Books & music

  • Canadian punk veterans DOA hit Australia one last time

    Veteran Canadian punk band DOA have set sail for Australia for one final tour this month. Formed in 1978, Henry Rollins described the band as “live they were monumental, change your life, blow away time … They came to town and we were like WOW!”

  • Iron Reagan dance on the Gipper's grave

    Radical punk-metal supergroup Iron Reagan have just released a free 13-track EP and are now playing it live across the US. Vocalist Tony Foresta and drummer Ryan Parrish answered some questions for Green Left Weekly's Mat Ward while they were driving to Dallas.

  • Aisha Fukushima brings politics back to rap

    Travelling the world is a big enough challenge for most people, but Aisha Fukushima also managed to make a politically-charged hip-hop album while she did it. Green Left Weekly's Mat Ward spoke to the California-based "rap activist".

  • Rapper Mau Power has the power to make change

    Mau Power's new album takes listeners through the big changes in his life - and the first of those came when he was jailed. "In 2001, I got incarcerated," the Torres Strait Islands rapper tells Green Left Weekly.

  • The romantics’ claws that may tear Pyne's vision -- investigating Shelley and Austen

    Sense & Sensibility, an Annotated Edition By Jane Austen (edited by Patricia Meyer Spacks) Harvard University Press 2013 448 pp, $54.95 The Annotated Frankenstein By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (edited by Susan J. Wolfson & Ronald Levao) Harvard University Press 2012 400pp., $45.00 In January, federal education minister Christopher Pyne announced that he wants the national school history curriculum to recognise “the legacy of Western civilisation”.

  • M.I.A. gives fresh answers to big questions

    The arrival of a new M.I.A. album is always a thing to behold. Music critics are sure to be polarised, as are the usually ham-fisted attempts to better categorise her work to make it less controversial than it is. Snide remarks about her latest, Matangi, however, have been relatively muted in the months since its release.

  • Hip-hop activist shows rap's power to politicise

    The politics in early hip-hop music inspired Solomon Comissiong to become an activist, author, lecturer and film-maker. Green Left Weekly's Mat Ward spoke to him about his work, which uses rap music as a tool to educate and organise.

  • Rebel Diaz rap about activists' 'radical dilemma'

    Rebel Diaz's much-anticipated debut album tackles a quandary faced by many activists - the "radical dilemma" of trying to change the system while being trapped in it. Green Left Weekly's Mat Ward spoke to the Bronx-based activist rap duo, made up of brothers RodStarz and G1.

  • Grindcore pioneers Nausea condemn a sick system

    Seminal grindcore band Nausea released a genre-defining album in 1989's World Downfall. A quarter of a century on, they have put out its critically-acclaimed follow-up, Condemned To The System, helped by the production skills of new bassist Alejandro Corredor. Green Left Weekly's Mat Ward spoke to Corredor about the tracks on the Los Angeles-based band's new album and his past in the Latin American hardcore scene.