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Where's the Love for the Women of Grime?
The origin story of any musical movement is often murky. It might have been Wiley who started grime, by flipping the garage sound into the “Eskimo” instrumental and laying the foundation for a new...
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What Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway” Trial Says About Copyright’s Increasingly...
In February 2015, Robin Thicke took his show to a federal courtroom in Los Angeles. Testifying in the lawsuit over his 2013 hit “Blurred Lines,” Thicke played and crooned a piano medley of U2’s “With...
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How Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Tap Into the Power of the Playlist
Days before April’s New York Primary, thousands of young people descended upon Brooklyn’s WNYC Transmitter Park for a rally hosted by Bernie Sanders. The crowd packed into every last square inch of...
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The Untold Story of Angry Angles, Jay Reatard’s Great Lost Band
When Jay Reatard died in early 2010 at age 29, he was barely coming off his second solo album, Watch Me Fall, a strong follow-up to his stellar 2006 debut Blood Visions and one that seemed to pivot him...
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14 Sets You Can’t Miss at Bonnaroo
Music festival season’s been in swing for a couple months now, and it chugs along this week with Bonnaroo. It all kicks off tomorrow and runs through Sunday, led by the likes of LCD Soundsystem, Pearl...
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10 Great Pitchfork Fest Performances from Artists Before They Blew Up
It’s hard to believe it’s been a decade since the first Pitchfork Music Festival in 2006. Throughout the last 10 years of weekends at Chicago’s Union Park, there has been a lot of documentation on our...
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Paul Banks and RZA On Their Banks & Steelz Album, Wu-Tang, and Chess
A few years ago, RZA had a very good week. He got to hang with Snoop. He ate barbecue with Russell Crowe. And the Wu-Tang Clan mastermind shared first tequila, then noodles, with Interpol’s Paul Banks....
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Philip Glass On Scoring Execution Scenes, Again, in Broadway’s The Crucible
Many aspects of Ivo van Hove’s ruthless Broadway adaptation of The Crucible keep it from existing in the same universe as traditional productions of Arthur Miller’s 1953 classic, least of which is that...
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Estonia Has a ‘Rock‘n’Roll President’ and a Booming Music Scene—But the...
During the opening ceremony of Tallinn Music Week this past March, Toomas Hendrik Ilves was standing behind two turntables on a small platform, surrounded by 100 or so delegates, spinning Lou Reed and...
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Can Brand-New Record Presses Solve Vinyl’s Supply Problem?
In 2014, after making about seven or eight CDs, Dustin Blocker wanted to make his first vinyl record. “We recorded the whole thing just for vinyl,” the frontman for Texas band Exit 380 says. Getting...
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The UK Leaving the EU Would Change the European Music Industry
On June 23, the UK will vote on whether to remain in the European Union. The in-out referendum was one of Prime Minister David Cameron’s promises in the 2015 General Election, ventured in part to stop...
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Mitski Is Not a Mythical God (But She Is Really Good at Math)
Our interview series Icebreaker features artists talking about things—some strange, some amusing, some meaningful—that just might reveal their true selves. This edition features big-voiced Brooklyn...
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What the Hell Is Simpsonwave?
If you are a person who spends any significant amount of time on the internet, you should know that at this point, you don't find memes—they find you. There’s something ingrained in the menagerie of...
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YG Doesn’t Need Your Co-Sign
For the better part of a year, YG was planning to call his sophomore LP Still Krazy, an apt follow-up to 2014’s My Krazy Life. But just weeks before its release this week, he changed the name to Still...
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How a Shamir Soundalike Ended Up in Apple's New Commercial
This week, Apple held its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. To preview its new iOS 10 mobile operating system, the company shared a video set to a curious—and, admittedly, pretty...
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The Smiths Were Way More Subversive Than We (and David Cameron) Care to Remember
It begins as a great wartime film would, with the setting. Dame Cicely Courtneidge leads the chorus of “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty” as soldiers chant the cities of Liverpool, Leeds, and...
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Cool Like That: The Reunited Digable Planets Look Back
In the same 1990s gangsta rap era that birthed the likes of Snoop Dogg, Wu-Tang, and Mobb Deep, a mild mannered trio called Digable Planets quietly emerged on the scene and, for a short time, burned...
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Mitski Doesn't Want to Become Indie Rock's Anne Hathaway
Our interview series Icebreaker features artists talking about things—some strange, some amusing, some meaningful—that just might reveal their true selves. This edition features big-voiced Brooklyn...
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How Do We Keep Venues and Clubs Safe in the Wake of the Orlando Tragedy?
On the morning of June 13, Brooklyn music promoter Todd Patrick—better known as Todd P—was reconsidering his views on event security. “I’m not a big fan of security pat-downs at shows at all,” wrote...
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How the Dust Brothers Saved Beck from Becoming a One-Hit Wonder with Odelay
In 1997, a little over a year after the release of his second proper album Odelay, 26-year-old Beck Hansenappeared on “The Late Show With David Letterman” for a live performance and brief interview....
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