John Payne

I’m as mad as any hatter . . . I feel safer touching wood. —“Just a Bit” When it comes to the persistent problem of descriptive inadequacy in contemporary music criticism, there can be no more fitting example than Robert Wyatt, the non-genre-bound English singer/composer/multi-instrumentalist who more than anyone has......

The little girls understand that the Strokes’ brand of rock isn’t revolutionary; they know that’s entirely moot. For them — and possibly the rest of us — what is undeniable is the sense that this band has hit on something that’s rather perfect, that is, it represents something exactly of......

Photo by Syd Kato Among the more interesting phenomena you’ll find as you slop about in the cultural muck of Los Angeles is that of the isolationist creative type who, deriving his or her work from usually very idiosyncratic sources, has been spending days and years willfully crafting utterly individual......

Photo by Alexei Hay Sometimes the hype, you just can’t resist it. Jane’s Addiction are back, oh yeah, with their first studio album in 13 years, and while they’ve attempted resurrection numerous times before, this new one called Strays does feel like the band have crawled out fully rested from......

Photo by Aaron Rappaport Just the other day, you were saying that you wanted to hear something different, popwise, that you were well and truly bored with all the merely adequate product bombarding your senses and thus making you feel that everything’s just . . . okay. Well now, here’s......

Photos by Ted Soqui More than 2,000 happy fans, musicians, music-biz types, sundry hangers-on and untold others attended the L.A. Weekly’s fifth annual Music Awards at the Henry Fonda Theater on Thursday, June 26. This year saw another wildly woolly and good-natured affair as freestyling hosts Busdriver, Aceyalone and Abstract......