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How the ’70s Dethroned the ’60s as Popular Music’s Golden Age
What was the single greatest year in rock history? As with most critical thought experiments, this is a question with no right answer, but one that’s fun and useful to argue about anyway. The way we...
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A Brief History of Famously Unstreamable Albums (That Ended Up Streaming Anyway)
Two years ago, Taylor Swift wrote a now-famous op-ed in The Wall Street Journal where she explained her stance against free streaming services like Spotify, giving a searing thesis statement for the...
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The Contentious Tale of the McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” Jingle
In 2003, Justin Timberlake helped launch an ambitious new McDonald’s marketing campaign. Tied around the slogan “I’m Lovin’ It,” the advertising blitz marked, surprisingly, the first time the venerable...
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No One's More Punk than Vivien Goldman
The title of a brilliant new reissue collecting Vivien Goldman’s small contribution to recorded music says it all: not revolutionary, but Resolutionary. Over her five-decade career, the 61-year-old has...
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A Brief History of Virtual Pop Stars
It’s been a busy year for Hatsune Miku, the world’s most famous holographic pop star. The teal-haired performer wrapped up her first North American tour this spring, selling out stops from Los Angeles...
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15 Songs Indebted to Suicide's Alan Vega
Contrary to their name, Suicide was not an act of negation, but of resurrection. Amid the post-glam, pre-punk void of the mid-1970s, Alan Vega and Martin Rev took the rotting corpse of rock‘n’roll,...
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Christine and the Queens Can’t Stop Googling Weird Diseases
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 Héloïse Letissier, the...
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Coming to Grips with Dead & Bro: John Mayer and the Improbable Live Rebirth...
Officially, there hasn't been a Grateful Dead concert since 1995, when the musical entity with that name dissolved following guitarist Jerry Garcia’s death. But try telling that to the fans filling...
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Fine, OK, Let’s Talk About Taylor and Kanye
It’s been a particularly gruesome season of the “Thrones”-ian spectacle of music meeting celebrity, and the bloodiest of the episodes may well be the hand-waving freakouttery that is the Taylor...
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Henry Rollins on How Suicide’s Alan Vega Changed His Life
Among Gen-Xers favoring subterranean sounds, if Suicide and Alan Vega happened to land on their radar, the person to thank was most likely Henry Rollins. Aside from his post-Black Flag jazz-punk outfit...
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Michelle Obama’s 5 Best Music Moments
Last night, Michelle Obama joined “Late Late Show” host James Corden on his recurring “Carpool Karaoke” segment. The First Lady sang Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours,” Beyoncé’s...
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The Radical Self-Respect of Fiona Apple’s “Sleep to Dream,” 20 Years On
“Now, when I listen to your shit, I hear similarities. I actually wanted to work with him [Jon Brion] so I could be like the rap version of you. That was one of my main goals. The albums that inspired...
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7 Times Uncle Tupelo Predicted This Political Mess We’re In
Uncle Tupelo was never really a political band, but the group had a socially conscious side. Like most of their alt-country peers, the influential trio (and later quintet) often romanticized a working...
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Reconsidering Temple of the Dog
If you’re writing alternate histories of rock, Andrew Wood has to come into play. The frontman of the Seattle band Mother Love Bone died just before his band’s debut Apple came out in the summer of...
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Women’s Beat League Wants to Close Electronic Music’s Gender Gap, One Synth...
“So who here hasn’t had a chance to set this up?” The eight women standing around the plastic table set near the center of the cavernous concrete space that is Portland, Oregon’s S1 Gallery scan each...
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7 Dope Videos by Beyoncé Favorite Melina Matsoukas
The MTV Video Music Awards are still a month away, but Beyoncé is already ruling them. She leads the 2016 VMA nominations—just announced this afternoon—with a career-high 11 nods. That’s ahead of...
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What Makes a Great Rock Doc in 2016?
The opening sequence of the new film Miss Sharon Jones! flirts dangerously with cliché. A narrator guides viewers through a montage of stills, performance clips, and Sharon Jones 101 talking points:...
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Gallant Will Annihilate You in a Game of Settlers of Catan
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 the elastic-voiced...
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The 8 Best DJ Mixes of July 2016, International Edition
If there’s an implicit theme to this month’s column, it’s a globalist one. Three of the mixes tackle geopolitical questions, whether it’s Ata Ebtekar’s survey of the Iranian avant-garde, Andy Votel’s...
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The Urban Malaise of The Strokes' Is This It, 15 Years On
It was fall 2010, and I’d given up on sleep. At night I woke up every couple hours to worry about my job, which combined 70-hour weeks with constant cross-country travel and a boss who regularly talked...
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