Results tagged “rb”

Fun around town, for $10 or less:

Need some variety in your life? Melange Variety Cabaret...On The Fringe is the ticket for you. It features belly dancing, music (R&B, blues, jazz, indie), clowning, puppetry, electronic music gadgetry... and, well, basically it's a cabaret! The remaining three shows promise to be lively and unlike any other show in Fringe. Which, considering the craziness variety that is Fringe, is certainly saying something. The full lineup can be seen here. Catch them tonight, Friday, and Saturday; tickets for the weekend can be had online, but for tonight you'll need to get 'em at the door. If you go to one show, you can get tickets to another for half-off. More puppets for you!

Fun around town, for $10 or less:

Fun around town, for $10 or less:

I'm a music guy. I listen to a ton of music, and because of Phillyist, I've been able to hear a lot of great stuff I never would have heard otherwise. But, no matter how much of a music fan you are, there are always some great albums that slip through the cracks and you don't manage to hear, even though you really should. So here are ten albums from 2007 I really should have heard by now, but for some reason haven't. Some are on this list because of critical buzz, while others are based on my own thoughts about the artists. And I pose the question to you, dear readers: Which two or three of these albums should I use my lovely Amazon gift card to buy?

This year's DanceBOOM! closes tomorrow, but true to form, The Wilma theater. made sure that its final week of programming was its best. The dancers, singers, and percussionists of Raices Culturales Latinoamericanas, a nonprofit group dedicated to "increasing public awareness of the beauty and diversity of Latin American culture through music and dance performances" greeted DanceBOOM! patrons and Broad Street passersby alike, fully ready to embrace, and able to prove, their organization's mission. I remember enjoying the group at last year's DanceBOOM! festivities, and I was happy to see them back in front of the Wilma. They're really good fun, and were it not for my highly impractical shoes, I would have loved to join them when they invited the audience forward.

Citizen Cope takes over the Electric Factory Friday and Saturday night with his Rubik’s Cube-style mix of folk, rock, and R&B. We first became acquainted with Cope (aka Clarence Greenwood) back in 2001 when Nelly Furtado was “Like a bird” and he opened for her at the Troc. There he sat on a stool, hair pulled back under a hat, armed only with his guitar and his drawling, slightly scratchy voice. At first we could barely see him, but the storytelling quality of his songs and the uniqueness of his tone drew us closer to the stage. He strummed his guitar and sang about characters from his life and his town, Washington, D.C. His colorful voice painted a mural of a hustler pushing counterfeit bills and lost souls seeking salvation. We and about four other people were mesmerized, while others continued to talk through his set. We signed up for his newsletter and waited for the release of his self-titled album.

Fun around town, for $10 or less:

Dear Philadelphia,

by Neil McGarry

by Neil McGarry

If you tuned into 100.3 FM on your radio dial a few months ago, there was a good chance you would have heard Modest Mouse or Queens of the Stone Age. There was also a chance that you would hear that “Closing Time” song that has somehow survived as a jukebox legend (we point the finger at drunk sorority girls). But, that’s the tradeoff, as is the case with almost every radio station: take the good with the bad. But Radio One had the notion that Philadelphia needed yet another hip hop station and turned Y100 into The Beat, which apparently bangs the best hip hop and R&B in town. So Phillyist asks you, “Whatever happened?” It’s a cliché, it’s tired, and it’s true: you really don’t appreciate things until they’re gone. Alternative music fans throughout the city mourned the day Y100 died. Not because it was the best station, but because, for all its flaws, it was the only station playing alternative music. Now that it’s been killed we’re realizing how devoid our airwaves are of alternative rock options. The other rock stations, 93.3 WMMR and 94.1 WYSP, have tried to accommodate this gaping hole by mixing in some newer stuff that we may have heard on the fallen Y100 like the Foo Fighters, The White Stripes, and Stone Temple Pilots. Classic rock, though, is their thing. Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, AC/DC, and Aerosmith are too popular with their listeners for them to make any drastic changes. New and alternative, while not entirely accurate in its application to Y100, is something that this city’s radio dial desperately needs. It makes no sense that the 5th largest city in the country doesn’t have an alternative music station. At last count we’re up to 27 hip hop and R&B stations, one good college station, one oldies station, and a handful of others constantly rotating Three Doors Down and Nickelback. What we need is another option. We need a station like Y100 to come back, even if they have to play Semisonic from time to time. Image credit: Matt Groening (The Simpsons)