Femi Kuti is definitely his father's son. And, although Femi has managed to get out of his father's gigantic shadow and make a legacy of his own, his story will always include his father. That is because his father is Fela Kuti. You know, the massively popular Nigerian afrobeat innovator, outspoken political activist, and overall legend who also happens to have an acclaimed off-Broadway musical based on his life and music, called Fela! (naturally). Yeah, it must be pretty tough to have Fela as a dad when you're trying to carve out a niche for yourself. more ›

Standing outside Neumo's Wednesday night, a friend of ours started ruminating on his recent house-hunting experience in the Central District: All the new places being advertised, he said, were townhouse style units with garages below them. The effect reminded him of frontier forts, with their wooden walls separating them from the wilderness. How exactly our conversation led from Vampire Weekend's concert inside to this is a little hazy, but it nevertheless summarizes the band pretty well: Much like those urban fortresses in the CD that keep their residents safely above street level, Vampire Weekend, notwithstanding their tightness and pop transcultural experimentation, is also about making black people's stuff safe for white people. more ›

Last night at the Showbox, we were reminded of something Gino Srdjan Yevdjevic said in an interview with us last year: we don't remember the quote entirely, but it was something to the effect of characterizing "world music" as "shit." Not the music or the musicians, per se, but rather the genre, a peculiarly American way of pigeon-holing and marketing foreign music. Gino understood the process only too well: back in the 1980s, he was a glammy Duran Duran-esque pop singer in his native Yugoslavia. Only when war forced him to flee to the US in the 1990s did he become a "world musician," performing traditional Balkans music in restaurants for disinterested diners under the name Kultur Shock. While he admitted the original incarnation of Kultur Shock could have done well, it's easy to see why he rebelled against the entire world-music cachet by adding punk rock guitar to the line-up and starting to yuk it up as a sex-crazed Eastern European immigrant à la Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd's "Wild and Crazy Guys." more ›

Do you need any other reason to go see Femi Kuti tomorrow at the Showbox? more ›