Josh Kun

Welcome to Tijuana. Tequila, sexo y marijuana. —Manu Chao In 1957, jazz bassist Charles Mingus recorded an album about Tijuana. He called it Tijuana Moods, and it’s a classic rendering of a Tijuana that may never have existed. It is the Tijuana of North American tourist myth and frat-boy sexual......

MICKEY KATZ Greatest Shticks (Koch) “Mort” is short for both Morton and Mortie. He’s my grandfather on my mother’s side, and he’s not dead yet. He probably will be soon — a year, or two, or 10. I wish he wouldn’t be, but ever since he started going to dialysis......

k.d. lang Invincible Summer (Warner Bros.) I have my own associations with summer. Going to lifeguard station 15 with my mother, my sister, and an orange boogie board with a black fiberglass bottom. We’d eat McDonald’s out of the bag, Quarter Pounders sweating from the heat, large fries sprinkled with......

A las cinco de la tarde. Over and over again. That‘s how it went. A las cinco de la tarde. It was the time when Ignacio Sanchez Mejias died -- that time, that afternoon frozen in words by the pen of Federico Garcia Lorca. I remember because it’s the line......

In his 1972 Diana Ross–as–Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues, Sidney Furie got “Strange Fruit” all wrong. Holiday wanders off a bus, stumbles on a lynching and covers her face in terror. Furie then cuts to the performance: Holiday with a gardenia in her hair, singing words that turn......

I'M IN AN ELEVATOR WITH TWO ARGENTINES, DANTE Spinetta and Emmanuel Horvilleur, and I'm not sure what to do with what I'm seeing. Spinetta's got his long black hair twisted into a single serpentine braid, and he's wearing a backward Kangol, red track pants and a black leather jacket. He's......

HASIDIC NEW WAVE | KabalogyMATT DARRIAUPARADOX TRIO | SourceZOHAR | KeterVARIOUS ARTISTS | Klezmer Festival 1998(Knitting Factory) Nobody’s ever actually specified the prerequisites for joining the avant-Yid ranks of JAM -- the Jewish Alternative Movement -- but judging by this new blitz of releases churned out by its Knitting Factory......

KID LOCO Prelude to a Grande Love Story (Atlantic) Jesus Life for Children Under 12 Inches (Yellow Productions) It's easy to have a crush on Kid Loco. As a French producer and remixer working mostly from a warm palette of not-your-usual samples (flutes, piano twinkles, acoustic guitars, strings, horns), he......