Tag: music

The classic rock star wanted to stick it to The Man, and did so bender by selfish bender. The new rock star knows you can’t do it alone.

Either Martin Mull or Frank Zappa or Elvis Costello once said writing about music is as pointless as dancing about architecture. Which doesn’t account for how I’ve danced to all these books.

Lisa Whittington-Hill on why Courtney Love deserves to be the girl with the most cake.

“The vault fire was not, as UMG suggested, a minor mishap, a matter of a few tapes stuck in a musty warehouse. It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business.”

“Like, wow. This is another family I have found.”

Hoping to reconnect to their love for the iconic musician, Kevin Sampsell and an old girlfriend go to hear his best known band play without him.

The term “slow jam” became widely popular when a song performed by Midnight Star debuted in 1983.

A list of longreads to make sense of ‘Leaving Neverland.’

“I wasn’t interested in writing the definitive book on A Tribe Called Quest. I was trying to write the definitive book on a single arc of fandom.”

Kimberly Mack recalls the ways in which rock music bonded her with her African American mom, and how those fierce sounds helped them cope with the poverty, violence, and despair both outside and inside their Brooklyn home.

My on-again, off-again love affair with Engelbert Humperdinck.

There’s no “I” in “Disco.” Oh wait, yes there is. This is why we can’t have nice things.

“The phrase ‘pull out all the stops’ comes from the organ; it’s fortunate for listeners’ eardrums that organists never do this.”

Chris Heath at GQ interviews nine sober musicians on thriving creatively.

“This is the other thing about Phish: you can be just as earnest and dorky as you want to be.”

“All you needed to do,” Springsteen says, “was to risk being your true self.” We ignore our demons at our peril.

What’s not to like about Dave Matthews, asks Allison Williams.

OutKast’s masterful 1998 album “Aquemini” defined a bold and Black South and predicted today’s pop music landscape.

In “Night Moves,” Jessica Hopper is 80% on her bike and 20% at a show, memorializing a young adulthood spent in just one of “a million Chicagos” — but one that shaped a wide network of artists and writers.

I believed that there was no music existing in the world with an unbroken connection to its original context. I was wrong.

When a young white musician gets invited to a house-party, the musicians he plays with show him a slice of blues culture many people assumed had died.

Joan Morgan’s “She Begat This” looks back at how Lauryn Hill crashed through hip-hop’s glass ceiling, while our critic looks at how the author and a cadre of black women writers did the same for hip-hop music journalism.

Nate Chinen may have been the last full-time jazz reviewer at any American newspaper. He says jazz hasn’t been in a better place since the ’60s — but the commercial infrastructure is broken.

How Canadian is Justin Bieber? His hometown’s “Steps to Stardom” exhibit provides some answers.

The story of Sadlack’s Heroes, the Raleigh dive bar that helped galvanize the alternative country scene in the 1990s.

The co-authors of ‘Country Music USA’ – a revised edition of the genre’s definitive history – talk about the music’s African-American tributaries, its unpredictable politics, country radio’s woman problem, and working on Ken Burns’ forthcoming doc.

She’s a rock star, and a mom, and a tomboy, and a wife, and a study in contradictions.

No one would have thought that Highland Ridge, Virginia was the center of anything. Then Jim McCoy’s honky-tonk came along.

German tennis player Andrea Petkovic meets the band.

The death of popular rapper XXXTentaction raises questions of ethical consumption.