Music Features

On 2002’s “Hovi Baby,” Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter shouted out the Roc-A-Fella Records braintrust, calling it, “’The Dynasty,’ no not Ming but Shawn’s / Dame, Kareem, nigga it’s the gangsta team.” The trio of Carter, and executives Dame Dash and Kareem “Biggs” Burke are the big three behind Roc-A-Fella Records, one …

A few weeks back, Flint rapper BFB Da Packman dropped Forget Me Not, his first album in three years. Before the release, he heightened fan anticipation when he revealed a Drake collaboration on “Olympic Shit Talkin,” a song that also features a verse from the currently incarcerated Rio Da Yung …

The Helado Negro canon goes pretty deep. The prolific electronic artist and producer has been making music since 2009, and his discography is marked by all kinds of weird turns and surprises: Go through the catalog, and you’ll find mazes of glitched-out noise, tinselly abstractions, lush robot love songs, and …

Mike Portnoy cannot remember the last time he sat for an interview as a member of Dream Theater, the band he left in 2010. And nobody in the prolific prog-metal band can remember the last time all five musicians took part in an interview together. The drummer, who returned to …

As Willie Nelson once sang, there’s no place but Texas — and some of country music’s hallmark awards shows seem to agree. In the past two years, two big-budget ceremonies have been staged not in Nashville but in the Lone Star State. On Sunday, the CMT Music Awards, airing on …

I t’s midday at the dawn of the 21st century — Wednesday, June 18, 2003 — in New York City’s Flatiron District, the gateway between uptown wealth and downtown cool. We’re on the west side of Madison Square, and 33-year-old Shawn Carter is busy. Several hours from now, he’ll host …

On Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé mixes R&B, country, and some hard-hitting guitars, among many other elements, and as the artist herself is well aware, there used to be a name for that kind of American melange: rock & roll. She slyly acknowledges that fact with two Chuck Berry moments on the …

Modest Mouse‘s Isaac Brock has been known to take as long as eight years between albums, but nearly three decades into his band’s career, he’s ready to pick up the pace. Three years after the release of the well-received The Golden Casket, he’s already recorded enough songs for a new …

If you wonder what motivates a band after three decades together, ask the Old 97’s. “It feels so unlikely that we’re here, in this moment, in our career and in our lives, and we’ve built something that’s really pretty unimpeachable,” Rhett Miller tells me. We’re sitting in his office — …

Inside Broadway’s James Earl Jones Theatre on a recent afternoon, Huey Lewis has some actual good news. Checking his texts, he learns that Martin Short will be attending the opening of The Heart of Rock and Roll, the rom-com musical based around songs from his catalog. Also on the list …