From Slick Rick and 2Pac to Shyne and Bobby Shmurda, prison time impacts musical careers, mostly for the worst. Young Stoner Life (YSL) top dog Young Thug has been incarcerated for more than a year on charges of conspiracy to violate the RICO Act. Yet, in spite of that tragedy …
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It has taken Kim Petras 15 years to get a debut album out. In the interim, the German singer —songwriter’s steady rise has made her one to watch among pop artists: Her “Era 1” singles, released from 2017 to 2019, were a cool homage to fizzy 2000s bubblegum, and her …
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The story of Stax records has long been smoothed over andsculptedinto a neat bundle of Southern aphorism and marketing copy: The Memphis home of “Soul Man” andShaftand the Staple Singers was the more authentic (insert adjective like “gritty” or “greasy” or “Southern-fried” here), counterpart to the pop-oriented Motown; a rare …
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If you know of Geese, then you probably know their origin story: A group of school friends from Brooklyn record an album during the pandemic as a last hurrah before shipping off to college; Partisan Records (home of British rockers Idles and the Irish post-punks Fontaines DC) signs the band …
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On Militarie Gun’s debut LP, Life Under the Gun, frontman Ian Shelton isn’t afraid to turn his innermost fears and doubts into straight-up earworms. A long-time member of the hardcore scene — with his rusty nail of a band Regional Justice Center — the Seattle musician and his newest project …
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Asake has established himself as the best new artist on the Nigerian pop scene, thanks to an innovative street-pop sound that fuses choir-like, crowded backing vocals with traditional Nigerian melodies and amapiano rhythms. Last year, he made three appearances on Rolling Stone’s Best Afropop songs of 2022 list, with “Sungba …
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Last year, Atlanta rapper Sergio “Gunna” Kitchens was riding high on the release of his celebratory eighth project, DS4EVER. But in the year and a half since that LP’s January 2022 release, Gunna and YSL label head Young Thug have had their lives and careers upended by RICO charges that …
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In the Aughts, Killer Mike was a fiery maelstrom, the South’s answer to Ice Cube, and an Atlanta polemicist comfortable with both dope-boy fantasies and bruising Black politics. But it’s been eleven years since R.A.P. Music, a classic pairing with rapper/producer El-P that inspired the two to form the world-conquering …
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Queens of the Stone Age’s music has never been short on bad vibes and lacerating observations, so the significant bile quotient of In Times New Roman…, the band’s eighth studio full-length, comes as no real surprise — especially when you consider what QOTSA leader Josh Homme has experienced in the …
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When Janelle Monáe was working on her fourth album, she road-tested it where it was meant to be heard: parties at Wondaland West, her Los Angeles creative headquarters. “I was like, ‘OK, if we have a party in spring of 2022, I want to have records ready,’ ” the singer-songwriter-actor-artist told …
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