Music Features

It’s an overcast weekday afternoon in August, and Westside Boogie is holed up in a recording studio just off Sunset Blvd. in Echo Park. Less than six weeks removed from the release of his second studio album, June’s More Black Superheroes, the Compton native is trying to stick to an …

There’s one thing we’re still sure of: Robin Thicke’s odious “Blurred Lines” is high on the list of the worst songs ever made. And for that matter, Leah Kate’s nursery-rhyme-biting, Olivia Rodrigo-aping TikTok irritant “Twinkle Twinkle Little Bitch” is definitely this year’s contribution. But in 2022, where all canons have …

In Steve Adelman’s nightlife memoirNocturnal Admissions, we get an inside look into the generation of dance culture on the rise at the dawn of the millennium, just before 9/11 would alter the course of our culture’s history. Embedded in these stories are anecdotes about how attitudes around queerness, dance music, …

You probably know Melissa Young as Kid Sister, who, in 2007, as a spritely Chicago MC earned a verse with the city’s burgeoning superstar, Kanye West, on her high-energy dance-rap track “Pro Nails.” Today, she continues to make music; she recently appeared on Black Thought and Danger Mouse’s boom-bap collab, …

Greg Dulli lives alone in Los Angeles, but when he picks up the phone, there are voices and music on the other end of the line. “I got to get it together a little bit,” he says as he moves from room to room, silencing radios playing his favorite French …

“If I Get Caught,” the first single from the R&B duo Dvsn‘s upcoming album, released last month, is far from subtle in its description of what some might call “toxic” behavior. In the chorus, destined for social media contagion, singer Daniel Daley informs us that “if I get caught cheating …

Forty-five years ago, on Aug. 16, 1977, Elvis Presley was found dead in the bathroom of his palatial Graceland estate in Memphis — officially of cardiac arrest, but the medicine cabinet of prescription drugs in his system surely didn’t help. In the decades since, reviving Presley and his legacy has …

Right from the start, In Search of… stood out. I discovered N.E.R.D.‘s 2002 debut at a Best Buy on the rim of Houston’s I-10 loop, sitting at the front of the store on a blue kiosk marked $6.99. I was a first-year high school English teacher, struggling to pull together …

Rolling Stone‘s interview series King for a Day features long-form conversations between senior writer Andy Greene and singers who had the difficult job of fronting major rock bands after the departure of an iconic vocalist. Some of them stayed in their bands for years, while others lasted just a few …

When Drake stepped onstage to give his acceptance speech for the BMI Songwriter of the Year Award in 2011, one of the names he shouted out — along with his mom, Kanye West, and Andre 3000— belonged to Phonte. The name of the rapper from the acclaimed North Carolina duo …