In our upcoming Summer edition One More Robot have turned their attention to various subcultures the world over. From Dublin's Goth scene to the underground Nigerian rock movement of the 1970s, our staff never cover the obvious. Here's a small preview of what we have in store.
To be one of the first to receive your copy, not to mention our Autumn and Winter editions later this year, be sure to subcribe right this minute.
We examine Irish subcultures through the second half of the 20th century, with very special photography provided by Garry O'Neill.
A look at Dublin's small, secluded Goth scene, including specialised night club Dominion and event organisers Sedation Industries.
A look at the music of Nigeria's underground rock'n'roll subculture
of the 1970s, featuring Fela Kuti, Monomono and The Funkees, among
others.
Michael A. Gonzales remembers how crack cocaine wounded New York City
and outlines how it was captured by artists, musicians and writers.
The tragic demise of the mysterious and haunting Nico.
Album reviews include Nicki Minaj, Bear in Heaven, The Futureheads, Too Short and M Ward.
And there's a ton more we couldn't find decent YouTube vids to match up with. New issue out later this month. For the latest news please 'like' us on Facebook.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Friday, May 11, 2012
Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch 1964-2012
“Fuck those whiteboys,” he said, a fine way to dismiss MCA, Mike D and the King Ad-Rock. Hip-hop’s Ramones. The Caucasian Run-DMC. I was never able to see The Beastie Boys live in concert, and now I never will.
Adam Nathaniel Yauch, rapper MCA, died on May 4th of salivary gland cancer. He was 47. Licensed to Ill, Paul’s Boutique (1989), Check Your Head (1992) and Ill Communication (1994) represent an uninterrupted stretch of crazy-high quality hip-hop in a genre that often struggles to put out more than two consecutive classics. As a group, The Beastie Boys are matched only by De La Soul in that regard.
MCA was the face of The Beasties’ evolution, from the teenage faux anarchy of their hit ‘(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)’ and the inflatable penises of their live shows to Tibetan Freedom Concert appearances and Yauch’s own nonprofit organisation for Tibetan independence, the Milarepa Fund. Yauch is survived by his wife, Dechen Wangdu – an American of Tibetan descent – and their daughter, Tenzin Losel.
As their labelmates on Def Jam brought hip-hop into suburbia, Beasties samples introduced Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and The Clash to the hood. Urban cultural exchange at its finest. --Miles Marshall Lewis
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Tara Stewart
Australian born Irish/Indian musician Tara Stewart has been on the Dublin scene for just over a year now with previous music featured on an RTE2 television show (The Importance of Being Ernest) a song that was recorded with Martin Furey of The High Kings. She has also supported Australian rock band Jet and played with the tribute to The Last Waltz in The Olympia last year.
This year is a complete change in direction and new makeover of the style of music that was once heard by Tara this includes new songs and a new line up, with what was a solo act turned into a five piece band. With catchy pop melodies and indie/rock sprinkles mixed in they have been playing together only a couple of months and are set to record a much anticipated debut EP at the end of April with Producer Barry Murphy (Leaders of Men & Machine Gun Baby).
The band is currently made up of Lead Vocal Tara Stewart, Guitarists Nicole Billings and Russell Keogh, Bassist Stephen Banim and Drummer Anthony McMahon with inspiration from The Smiths and Fleetwood Mac to Michael Jackson.
Already 2012 summer is planned to be a big year with Communion Dublin in Academy 2, Ruby Sessions, Dublin INK live, Festivals, London shows and the official launch in August at The Workman’s Club.
Keep an eye out for dates to be announced very soon on twitter and facebook pages and some new music previews/videos to be released in the next few months.
