I Think It's Time to Get Real

"I remember as Ryan and I were comparing song notes, it became increasingly apparent that punk rock and gospel had very similar energies: driving beats, shouting, call and response vocals, group participation, etc. It was enthralling to stumble on the similarities, and it's something we are still exploring."

Luke Turner in The Quietus talks with Algiers.

"If Dixie Can Make Peace with the Hellish Parts of Its Legacy while Fostering Its Inherent Strengths, It Just Might Achieve a Real Breakthrough"

"Thompson finds the greatest reason for hope in an unlikely place—the past, specifically that part of it staked out by the Agrarians, the group of Vanderbilt University teachers and students (among them Robert Penn Warren) who in 1930 published 'I'll Take My Stand,' a manifesto in praise of the Southern way of life.
"Although wrong about race, the book was right about much else. The Agrarians championed sustainable family farms, ecology, human scale and, most of all, community. They were green many decades before the rest of America, and they were down home."

Steve Oney in the Los Angeles Times reviews Tracy Thompson's The New Mind of the South.

Tip on the Tightrope

"The album follows the path of Cindi Mayweather, an android whose desire for a shape-shifting human causes her to break free of the bonds of society and reach a higher level of consciousness. Echoes of slave narratives and the struggles of the civil rights movement run through the work, but Philip K. Dick, Andy Warhol and the filmmaker Fritz Lang are equally important muses.
"The recording demands active involvement from listeners. Musically, it ranges widely, from Stevie Wonder soul to funk-rock hybrids to shimmery freak folk and James Bond movie-style balladry. Then there's that story, which requires detailed attention to fully comprehend."

In the Los Angeles Times, Ann Powers meets with the ArchAndroid herself, Janelle Monáe.

The Men of Summer

In The New York Times, Sam Tenenhaus and Michael Shapiro review Howard Bryant's The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron and Bill Madden's Steinbrenner, respectively.

Homegrown

"Though violent extremist groups have been around in America for decades, they surged in the 1990s, a decade of spectacular domestic mayhem--at a cabin in Ruby Ridge, Idaho; on a compound outside Waco, Texas; in downtown Oklahoma City. Their heroes were men like Timothy McVeigh, Theodore Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph.
"Today the groups are shadows of themselves, with many of their leaders dead, imprisoned, disillusioned or just inept.
"Many observers attribute that to Sept. 11, for diverting the rage of disaffected Americans away from the U.S. government and toward foreigners, and for fueling the subsequent Patriot Act-driven crackdown. Others say the movement began to crumble earlier, when the Y2K disaster, a favorite prediction of conspiracy theorists, failed to materialize.
"And part of the collapse may have just been human nature. 'Many of the people had such huge egos that they didn't know how to work together and keep the movement going,' said Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at the liberal Political Research Associates think tank who specializes in the study of right-wing networks. 'So it basically unraveled.'"

Richard A. Serrano in the Los Angeles Times reports on the state of domestic anti-government terrorism.

Gardening at Night

"'It just come to me that the world started with a beautiful garden,' Finster told writer Tom Patterson in the 1980s, 'so why not let it end with a beautiful garden?'
"Today, the world lumbers on. But Finster's gardens, once a magnet for artists such as Keith Haring and pop icons including R.E.M., are an overgrown tangle surrounded by a chain-link fence and barbed wire."

Richard Fausset in the Los Angeles Times reports on the disputed legacy of folk artist Howard Finster.

Living in America

"The sneer on her face and the yank on her dog's leash as she turned and walked into her house left me with no doubt that she did not believe me - that I was just another trifling, riffraff black man looking for an opportunity to rape and rob her, or worse. My expectation was that a police car would soon arrive to question me, so I removed two picture IDs from my wallet and placed them in my shirt pocket. It's not a good idea to reach for your wallet when the police approach you as a suspect. (I suppose that I should just accentuate the positive and be thankful that the police did not come and the woman did not let her dog bite me.)"

In The Baltimore Sun, retired Judge Kenneth Lavon Johnson recounts an experience in suburban Atlanta.