Ted Niceley News Today

As frontman of Razz, Mr. Reidy shocked audiences and reshaped the D.C.-area music scene in the 1970s.

Girls Against Boys is the crucial and criminally under-appreciated link between 90s alternative rock and the 2000s post-punk boom. Freak*on*Ica plays well in these times.

Mick Jones for a proposed Alternative Press piece on punk’s original guitar heroes. Though it remains unpublished, I asked in the course of it what he thought of Rancid. Jones waxed effusive, noting he’d met the Berkeley punk traditionalists in the course of a U.S. Big Audio Dynamite tour, impressed with how hands-on and DIY they were in the running of the band, down to storyboarding their own videos. I smirked. “You’re being considerably generous, considering many cynics think Rancid ...

What propelled Nirvana out of the underground into stores monitored by SoundScan wasn’t Butch Vig’s glossy, radio-friendly production. It wasn’t even Samuel Bayer’s visually catchy “Smells Like Teen Spirit” MTV video, with the band, moshing fans and anarchy-symbol-wearing varsity cheerleaders disrupting a high school pep rally. It was Kurt Cobain’s ‘60s-pop-radio-bred compositional smarts, which sliced through the wall-of-filth guitars like a chainsaw aimed at a stack of Kleen...