FRIDAY 9/16

TOO $HORT

10 p.m. Revolution. $35-$250.

Maybe now that he’s in the valedictory stage of his career, Too $hort isn’t worried about pulling the curtain back. “You’re not gonna come to my house at 7 in the morning, when I wake up, and it’s like 15 girls laying over the couches and stuff. It’s not like that,” he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal this week. “Most songs are not true. They’re just meant to be entertaining.” The truth sometimes hurts. A prostitute cussed out the pioneering West Coast rapper, who built his career on lascivious songs like “I’m a Player” and “Freaky Tales,” after he told her he wasn’t really a pimp. “It was disturbing to her,” he told the Review-Journal. “But that’s what makes artistry good, is you make it believable.” More confessions from $hort Dawg, who turned 50 this year and is celebrating 30 years rapping: A lot of his songs sound alike on purpose. He told Complex in 2012 that he admired how funk groups like Parliament and Ohio Players often revisited music with small changes. “I liked that technique, so I brought it into hip-hop. … Like if you [use] something like a certain drum kit [that] makes some certain sounds and you use a bass guitar or you use some kind of keyboard and you make a hit record with it, go back and use those same instruments, change the notes, and make another fucking hit. People like that sound.” LM

Advertisement

FRIDAY 9/16

PAPERCUTS

7 p.m. Dunbar Garden. $3-$5 suggested donation.

The heyday of DIY zine culture in Central Arkansas is difficult to pin down. Was it the advent of Towncraft-era punk zines like Fluke, Lighten Up! and Eyepoke that helped mobilize the punk and art scenes of the early 1990s? Or does it span the long-running tenure of Mary Chamberlain’s independent literature distributor Tree of Knowledge, which, as Microcosm Publishing’s Joe Biel states in his book “Good Trouble,” served — and still serves — as a “mail-order house filled with all kinds of literary and iconographic artifacts with punk roots or touchstones?” Whether its heyday lies in the past or the yet-to-come end on the temporal spectrum, Papercuts will give visitors a pretty good idea of where the scene stands now. Billed as the “4th annual All Ages Small Press/Self-Published Zine and Mini-Comix Shindigthinggy,” the event features cut-and-paste masterpieces for sale, trade, and even a few for free from the area’s zine community. Nonliterary sustenance includes food from Southern Salt Food Co., draft beer made from hops grown in the adjacent Dunbar Garden, and live performances from Fayetteville’s Nite Pup and William Blackart, the Russellville spinner of sad songs and author of a lovely zine himself, “Good Night World,” whose spines are made of deconstructed cardboard from packages of Busch Light. SS

SATURDAY 9/17

DISCO 3000

9 p.m. Club Sway. $14-$36.

Before things went far south enough to inspire a subpar Macaulay Culkin film, the Limelight Club in New York City was home to Disco 2000, a glittering bacchanalia of naked skin, neon platform shoes and drug-fueled abandon. Inspired by that ’90s “club kid” culture, Little Rock’s House of Avalon has put its own #glitterrock twist on the party and called it Disco 3000, its biggest and most outlandish shindig of the year. Ostensibly, it’s a big dance party, but — and this is made most clear from any Disco 3000 photo gallery online — it’s really a challenge to self-expression through elaborate DIY costumes. The event is met with so much enthusiasm that, unlike other Avalon parties, there are no scheduled performers at Disco 3000; the party itself is the performance. This year, the theme is “subtly about technology, its role in our lives and in the parties we throw,” House of Avalon co-founder Hunter Crenshaw said. “We hand-make all of our costumes to directly correlate with the themes and our personal identities. This year, our costumes are inspired by Renaissance paintings, mixed with digital technology. It’s going to be beautiful.” SS

Advertisement

SATURDAY 9/17

TP AND THE FEEL

9 p.m. South on Main. $15.

The 2016 album “I Am Trap Jazz” by Quincy Watson (known to some as “QNote”) and musical partner Phillip Mouton (known to some as Philly Moo) pushes the definition of hip-hop vintage a bit further back than the days of Eric B & Rakim or De la Soul. It refers to Charlie Parker and especially to Miles Davis’ spoken word interludes, putting beats and loops under improvised saxophone riffs that result in a vibe that’s positively pinot noir, and though their full-band sound leaned slightly more toward straight R&B, it unquestionably informed the new direction the duo is headed. The “T” and the “P” in “TP and the Feel” refer to trombonist Emanuel “Tiko” Brooks and to Mouton; the bop’s filled out by Watson on keyboards, Joshua Stark on drums and Shawn Nelson on bass. The dormant Afterthought Bistro and Bar was home to the band’s sound for years, though members of the group sounded right at home in the Old State House Museum when they peeled out a medley of Sister Rosetta Tharpe hits at a tribute to the pioneer last May. SS

SATURDAY 9/17

WARREN BLUES FESTIVAL

5 p.m. Bradley County Fairgrounds. $1.

