The third and final Nirvana album, In Utero, turns 25 today -- we did an Anniversary piece on it when it turned 20. On this occasion, let us revisit this MTV News segment from when the album was released in which the network got students at St. Johns University to give their thoughts on Nirvana (if they had any). They even gave them CDs of In Utero to take home with them and asked them to return to...
Pianist and composer Randy Weston died on September 1, at 92. His playing style was strongly influenced by folks like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Earl "Fatha" Hines, and especially Thelonious Monk, but it was his embrace of, and efforts to explicitly link jazz to, African music that made him such a unique and important figure. (Being either 6'7" or 6'8" also helped with the "unique" part; he was literally...
Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute. You don't have to have been alive in 1998 to instantly recognize that jangly mandolin, swelling strings, and those crisp acoustic chords. The Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris," a single written for the late-'90s Nic Cage-Meg Ryan cryfest City Of Angels, continues its ubiquity, even 20 years after...
Earlier this month, the seven-member K-pop boy band BTS had the #1 album in the US with their compilation record Love Yourself: 結 'Answer,'. Simultaneously, Crazy Rich Asians, the Jon Chu-helmed romantic comedy featuring an all-Asian cast, was the highest grossing film in the country for the third week in a row. That means, at one time, the most popular media Americans were both watching and listening...
Let's start now. Or as close to now as can be defined in this conversation, between the time and place I am in as I write these words and the time and place you are in when you read them. On my end, now is roughly two weeks after the release of Andrew W.K.'s video for the title track from his 2018 LP You're Not Alone. It's an odd clip, a negative-image video allegedly meant to illustrate the following...
The smoking ban was a good thing. The first time I walked out of a club without my hair and clothes reeking of smoke, without my eyes stinging, I felt like I was living in a whole different dimension. That had been an ambient, omnipresent part of the live-music experience, and then all of a sudden it wasn't. Venue staff no longer had to function in an environment of pure gaseous smog. Smokers could...
Every few years, a major national publication will publish an overview of the Christian music industry. This week, Kelefa Sanneh has a good one in The New Yorker. Sanneh's history of Christian rock and pop begins way back in the 1950s, with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s advice-column exhortation that gospel and the devil's music should not mix. From there it moves at a measured pace into the present, highlighting...
Here is an epitaph: They did everything wrong. At the turning point of the '00s and '10s, a hinge point in which rock music slid further into its lowest influence culturally and economically, they started a band that blended pop-punk and '90s alt-rock and old-school punk and hard rock and hair metal in ways imperceptible, winning over the freaks who loved loud guitars but not securing themselves a...
Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.…
I know this is a big ask because it sounds like a throwaway gag from The Office, but I beg of you, loyal Stereogum reader: Put some respect on the name of “Lackawanna County’s ska-punk scene in 2005.” The Menzingers, Captain, We’re Sinking, and Tigers Jaw all emerged from hardscrabble Scranton and laid the groundwork…
Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.…
Back in the ’90s, Melissa Auf der Maur rose to prominence as the bassist of Hole. But even then, the mechanisms and visibility of being in a major rock band weren’t for her. She signed the contract in search of experience, got it, then walked away. After a brief stint with the Smashing Pumpkins following…
Homeboy Sandman raps; he does not dance. So he was surprised when he found himself with his girlfriend doing the thing he doesn’t do at a party at Queens’ Rockaway Beach. His collaborator Edan was DJing and put on William DeVaughn’s “Be Thankful For What You Got.” Sandman immediately started moving. “I thought y’all were…
When British indie collective Los Campesinos! announced a reissue campaign and North American tour for their first two albums — the brilliant one-two punch of Hold On Now, Youngster… and We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, which both saw release in 2008 — warm feelings of nostalgia were undoubtedly elicited for anyone who held the…
Tim Kasher is really, really glad to be back in a band. Though the longtime artist put out a solo record, No Resolution, just last year, he hasn’t released anything with his best-known project, post-hardcore stalwarts Cursive, since 2012’s I Am Gemini. But that’s all about to change: Come October 5, Cursive will drop an…
Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.…
Yowler debuted in 2015 with the release of The Offer, a short, lush collection of songs that honed in on a very particular strain of sadness. The project started as a songwriting outlet for Maryn Jones separate from the music she worked on with the Columbus-based indie-folk act Saintseneca and her scrappy rock band All…
Kennesaw, a small Georgia town just north of Atlanta, is most famous for two incidents. The first, the 1982 passage of a law mandating gun possession as a largely symbolic rebuttal to a handgun ban in a county three states away, gives you context for the community that would erupt in the second event: the…
There’s a lyric on Thou’s new album that sums up their 11-plus year existence pretty succinctly: “We are vast unknowable beings without the confines of your perception.”
John Rossiter came of age as an emo kid in the Midwest, so it goes without saying that he’s had some formative Saddle Creek experience. But with only the slightest prompt, the Young Jesus frontman is gonna say it anyway: “Album Of The Year is one of my all-time favorite records,” he gushes, describing the…
Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.
1991 is the year alternative rock went mainstream. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden were about to take over the world; Out Of Time and “Losing My Religion” turned R.E.M. into megastars;…
Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.
Jill Cunniff is a lifelong New Yorker, born and raised. But today the Luscious Jackson frontwoman and founding member is in Los Angeles visiting her brother, who, naturally, works in TV.
Rico Nasty is a nu metal-channeling rager, a Balenciaga-wearing pop trap diva, and a bullish shit-talker. All three personas, and the ones in between, thrive on an infectious catharsis. The rager — sporting black, spiked-out hair and the leather choker to complement it — is who shows up to perform at New York’s SOBs on…
