Phil Spector

Phil Spector Movie With Pacino Contends He May Have Been Wrongly Convicted

Spector, that is, not Pacino. Phil Spector, by David Mamet--airing on HBO on March 24--tells of the music legend's conviction for the second-degree murder of actress Lana Clarkson in his mansion in 2009. But the film looks at the flip side of the story. I hear that while it doesn't exactly come o ... More >>

In His Great Tabu, Miguel Gomes Offers More

The Maximalist

NYFF Daily Reviews: Tabu Is a Best of Fest Contender

Today our Nick Pinkerton goes long on the remarkable Tabu. Tabu Directed by Miguel Gomes Screens Sunday, October 14 This has been an unusually exciting New York Film Festival, but even still, the programming tends to accommodate itself to recognizable categories, like faces in someone else's yearb ... More >>

'Sub Pop/Hardly Art CMJ Showcase'

Summer, We're Over You: 8 Reasons to Look Forward to Winter

viaYeah, you wish. ​Listen, we (that is, Jen) loves summer. But maybe not everyone does. And because it's our dear intern Esther's last day, we're letting her sound off on the subject. Let the summer-hating commence! It's August, and it has been for two weeks now. Summer is almost over. We ma ... More >>

Casey Anthony Career Plans! Here's A Great Idea!

​So she got off. I guess that really was rotting pizza in her car trunk, not the decomposition stench of her murdered and duct taped daughter. So what's in Casey Anthony's glamorous future? I know!

Q&A: DJ Harvey On Phil Spector, American Idol, KGB Theremins And The Only Two Kinds of Music in the World

John Barclay​ Thirty-three years ago Harvey Bassett had his punk band's song played by legendary DJ John Peel on his BBC radio show. He was 13 years old. He has been on musical walkabout ever since, becoming a world-class DJ, bringing back the Jamaican soundsystem and single-handedly reviving ... More >>

Four Bands Carrying On The Ramones' Legacy In 2011

Joey Ramone would have been 60 years old on May 19. This week, in celebration of the birthday of the Queens-born gone-too-soon punk legend, Sound of the City will run a series of features on his life and his legacy. ​The Ramones may have shouted their last four-count 15 years ago, but whether ... More >>

Q&A: Rock 'N' Roll High School Director Allan Arkush Looks Back (Plus Exclusive Photos)

Joey Ramone would have been 60 years old on May 19. This week, in celebration of the birthday of the Queens-born gone-too-soon punk legend, Sound of the City will run a series of features on his life and his legacy. Bruce Frankel/courtesy Allan Arkush​ Allan Arkush has executive produced a bu ... More >>

Q&A: Darlene Love On Her Wig Collection, Her Pentecostal Past, And Phil Spector

by Andrew Hamlin Alan Hamlin​After singing lead on so many Phil Spector -produced standards--"He's A Rebel," "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),""He's Sure The Boy I Love"--Darlene Love was recognized for her stellar pipes last month, when she was granted a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of ... More >>

Barracuda Redesign: What Do You Kids Think?

​ Barracuda is the long-running gay lounge, complete with drag entertainment, which has helped keep Chelsea from being yesterday's gay bastion of boozey brassiness. But when I dropped by the place recently--to the delight of millions--I remember thinking, "They could use a little bit of a re ... More >>

SEASON OF LOVE

Pop’s constant crooner comes to Times Square

This Week in the Voice: An Immigrant's Heart

​In this week's Village Voice, a (literally) bleeding-heart story: Julia Amparo-Alvarado, an illegal Guatemalan immigrant who escaped her country's internal strife for a better life, isn't well. The figurative nature of enlarged and battered heart manifested in the physical form. And now, beca ... More >>

This Week's Voice: The-Dream, Miley Cyrus, the Great Dancehall Freeze Out, Jazz Consumer Guide, and More

Courtesy Def-Jam Records In this week's Village Voice, Rob Harvilla marvels at the brilliant stupidity of r&b lothario The-Dream. Theon Weber examines the calculated rebellion of Miley Cyrus. Jesse Serwer reports on the Great Dancehall Freeze-Out of 2010, during which many of Jamaica's biggest act ... More >>

The Best Girl Band Movies Ever

Girls rock through the ages

Raveonettes

News Roundup: New Yorker Festival, Brooklyn Country Festival, Phil Spector's Prison Papers

​--Tickets for the October 16-18 New Yorker Festival, which will feature plenty of musicians--Neko Case, Bon Iver, Loudon Wainwright III, Ian Hunter, Jace Clayton, and Melvin Gibbs, to name a few----and a really ace concert at the Bell House with Liturgy and Dirty Projectors, are on sale now. ... More >>

Doninick Dunne, 1925-2009; Ellie Greenwich, 1940-2009

​ Two well-known, highly-specialized figures in the arts recently died. When Dominick Dunne, who passed Wednesday at 83, began covering celebrity trials, they were mainly the province of leering Steve Dunleavy manques, or Steve Dunleavy himself. Dunne, who was inspired to such journalism by th ... More >>

R.I.P. Ellie Greenwich, the Woman Who Wrote "Be My Baby"

Loss on top of loss: Ellie Greenwich, the pioneering female songwriter who wrote some of the most flat out brilliant songs of the 1960s, including "Be My Baby," "And Then He Kissed Me," "Da Doo Ron Ron," "River Deep, Mountain High," and "Leader of the Pack," died this morning at the age of 68. Bro ... More >>

News Roundup: R. Kelly, Jay-Z, Mr. West, Drake and Nipsey Hussle, Phil Spector

​--On Tuesday, we noted that R. Kelly had announced his "Ladies Make Some Noise!" tour, which included an NYC stop on October 16th. Now the venue has been revealed-- the WaMu Theater At Madison Square Garden--and tickets are on internet presale right now. The password? LADIES. This man and his ... More >>

Who Should Replace Paula Abdul?