Histories of the blues in Arkansas don’t often mention the Southeast Arkansas town of Warren, but according to Greg “Big Papa” Binns, whose grandfather once owned a bakery on the black-owned business street “Catfish Row,” it was home to performances from the likes of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters, BB King and Howlin’ Wolf as a stop on the so-called “Chitlin’ Circuit” that helped kickstart their musical careers in the ’40s and ’50s. To honor that legacy, the Bradley County Fair will host the first-ever Warren Blues Festival, featuring performances from CeDell Davis and Brethren, Lucious Spiller, Zakk and Big Papa Binns, Cameron Kimbrough and The Backyard Players. SS

Advertisement

SATURDAY 9/17-SUNDAY 9/18

FIREHOUSE HOSTEL AND MUSEUM GRAND OPENING CELEBRATION

5 p.m. Sat., noon Sun. Firehouse Hostel and Museum. $5-$28.

In 1892, Little Rock established its first professional fire department, a significant step up from the days of volunteer bucket brigades, and in 1917 built the Spanish Revival-style Fire Station No. 2 in MacArthur Park (then called City Park). That building, long admired by preservationists for its exposed rafters and glazed-brick interior, is now home to the Firehouse Hostel and Museum, a project of the city of Little Rock and Hostelling Arkansas that’s nearly 10 years in the making. The museum shows off firefighting relics like alarms, ladders and a fire pole converted into a bar-height table, and the hostel offers 36 twin-size bunk beds, a communal kitchen, Wi-Fi, free parking and breakfast for guests at $28/night. To inaugurate the hostel, the public’s invited to book a room and stay overnight Saturday evening, when there will be food trucks, a photo booth and live music from Connor Rayburn. Or, come Sunday, Sept. 18, at noon for a tour of the premises and peace-themed arts and crafts to kick off Arkansas Peace Week. To book a bunk, call 501-476-0294 or visit firehousehostel.org. SS

WEDNESDAY 9/21

NATURAL CHILD

9:30 p.m. White Water Tavern. $7.

Divinely inspired by a batch of weed brownies, the members of Natural Child wrote collaboratively for about two years straight, primarily from within one of two minivans, or so they told Paste Magazine. That process yielded a trilogy of earnest rock albums decked out with cuts that are alternately airy and open, as on “Bailando con Lobos” (2014), or reckless and driving, as on the earlier “Laid, Paid, and Strange.” If the tracks on the band’s Sept. 16 release “Okey Dokey” are any indication, the group owns that duality. “Now and Then” channels the straightforward English rock vibe that characterized “Hard In Heaven,” one of two albums the band released in 2012, and “Sure Is Nice” — the track that opens “Okey Dokey” — sounds like it’d be best enjoyed in a mixtape dominated by Canned Heat outtakes, heard from the passenger seat of a Ford Ranger without air conditioning on the way to do something that will result in a sunburn. As a commenter on those previewed tunes so succinctly put it, “These guys make me feel good.” Natural Child’s joined by Bombay Harambee, a local quartet whose lyrics drip with subversion even when they’re downright academic: “Lost all those penny stocks to noblesse oblige/In the interval best clutch your tickets flush.” Rounding out thenight is Faux Ferocious, a Nashville rock quartet whose upcoming release, “Clone the Rubicon,” oozes pathos and bite, as in the deceptively self-assured “Who I Become”: “What’s the matter? You didn’t think I knew? Yeah, we talked and he was cool and relaxed. What’s he got that I don’t got? And is it something I can get?” SS

Advertisement

Be a part of something bigger

As a reader of the Arkansas Times, you know we’re dedicated to bringing you tough, determined, and feisty journalism that holds the powerful accountable. For 50 years, we've been fighting the good fight in Little Rock and beyond – with your support, we can do even more. By becoming a subscriber or donating as little as $1 to our efforts, you'll not only have access to all of our articles, but you'll also be helping us hire more writers to expand our coverage and continue to bring important stories to light. With over 63,000 Facebook followers, 58,000 Twitter followers, 35,000 Arkansas blog followers, and 70,000 daily email blasts, it's clear that our readers value our great journalism. Join us in the fight for truth.

Previous article Is this formal enough, Sen. Boozman? Next article City manager to review LR police car take-home policy