Meat Loaf was a rock & roller like no other: a 300-pound sex symbol with a throat of gold. The singer, who died Thursday, started out in musical theater, and he boasted a clean, commanding voice that spanned both the baritone and tenor ranges. His delivery was a natural fit …
Read More »French Montana: 'Get Hip or Get Left With the Dinosaurs'
& lsquo;’I was saying that they had amnesia about everything: The Cocaine City DVDs, the Coke Boys era, from Chinx to the Max B collaborations,” French Montana tells me. “I felt like they have had amnesia about my accomplishments.” The rapper spent the past couple of years out of the …
Read More »Inside the Mysterious Bliss of Tirzah's New Album 'Colourgrade'
It’s 10 p.m. in the sleepy London suburb of Sidcup when musician Tirzah Mastin puts her children to bed and joins me for our first call over Zoom. Beside her, a whirring static scratches from her baby monitors. It evokes the dusty quiet after a needle drops, just before a …
Read More »Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind: The Grunge Ripple Effect in 10 Nineties Rock Songs
For the first wave of grunge superstars, 1991 was “the year punk broke.” For many of the rock bands that were already popular in 1991, it was the year punk broke them. But grunge and punk didn’t overtake the Aqua Netted power ballads that dominated late-Eighties and early-Nineties MTV overnight. …
Read More »What Producer Duo Take A Daytrip Have Learned from Lil Nas X's 'Montero'
David Biral and Denzel Baptiste, better known as the production duo Take A Daytrip, have spent years building worlds with Lil Nas X. You may have caught them in one of the Twitter guru’s latest videos, clad in scrubs and anxiously aiding Nas X as he delivered his debut album …
Read More »The 25 Best ABBA Songs, Ranked
It’s official: this is the summer of ABBA. The blockbuster Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again brought the spectacle of Cher belting “Fernando.” That probably sent you back to the original Mamma Mia— yes, even the scene where Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan duet on “SOS.” Yet somehow that …
Read More »Jeff and Spencer Tweedy, Andrew Bird Lead Tom Waits Tribute Benefit Album
On Saturday, nearly two weeks after beloved Chicago venue the Hideout reopened for outdoor events following a 16-month shutdown of music clubs due to Covid-19, Jon Langford’s Pine Valley Cosmonauts celebrated the release of their Tom Waits tribute album The Closing Time. Benefiting Chicago Independent Venue League’s (CIVL) SAVE Emergency …
Read More »How Mach-Hommy and Westside Gunn Made 'Pray for Haiti' a Modern Hip-Hop Classic
There have been great hip-hop albums since the Nineties, and that will continue on into infinity. But rarely do you find an album that makes you want to go back and decode every lyric. Especially in the past few decades, those sorts of releases have become increasingly rare. It isn’t …
Read More »Tomorrow x Together: Leaders of the Fourth Generation of K-Pop 'It Boys'
As the first boy band to debut under Big Hit Music since BTS, the guys in Tomorrow X Together (TXT for short) know they have their work cut out for them. But rather than follow in the footsteps of their labelmates, Soobin, Yeonjun, Beomgyu, Taehyun, and Hueningkai say they’re using …
Read More »Big L Is 'Rap Royalty.' Why Is His Legacy in Disarray?
In 1995, a young rapper named Jay-Z appeared on The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show, a radio program that served as an essential proving ground for any fledgling New York MC. The gifts that would transform Jay-Z into a million-selling megastar were already evident as he freestyled, shifting deftly between …
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