1990s

By now, the Wu Tang Clan has become a global brand, their 'W' symbol recognised almost the entire world over. This is inexplicable for many reasons. For starters, their music is about as hardcore as hip hop gets. Take 'Protect Ya Neck' for example. Nine MCs (yes, NINE) rap over what sounds like a home-made cassette and there is not a chorus in sight. However, the song is a stone cold classic that still slaps as hard today as it did when released and somehow became a crossover

"That rug really tied the room together" What happens when you take an abject stoner with no discernible income, skillset or education and throw him into the middle of a Raymond Chandler-eqsue noir thriller? This is the question that the Coen Brothers came to the table with when conceptualising this film. Coming off the back of the critically lauded and quite brilliant 'Fargo' (1996), the Coen Brothers, as they have tended to do throughout their career, followed up a dark cr

"So I was sitting in my cubicle today and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that's on the worst day of my life." Before Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant's 'The Office' there was 'Office Space', one of the first films to satirize the mundane realities of life in an average workplace. At the time of it's creation, Mike Judge was riding high off the ba

Obviously, in this day and age, the subject of Sean "Puffy" Combs, aka Puff Daddy, aka Diddy, is a touchy one. At the time of this writing, he is sitting in county jail awaiting trial on a variety of charges, including assault and sex trafficking (among other things). As a human being, he has always been suspect. Even way back when the east coast / west coast beef was destroying hip hop, famously taking the lives of 2pac and Puffy's best-selling artist The Notorious BIG, if y

To try and categorise the music of Ween is really an exercise in futility. To say their music crosses many genres is a massive understatement - it's more like they fully become a different band with every song, unless we're talking about something like their 1996 release '12 Golden Country Greats' wherein the band go full-on spit and sawdust for an entire album. This genre-bending style culminated, in the opinion of many, in 1997's 'The Mollusk' - widely considered to be thei

“As with everything else in my life, I decided that if we were all going to get through this in one piece, I’d better have a sense of humor.” If you're like me, you may have been made aware of this book because of David Fincher's macabre 2017 TV Series of the same name, which is a faithful adaptation of the account of John E. Douglas - creator of the FBI's Criminal Profiling Program and allegedly the first person to coin the term "serial killer". 

"So I've decided to take my work back underground....to stop it falling into the wrong hands."  Before The Prodigy became a worldwide sensation, with Keith Flint becoming a cyber-punk poster boy and even your granny knowing the lyrics to "Firestarter", there was this: four maniacs from the illegal rave scene in deepest Essex. Their first album ('Experience', 1992) took the rave from the abandoned warehouses and shot it into the mainstream. Their unexpected breakout hits 'C

“Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.” This book came to my attention recently when hearing, of all people, Joe Talbot (lead singer of vicious post-modern punk band IDLES) saying how much of an influence it had been on their work. Considering their music, this was an intriguing concept. Based on the