News

Drag City types love all the fan mail you folks send in on a daily basis; it's our mission to ignore more pressing matters and respond to each and every letter received in timely fashion, gold pens in hand. Sure, we're used to the blood-scrawl of many an inmate, and always pass each of those tear-jerkers on to the artist to which they're directed. Most exciting are the letters full of mystery and intrigue to which we're obligated to investigate. Below is an excerpt from... (read more)

Tomorrow evening Bill Callahan will make his Lincoln Center debut as a part of the Center’s American Songbook series. It’s pretty pretentious - I'm sure you've seen it on TV. Somebody performs your song while you sit up in the mezzanine with a smile plastered on your face, trying to live through the moment with a medal rainbow-strapped around your neck. It's a good moment for mom, but for the rest of us...

Oh, wait, that's the Kennedy Center Honors, right! No, no - this... (read more)

For those of you who were born yesterday, it's hard to talk about 2001 without choking a bit. You know, when Y2K killed everyone and all their stuff, things were nuts, dude. We were eating dog food, drinking science water, making up sign language to indicate how high we were, reading the words in magazines, asking strangers for the time – just nuts. Then Damon & Naomi with Ghost called (on what you call a "land line") and they were all like “we made an... (read more)

Go go go to the chocolate city! Or let the one and only Jennifer Herrema take you there via the virtual world of You Tube with this intoxicateding version of the celebrity video playlist. Taking inspiration from the badass streets of SE Washington DC where this Black Bananas-frontin’ femme fatale first got her Rad Times rolling (and learned a thing or two about knife fights and double-compound swear words), Jenny Bananas put together a string of videos that totes pass the mustard. With... (read more)

New albums out, shit. Hey, we love 'em, but let's be honest — a new release is just the same as any other release, it just sits in a record store waiting for it's own peculiar kind of magic to occur. Or, okay, right — on a website, waiting for your to download and upload and digitally loose its (reduced) magic. But a new release plus a show? Now that's something a little more real. The new music is represented in a place that is... (read more)

It's a wide world of song that we're living in, if you can really call what "we" do living. Actually, "we" need more living in our lives - so open your eyes and ears to the endlessness of song and vision and everything else that's available to your five senses! Who knows what's going out there until you check, you know? Like, case in point - the residents of Sydney, Australia probably wouldn't imagine while looking up at the high rises that a certain celestial... (read more)

Tomorrow night the famed Music Box Theater will host an evening of entertainment that will rival the glamour of the ice capades and the excitement of Vietnam-era USO shows. The Chicago premier of Dragonslayer starts at 7pm with live music from Bitchin Bajas, visual accompaniment from Olivia Wyatt and a rock and roll appearance from Mayor Daley.

We’ve been talking about it for months as the SXSW/Hot Docs hit has been travelin the country, making waves and leaving names in a trail of... (read more)

The organic movement is finally real! It brings us a caffeinated surge of pleasure to introduce to you the first-ever (and only) Bonnie Prince-certified organic coffee. Up until now there were rules and rules about how to get a product certified organic, but standards are for the birds. And Bonny eats birds for breakfast. With coffee, goddamn.

Along his travels Bonny some how managed to find himself on the island of Hawaii and met up with the Kona Coffee people. After rigorous experiments with... (read more)

People everywhere are always asking us, "what's up with J-New? Has she made a new record? Will she play my birthday party?" All the time! Sometimes when we're in the john, cuddled up to the urinal, and we hear "Do you know Joanna...?" So often, we leave people hanging. But not today! Come on, ask us! No, she won't play your birthday party, but we can safely report: Joanna Newsom did ACL and tore that shit up right good! No, not that ACL,... (read more)

The internet creeps hard sometimes. Usually the trash that floats into our inbox sticks to the standard, semi-personalized ads for sex written by ESL students. But after a few glasses of Tang and Purple on Time. at full volume, the poetry in these messages start to appear like ghosts in a samurai movie, hippies in the sunshine or, so we’re told, pirate ships in a magic eye poster. Spam is the new outsider art, man, coming to a contemporary art museum near you any day... (read more)