Music Features

Dinah Jane had a “bad bitch” wake-up call earlier this summer. The former Fifth Harmony member was preparing to perform at a local queer bar in her hometown Orange County. It was her first time on stage in over three years and she wasn’t sure how many people were going …

With a fresh divorce from Sam Asghari and speculative headlines about Britney Spears’ life back in tabloid headlines, fans of the pop star are entering a new era of uncertainty and looking into the future with cautious optimism. After all, they, along with Spears, have somewhat been here before. When …

Former MTV president Van Toffler had the history books on his mind when he asked Madonna to open the 2003 Video Music Awards. Toffler wanted to honor the VMAs’ nearly two-decade legacy with a callback to its inaugural 1984 edition. A lot had happened since Madonna rolled around in a …

It’s been less than two weeks since the video for Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” made its way onto YouTube and the life of the Farmville, Virginia-based country singer hasn’t been the same since. The once-unknown songwriter, who as recently as August 7 claimed to be living off …

When Shaquille O’Neal logs onto Zoom for a quick chat about his new dubstep album, he tells me that he’s at a vacation home in Antarctica. “I bought it online,” he says with a smirk. “Me and my boys, we had a couple of days. ‘Yo, let’s fly and see …

For more than a decade, Victoria Monét has powered her career as an independent musician through her work as a songwriter. It’s been lucrative enough that she never really had to bank on major record labels taking a chance on her as a leading artist. Sure, it would have been …

To hear Brent Cobb tell it, you can draw a line from today’s class of the most celebrated country artists straight back to Shooter Jennings’ debut album, 2005’s Put the O Back in Country. One of the first LPs produced by Dave Cobb, it helped forge relationships between the Grammy-winning …

Welcome to our weeklyrundown of thebest new music — featuring big singles, key tracks from our favorite albums, and more.This week, Quavo honors the late Takeoff with a posthumous feature, Usher ups the jealousy ante in new song, and Reneé Rapp captures the plight of queer girls with pop perfection. …

Unknown Virginia country singer Oliver Anthony and his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” have had an unusual, stratospheric rise over the past several days as the track, championed by conservative pundits and politicians, has unexpectedly become one of the best-selling songs in the country this week. “Rich Men” now …

Travis Scott‘s Utopia has only been out for two and a half weeks, but it’s already spawned numerous strands of discourse, from the apparent debt its production owes to various scrapped Kanye West songs to the debate over whether its lyrics should have more extensively addressed Scott’s reaction to the …