95 North. . . The Newspaper

J. Cole's most recent album,  KOD , arrived at an interesting point in pop music: Lil' Pump and the other lil's are dominating the headphones of teenagers, filling in a cultural void with blue hair, Xanax, learn, and generally ignorant behavior. Such is the long-told story of youth. 50 years ago the Beatles were wearing their mops, smoking marijuana, and perfecting the devils music. They said they were bigger than Jesus. People burned their records. Old timers complained about the hippies. Those hippies grew up, and complained about the gen-X kids who were fed a steady diet of malaise, Beavis and Butthead , punk rock, and Mad Magazine . Those kids grew up and had millennial's- a generation of spoiled, but poor kids who whiz through life on apps, killed the traditional music business, elected Obama, and deferred their student loans. J. Cole, born in 1985, is a millennial, and perfectly typifies the general experience of a millennial in many ways. His first album,...

City dwellin' east coast professionals. . . I guess they all have a heart, and The National are here to document it for us  under the florescent city lights of commercial Manhattan.  Is there a science to walking though windows? Who are these guys? For starters: The National mesh, construct, tear down, and play rock n' roll unlike anyone else. At the core of all their  songs lies a detectable heart buried underneath a sea of concrete .  After a typical National song has reached it's conclusion, we've read a tightly constructed essay of postmodern discontent, meticulously built with plenty of poetry and no wasted words. Although the band is led by lead singer Matt Berninger, the National does not serve as a vehicle for any sort of overwhelming personality. As a unit, the National almost always have something to say that seems to stretch beyond just one personality, suggesting that a collective approach is favored by the band.  Unlike much of the musi...

How about a band with not one, but three verified songwriting aces’s? Sounds good to me. And no, they're not the Beatles. Who are the Truckers? They hail from the music hotbed of  Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and are known to generally play alt-country, rock, folk, and blues. Their de facto leader is Patterson Hood, but the band has been strongly influenced by two other songwriters: Jason Isbell and Mike Cooley. Isbell, who is much younger than Hood and Cooley, was separated from the band sometime around 2007. You can read about Jason's best work here. Just like the Beatles, the band seems to follow the rule "if you write the song, you sing it". Despite the different songwriting voices that populate the Truckers albums, all three songwriters are deeply rooted i n, yet critical of, southern culture. In fact, they coined  “the duality of the southern thing" phrase, which spoke to the contradictions and complexity of southern culture. The band works hard, aren...

James McMurtry, who's name I keep wanting to spell minus the "r" at the end, has written some damn good songs. He's the son of a southern pop-novelist and english professor who delivers his tightly worded short stories with incredible authenticity and grace. For years, McMurtry's been cruising around the edges of the Americana/folk music scene, playing extensive dates in his home state of Texas and points north and west, (Montana, Oklahoma, rodeos, county fairs) and quietly earning his place as one of the best songwriters you've never heard of. McMurtry has an odd way of playing the guitar-he often plays a 12 string- somehow drawing out more emotion and mood out of simple chords than most. His voice is not dynamic-he's not quiet one song, desperate in another, and mournful in the next. Rather, he demonstrates a vocal consistency throughout his entire catalogue, and for good reason: it's downright honest, direct, and well-meaning. Even in his dar...