Free Republic

Big Boi isn't indie. Or is he? As one-half of the rap duo OutKast, he has sold some 18 million albums, won six Grammy Awards and appeared on more hit songs than even he can keep track of. Yet there he was on July 18 at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, playing alongside bands only a fraction as successful. As thousands of writhing, fist-pumping fans swarmed the main stage and climbed on top of fences to get a look at the hip-hop megastar, thousands more were across the park, stomping and dancing to the largely unknown noise-pop act Sleigh...

It seems to me that there’s money to be made for some young, enterprising, conservative musician. There aren’t really any conservative indie/alternative bands, but there are plenty of conservatives who like that kind of music. Can you imagine how they’d rally around a band who was outwardly conservative. And if Rush Limbaugh told his listeners about that band? They’d be millionaires overnight. Same, though less so, for a liberal country band. By the nature of the art form, there are more liberal musicians, in general, than conservative. But country still doesn’t have too many successful liberal acts (minus the Dixie...

WASHINGTON - A conservative independent group that ran millions of dollars in ads against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 will pay $750,000 to settle charges that it violated federal campaign laws. The penalty, announced by the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday, is the third largest in the history of the commission, which regulates election money. The FEC's six commissioners approved the settlement unanimously. The group, Progress for America Voter Fund, raised nearly $45 million in 2004, making it the best financed Republican-oriented group in that campaign. The FEC said that it "failed to register and file disclosure reports...

Another of the lower profile independent films shot in the high desert has resurfaced, premiering earlier this month at New York's Tribeca Film Festival. "Paris," a noir-style romantic thriller directed by Ramin Niami, was filmed partially in Pearblossom and other Antelope Valley locales in October 2001. The digitally shot production starring Chad Allen and Bai Ling was in town for about a week at the Pearblossom Motel, a trailer park on Sierra Highway and a few desert roads. The film competed at the Tribeca fest with four other entries in the narrative feature category for first and second-time filmmakers. Unfortunately,...