Phil Spector

Glasvegas+Ida Maria

Live: Say Anything at Hammerstein Ballroom

Vampire Weekend in the National League Playoffs?

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 >>

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

Baby's On Fire

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

Musicology

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

Quirky and Quaint

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

Dear Diary

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

Teen Angels

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

Live: The Teeth-Grindingly Precious Grizzly Bear at Town Hall

The MVP, as usual. CREDIT Grizzly Bear Town Hall Friday May 29 Things shouted at Grizzly Bear tonight, in ascending order of dunderheadedness: "What's your favorite color?" "Tweet something!" "What kind of reverb pedal do you use?" "Best album of the year!" Knock it off. GB's Veckatimest is, ... More >>

Horoscope

The MVP, as usual. CREDIT Grizzly Bear Town Hall Friday May 29 Things shouted at Grizzly Bear tonight, in ascending order of dunderheadedness: "What's your favorite color?" "Tweet something!" "What kind of reverb pedal do you use?" "Best album of the year!" Knock it off. GB's Veckatimest is, ... More >>

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

The MVP, as usual. CREDIT Grizzly Bear Town Hall Friday May 29 Things shouted at Grizzly Bear tonight, in ascending order of dunderheadedness: "What's your favorite color?" "Tweet something!" "What kind of reverb pedal do you use?" "Best album of the year!" Knock it off. GB's Veckatimest is, ... More >>

Stuff You Need to Know This Week to Avoid Cultural Ostracism

The MVP, as usual. CREDIT Grizzly Bear Town Hall Friday May 29 Things shouted at Grizzly Bear tonight, in ascending order of dunderheadedness: "What's your favorite color?" "Tweet something!" "What kind of reverb pedal do you use?" "Best album of the year!" Knock it off. GB's Veckatimest is, ... More >>

Austen Powers: The Reruns

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

MERRY KITSCHMAS

Be Ronnie Spector's Little X-Mas Baby

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

Hi-Yo Silver

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

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

Crystal Antlers

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 >>

Now O'Reilly Is After Me Personally!

Dwindling demagogue Bill O'Reilly has it out for me! The incredibly sensitive feminist-cum-loofa-enthusiast doesn't like the way people like me have been ragging on the semi-nude-modeling boob-implanted moralist known as Carrie Prejean. I don't watch O'Reilly's car wreck of a show, which is famous ... More >>

This Scarlett Johansson/Pete Yorn Song Is Actually Pretty Great, Guys

Scarlett Johansson, the musician, was last seen being loathed for Anywhere I Lay My Head, her Dave Sitek-assisted suite of Tom Waits covers, a project that was probably doomed (critically, anyway) by her incredible beauty and success way before it even got started. But that record was better than it ... 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

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 >>

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 >>

Who Should Replace Paula Abdul?

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

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

Raveonettes

​--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 >>

The Best Girl Band Movies Ever

Girls rock through the ages

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 >>

SEASON OF LOVE

Pop’s constant crooner comes to Times Square

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

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: 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 >>

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!

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 >>

'Sub Pop/Hardly Art CMJ Showcase'

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 >>