Music

America’s most storied urinals were lost to history last week. Hilly Kristal, the founder of CBGB’s, died on August 28 of lung cancer, just a few months after his legendary punk club closed its doors with the intention of reopening as a retrofitted knock-off venue in Vegas. As much as it pained me to envision CB’s as some kitsch attraction at New York, New York, the hotel, in a way the proposed transport and reassembly of the joint made sense. Kristal was the Moses of a Lower East Side rebellion. I can’t envision a better tribute to his legacy than to have his piss-stained ark wind up in a desert as dry as the Sinai.

Lionel Trilling memorably spoke of the “dark and bloody crossroads where politics and literature meet," usually at grave expense of both. Quite without realizing it, Jewcy has cultivated a special genre of criticism that explores this messy intersection as it relates to politics and music. Over the past few months we’ve run a series of articles and interviews concerned with the dynamic potential, and ideological trappings, of folk, rock, Britpop, “glam rap” and post-punk. What happens when aging 60’s legends flirt with notions of Jewish power? How has Nine Inch Nails’ Romantic cult of death morphed, as Paul Berman might have foreordained, into a high concept ditto of Islamist reaction? Also, who the hell taught Morrissey to smile? Check out our harmonious highlights below, and click

Performing wrapped up in wires or covered with mud, orgasmically moaning about throwing himself away, Trent Reznor has long bestowed market appeal on all things transgressive. He added FM rock flair to the experimental electronics of Cabaret Voltaire and Skinny Puppy, and made sadomasochism mainstream. Now, after having spent the majority of his career in existential self-contemplation (or flagellation, as it were), Reznor seems to have found his political voice on the new concept album, Year Zero. The album revels in apocalyptic imagery – the blood of the guilty, the blood of the pure – and features a homegrown video chronicling the last days of a righteous resistance. Al Qaeda has finally found its rock star.

I first heard the band Dengue Fever at Zen Sushi, a restaurant in the Silverlake section of Los Angeles with the feel of an unused Kurosawa movie set. Fake bamboo and plastic shoji screens abound, and the menu features mysterious comestibles with names like the Golden Buddha and the Love Boat. A fair assortment of with-it types had come that night to order the bad sushi and get laid. The evening’s sole celebrity, a sallow and porcine Matt Dillon, loitered by the restaurant’s small stage, rubbing elbows with the exquisitely tattooed swells pounding cocktails amid the mood lighting.