Living Colour came out of nowhere in 1988 with the hard-edged funk of ‘Vivid’. ‘Vivid’ cracked mainstream radio and blew up on MTV. For a while it looked like the black rock barrier had been reduced to rubble. Now, as the band celebrates the 25th anniversary of their debut, Vivoscene writer (and longtime fan) Jason Motz re-visits ‘Vivid’ to see what sets it apart from other hard rock albums of the day.

Overlooked, underrated and doing his damndest to keep it that way: such was the mysterious life of Fred Neil, whose songs you probably know, but don’t know that you know. It’s time to remedy all that and celebrate the life of a songwriting genius.

The punk equivalent of Townes Van Zandt, Art Bergmann deserves greater recognition. And people who do not like to rip off society’s scabs need to be forced into Sexual Roulette.

The ‘California’ album by American Music Club is not a Billboard-recognized classic in the halls of rock. Lost amid the hairspray and spandex of those halcyon Bon Jovi days, when George Michael and Debbie Gibson ruled Pop and rap slowly transformed itself into a respectable-and-soon-to-be-profitably-game-changing-genre, American Music Club’s marriage of bleary-eyed country rock and San Fran Soul was doomed to fail… on the charts that is.