Facebook: www.facebook.com/tarastewartpage
Twitter: www.twitter.com/tarastewmusic
Saturday, April 7, 2012
StyleSiren and One More Robot presents 'Singles Bar'
Damon Albarn – ‘The Marvelous Dream’
[Parlophone]
★★★★☆
Damon Albarn’s varied and accomplished career has itself done a lot to remove folksy, Nick Drake-style music from my appetite. Whence the African poly-rhythms, US backpack rap, and iPad synths? Nowhere to be found on his latest, ‘The Marvelous Dream’. The song is premised in part on the life of Elizabethan mathematician and astronomer John Dee. Other than some references to the moon and “god fire”, you’d hardly know it, though. It is, rather, a hypnotic, quiet piece of music: two-and-a-half minutes to pause, turn off my phone, stop checking email, and just listen. ‘Marvelous Dream’ creates a space where hand claps are captivating, and a relatively tuneless tune entrances. It’s a solid reminder that life and music don’t require super-saturated aesthetic pleasure to feel good. Or at least, “not quite dead.” – B. Michael Payne
Justin Bieber – ‘Boyfriend’
[Island/Def Jam]
★★☆☆☆
A decade ago teen idol Justin Timberlake made a run for adulthood with acoustic-driven pop tracks about hooking up with grown-up girls. Cut to 2012 and this Justin seems eager to repeat the formula. Unfortunately, everything about ‘Boyfriend’ feels a bit Timbo-lite, from the awkward spoken word/rap segments to the wayyyy toned down sexuality. I was as guilty as anyone for enjoying the adolescent Bieber’s weird collaborations with hip-hop’s elite, but hearing the now 18-year-old’s deepened voice for the first time, it’s evident that he’s growing into a sluggish, soul-less singer. – Dean Van Nguyen
Toy – ‘Motoring’
[Heavenly]
★★☆☆☆
Channelling the spirits of seventies post-punk and their 21st century successors in equal measure, London’s Toy have a strong formula that also exudes a love of seventies psychedelic with their heavy Korg-driven sound. Unfortunately, that formula is bastardised a little too obviously and single ‘Motoring’ is actually just plain pedestrian. – Jonathan Keane
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Broadway Buddhas and the Birth of Hip-Hop
Originally Appears in Issue 8
New York City, 1977: it was the humid summer of a serial killer named the Son of Sam, the infamous blackout and Bronx bombers the Yankees heading towards the World Series. Uptown in Washington Heights, the sweltering streets were alive with musical ice cream trucks, the sweaty slaps of Dominican domino games, perspiring boys pitching pennies on the corner and young kids darting through the fire hydrant sprinklers.
The bustling block where I lived on 151st Street between Broadway and Riverside from the age of four was full of rowdy kids who were like family. My best friend was Kyle Jenkins, who was cool as the Fonz and lived upstairs in apartment 4-F with his gossipy mother Miss Josephine and five fine sisters.
For full article visit: http://blackadelicpop.blogspot.com/2012/03/broadway-buddhas-and-birth-of-hip-hop.html
Sunday, March 4, 2012
One More Robot Magazine Opens New Online Store // Subscriptions Now Available!
Due to the recent success we've had selling issues online via eBay, we at One More Robot are extremely happy to announce a new online store via social community website Storenvy.com. With a smart new look and easy to use interface, onemorerobot.storenvy.com will make purchasing current and back issues of the magazine easier than ever before.
Also available via the new store, readers can buy a subscription to One More Robot for the first time ever. So for a mere €15 ($20) excluding p&p, you can be one of the first to receive the next three issues (Summer, Autumn and Winter 2012), which will be delivered straight from the printing press to your front door. And believe us when we say these issues are going to be hot!
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Resurrecting The Stone Roses
The Stone Roses are back and they wanna be adored once more. Announced last October, the band’s reunion will see the original line-up play two dates at Heaton Park in their home city of Manchester next year before embarking on a world tour.
Tickets for the gigs at sold out in 14 minutes, with some later surfacing on eBay for as much as £1500 – nearly 30 times the retail price – suggesting that anticipation for The Stone Roses is high. Indeed, new songs are being written and, according to the lead singer Ian Brown, an album for 2012 is potentially on the cards.
The band’s eponymous debut, which burst onto the Manchester music scene in 1989, still remains a seminal classic. Songs such as ‘Waterfall’ and the transcendental ‘I Am the Resurrection’ have ingrained themselves into the consciousness of a generation and show no sign of loosening their hold on younger listeners. After 1994’s disappointing follow-up Second Coming, however, the band disintegrated into acrimony.
If there remains hard feelings among the four members, they certainly weren’t on show this October. Speaking at the band reunion’s press conference, Brown joked: “We’ll ride this until the wheels come off, like we did the last time.”
But while many fans are ecstatic at the opportunity to see The Stone Roses relive old glories, others are more sceptical.Was it not only two years ago that guitarist John Squire said that he had, “no desire whatsoever to desecrate the grave of seminal Manchester pop group The Stone Roses,”? Of course, the usual crowd of jeerers accuse the band of shameless profiteering. Worse still, they say, they’re destroying the legacy of a wonderful group.
Perhaps a friend of mine, still disillusioned by the feeble reunion of The Pixies, summed it up best. “Seeing your favourite band reform is like bumping into an ex-girlfriend from years back. The only difference is she is now older, fatter and, yeah, probably even balder”. Wise words, particularly so when you’re talking about Frank Black. But will it be the same case for The Stone Roses?
