In an excerpt of a book dedicated to the classic soul album Donny Hathaway Live, author Emily Lordi looks at the ingredients that make Hathaway’s cover of “A Song for You” such an achievement.
Two books about two crucial years in the story of rock and roll, taken together, reveal how the genre shrank to become the playground of white men with guitars.
The strange story of a made-up pop star who managed to keep an album on iTunes for six weeks and get 64,000 followers on Twitter, without recording a note of new music.
The dizzy, saccharine music of the London-based record label PC Music is invested in the most addictive pop of modern history, but the label’s songs feel detached, almost cynical.
Two writers dig to the bottom of why other people’s bad taste in music bothers us so much, and along the way, lay out the new rules for thinking and writing about pop.
You don’t have to be a Beyoncé fan to be impressed by her success. But the depth of devotion shown by her most ardent supporters is just as stunning and intriguing as the singer’s own flawless image.
In Brazil, samba isn’t just the music of Carnival. With throngs headed to the country for this summer’s World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, samba de rota has become an act of cultural resistance.
When even the biggest stars in the world are relying on extramusical gimmicks to hype new albums, what’s an unknown rapper supposed to do to get noticed? Maybe fake a profile in the paper of record?
The super-sized leading light of the new dance mainstream thrives at throwing the kind of one-off party that even a well-dressed, friendly audience in a regular-sized club can enjoy.
Even as they reached the Top 10 in Britain, appeared on TV and had young women swooning by the thousands across the pond, their first singles in the U.S. were released on tiny independent labels and went nowhere. What went wrong, and finally right, in the leadup to the night of Feb. 7, 1964.
It’s almost as if, on The Marshall Mathers LP 2, he’s trying everything to be accepted and unacceptable, all at once. Yet his ability to be lyrically captivating through it all is astounding.