By Freshness Magazine

Along with artist Todd “REAS” James‘ immediate family, hundreds of well-wishers, included fellow artistsSteve “ESPO” Powers, KAWS, Tomokazu “Matsu” Matsuyama, Jose Parla, Eric Elms, Suckadelic, and more packed Gering & Lopez Gallery last evening congratulate Jame’s debut solo exhibition in the U.S. Self-taught, Todd James’ extensive art works crossed across genres and mediums. Best known by his graffiti tag REAS, the New York City-base artist was instrumental at the height of the graffiti culture during the 1980s, which gave raise to other artists like FUTURA, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and more… Later, James’ cartoonish design was translated onto other genres, from The Source magazine’s original logo, cover art for the Beastie Boys, to more recently, a collaboration collection with Stussy. In this, his solo exhibition, titled Make My Burden Lighter, James explored further the fallacy of the so-called “American Life”.  [Read More]

By Adam Rath – NY Press

Before it doled out a fiveshots-for-$10 special designed to lure in passing college kids, Continental hosted some of New York’s most infamous punk shows. From 1991 when the club opened until 2006 when the plug was pulled on live music,The Ramones, Agnostic Front and The Cro- Mags were just some of the seminal local bands to take the dive bar’s stage. Fifteen years after opening the club, though, owner Trigger stopped hosting live shows in favor of pulling in a crowd that would pay for its drinks and enable him to keep the doors open. After more than three years of silence—save the sound that one too many Jaeger shots brings out of a New School freshman—Trigger is bringing music back to Continental for a onenight-only show featuring some of the club’s best-loved alumnus. [Read More]

By Jon Pareles – NY Times

Teddy Pendergrass, the Philadelphia soul singer whose husky, potent baritone was one definition of R&B seduction in the 1970s but whose career was transformed in 1982 when he was severely paralyzed in an auto accident, died on Wednesday night in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 59. [Read More]

By Jon Pareles – NY Times

MY 21st century started in 1998, when I got a new toy. It was the Diamond Rio PMP300, a flimsy plastic gadget the size of a cigarette pack. PMP stood for Portable Music Player. It had a headphone jack, and it played a recently invented digital file format: MPEG-1 Audio Layer Three, or MP3.

The Rio’s 32 megabytes of storage held a dozen songs at passable fidelity. Its sound was clearly inferior to a portable CD player; its capacity was comparable to a cassette or two. But the beauty of it was that it didn’t need any CD or cassette inserted, just digital files — copies of songs — loaded from a computer, to be changed at whim. They might come from albums people owned or borrowed; they might come, even back then, from strangers online. The Recording Industry Association of America sued to have the PMP300 taken off the market and failed — the prelude to a decade of lawsuits trying to corral online music. [Read More]

By Carol Vogel – NY Times

Those moving advertisements atop taxis generally deliver not-so-subtle messages, like which airlines to fly or movies to see, who makes the sexiest blue jeans or the coolest sunglasses.

High art they most certainly are not.

But for the month of January, Show Media, a Las Vegas company that owns about half the cones adorning New York City’s taxis, has decided to give commerce a rest. Instead, roughly 500 cabs will display a different kind of message: artworks by Shirin Neshat, Alex Katz and Yoko Ono. [Read More]

By Andrew Adam Newman – NY Times

ON Hulu, the popular Web site that streams free television shows and other video, users have proved to be perfectly willing to watch short commercials, and a new site is betting that the same willingness will apply to downloading music.

FreeAllMusic.com, which began a test version for invited users on Dec. 22 and plans to open to the public in January, will allow users to download songs, which may be copied and shared — unencumbered, in other words, by digital rights management restrictions.

In return, instead of paying 99 cents a song as on iTunes, users must first watch a 15- to 30-second advertisement. [Read More]

By Jon Caramanica – NY Times

“TIK TOK,” a zippy and salacious celebration of late nights and mornings-after by a new artist named Ke$ha, has spent the last few weeks zooming toward the top of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. Along with “Rapture,” the 1981 hit by Blondie, it’s one of the most successful white-girl rap songs of all time.

Actually, that depends on who you ask.

“TiK ToK” is sung in the chorus and rapped in the verses, enhanced by Auto-Tune in a few places, in keeping with its electro-pop production. There are even a couple of ad-libs by Diddy, and a line that appears to be borrowed from Jermaine Dupri. [Read More]

By Christopher R. Weingarten – The Village Voice

If Spin was right to name “Your Hard Drive” the best album of 2000, we’d like to formally nominate “The Internet” as Most Unforgiving Asshole of the 2000s. As of ’09, bands have an official life span of about nine months dating from the launch of their MySpace pages, thanks to the comically accelerated, DSL-enhanced hype cycle. Faster than you can tweet “Serena Maneesh,” entire genres of music are “discovered” by attention-starved writers; bloggers engage in hilarious slap-fights about who was there first; magazines feel pressured into writing clueless, hackazoid, late-pass trend pieces; bands get elevated to a critical mass of attention they can’t possibly handle; and the phenomenon is promptly abandoned once we find a newer, shinier toy to play with. [Read More]

By Alex Littlefield – Newyork Press

This fall, the 76-year-old artist released Between My Head and the Sky, her first album since 1973, with the Plastic Ono Band, and a release that marked her first time sharing the studio with her son, Sean Lennon. Additionally, 2009 saw Ono drag a pile of awards back to The Dakota, including a Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Biennale, and the release of the Don’t Stop Me EP. If that wasn’t enough, in recent years, Ono has racked up five number-one dance singles. What were you doing all decade?

Alex Littlefield recently got Ono on the phone to see how she managed to make it through 2009 intact. [Read More]