It List: Thursday

RZA/Stone Mecca (The Palladium): RZA with Stone Mecca: Ok, so I really shouldn't have to say anything about RZA to get you to go to this, and he really shouldn't have to do anything to cement his status as an icon. He produced Wu Tang's debut 36 Chambers, an indisputable, paradigm shifting revolution in hip hop, as well as the vast majority of anything else ever released by Wu Tang or any related solo project that is worth your time or trouble. Oh, and he also had a hand in producing that forgotten little gem known as the Gravediggaz. The thing that was so great about Wu Tang was that they were artisitically adventurous, musically challenging and always relevant in a "thinking man's hip hop" sense while remaining decidedly street (i.e. violent, dark and a little insane), preventing asshole middle aged white liberals from using them as a prop for their purported images as people who are "open to hip hop culture." I hope all this provides more than sufficient motivation to go to this show, but it should also be noted that RZA will be performing as his thugged out space funk loving alter ego Bobby Digital, who will apparently start in an uncoming film that will coincide with the release of the first new Bobby Digital album since 2001's slightly disappointing Digital Bullet, which is an album I forgot I used to own until a few seconds ago. Extra credit is due for the killer artwork by the legendary Bill Sienkiewicz on that Bobby Digital debut.

Weird Weeds/Shiny Around The Edges/Fight Bite/Verulf (Rubber Gloves): Weird Weeds' desolately expansive songs and creaky, scraping performance style makes them a perfect fit with Shiny Around The Edges, as they are two groups that often sound improvised but are predominantly premeditated. Fight Bite is a band we first discovered on a corporate news weekly's blog, one month after we wrote about them, and only to find that we had been misspelling their name as "Fight Bite." Are local music writers paid by the mistake?

Gretel/Sarah Jaffe/Doug Burr (Dan's Silverleaf)

Ringo Deathstarr/Street Hassle/Salim Nourallah (Club Dada)