Word: rucker
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...music of Hootie & the Blowfish gets its charge from rock 'n' roll, but it's grounded in the blues. The quartet got together when its members were party-happy students at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. Lead singer Darius Rucker says the band was formed "to make a bit of money, drink a few beers and meet a lot of girls." That was nine years ago. On their major label debut, Cracked Rear View (Atlantic), the band still plays with frat- party swagger -- big, bearish guitar work, brawny drumming -- but Rucker's expressive, doleful vocals reveal an admirably...
There are difficult emotions here. On the sweeping, sorrowful song Let Her Cry, Rucker sings about a relationship on the rocks, ruined by drugs and alcohol. On the mournful Not Even the Trees, grief hangs from his vocals like a shroud as he tells of going home after his mother's death. The album's most powerful moment is Drowning, a song brimming with bewildered outrage. The band is an interracial one -- Rucker is black and his bandmates white -- and the group uses this song to address the illogical, sometimes unfathomable nature of racism. "Why is a rebel flag hanging...
...arrangements and production of the songs on Cracked Rear View are a bit too smooth -- the blues are in the band's soul, and that would have been better reflected by music with a rawer, less processed feel. But on every song, Rucker's vocals are marvelously commanding. Low, rough and charismatic, his voice can convey depths of feeling that would do a true bluesman proud...
...ground swell. Captain Melea Riley, who commands a training battalion including both men and women at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, says, "I have never come across a woman who said she would like to be in a combat infantry unit." Cornum, the bemedaled flight surgeon, now back at Fort Rucker, Alabama, confirms that. "Personally," she says, "I've never met a woman who wanted to be in the infantry...
Much of this, of course, is a cyberpunk pose. As Rucker confesses in his preface, he enjoys reading and thinking about psychedelic drugs but doesn't really like to take them. "To me the political point of being pro- psychedelic," he writes, "is that this means being against consensus reality, which I very strongly am." To some extent, says author Rheingold, cyberpunk is driven by young people trying to come up with a movement they can call their own. As he puts it, "They're tired of all these old geezers talking about how great the '60s were...