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CLUB PARADISE
Bad news, Future fans who purchased tickets to see the Atlanta rapper open Drake’s Barclays gig: The guy behind the prettiest hooks in hip-hop got kicked off the tour for telling Billboard that the songs on the headliner’s recent album, Nothing Was the Same, is full of hits but not ones that make you want […]
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SWAN SONGS
The members of Swans might be a bunch of dreary-faced LES expats, but they have much to celebrate. Like phoenixes, the group has risen from the ashes of its quasi-industrial negative-rock past. In their original ’80s formation, they were a volatile fringe collective that predicted sludge metal and goth ethereality and, by the time they […]
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Crossing Over: Michael Jackson, Ne-Yo, and the Sound of Pop in 2012
Michael Jackson would have turned 54 last week, and to celebrate that fact—as well as the imminent release of Bad 25 (Epic), a reissue of Jackson’s 1987 album—Pepsi, the soda brand so associated with the singer during his late-20th-century world-domination period, threw a party. The bar was stocked with tallboys of the soft drink emblazoned […]
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Dead Sara Is Weathering the Storm
A few weeks ago, I was perusing the Billboard Rock Songs chart, which for quite a while now has been the running diary of a genre in crisis. The number of stations specializing in rock of the non-classic variety is shrinking as more and more frequencies turn away from music (à la the former WRXP’s […]
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OFF TO THE RACES
After months of being called unkind names, such as a YouTube flash in the pan, a PR product, and Everything That Is Wrong With Music, Lana Del Rey finally released Born to Die, the much anticipated—or at least much talked about—follow-up to viral hits “Video Games” and “Blue Jeans,” moving off the Internet and up […]
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SHAKE, RATTLE, & ROLL
Shut out of Jack White’s packed Webster Hall gig last month? This week, the garage-rock star returns to New York for a two-night stand at the roomier Roseland Ballroom; what’s more, he does it with a new feather in his cap, as Blunderbuss, White’s deeply cranky solo debut, just became his first album to hit […]
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REGGAETON LATINO
In 2006, Don Omar’s King of Kings took reggaeton higher up on the American pop charts than it had been before. Six years later, the former preacher from San Juan is going as strong as ever, taking home eight awards—more than anyone except bachata freshman Prince Royce—at the recent Billboard Latin Awards. Of those eight […]
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Carly Rae Jepsen: Crush Patrol
The other night, I was on a train, sitting across from two women who were sharing a single set of headphones—communal listening for those worried about disturbing the people around them. A man of their age and interested in, if not one, both, inquired after what was filling their ears. They giggled girlishly. “We discovered […]
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Jay-Z and Kanye West Guard the Throne
Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne had the entirely unfortunate luck to come out at the worst possible moment to release an album with a faux-gold-leaf cover: four days after the U.S.’s credit rating was dropped from AAA to AA, in the midst of a moment that felt like any illusions of stability we’d […]
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The Year Ravers and Pop Fans Learned to (File) Share
The difference between the way electronic-dance audiences perceive dance music—contemplation-worthy, the locus of a cabal-like subculture—and the way pop audiences think of it—fun party music, the epitome of a mindless good time—pretty much says it all about their intersection in 2011. Or lack thereof: This year, each side gave the other something it needed, without […]