The weight of history hangs heavy in Muscle Shoals. Not many towns as tiny as this Northern Alabama burg have such a strong connection with celebrity past, and the result is that Muscle Shoals’ national identity has been almost completely consumed by events that occurred there many decades ago. I refer, of course, to the legendary music that was created in the Shoals in the 1960s by Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Wilson Pickett, The Allman Brothers, Otis Redding, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Etta James and countless others at FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound Studio.

The hip-hop community is at war. I’m not talking about the East Coast vs. West Coast battle that resulted in the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. The war I speak of isn’t a war of egos and guns, fought with real hardware and ending in all-too-real results. The war I mean is a skirmish between ideologies, but the outcome is just as important, and the stakes are the very identity of hip-hop itself.

Fire is fascinating. Even if you are terrified by fire, it holds you in some amount of awe.

As we approach the one-month anniversary of the devastating storms of April 27, many victims are still struggling to recover from the damage done to their personal property and emotional well-being.

Alright, I know we’ve really been hammering the Secret Stages peg over here at Birmingham Weekly, but it’s only because in addition to being media sponsors of the festival, three of us are founding organizers of the thing.

Everyone knows that the music industry is changing forever. Faced with emerging technology that makes the traditional model of record production obsolete, the entire business is undergoing a public soul-searching as well as a mad scramble to be the first to stumble on a new model that makes sense (and money) in the internet age.

We are a little less than a month out from Secret Stages, Birmingham’s newest music festival, which will be held May 13 and 14 in the heart of the loft district.

We all have stories. We hold them close, for stories are the most potent form that memory can take. We carry them around with us, carefully polishing and honing them in the telling and re-telling, until they become integral parts of our identity.

At this point, I think it’s pretty clear that I think graffiti is art. We’ve featured Birmingham graffiti in our SEEN section and on our cover on more than one occasion, and in an artistic context. What wasn’t clear to me until recently, however, was that the status of graffiti as art was in question at all.

If you haven’t heard, the state tourism board has dubbed 2011 the “Year of Alabama Music”, and it certainly seems as if their timing was right. The pall that fell around the music scene in Birmingham after the messy demise of City Stages has apparently lifted. There is a flood of music-related events happening or being planned in Alabama right now, many of which are in their first or second years.