Word: scottishly
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Whether climbing Alaskan glaciers or guiding Teddy Roosevelt through Yosemite National Park, left, Scottish-born John Muir saw wilderness as something quasi-spiritual, where "tired, nerve-shaken, overcivilized people" could find renewal. As a nature writer and the Sierra Club's founding president, he argued eloquently for preservation, as when he battled to save Yosemite's beautiful Hetch Hetchy Valley--you might "as well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches," he fumed. Muir lost, yet his words still echo with each new threat to wild places...
...including Busta Rhymes, Pete Rock and DJ Premier of Gang Starr, stick successfully with old-school beats. Unfortunately, the couple of tracks produced by Shok from the Ruff Ryders are less effective: one titled "Do the Ladies Run This" is marred by a bagpipe-like synthesizer instrumentation. Resemblances to Scottish folk tunes aside, Dirty Harriet is an outstanding album that welcomes Rah Digga to the ranks of hip-hop's elite. The album's title is a direct reference to abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman: let's hope that Rah Digga's debut guides a new breed of female rappers...
American music writers may instinctively dash off Radiohead comparisons with any British rock band with intelligent lyrics, but Scottish indie rock band Travis are far too important, both commercially (2 million UK copies sold, which to put in perspective is almost one-and-a-half times what Britney Spears sold over there) and artistically (Brit Award winners) to be analyzed merely by comparison. Perhaps the best rock album of 1999, The Man Who's sold the world over, and it finally receives a belated American release just in time to support the band's current tour with Oasis...
...London-based Scottish rock band Travis makes music that sounds like the sound track to a troubled sleep. On this satisfying new album, its songs are gentle but insistent, melancholic but always melodious. At times the band comes off like a more polite, slightly less experimental version of the art-rock band Radiohead. Although the majority of the tracks on this CD--including the mellow Driftwood, the mopey Why Does It Always Rain on Me?--are quiet and introspective, Travis never comes across as wimpy or insubstantial...
...more trivial but nonetheless troublesome note, some of the actors' thick Scottish accents posed yet another barrier between the audience and the performers, most notably with Barbs. This obstacle to communication is especially lamentable considering the intimate nature of the Boston Center for the Arts, a small theater where even the worst seating guarantees proximity with the action on stage...