It is undeniable that Joe Mauer and Brother Ali are kings of the Twin Cities. Both have achieved superstar status in the last few years with their natural talents and abilities and have not forgotten their roots.
Brother Ali has become a household hip-hop name with sold-out worldwide tours; his most recent album reached No. 56 [...]

The first time I noticed their talent was on a friend’s link on Facebook. Next thing I knew, my lips puckered up, my head was bobbing and my heart was pumping as I watched their highly stylized videos. It was like Gummo-meets-rave-techno satisfying. I am talking about Die Antwoord, an Afrikaans zef rap-rave band from Cape Town, South Africa. The first [...]

Music is arguably more crucial to human existence than adequate blood flow. Want proof? At Fast Horse World Headquarters, we bicker somewhere between six and 84 times per day about which XM radio station to listen to, sometimes resorting to yelling — all in the interest of finding good music, not because we hate each other. But nowhere to [...]

I firmly believe in preemptively outing myself. Thus when a friend offered me a ticket to the upcoming New Kids On The Block concert, I openly told my colleagues why I was leaving the daily grind a wee bit early.
They mocked. I shrugged. To me, a concert is about the entertainment factor, not about musical [...]

I found myself getting a bit sentimental about the late-’80s/early ’90s Twin Cities music scene when I saw this post by Jim Walsh at MinnPost about a recent Jayhawks reunion show in Spain. Seeing the grainy reunion concert footage Walsh found on YouTube got me thinking about what might have been for some of my favorite [...]

When I’m listening to music at work, I find myself neurotically re-checking to see if my headphones are plugged into my computer properly. Sometimes I will remove my headphones just to reassure myself that the music is not being broadcast from my laptop speakers. I do this not because I’m embarrassed by my musical tastes; [...]