Stan wars raged out of control in May. Taylor Swift fans tried to cancel Burger King for a tweet poking fun at her songs about ex-boyfriends. Barbz called for Usher’s head when he downplayed the prospect of a Verzuz battle between Nicki Minaj and Lil’ Kim, calling the Young Money chart-topper a “product” of the […]
It’s hard to picture Rihanna in 2020 without her multiple crowns: wealthiest female musician, one of the world’s best-selling artists, a multi-hyphenate businesswoman, the first woman of color to lead a luxury fashion house under LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. But in 2005, she was just a tenacious, unknown 17-year-old from the left side of […]
Doja Cat’s wigs may have gotten their lives together, but the eccentric, unfiltered rapper-slash-singer has never once given up her unruly ways. The nascent 24-year-old star has been stirring up trouble long before she went viral with 2018’s “Mooo! (Bitch, I’m a Cow),” and her latest scandal probably won’t be her last. While videos and […]
Skate culture caught fire in the ’70s thanks to crafty Cali kids turning empty pools into hangout spots and linking with the satellite network of photographers, manufacturers, and builders responsible for creating the early skateparks and founding the first magazines. In the ’80s, films like Thrashin’ and Gleaming the Cube made messy attempts to bring […]
Tame Impala makes music about learning to adapt to life’s changes. In a decade, the psychedelic rock torchbearer and musical flagship of Perth, Australia, polymath Kevin Parker blossomed from renown at home and among indie-rock fans in the know to its current status as one of the Western world’s must-see festival closers, adored by hip-hop […]
Mike Hadreas didn’t listen to show tunes before he became stuck at home. Lately, though, the musician has started his days quarantining in Los Angeles by listening to Sinead O’Connor’s cover of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” from the musical Evita. “There’s something satisfying to it to me right now, because I’m stuck here but […]
El-P, our resident rap doomsayer, warned us that everything was going to shit long before it got there. As a solo artist, a producer, a member of the rap groups Company Flow and now Run the Jewels, and the former head of the venerable hip-hop label Def Jux, El-P, born Jaime Meline, built a sturdy […]
Hip-hop lost a visionary thinker and a lifelong tastemaker over the weekend in the late Andre Harrell, founder of the seminal hip-hop label Uptown Records, home to a number of the architects of the new-jack-swing revolution of the ’80s and ’90s and an integral stepping stone for black music icons like Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, […]
Charli XCX is levitating a couple of feet over a DJ booth. “My fans like pop music and poppers. Guess they really know what’s uppppp!” she drawls like an automaton with vocal fry. Air horns pierce through the torchlit rave dungeon. As she reaches the chorus of a new demo she’s calling “Gen- eration,” the […]
Pioneering, flamboyant, eccentric — Little Richard was all these things, and then some. And just as his anarchic performances suggested, the late legend was just as wild away from the piano, living a life full of sex, drugs, spirituality, generosity, sex, bravado, kindness, and some more sex. The immediate outpouring following his May 9 death […]
As the planet reels in anxiety and grief, Matty Healy sounds surprisingly calm, almost as if he’d expected this, or certainly hadn’t been entirely surprised by it. “It is a very, very odd time,” he says over the phone from the recording studio in the English countryside where he’s been quarantining with the drummer-producer George […]
The rise of Instagram Live as a stopgap entertainment hub for people whose nighttime meeting grounds are shuttered indefinitely was the first sign that the quarantine couldn’t completely quash plans for spring music, even in the absence of live events in the traditional sense. Over the past month, Minecraft has hosted festivals featuring performances from […]
Imagine sitting next to Little Richard at a dinner party: I remember one night, we had this wonderful orgy going. It was one of the best I have ever been to. And in the middle of this orgy, that was fantastic, somebody knocked on my door. I said: ‘Just a moment! This is an orgy!’ […]
The 6ix9ine saga jumped through the looking glass last fall when he escaped federal racketeering and firearm charges by pleading guilty and appearing as the star witness for the prosecution during the trial against the Nine Trey Bloods — the set he shouted out throughout his meteoric rise to rap stardom, fueled by the thunderous […]
Earlier this March, Kehlani was scheduled to meet with her record label. She was preparing to put out her second album — her first since having a baby and a return to her R&B roots. There was a plan to open on Justin Bieber’s Changes tour, along with a number of dreamy solo dates. Executives […]
