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 […]
In just a couple of months, 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 […]
Last night online I tried to think of a bad song about rain, and I couldn’t come up with one, and no one else who tried to come up with one in the Twitter thread could do it either. That’s because rain is a rich topic for songwriters. You can roll it out as melodramatic […]
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 […]
Times get tough, and country music gets tougher. The tumult of the late 1920s is the backdrop for songs of solace by early stars like the Carter Family. Peaceniks and hippies responding to the unrest of the ’60s assumed the trappings of country music to vent in tunes like the Band’s “The Weight” and Crosby, […]
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, […]
Part rapper, part singer, and part heir to the throne of BET Uncut, Ontario hip-hop star Tory Lanez has carved out a unique path to fame that began as an overactive youth bouncing between family in Montreal, Toronto, New York, and Atlanta, then broke big thanks in part to Chixtape, a mixtape series on the […]
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 […]
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 […]
I can’t tell if 645AR is doing a bit or not. The 22-year-old South Bronx rapper writes songs about serious street shit delivered in a high-pitched squeal of a voice, flipping our expectations for how those stories are meant to be told and undercutting their darkness with humor. In January, his breakout song “4 Da […]
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, […]
I didn’t think it was possible to have nostalgia for a city I currently reside in, but reducing travel to the five-block radius around my building has made me miss places and people situated only two or three miles away. I haven’t seen grass in six weeks. I’ve been looking at the same six trees […]
You might know Mike Dean from his work on pivotal Texas rap albums by UGK, the Geto Boys, Z-Ro, and Devin the Dude or from his work as a co-producer, mixer, and masterer for everyone from Kanye West and his G.O.O.D. Music collective to Travis Scott, Frank Ocean, Beyoncé, and Madonna. The Houston native is […]
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 […]
I spent most of my 20s toiling away in supermarkets and minor chain department stores, making just enough money to get to the next week in one piece. (My heart goes out to grocery store employees in hectic public-facing positions during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is draining, often thankless work on a good day; if […]
March has been illuminating. We’re learning what we’re made of and what we can and can’t do without. A pandemic is the rare situation that requires governments and citizens to act in concert in order to ensure each other’s well-being. But we live in a bifurcated nation. One half supposes it can live without the […]
A week is a long time. For a while, I’d forgotten. Time is a blur when there’s people to meet and shows to see and trains and cabs to linger on along the way. With (responsible) people limiting travel to just the most essential jobs and errands, and with (smart) major cities strongly advising against […]
So, Donald Glover did … something this weekend … maybe? At around 4 a.m. on Sunday morning, an hour’s worth of new music appeared on a website called “Donald Glover Presents,” using the same font and titling that accompanied the release of the musician and actor’s Adidas sneaker collaboration last spring. The music streamed on […]
SXSW is canceled. Coachella is delayed. Live Nation and AEG tours are suspended. Broadway is going dark. Some TV talk shows continue, eerily absent their lively studio audiences. Major sporting events are off until further notice. The brisk pace of the coronavirus outbreak is causing chaos in every sector of the entertainment industry. Curbing infections […]
When he first emerged from the depths of the internet, Jay Electronica seemed to be a project about ambition. The enigmatic New Orleans rapper’s origin story, as told in a little late-2000s sketch called “Departure,” takes place in the aftermath of a friend’s murder. He recounts: “Last night, I was across the tracks With Freddie […]
In a week, the ongoing contract dispute between Houston rapper Megan Thee Stallion and 1501 Certified Entertainment, the Texas indie record label that signed her in 2018, has rapidly devolved into one of the most lurid rap-label tiffs in recent memory. On Sunday, Megan told fans that 1501 was attempting to block the release of […]
In a certain world, you could sum up the mid-’90s with Stephen Malkmus, crying while drinking a martini, singing Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh. Malkmus’s group, Pavement, is still one of the great examples of what was thought possible with guitars and irony at the dawn of the internet. Decades later, we caught up with the joke, and […]
It’s the year 2020 and the prodigal Dixie Chicks have finally returned, no thanks to George W. Bush and his ilk. Their new Jack Antonoff-produced single and music video, “Gaslighter,” dropped today, ahead of the May release of Gaslighter, the first new Chicks album in 14 years. Naturally, we have a landslide of feelings about […]
I’ve been playing Bayonetta a bunch this month. …How to even describe it? You’re a gun-wielding witch who awakens from a several-hundred-year slumber stripped of your memories but not your weaponry. You tear through a sepia-toned landscape causing all kinds of psychedelic gore, I guess to restore the balance between light and darkness, or whatever. […]
The first time I saw King Krule, performing at an event for the now-defunct College Media Journal Music Marathon in New York hosted by the Fader in 2011, he seemed an excited and preternaturally talented teen guitar wiz on the rise. The then–17-year-old singer-songwriter, just weeks out from his first good marks at indie publications […]
Grimes is the archetypal modern internet citizen. She’s heard all the right records. She’s seen all the right films. She has great taste in video games and anime. She reads a lot and studies language and history. She has lofty ideas about where tech is headed. She got serious about wokeness and poptimism early on, […]
Best Coast’s last album, 2015’s California Nights, was the ultimate Best Coast album: crisp, guitar-driven music about love and getting high in California. But when a journalist recently asked front woman Bethany Cosentino how many songs on her band’s new album, Always Tomorrow, were about California, she recalls having to break the news that, this […]
Five years is an eternity. In the fictional Earth of David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, it was enough time for the entire planet to die. Here on Earth Prime, it has been enough time for everything to go kind of awry, for hurricanes, wildfires, diseases, and […]
Backlash, as a very abrupt kind of motion, is governed by the laws of Sir Isaac Newton. Action begets reaction in equal measure. The action on Billie Eilish has been intense this year. She swept all the major categories at the Grammys last week on the strength of her debut When We All Fall Asleep […]