Many pop songs have guitars in them. Ditto drums and piano and synthesizers. Fine! That’s fine. I am not here to take your guitars and drums and pianos and synthesizers away. I am just here to say, more pop songs should have horns in them.
Jesus, this is terrible. Just terrible. Prince is dead. There’s no way to wrap your arms, or your head, around it. Just pick a moment and fixate. Like that time he burned “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” to the ground.
When Coachella opens its gates at the Empire Polo Club today, it sounds the bugle for Festival Season, now a live-music summer staple from coast to coast. At the time of the first Coachella in 1999, its multi-day, multi-stage format was a novelty to anyone who hadn’t trekked out to a Woodstock anniversary or jam-band…
What the world needs now is a great Kanye West song: no less and please, God, no more. Enough with the delays, the obfuscations, the feuds, the amusing tantrums misidentified as unhinged rants, the legit unmisidentifiable social-media disasters. It’s exhausting. He’s exhausting. We’re exhausted. To quote Thoreau:…
Can we start with “Under Pressure”? Is that too obvious? Eh, who cares. We’re starting with “Under Pressure.” Get a load of the a capella version, man. Two Top 5 all-time rock singers howling into the void until the void retreats in terror and awe. This song owns.
You could’ve seen this LCD Soundsystem reunion business coming if you’d looked hard enough—if you’d looked anywhere, in fact, for any length of time and with any degree of hardness. Hell, it was obvious to anyone who watched the full-length feature film devoted to their alleged final show, a Madison Square Garden…
The truth is that all sorts of weirdos get to be pop stars nowadays, and that should excite you whether you like pop stars or weirdos. Think Lana Del Rey, who has excellent rocket-launcher technique and makes profoundly soporific records that double as fainting couches. Think Fetty Wap, who has one eye and rap-sings…
Don’t bore us, get to the chorus: John Seabrook’s The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory (Norton) is one of the most frustrating music books in memory. You will learn a lot from this book; unfortunately, a lot of what you’ll learn is inaccurate. And all too often, what’s not inaccurate is vitiated by Seabrook’s wan…
Sorry, but the Jay Z you all worship might not be as good as you think. Or maybe it’s just that he’s easily dwarfed by the guest verses on his own tracks. These days he’s more or less abandoned making new music, instead busying himself with buying up companies and brands and streaming services or, in his latest jape,…
Credit where credit’s due: The New York Mets are very good this year, and they wholeheartedly earned the NL East title. But given the team’s habit of historic late-season collapses—recall, for example, when they blew a sturdy seven-game September division lead in 2007 by losing 12 of their last 17 games—there must’ve…
Embrace the moment: One of the most feverishly anticipated hip-hop
albums of the year is finally here, and it’s made up almost entirely of sampled cat sounds. It’s called Meow the Jewels, and you can download it for free right here, and its backstory is now the stuff of internet (and cat) lore. It started when EL-P and…
Speedy Ortiz are a noisy, lurching, acerbic, ’90s-channeling rock band from Northampton, Mass., whose loudest release of 2015 is liable to be a phone number. On Labor Day, the quartet took to Facebook to announce the creation of “(574) 404-SAFE, our help hotline you can text if you are being harassed or feel unsafe at…
So Donald Trump took the stage at an anti-Iran-deal rally to the strains of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” and Michael Stipe got all salty about it, and, well, look out. You’re welcome.
So what we’ve got here is Miley Cyrus singing a morbid piano ballad called “Pablow the Blowfish.” She’s wearing fluffy unicorn pajamas and playing an electric piano in an ersatz cornfield; additional props include a stuffed unicorn on a stool and an inflatable Super Mario Bros. power-up mushroom. Verily, the song is…
Popular music becomes harder to wrap your head around as you get older, but shit’s so weird these days that you don’t even have to be that old to find yourself flummoxed by it. The majority of people in their forties don’t get Taylor Swift, lots and lots of thirtysomethings are baffled by the success of Drake, and…
Dr. Dre has enjoyed one of the most remarkable careers in hip-hop history. In music’s most youth-dominant genre, not only has he managed to roll with the changing times, he has ranked among the most powerful forces steering the direction of the rap industry for a solid two decades. Which makes it a little…
It’s a little after six on a sultry Tuesday evening, and the Champions sports bar nestled inside the Long Island Marriott is packed with an unusual crowd. The walls are lined with memorabilia from the New York Islanders, who up until a few days ago called the crumbling Nassau Coliseum next door home; beneath the…
“Hi, we’re Third Eye Blind from San Francisco, California, and we’re high as kites.” Stephan Jenkins beams at the Blue Hills Bank Pavilion crowd from the depths of his hoodie; his legs are encompassed by shorts and a glossy cylinder of fabric that could be classified as a skirt. Behind him, the stage lights stir and…
1. Chris Brown
