Brian Eno will always be best known for his invention of ambient music (or at least its coinage) and for his work as the…
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…
It’s somewhat curious that Guided By Voices has so comfortably settled into its position on the Mount Rushmore of ’90s indie rock. That their…
When Miles Davis released his seminal 1969 album In a Silent Way, its newfangled, neoteric sound — which Lester Bangs described as “space music” —…
Dwight Yoakam is, in many respects, a victim of his own early success. His 1986 album Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. remains as accomplished a debut…
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s The Message, released in 1982, is one of the most important albums in all of hip-hop. While coming in…
One of the horniest albums ever recorded, Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson is a 28-minute exhalation of libidinous longing. The album tells a Lolita-like tale, partially autobiographical,…
Waylon Jennings may not have invented outlaw country, but with Honky Tonk Heroes he gave the movement its clearest distillation of purpose; its manifesto, its aesthetic framework, even…
The West Coast has always been a boon for launching rap oddities; today, it’s brought us Lil B and Blueface, and in the ’90s,…
It was the time of the outlaw. Waylon Jennings’s 1973 Honky Tonk Heroes had already set the mould for a type of country music…
In her biography on her late husband — renowned Chilean singer/guitarist Victor Jara— Joan Jara recalls the days leading up to the impending sea-change…
Had he not been murdered more than two decades ago, Tupac Shakur would have turned 48 this month; he would be in the third…
The adage coined by Charlotte Whitton — that women must work twice as hard to be considered half as good as men — was…
There are a couple of ways to apprehend Mule Variations, the twelfth studio album from Tom Waits and the second to be co-written almost entirely…
In 1982, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released what’s largely considered the first ‘conscious’ mainstream rap single, “The Message,” a harrowing seven-minute journey…
Was it when Elvis first suggestively gyrated his hips on national television? The first time a fan let out a piercing, adulatory scream as…
Emmylou Harris’ first four studio albums all stuck to an eclectic formula that allowed her to establish her bona fides as the premier interpretive…
Richard D. James’s debut altered the electronic music landscape, and remains a singular experience within the enigmatic musician’s oeuvre. Whereas the album’s follow-up, Selected Ambient…