Aceyalone’s omnipresent ambition

Aceyalone wants to make hip-hop an art form, he says. So it makes sense that he’s doing a poetry book, and that he has ambitious ideas about what an album should be. 1998’s A Book of Human Language was literary to the hilt—different tracks are chapters, not songs, and he recites Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” [...]

Getting down to the business of getting down with Ozma

PHOTO and ILLUSTRATION by STERLING ANDREWS
At their best, the ’90s were a clusterfuck of brilliant and weird pop bands that now either sit comfortably idle on pedestals (Nirvana, that dog., Ben Folds Five) or uncomfortably idle in a debilitating vegetative state. These bands (names withheld to [...]

Be Your Own Pet: Banned in the U.S.A.

PHOTO by MICHAEL LAVINE
Be Your Own Pet are from Nashville, a town so infested with country-music-industry cutthroats that it rivals only Los Angeles on the entertainment-biz creativity-discouragement index. So it’s little surprise, maybe, that their music—unpredictable, rapid-fire tempo, 1980s-camp-movie meets rock-party—has fallen victim to industry censorship. Universal, the [...]