It is hard to tell at this early stage. Pulp’s reunion last year showed that revival acts can not only be successful, but can also steal the show at several music festivals. But then again Pulp has Jarvis Cocker, a wit of the Morrissey and Mark E. Smith vintage, at the helm. All the Stone Roses have is Ian Brown. Not exactly the finest vocal talent in the world.
Regardless, The Stone Roses will no doubt headline several festivals this summer playing classic track after track. Perhaps it is 2012, and not 1994, that will be known for The Stone Roses true second coming? --SIMON MEE
Monday, February 13, 2012
The Dime Squad #3: Jonathan Bogart
Can you remember the first time you heard hip-hop? What was the song that made you aware?
I don't remember the first time I heard hip-hop with any clarity -- there was never any head-turning "what is THIS?" moment, because I had heard it described long before I ever heard it. Because of my sheltered upbringing -- I was homeschooled for most of the 80s, and my parents were evangelical missionaries -- I'm pretty sure I didn't hear any hip-hop until 1990 or 1991, when I would have first been exposed to Christian rappers like dc Talk, Stephen Wiley, Mike-E, P.I.D. (Preachers In Disguise), and others I can't remember on a sampler cassette that filtered into our house from some kind donor. But it would have only been a few months later that I turned on local radio and heard "Ice Ice Baby," which was the first mainstream hip-hop I heard. I remember envying the kids at the Guatemalan school I was going to, who danced to "Ice Ice Baby" and knew all the words even if it was the only English they knew.
You're really well known and respected among music journalists and readers alike but, unlike many of your peers, most of your work crops up on very alternative websites and, of course, your many blogs. Was this intentional on your part?
Well, I've only been writing seriously about music for two or three years, and I think I'm about where that deserves. I don't try -- or necessarily even want -- to make a living writing about music, so I haven't pursued the kind of exposure or access that someone paying bills by their pen needs. I think of my peers as other enthusiastic amateurs; I've never even pitched anything that hasn't been solicited first.
I think I first came across you when I read your 'best of the decade' song lists of every era right back to the 19th century. I used to listen to those lists song-after-song. Can you tell me a little bit about that project and when did you become so enamoured by musical history?
The project actually started as a response to Pitchfork's 200 Songs of the 1960s feature -- and after doing the 60s, I realized that it was so much fun I wanted to do one for each decade. I've always been interested in history, so when I started becoming fascinated by the broad scope of music around the turn of the millennium thanks to the endless availability offered by Napster and the canon-making of end-of-the-century lists, it was natural for me to be as interested in the music of the Coolidge Administration as in the music of the Nixon, Reagan, or Bush II eras. (That's the 20s, 60s/70s, 80s, and 00s respectively, for non-American readers.)
Are you a big time music collector? I'm thinking about the piece you
wrote for The Vinyl Issue. Also, it can't of been easy to Napster some
of the tunes on your list like 'Russian Scissors' by The Oriental
Orchestra or "Rock My Soul" by The Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet.
I've had my bouts of collector's fever; especially with older material,
it's essential to be able to track down reissues on CDs and LPs. But
there's more available online (or through certain ahem channels) than
you might expect; the tricky part is knowing what information to trust.
Finally, I just five minutes ago googled both our names and saw this: http://rockcritics.com/2011/06/21/existing-yesterday-today-and-tomorrow-with-jonathan-bogart-a-rockcritics-com-interview/ You call me "The Second Nicest Man in Pop Criticism". And Hendrik is #1! Care to comment on this travesty? I'd come after Hendrik's crown, but I'm actually too nice to do that..
There's such a thing as being too nice! You have an editorial judgment which makes you not a pushover.
haha. very flattering.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
The Dime Squad #2: Miles Marshall Lewis
DVN: As soon as we first start talking about a Nineties Hip-Hop Issue you straight away mentioned Hype Williams. Considering the scale of what could be covered, what drew you to Hype?
MML: Contributor Michael A. Gonzales is a close friend. We've had a lot of private conversations about enjoying Belly, the 1998 Hype Williams film. When Michael mentioned the Hip-Hop Issue to me, we both thought immediately of Hype. With his omnipresence on late 1990s MTV, a lot of folks expected Hype to graduate to Hollywood in a bigger way, like former video directors David Fincher, Brett Ratner, Spike Jonze and McG, for example. But his imprint on Nineties hiphop is enormous if you think for even two seconds about the images of the culture that flooded that era.
DVN: Why do you think Hype has never really made that step into Hollywood? Do you think if big screen recognition never happens for Hype it might be something he looks back on and wishes he had achieved?
