Music Features

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 …

Kelman Duran’s music has always been as mesmerizing as it is thoughtful. His electronic abstractions tend to be amoebic and malleable, blending into dembow, reggaeton, and Caribbean riddims that are often atmospheric and moody, saddled with emotion. It’s a sound that’s flourished in underground spaces across the globe and attracted …

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 …

When we meet, Atlanta-based rapper J.I.D is only a few weeks away from releasing his long-anticipated third studio album,The Forever Story. He tells me at least three times over the course of our conversation about his frustrations around releasing the project. “A lot of noise got in this time,” he …