​Another onetime chart-topper, like an Olivia Newton-John or a Deborah Gibson?

Phil Spector's Prison Barber Is Extremely Relieved Right Now

via the Smoking Gun, of course Right. So that haggard, emaciated, disintegrating man in the photo above is Phil Spector, pictured sometime around day one of the 19 years to life he's serving in a California state prison for murdering the actress Lana Clarkson in the foyer of his gun-riddled mansion ... More >>

Week in Review: We Got Arrested at Your Benefit Show

In the short week that we outsourced absolutely nothing to India (not even the phoner we didn't do with the guy who plays trumpet for Cake), we got even less cosmopolitan and global when Cannes correspondent J. Hoberman came back and showed up at the office like the rest of us. Except, unlike him, w ... More >>

Spector Gets 19 Years to Life

First the conviction, and now the sentence. Phil Spector will serve 19 years to life for killing actress Lana Clarkson in his gun-riddled mansion of a home in 2003. The AP gleefully notes that the sentence "suggests to some that California prosecutors have broken a decades-long string of celebrity m ... More >>

Pink Mountaintops

Crystal Antlers

Week in Review: Music About Being Young from the Perspective of People Who Are Middle-Aged

In the week we talked Charlie Gibson into saying our name, twice, we apparently made fun of the Hold Steady for being middle-aged, although that wasn't really exactly what we meant to say. Right wingers still really hate Janeane Garofalo, huh? Other interviews: Smog's Bill Callahan on his new Somet ... More >>

As Opportunistic Tell-All Autobiographical Titles Go, My Life Caged Behind Phil Spector's Wall of Sound Isn't Bad

Two not-so-surprising but morbidly entertaining pieces of information from this Mediabistro item on an upcoming memoir from recently convicted murderer Phil Spector's adopted son Louis Spector. The first is its entertainingly Saw-like title: The Gingerbread House on La Collina Drive: My Life Caged B ... More >>

Is Anyone Sicker Than Phil Spector?

Let's have a belated hooray for the conviction of human chia pet Phil Spector and his Yahoo Serious hairdo. Can you believe a couple of jurors last time around actually thought Lana Clarkson had killed herself, even though a procession of other women came forth to describe the way Phil had ritualist ... More >>

He Shot Me (And It Felt Like Second Degree Murder): Phil Spector Found Guilty

The once-vaunted and now deeply fallen record producer Phil Spector won't dodge the murder of actress Lana Clarkson twice--after 30 hours of deliberation, a Los Angeles jury just handed down a guilty verdict for murder in the second-degree, the same charge Spector dodged after a 2007 mistrial. The 4 ... More >>

One Take, Phil

Phil Spector, early practitioner of the wall-of-sound multi-layer recording approach, producer of "Da Doo Run Run" and "Be My Baby," and lunatic, got a deadlocked jury when first tried for the 2003 shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson. But on the retake, Spector has been found guilty of second-de ... More >>

Glasvegas+Ida Maria

Celebrity Justice 101: Can Fame and Dollars Buy You Innocence?

Here's a quick primer on the shocking cases that many feel add up to the modern Mount Rushmore of celeb-justice abominations. *O.J. Simpson was declared not guilty of double murder in 1995. Something about how the gloves didn't match his pickaxe. *The Ramseys ran free after JonBenet's death. App ... More >>

MERRY KITSCHMAS

Be Ronnie Spector's Little X-Mas Baby

Vampire Weekend in the National League Playoffs?

Mamma Mia! Drains the Fun Out of ABBA

Thank you for the music. But your movie’s kinda drab.

The Very Best "Best of '07" Round-Up!

The absolutely last word on words not to have lived by during the previous year

Live: Say Anything at Hammerstein Ballroom

Austen Powers: The Reruns

The specter of the novelist and the novel defense of Spector. Plus a meal with Haggis.

Stuff You Need to Know This Week to Avoid Cultural Ostracism

Dense Alt-Rap Poundcakes Get A Little Too Light And Fluffy

Regress-to-the-Mean Girls

The Pipettes give feminism, '60s pop, and foxy librarians a bad name

Radicals of the Moment

Public enemies tricoastal, and that doesn't even count the Balkan guys

Musicology

Horoscope

Hi-Yo Silver

Ready to head home, Chicago kids end tour wet with sweat

Teen Angels

Dear Diary

Baby's On Fire

Quirky and Quaint