If punk rock’s heart belonged to any one person, it beat in the chest of Joe Strummer. At a time when the movement was largely defined as a glue-sniffing “blank generation” with no future, the Clash’s frontman shaped it into something more purposeful, empathetic, ambitious, and even idealistic. In their brief time together, The Clash […]
Michael Stipe met Peter Buck in an Athens, Georgia record store in January 1980, and that fortuitous moment spawned one of the defining ‘80s bands. Joined by the rhythm section of Bill Berry and Mike Mills, R.E.M. worked up a jangly yet esoteric sound – equal parts Velvet Underground and The Byrds — that quickly became their […]
Looking back at 1982 in music, the headline is obvious: Thriller Sells A Bajillion Copies, Becomes World’s Biggest Album. But is it the year’s best album? Funny enough, Michael Jackson‘s sixth LP hardly even affected the charts that year — it snuck out in late November, just as Men at Work’s 1981 blockbuster, Business as […]
In the U.K., Kate Bush has been a major star since her chart-topping debut single, 1978’s “Wuthering Heights,” and has grown into a beloved national institution over the last few decades. In America, she’s closer to a cult artist who reached her peak of mainstream popularity with 1985’s gold-selling Hounds of Love, which spawned her […]
Compared to the last couple of years, 2022 has been a bonanza of incredible rock record releases. It seems like every week there are two or three projects just begging for proper time and attention. Many artists who were kept off the road due to the pandemic and were inspired to write during their forced, […]
The man born David Jones adopted the stage name David Bowie in 1966, avoiding confusion with The Monkees’ Davy Jones. But then he just kept on adding more aliases to his roster of identities: Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, The Thin White Duke, the list goes on and on. Had he not been rock’s […]
“First Class,” the second single from Kentucky rapper Jack Harlow’s album Come Home The Kids Miss You, is one of the biggest songs of 2022 so far, reaching No. 1 on the Hot 100 twice since its April release. One reason for the quick ascent: the familiarity of the chorus, which samples Fergie’s vocals from […]
“Give me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald There’s an image of Tony Soprano, the patriarch of the North Jersey crime family, that is embedded into my brain: crouched in a swimming pool, gold necklace dangling around his neck, with a big cigar sticking out of his mouth, his […]
Roxy Music gave us Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno, influenced punk and new wave, and charmed a legion of musicians with their sonic collage art: David Bowie, Chic, Grace Jones, Sex Pistols, U2, Duran Duran, Siouxie and the Banshees, Radiohead, Scissor Sisters, Franz Ferdinand, and more. So why the hell did it take decades for […]
The following acts released quality albums in May 2022 alone: Radiohead off-shoot The Smile, Kendrick Lamar, Wilco, Arcade Fire, Sharon Van Etten, The Black Keys, Florence + the Machine, Harry Styles — we’ll stop there for space reasons. It’s been such a wild music year so far, only some of them made the following list. […]