rakemag

When it comes to sketch comedy on the tube, Saturday Night Live has long hogged the limelight (Mad TV is actually edgier and funnier these days), while no one would argue the canonical importance of the Pythons (they’d dissolved before the current cast of SNL was even born). But of the three greatest sketch comedy … Read more

A delightful throwback to the great TV detective shows of the 1970s like Columbo, Monk has inspired a great deal of affection in our mystery-loving Rakish hearts. Quite simply, a very clever show, in terms of both the creatively offbeat, yet solvable crimes (like the skydiver who somehow drowns in midair), and the quirky nature … Read more

Oddly enough, this foul-mouthed, taboo-smashing sendup of racism in Westerns, co-written by Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor, made more money than any real Western ever did—which must have set John Ford spinning in his grave. Brooks shows he’s not above tooting his own horn by noting in an interview on the DVD that the infamous … Read more

Mozzer’s post-Smiths solo work grew steadily less compelling through the nineties, so much so that while our fickle fanboy hearts wanted to sanctify Stephen Patrick Morrissey in 1986, by 2004 we were unaware that he hadn’t released anything for seven years. If you can make a sliding scale out of that timeline, we feel pretty … Read more

What’s this fuss over Avril Lavigne and the second coming of Alanis Morrisette? PJ Harvey can eat them both for lunch, and have Fiona Apple for dessert. The cover of her seventh album, Uh Huh Her, shows the scrawny but unstoppable seductress in the passenger seat of a car whose pudgy driver obviously doesn’t know … Read more

Ah, summer! Like the lilacs (but without the nagging allergies), Wilco has blossomed anew from yet another line-up change, after guitarist/keyboardist Leroy Bach left the group on good terms in late January, just after wrapping up recording for A Ghost is Born. The band’s fifth full-length album and follow-up to 2002’s career-defining Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, … Read more

If Phil Spector could produce the Ramones, why can’t Jack White, garage-rock hero of the White Stripes, take a whack at spinning the studio dials for honky-tonk goddess Loretta Lynn? No good reason at all, and Van Lear Rose, which White both produced and arranged, proves that opposites can indeed attract beautiful music. The most … Read more

When the hippest art museum in town throws a concert in a sculpture garden under the summer sun we have only one option: Rejoice. If you’re going through Walker withdrawal, this year’s Rock the Garden street party will be therapeutic as an event where the “without walls” concept is in full effect. For the last … Read more

Come for the scat, stay for the ballads. And be taken in by one of the most confident voices in modern jazz singing everything from Brazilian bossa nova to seventies soft rock à la Cat Stevens. While specializing in a Midwestern mix of blues, folk and pop, the versatile Allyson also borrows from genres the … Read more

One of these days, k.d. lang is going to run out of musical forms to conquer. Her latest success is as a vocalist working with America’s top symphonies; this month, she’ll do a one-night stand with the tuxedoed Minnesota Orchestra, not one of whose members lower-case their initials. After the Orchestra struts its stuff through … Read more