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 […]
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, […]
For over a decade, Hayley Williams sold gale-force emotional reckoning as the lead singer of Paramore, one of the most successful bands on the forefront of the mainstream emo revolution of the middle aughts. Hard-charging riffs carried her sweeping vocals and incisive lyrics across the country, building the band’s profile through endless touring. Paramore stayed […]
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 […]
For years, CDs have arrived each week by the dozen, their styles, careers, and time periods all competing for my attention. I would get to them all eventually, I told myself — when I was idled or sick or housebound. But in these past weeks, I’ve found I have no appetite for exploration, no urge […]
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, […]
TRL was always a war. Fans of *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys battled for the run of the MTV music video countdown show in its early years, as did fans on opposing sides of the long-simmering (and overhyped) beef between Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Hip-hop heads and nu-metal outcasts rejected the neatness of the mass-marketed […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Talk to a person of a certain age about the state of R&B for long enough, and you’re likely to hear them say the genre’s changed. It isn’t what it used to be. The singers are getting more and more reckless and raunchy. They’re right and wrong. The era that’s spawned songs like Jhené Aiko’s […]
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 […]
The Grammy for Best New Artist is something of a curse. It’s keen on capturing artists in a breakout year but not so good at guessing what happens next. For every good call — like the Beatles winning in 1965, or Mariah Carey in 1991, or Adele in 2009 — there’s another that veers left. […]
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 […]
A lot of rappers say they love anime, but Lil Uzi Vert is the rare artist who deserves a series of his own. The Philly star is short in stature with a massive personality, a shit talker who’s also in touch with his feelings, a sharp dresser with a flair for colorful hair. Like a […]
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 […]
Bad Bunny is cruising down lanes that not too long ago didn’t quite exist. The Puerto Rican singer/rapper has done American late night, Coachella’s main stage, the Super Bowl halftime show, and collaborations with the likes of Drake, Nicki Minaj, and Cardi B without singing in English. Bunny’s 2018 debut X100Pre is a landmark Latin […]
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. […]
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, […]
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 […]
James Bond is Old Hollywood’s last man standing, the rare film franchise from the ’60s that can still do numbers in the 21st century. People will always show up for a meticulous crime thriller, for a hero who never seems to sweat or worry. A character as adept at cheating death as 007 needs a […]
Super Bowl halftime performances can be and often are quite bad. In the early years of the show, you were lucky to get a marching band, a college drill team, a few incongruous movie stars, or some other wholesome business. Carol Channing played twice. The youth educational organization Up with People made four appearances between […]
Fuck with Kesha, and you’re in for the fight of a lifetime. That’s the message of “Tik Tok,” “Die Young,” “Warrior,” and “We R Who We R” — hits about going to war with the night and coming out the victor — and of many of the singer-songwriter’s endeavors since then, including her protracted battle […]
You can’t control your reputation. You think you can by striving to do and be good, but people are hard to win over now, and with good reason. Hucksters are on a powerful tear. No one buys anyone else’s story anymore. Come up too quickly, and you get called a grifter or an “industry plant.” […]
This was always going to be a heavy Grammy ceremony, but there was no way to tell just how heavy it would get. Upheaval at the highest levels of the Recording Academy had muddied the days leading up to the show. On January 16, it was announced that Academy president and CEO Deborah Dugan — […]
Paramore’s journey from the beefy pop-punk of “Emergency” and “That’s What You Get” to the soul and pop-rock moves of “Ain’t It Fun” and “Hard Times” is a surprising turn, but not an unlikely one. You could sort of see a singer with the immense chops of a Hayley Williams not wanting to be confined […]
Over the last year or so, through chance or subconscious ambition or some cosmic provenance, I’ve gotten to speak with a number of people who knew and worked with Mac Miller in his lifetime. They all give a similar account. Earl Sweatshirt compared his friend to a pirate ship on the go: “He was moving […]
The path to Selena Gomez’s third album has been beset on all sides by hardships. Gomez has fought a battle with lupus that led to intensive therapy, kidney transplant surgery, and cruel internet speculation about fluctuations in her weight. There were makeups and breakups with high-profile exes Justin Bieber and the Weeknd, whose Purpose and […]
R&Bieber’s back. After genre excursions into pure pop, country, EDM, and airport reggae on records with Billie Eilish, Dan + Shay, BloodPop, and Ed Sheeran, the Canadian singer shifts gears again on his first solo single since 2015’s Purpose. “Yummy” is a torrent of sexual innuendoes set to muted keys and trap drums. The beat […]