“Fuck Soulja Boy. Soulja Boy, I know you’re young enough to be my kid but you single-handedly killed hip-hop, man. That shit is such garbage.…
Few debut albums have, since their initial release date, so easily defined themselves as a milestone and game-changer for a genre in the way of…
How lucky would one be to have the opportunity to listen to Definitely Maybe while remaining blissfully ignorant of the very inflated egos of both…
The accolades that critics, fans, and lay listeners alike have bestowed upon Blue Lines since its release in 1991 — being branded as the album…
Black Sabbath are generally credited as the leading pioneers of heavy metal music, and rightfully so. They took some definite cues from outfits like Led…
There never was a romance quite like it: beat poets/star-crossed lovers Exene Cervenka and John Doe form a little rock band with guitarist Billy Zoom…
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is a masterpiece. The inception…
Steve Albini boasts a legacy that is at once massive and, at the same time, pretty fucking stupid. The albums he worked on as a…
“I love you / you pay my rent.” These words, sung in a chorus on the 1987 classic Actually, are probably the sharpest distillation of…
What’s the difference between music and noise? Besides general semantics, the two terms are perceived to create something of a dichotomy in relation to one…
After writing the early blueprint for ’90s R&B, Mary J. Blige laid out her own musical foundations on 1994’s My Life. The influence of hip-hop…
Widely hailed as a major turn in Emmylou Harris’s already illustrious career, the 1995 album Wrecking Ball found the beloved country artist exploring new avenues…
It’s only appropriate that Dusty Springfield’s 1969 record — which found the singer’s vocal sensibilities shifting over to R&B, and to more deliberately paced arrangements…
For a band so insistent on defying any and all principles of behavior, even (or perhaps especially) when it meant sabotaging their own success, it’s…
There comes a time in every young pop vixen’s career — usually, after her third or fourth album has dropped and sales slowly start waning…
It can be tempting to give up early on Radio City — right after album opener “O, My Soul,” the one song here that seems…
The origins of The Velvet Underground as a group are about as haphazard as they come. The ostensible writer of the outfit, college-educated Lou Reed,…
There’s no better place to start with demolishing the myth of Captain Beefheart’s ‘inaccessibility’ (and, frankly, many other myths) than Safe as Milk. The man…
Brian Eno will always be best known for his invention of ambient music (or at least its coinage) and for his work as the producer…
Nobody denies that Johnny Cash was a legend; his mythos looms large in Ken Burns’s Country Music documentary, as good a bellwether as any for how Cash remains one…