Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Articles

Year-End Listmaking Guilt

Revisiting two records that we didn't spend enough time with in 2008. Every arts writer is implored, to one degree or other, to write year-end...

Articles

Producers’ Choice

Hip-hop beat-makers Jake One and DJ Signify offer differing takes on the showcase album Hip-hop albums by producers who don't rap--unlike, say, Kanye West or Swizz Beatz, who started as beatmakers before taking to the mike--often fall into two broad categories: The first is to showcase the producer's..

Articles

Singles, Attached

New Order and Jay Reatard release singles compilations that challenge the hallowed album form Albums were once simply collections of previously released songs. Therefore, there shouldn't be too great a split between an album and a singles roundup, right? For whatever reason--reading too many issues..

Articles

Clothes Make the Band

New photo books on early punks say at least a thousand words Two of the year's most enticing photo books tackle rock pioneers as their subjects. In a strange, coincidental twist, both have bright pink covers. New York Dolls (Abrams Image) collects photographer Bob Gruen's portraits, live shots, and..

Articles

Sista Solange

How Beyoncé's younger sis may sidestep the trappings of success\rI wrote all those words last week discussing "A Milli" as a pop meme, and I missed the most obvious example to date: "Diva," from Beyoncé's new I Am ... Sasha Fierce. The track is not just inspired by Lil' Wayne's hit; it's a shameless rewrite-and..\n

Articles

An Intro to “Post-Standards”

Reimagining Lil Wayne's "A Milli" and M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" When does a song become a standard? Answer: when a lot of people put their spin on it. Jazz critic Will Friedwald, whose 2002 book Stardust Melodies features "biographies" of a dozen such songs ("Stardust," "I Got Rhythm," "St. Louis Blues"),..

Articles

The Listener: Studs Terkel

Remembering a great man's always-attentive ears There's something cosmically appropriate about Studs Terkel dying, at age 96, on Halloween. It shares a similarity with James Brown dying on Christmas Day: the holiday adds a notable flourish. The Godfather of Soul lit up the stage like a Christmas tree,..

Articles

The Art of the Segue

\r\nWhen two songs make a right\r\nA great segue is where you find it-even if you weren't necessarily on the lookout. The two I'm most besotted with...

Articles

Ball of Confusion

Did Motown lose its way in the 1970s? I used to believe that compiling every Motown A-side up to about 1970 would create the greatest album of all time. Well, as it turns out, not quite. The Complete Motown Singles is a projected 12-volume, box set series released by Hip-O Select, an arm of Universal..

Articles

Reinventing R&B History for the New Century

How Raphael Saadiq honors the past and blends in the present\rThe Way I See It (Columbia), the third solo album by Raphael Saadiq, is one of the more formally intriguing I've heard in a while. On it, a highly respected R&B veteran directly mimics soul music as it sounded in the decade prior to disco.\r\rSaadiq,..\n

Articles

Who’s a Dilettante?

Letting go of the impulse to be an expert Last year I decided I was going to teach myself about Duke Ellington. Great idea, right? We all know Duke Ellington is awesome even if we don't know why. So I decided to find out why. I bought a bunch of CDs and downloaded others; for a while I played them when..

Articles

Michelangelo Matos on Going Forward into the Past

To trace the story of pop music's use of nostalgia is, in some ways, to trace the story of pop music. Of course all musicians recycle what came before by remaking it, reimagining it, or sampling it. Take Amy Winehouse: no major contemporary artist relies more heavily on retro style, both visually and..

Articles

The Dylan Industry

Is there a more efficient machine in popular music than that of the Dylan Industry? It's sort of amazing how well oiled it is, in part because so much of it is out of the direct control of Bob Dylan and his associates. Obviously, Dylan Inc. stays on its toes: the man's official website is a model for..

Articles

Music in Everyday Life

Do something long enough and you can start to forget why you're doing it. This is the tenth year I've made at least part of a living writing about music, and over that time I've managed to forget why again and again. Something always reminds me-a song or an album, a concert or a DJ set, a movie or a..

Articles

Michaelangelo Matos on the Sophomore Slump

"If such a thing as the slump exists–and everyone seems to agree it does–it's worth examining why."

© Copyright 2025