Trying to explain what música ranchera is to non-Mexicans reminds me of the apocryphal quote attributed to–take your pick–Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington, when someone asked what jazz is. Ranchera ...

Go ahead, call us a bunch of culture-less, lily-white suburbanites with a partiality to flip-flops and right-wing politics. Those kind of labels never cease to amuse us. Because one thing that ...

At the end of October, The Orange County Register did what any Southern California media outlet looking for an easy Halloween story does: send a reporter to Black Star Canyon. The remote site, reached ...

Dwight Manley: The Brea King? Illustration by Paul Nagel. Photo by Federico Medina. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, once a young apprentice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and who later ran “Rainbow ...

The guy is drunk. Obviously drunk. Shitfaced. Instead of joining the 10-person line politely waiting to use the men's room at Disney California Adventure, the twentysomething in an oversized T-shirt ...

If you want to see how rising sea levels will change Orange County over the course of this century, you have to go to Balboa Island. For much of the 19th century, what we now call Balboa Island was ...

In 1952 or 1954 (depending on who’s telling the tale), Bert Grimm bought a business located at 22 Chestnut Place in Long Beach, on the corner of Chestnut and Ocean Boulevard. The small square space on ...

One of the best parts about buying a physical album (if you still do that sort of thing) is the album cover art. And if you're a metalhead or crusty punker, the more brutal and bloody it is, the ...

In early 2018, the Orange County Board of Supervisors evicted the homeless from tents along the Santa Ana Riverbed, only to realize there was no place to relocate them. In March, the board voted ...

It’s no secret that heavy metal music can be a bit morbid and macabre. Heavy metal artists have never been afraid to musically confront mortality, pain, suffering and other grim topics by creating ...

Talk to some people (we guess), and they'll tell you that '90s nostalgia is the only kind of nostalgia that matters. But let's be honest: Within the '90s-rock spectrum, as far as quality is concerned, ...

The demon inside Rikk Agnew is the kind punks pay to see. Screeching feedback jolts through his body, provoking a maniacal grin. His black eyes bulge as he stabs at his guitar strings, his jaw ...