So far, this has already been a pretty good year for hip-hop lovers in the Queen City. Now it’s time to turn back the clock. On Friday, Hip-Hop Hall of Fame Inductee Doug E. Fresh performs at the Town Ballroom as the first performer in the “Celebrity City: Let’s Take It Back To The Old School” series. The Barbados-born Fresh, née Doug E. Davis, is known as the father of beatboxing, the art of imitating drum sounds to form a beat—the backbone of hip-hop. Breaking into the scene in the early 1980s as part of the rap trio Treacherous Three, Fresh has worked with everyone from Kool Moe Dee to Slick Rick. Recently, Fresh has collaborated with such notable hip-hop personalities as Nas and Ludacris. However, hip-hoppers aren’t the only people that can enjoy this fun form of vocal percussion, as it’s been a time-honored school lunchroom tradition. It’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll be in awe of what Fresh can do and leave the show “boom”-ing and “chick”-ing.

Author Samuel R. Delany is known, by and large, as one of the greatest living science fiction writers (the genre’s James Joyce according to Delany scholar David Samuelson). But he’s also much more than that. In the course of writing 34 books, Delany has challenged traditional notions of gender and sexuality, race and class, genre and theory, identity and difference. Besides being awarded four Nebula Awards and two Hugos, the top prizes in science fiction writing, Delany also won the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime’s contribution to Gay and Lesbian Literature. He’s also contributed greatly to African American literature, postmodernism and queer theory, among others. Delany reads tomorrow night at Trinity Episcopal Church in conjunction with a two-day critical symposium on his work hosted by University at Buffalo’s English Department (for complete schedule, visit www.english.buffalo.edu/delany). Lucky for us, he’s as engaging of a reader as he is a writer, easily shifting tonal range to match each character’s voice. The reading will be a homecoming for Delany, who taught at UB from 1999 to 2001.

When you’re counting the great American capitols of Southern Rock a few come immediately to mind: Macon, Ga, Gainesville, Fla. and Portland, Ore. Well, that last Northwestern music mecca might not quite fit the bill. That city is more famous for such underground breakouts as Modest Mouse and the agit-femmepunks Sleater Kinney. The PDX quintet I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch In The House aren’t necessarily looking to change any of that, and they’re not exactly Southern Rock anyway. However, the band’s collision of Americana, heavy electric blues and hardcore punk does bear some resemblance to Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels and the Allmans. The band’s 2005 in concert disc Live At Dante’s hits you hard with its potent power, like a whiskey bottle smashed over the back of your head. On that disc and in concert, Lick Any SOB proves to be a raucous mash-up of styles; part Drive By Truckers, part Willie and The Family and part Silver Bullet Band. And how can you not love a band with a lead guitarist whose name is Flapjack Texas? On Saturday (March 25), I Can Lick Any SOB In The House plays a show with Two Cow Garage and Semi-Tough

Few artists have as much fun undermining Trademark Culture as Jason Forrest, whose 2004 plunderphonic classic The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash skewered Credence Clearwater Revival, the Talking Heads and the Who in a flurry of clicks, cuts and an unlikely punk rock tool: dance floor beats. Originally known as Donna Summer, Forrest rose to fame on the basis of his iconoclastic brand of breakcore culture jamming, only to find his illustrious career cut short when lawyers for the original disco diva caught up with him. Forrest responded with Unrelenting Songs…, the work of a sonic vandal in a musical culture defined by artistic idolatry. Calling his work “cock rock disco,” Forrest revels in paradox, challenging nostalgists to answer the provocations of sample culture while simultaneously bullying airhead disco with big rock riffs. More recently, his entirely original prog-rock dance floor symphonies and his collaboration with avant-gardist David Grubbs prove that scavenging the detritus of others is not his only gift, and that his most subversive effect might be his embrace of an unabashed aesthetic of fun. The similarly fearless Duran Duran Duran and Niagara Falls’ rising IDM star Wisp (Reid Dunn) round out the bill.