MML: Right now Hype's supposed to be directing Lust, an erotic thriller written by Joe Eszterhas, who did the scripts for Basic Instinct, Flashdance and Showgirls. In 2004 Hollywood made a live-action Fat Albert film that Hype was tied to at some point. Someone else directed and it flopped. He got hired to direct Speed Racer too, another flop that fell through for him. Researching for my piece in the Hip-Hop Issue, I found another project, a zombie horror movie called Thrilla, that got stuck in development hell for him. The period between Belly and Lust may just not have been Hype's time for Hollywood. Better for him to have spent the years improving his craft than for him to have blown his shot directing flops.
DVN: You were also interesting in doing something on the East Coast/West Coast rivarly, but we already had Charlie touching on that in his Pac piece and Michael in his Bad Boy feature. Charlie describes hearing about Pac's death and MAG talked about crying when he heard Biggie died in a recent blog post. Do you have memories of both those incidents?
MML: When Tupac died, I was headed to a Giorgio Armani party downtown at the Armory. I found out from David Mays, the founder and publisher of The Source magazine. He had just found out somehow, and went through the office telling everybody the news. I was on the phone with someone in the Source's conference room. Dave peeked his head in and said "he's outta here" or something like that. News reporters were outside the Armory asking people about his death as we all went inside. D'Angelo was performing at the party dedicating songs to Pac, and everybody there was talking about it. I didn't cry for Big, but definitely I cried for Pac. I remember that moment, smoking a blunt and listening to "Old School," off of Me Against the World.
When Biggie was killed, I was spending the night at a girlfriend's house in New Jersey: Asondra R. Hunter, the second editor-in-chief of Honey magazine. She was out in L.A. at the party where Big was shot. She called and told me what happened. I checked messages from my answering machine in Brooklyn. My father had called, my best friend Marc and Asondra again. It was numbing.
DVN: Can you remember the first hip-hop record you fell in love with?
MML: My childhood in the South Bronx was full of hiphop I loved: "Rapper's Delight" and "8th Wonder" (Sugarhill Gang), "The Breaks" (Kurtis Blow), "Feel the Heartbeat" (Fearless Four). "Original Human Beat Box" by Doug E. Fresh too. But the first rap record I loved enough to buy was "Roxanne Roxanne." I bought the whole UTFO album. Mix Master Ice could cut.
DVN: The Bronx seeps into your work quite abit, from your first book Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don't Have Bruises through to the title of your publication Bronx Biannual. Looking back to those early hip-hop records you just mentioned, could you tell something special was happening?
MML: Well, yeah. Something special was happening whether or not it ever spread worldwide. I was just a kid in the backseat of the car hearing his parents laugh at the Sugarhill Gang when their records came on the radio. Dad said rap would never last, Mom agreed with Dad, and that was the end of it. From their point of view. But especially once Def Jam Recordings took hold, plus Krush Groove and flicks of that nature came out, I knew hiphop was never going anywhere. I never bothered to see Beat Street in the movies; I lived on Beat Street
DVN: Ha! And I think all Dubliners who didn't see Once can relate to that... So how did you end up making the jump from hip-hop fan to hip-hop journalist?
MML: I'd interned on Vibe's first two issues in the summer of 1993. I published my earliest work around that time in magazines like Noir, Freedom Rag and Eyeball. Then The Source had a famous editorial walkout that I won't get into here, but it left them with no writers, and I was one of the freelancers to fill in the gap. My Grand Puba feature for them was the first time I ever got paid. A year later I was reviewing Erykah Badu's first album for Rolling Stone. Three years later I was the music editor of Vibe. In 2004 I published my first book, sort of a memoir of my relationship to hiphop, including interviews with Russell Simmons, KRS-One, ?uestlove and Afrika Bambaataa.
MML's work can be viewed at www.furthermucker.com and he tweets @futhermucker.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Welcome Friends
Firstly, The Nineties Hip-Hop Issue is on sale right now in Dublin City at Trout Records (George's Street Arcade), All City (Crow Street, Temple Bar), The Record, Art & Game Emporium (Fade Street),
The Winding Stair Bookshop (Lower Ormond Quay) and Blind Tiger Collective (South William Street). Anywhere else in the world it's available via mail order. There's also more background information on the issue via the editor's own blog. Back issues are also available and, for a limited time only, we've a good deal in bundle packs which you can check out here.
There's more info about the magazine itself on our About Us page and we're pretty active on Facebook and Twitter so be sure to check us out there and join in the fun.
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