When the anonymous songwriter/producer Ghostwriter recently dropped “Heart on My Sleeve,” a song built around the AI-cloned voices of Drake and The Weeknd, Universal Music Group moved instantly to remove it from streaming services. But one artist has reacted very differently to the emerging technology. Grimes, whose last album was …
Read More »OK, Seriously, What Was Frank Ocean's Deal at Coachella?
Frank Ocean‘s Coachella performance last Sunday (April 16) was so bizarre, beginning with the fact that much of it took place backstage, that some critics assumed it had to be a deliberate, brilliant deconstruction of expectations for festival headliners. Or something. Then Ocean himself said it “wasn’t what I intended …
Read More »When Are Fake Songs Better Than Real Ones?
Critics, including our own Alan Sepinwall, weren’t crazy about Daisy Jones & the Six, Amazon Prime’s now-concluded adaptation of the best-selling faux-oral-history novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid. But the Fleetwood Mac-meets-Almost Famous fashion, the charisma of its stars, and perhaps most of all, the music, led many fans — particularly …
Read More »How Ye, George Harrison, Queen, and More Made Their Worst Albums
Kanye West was at the beginning of what would become a complete self-immolation of his career and image, and made… Ye. Burnt out in the mid-Eighties, Bob Dylan dropped the half-assed Knocked Out Loaded. George Harrison ran out of ideas in 1982, and ended up with the flaccid Gone Troppo. …
Read More »How Do Great Artists End Up Making Horrible Albums?
Thanks to contractual obligations, burnout, bandwagon-jumping, over-ambition, or all of the above, it can be surprisingly easy for some of the most talented artists ever to release truly dire work. In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, we dive into the first half of Andy Greene’s recent “50 …
Read More »Defending the Grammys: Harvey Mason Jr. Makes His Case
From yet another Beyoncé snub for Album of the Year to fan-roundtable segments that some viewers found cringe-inducing, this year’s Grammys sparked even more controversy than usual. In the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, responds to criticism (including …
Read More »Seriously, Why Can't Beyoncé Win Album of the Year?
After three Album of the Year snubs in a row for three epochal Beyoncé albums, it’s hard not to wonder: What, precisely, is going on with Grammy voters? In the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, Brittany Spanos and Rob Sheffield join host Brian Hiatt to discuss …
Read More »The Wildest Left-Turn Albums Ever, From Lil Yachty to Queen to Taylor Swift
Lil Yachty‘s ambitious new album, Let’s Start Here, is an out-of-nowhere dive into psychedelic rock from an artist who formerly described his genre of choice as “bubblegum trap.” Say what you will about the project — critical reaction has ranged from marveling at his boldly realized transformation to umbrage over …
Read More »The Making of SZA's Chart-Topping 'SOS'
With SZA‘s SOS spending its sixth week in a row at Number One, we talked with three of her key collaborators on the album for an in-depth look at its creation on the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast. (Previously, SZA herself gave a revealing interview on …
Read More »'I Count Myself Hugely Lucky': David Crosby Looks Back in Unheard Interview Audio
“I count myself hugely lucky in life, for all the people that I’ve gotten to make music with,” David Crosby tells Andy Greene in never-before-heard interview audio. “I’ve gotten to make music with some stunningly talented people.” Excerpts from two of Greene’s final interviews with Crosby, who died last week …
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