The Anniversary

Here it is: the pivot point in Kanye West's career and maybe recent hip-hop history at large.

"The 'masterplan' was first mentioned in Noel's flat," recalls original Oasis drummer Tony McCarroll in Oasis: The Truth, his memoir. The occasion McCarroll describes took…

You couldn't wrongfoot Jay-Z. That was the entire point of Jay-Z. By the fall of 1998, Jay-Z had become the biggest star in all of…

It is a question that has vexed philosophers, by which I mean people who perhaps overthink popular music, for 25 years now: Who is the…

There are a couple ways you can divide up R.E.M.'s career. Considering they are a band that released music for just about 30 years, almost…

I burned my final mix CD in 2013. "Random Music" was scrawled in sharpie across the reflective silver disc, belying the very deliberate and not…

Britney Spears is the first thing you notice upon entering my childhood bedroom: a messily-taped 34-inch poster of a 17-year-old popstar with a million-watt smile.

She was in and out of mental hospitals and drug rehabs constantly. Then she wrote a note about going to join our father in a…

"Right about now/ The funk soul brother/ Check it out now/ The funk soul brother/ Right about now/ The funk soul brother/ Check it out…

American Water dismisses much of the American dream. While many Americans were taught to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, to conquer, to climb, in…

For an emerging artist, a hit single is both the best and worst thing that can happen to you.

As far as lyric as band-thesis statements go, Fucked Up never made their ethos clearer than on the chanted refrain of "Twice Born." "Hands up…

Crafted in the California desert, cutting their teeth playing free impromptu parties beneath the stars, and named after an undead creature from the Dungeons &…

The indie rock subgenre known as "noise-pop," which distorts candy-sweet melodies with blown-out guitars and echo, had something of a renaissance in the late 2000s.

In the late '90s, musical genres that once felt as separate as continents began to shift into each other like tectonic plates, the great unifier…