson died. Two days after his death on June 25, 2009, I wrote the following tribute for The Charlotte […]
A Mother’s Wisdom: ‘You Can Do Whatever You Want To do’
I wrote the following tribute to my mom, Joan Carlton Kemp, for a Charlotte, North Carolina, publication on February 18, 2018, the morning after she […]
Folk You! (The Early Days of Antifolk)
In the mid-1980s a ragtag group of folk musicians led by the one-named singer-songwriter Lach, along with Roger Manning, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Kirk Kelly, Michelle […]
RIP ‘The Village Voice’: My Life in the Ailing World of Alt-Weeklies
WHEN I WAS laid off from my job as editor-in-chief of the North Carolina alt-weekly Creative Loafing Charlotte in 2013, my staff had just wrapped up an […]
‘To Live Without You Would Only Mean Heartbreak’: Aretha Franklin, 1942-2018
Easily the most influential female African American singer that popular music has ever produced, Aretha Franklin took the gospel music of Mahalia Jackson out of church and onto the pop charts.
R.I.P. Grant Hart: On Sugar Lake with Hüsker Dü
I was lying on a raft in the cool, crystal blue waters of Sugar Lake, a rock quarry near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, beer in […]
Name That Tune: The Embattled Art of Digital Sampling in Hip Hop
In 1989, the legal and artistic implications of sampling were reaching a boiling point. Old-school rockers called it “stealing,” forgetting that their own heroes of rock guitar […]
Hank Shocklee: The Bomb Behind Public Enemy’s Squad
In 1991, when I interviewed Hank Shocklee — the Bomb Squad production crew member who Chuck D once called the “Phil Spector of […]
Rap and Rebellion: The 1992 L.A. Uprising, 25 Years Ago Today
The following roundtable discussion was published in Option magazine 25 years ago. The points made in this discussion by members of the L.A. community and […]