Exactly how much bigger can reggaeton get? This is a perpetually grating question that’s followed the genre around as it’s skyrocketed to the very center of the mainstream over the last few years and become one of the most omnipresent sounds on the planet. To naysayers, the music represents an …
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“When you cut into the present, the future leaks out,” declares a craggy-voiced sample of late Beat novelist William S. Burroughs near the middle of Jack White‘s avant-rock tune “Into the Twilight.” In the Fifties, the Naked Lunch author popularized a radical style of writing he dubbed “the cut-up technique,” …
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Destroyer‘s last album, 2020’s Have We Met, was recorded mostly at Dan Bejar’s kitchen table — whispered phantasmagorias woven after his family was asleep. Bejar’s latest, Labyrinthitis, is an apt insomniac’s companion as well — but this time it’s for lonely dancers who linger on the floor until the sun …
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Spoon are the most reliable great American rock band of the past 25 years. That might say more about American rock than it does about Spoon, but facts don’t lie. They’ve been at it since the mid-Nineties, and they’ve never made a dull record, thanks to leader Britt Daniel’s brilliant …
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On the week that ended September 10, Common went viral. No, it wasn’t for A Beautiful Revolution, Pt. 2, the new album he dropped that Friday. Instead, it was for a YouTube clip of two freestyles he performed for the LA Leakers, a hip-hop show hosted by DJ sourMILK and …
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By 1969, the Beach Boys were in a rough place commercially. The brilliant Pet Sounds, years away from gaining the cult following it would eventually accrue, was a commercial dud. Radio had moved on to heavier rock and soul. The Summer of Love and Monterey Pop came and went without …
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It certainly must feel good to say “I told you so.” Back in 2011, a then 20-year-old Tyler, the Creator routinely took to social media to profess a slate of ambitious goals. A Grammy Award. A collaboration with Lil Wayne. A music festival and amusement park. They seemed outlandish for …
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Annie Clark has framed her frenetic and unabashedly retro new album Daddy’s Home as a kind of reckoning. Her father has returned home from prison, where he served 12 years for his involvement in a multi-million-dollar stock manipulation scheme; in the meantime, Clark radically transformed her St. Vincent music persona, …
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Justin Bieber’s sixth album, Justice, begins with the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” the civil rights icon declares, leading us to expect, perhaps with some trepidation, a statement on our troubled times from the 27-year-old pop star himself. Instead, Bieber …
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Machine Gun Kelly made his name as a Cleveland rapper known for his high-adrenaline rhyming style and occasional beefs with Eminem. But on Tickets To My Downfall he tries a new gambit that works surprisingly well, switching to late-Nineties/early-2000s pop punk, with Blink 182’s Travis Barker producing and playing drums. …
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