When Hayley Williams started the pop-punk group Paramore at 15, all she wanted was to be in a band with her best guy friends. And for a while, that’s what she did. But as she grew into an icon for emo kids, touring worldwide and releasing platinum albums with her band, Paramore was disintegrating. The […]
Drake is the patron saint of passive aggression. You burn his candle when you’ve been wronged, when you’ve been dumped, when you feel like you get more attention for mistakes than accomplishments. In exchange for your devotion, he gives you protection against the hordes of doubters and haters, real or imagined, that stand in the […]
What’s Beyoncé’s Finsta? She’s been too quiet on main. She’s only popped up on Instagram a few times this year, to show off her New Years fits, to honor Kobe and Gianna Bryant, to advertise her Ivy Park line, to plug Kelly Rowland’s latest single, to catch fans up on her Disney Family Singalong spot, […]
Even as states around the country begin to reopen, it looks like it will take some time until things are totally back to normal in the entertainment industry. Events and concerts are continuing to get canceled, so if you had plans for an outdoor festival or Broadway play this summer, make sure to check your […]
When John Prine lost his life to complications from COVID-19 on April 7, he went quickly — almost overnight. His wife and manager, Fiona, had contracted the disease in March following a European tour, but won her fight. Prine was hospitalized in intensive care for 13 days, but it seemed like the 73-year-old was going […]
When bad things happen, concerts usually follow. After 9/11, there was America: A Tribute to Heroes and the Concert for New York. After Hurricane Katrina, the major TV networks broadcast A Concert for Hurricane Relief, an event famous for Kanye West’s declaration that, “George W. Bush doesn’t care about black people,” and Shelter for the […]
In just a month, Swizz Beatz and Timbaland’s Verzuz beat battle series has grown from a novel event bridging hip-hop’s past and present into uplifting excitement in our indoor spring, joining DJ sessions by D-Nice, Questlove, and others as well as Ontario artist Tory Lanez’s unpredictable Quarantine Radio series as the must-see remote-but-live viewing for […]
No one likes coffee more than Chelsea Peretti. David Lynch comes close, but only Peretti could have written the ridiculous banger “Coffee Crankin’ Thru My Sys” from her podcast, Call Chelsea Peretti. Eight years after that musical debut, and one year after leaving Brooklyn Nine-Nine where she played Gina Linetti, Peretti has matured as a […]
Fiona Apple FaceTimes me on a recent Friday afternoon from a bright-pink futon inside her Venice Beach home, her hair in a long braid, wearing giant headphones, a cozy green sweatshirt, and no makeup. The first thing she says is that she’s nervous. “I’m like, Oh, shit,” she says, laughing. Her nerves are understandable. Apple, […]
Fetch the Bolt Cutters is like nothing Fiona Apple has done before, but the album is still recognizable as something only she could create. It’s purposefully unvarnished, a raw export from the inside of her brain: Her voice stretches and loops, morphing into Vipassana chants and spooky, surreal yelps; in the middle of one song, […]
It is possible to be born too early for the world to develop a language to understand the way that you move, and to be made to feel, throughout your formative years, like the difference between you and everyone else is a crime that warrants punitive action, an errant behavior or belief system you must […]
We talk about death every day now. It’s in the air. It’s on the ground. It’s waiting on the other end of cell phones buzzing in the wee, small hours. It’s peering back at us through laptop screens. It’s wafting into windows on sirens punctuating silent nights, slicing through our illusion of calm as steel […]
It was the dog-end days of the 1960s. Psychedelia still hung like a haze in the air; Altamont’s bad taste lingered with it. Dylan was doing who knows what, the Beatles had broken up. The Black Panthers were both preparing for war and being entertained in Leonard Bernstein’s Park Avenue apartment. Four students were gunned […]
By the time it ended last year, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend had gifted 157 songs to the world. A lot of the musical credit goes to Grammy- and Emmy-winning composer, songwriter, and producer Adam Schlesinger, who died on April 1 at age 52 from complications of COVID-19. Schlesinger collaborated on all of the show’s memorable songs with […]
Many of the notable hip-hop, soul, jazz, and funk records of the last decade and a half share a common fingerprint. The nexus joining the intricate grooves of Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. and To Pimp a Butterfly, Kamasi Washington’s Heaven and Earth and The Epic, Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah diptych, Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, and records […]