Author: Ed Johnson

Deep in the bowels of a Southeast Portland home, inside a basement covered with bright wood paneling and filled to the brim with drums, guitars and the detritus of various bands, Red Fang are practicing. Or rather, they were.

Here’s the deal: Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly are two of the best films ever made. So, if you haven’t seen them, please, get yourself the Northwest Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium.

When talking to Sapient, one thing is clear: He takes his music seriously. He repeats, again and again: “This is what I do.”

Hip-hop, a music festival, and the Crystal Ballroom’s 95th birthday this weekend.

I see the best and worst minds of my generation destroyed and ignored by free-range narcissism, MTV fucks and close encounters with video cameras and confessional booths, whose fix is television, or more correctly, celebrity, an all consuming nectar.

The new Notorious B.I.G. biopic, Notorious is a lot like snorting coke off a stripper’s ass.*
At first, it feels pretty good, like it’s the best decision you’ve ever made. Then it’s over, and you realize what you’ve become: a living, breathing, herpes-infested cliché. Also, you feel slightly, er, dirty.

For music obsessives, it’s not enough to just like a band or an album—we want to know every possible detail, every weird story, every near failure and secret triumph.

Music reviewer and Pandaguin cartoonist Ed Johnson guides you through the most advisable music events of the weekend.

Clint Eastwood is clearly troubled by modern America. And in his new film Gran Torino, he growls all about it, to riveting effect.

1. Black Elk, Always a Six, Never a Nine
The loud, angular attack of Black Elk is undeniable, and this newest album shows the band at the top of their noise/metal/rock maxim.

Slums in the Third World are, by nature, tragic places–and Danny Boyle’s new film, Slumdog Millionaire, doesn’t aim to change that essential truth, even as it finds the beauty in its hardscrabble surroundings.