Request Icky Thump here.
"If you abandon a band as soon as other people like them, then you don’t love it for the right reasons. You like music for identity."
-Jack White.
Jack and Meg White celebrate a decade playing together as The White Stripes by releasing yet another stellar album, Icky Thump, and taking the music of the American South to the far corners of the globe. They also prove that, contrary to pulp wisdom, two people can be a crowd… pleaser.
Also in this issue
Request The Empire Strikes First by Bad Religion from SDCL here.
Greg Graffin: Punk-Rock Ph.D.
The frontman of legendary punk outfit Bad Religion stalks a much different stage nowadays. But even though he finds religion and science incompatible, he’s still finding a way to mix science and rock, work and pleasure.
Graffin, 42, is one of those rare people who seem to have combined two lives into one. As an undergraduate and graduate student at UCLA, he studied ants in Mexico, mammals in the Amazon River basin and reptiles in southeastern Arizona, and he earned a Ph.D. in 2003 from Cornell University for a dissertation exploring the attitudes of prominent evolutionary biologists toward science and religion. But he’s spent more time onstage than in rainforest canopies. He founded Bad Religion with two friends in 1980, when they were sophomores at El Camino Real High School in the San Fernando Valley. In the quarter century since then, Bad Religion has gained a worldwide following for its hard-driving, thoughtful, and — despite all the philosophizing — surprisingly fun songs. They’ve been “one of the greatest punk bands ever,” says Lou Brutus, host of the punk station, Fungus, on XM Radio. “Part of it is talent, and part of it is just determination to be a f—ing great band.” By Steve Olson
Here is proof positive that you can be a rebel and make a difference.
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