Let’s start this article with full disclosure. As someone who’s performed at and hosted Soundset a few times, put out albums jointly with Rhymesayers (RSE) and Soul Tools, and received support for the Twin Cities Celebration of Hip-Hop festival from RSE, my perspective is biased. Sorry, my friend, you aren’t going to get a disgruntled dissertation.…

Trampled by Turtles frontman Dave Simonett is teaming up with Mark Gehring, a Twin Cities-based artist manager and the force behind the Minnesota Beatle Project series, to launch a new record label, GNDWIRE (pronounced “Ground Wire”) Records. Simonett and Gehring have tapped into a powerful network to help with their launch, combining their resources to get distribution…

Minneapolis saxophonist Curt Oren is making national headlines with an increasingly absurd series of attempts to raise awareness about…his new hat. First, Oren and his friends thought it would be funny to get a hat reading CURT’S NEW HAT. Then, Oren got a t-shirt saying, DO YOU KNOW ABOUT MY NEW HAT? One thing led to another,…

Is the song “Happy Birthday” a copyrighted musical composition, or is it in the public domain? The answer to that question makes a big difference to music publisher Warner/Chappell, which would like to collect royalties every time the song appears in a movie or TV show. A U.S. District Judge is currently hearing a civil…

Strange Names: Use Your Time Wisely Though Strange Names are now based in New York, many of these songs will be familiar to Minnesota listeners who followed Strange Names here until they moved east last year. Taking new wave to what they call “next wave” is what the band are doing on Use Your Time…

It was an historic evening at the First Avenue Mainroom as dozens of musicians from the early punk rock and new wave scene converged to celebrate the short-lived but high-impact Longhorn Bar. Open for a few years in the late 1970s and early ’80s, the Longhorn was “a little bit like CBGB with Cheers mixed…

Gabriel Douglas has built his reputation on the churning, heavy-thumping blues rock of the 4onthefloor, whose sound is defined as much by his wild man warrior-bellow vocals as it is by the steady pulse of the four members’ synchronous bass-drum thuds—but a delve into the corners of his catalog reveals an artist with a startling…

Run the Jewels are keeping their promise to release Meow the Jewels, a Kickstarter-backed remix of their Run the Jewels 2 album incorporating cat sounds. El-P has shared a short snippet of “Angelmeowster,” a remix of “Angel Duster.” (Pitchfork) ANGELMEOWSTER (by Dan The Automater) #MeowTheJewels #heyyouaskedforit https://t.co/MjnelRZ4UX — el-p (@therealelp) May 18, 2015 Who booed Kanye West at…

One of the biggest draws at this year’s Rock the Garden is Saturday’s headliner, Belle and Sebastian, who will be returning to Minneapolis for the first time in nine years. And it’s a fine time for the orchestral pop band to be playing a big outdoor show because they just released the danciest album of…

Stephin Merritt covered the ABCs of his musical past Friday night at the Cedar Cultural Center; a stop on his solo acoustic U.S. tour. The multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, and musician-of-all-trades was stripped down to just his voice and his ukulele, accompanied by long-time bandmate Sam Davol on cello. Merritt played a full 26-song set, one song for…