What Would You Wish For?

B.o.B’s “Airplanes” fits right into rap’s post-Kanye landscape. Its self-doubt and insecurity manifest themselves in brash bursts over a genre-confused, modern rock beat. But the song owes a lot of its power to a more ancient stretch of DNA, the notion that airplanes are an almost-magical mode of conveyance and escape.

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Who Throws Chicken Wing Bones On The Sidewalk? Who?

In a classic it’s-not-me-it’s-you move, I’ve decided it’s not the outdoors I don’t like. I don’t like other people. There are three types of other people you encounter when you take your dog outside.

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Is Kanye West Overshadowing His Art?

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was made by a combination evil villain-mad scientist on a tropical island. He imported henchmen and women as his whims moved him. They were ensconced in a mansion, replete with well-appointed staff and coterie at his beck and call. There were five-star dishes and different exotic fishes everywhere.

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Drake & Kanye: The Dream Team?

Drake’s been good for Young Money, but it bears looking into: Is Young Money good for Drake?

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Love the Music, Ignore the Message: How Critics Are Failing Odd Future

By the time they played their first New York show, the Odd Future story was at maximum volume, and had three notable features.

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Can Kid CuDi Rock?

Arbitrary name capitalization. Assaulting fans. The unwieldy combination of rap and rock. Arrest for drug possession. Concept album sequel to a concept album. KiD CuDi is a interesting dude, but one who's not necessarily the most adept at self-awareness.

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Taylor Swift Doesn't Need A Blog. She Has A Record Deal.

Taylor Swift — more than the over-sharing Kanyes and PSA-authoring Gagas of the music world — seems to be performing a sort of LiveJournal style of music. Actually, Swift is probably too young to have a LiveJournal, but the name is a lot more evocative than the more contemporary Twitter. 

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Is "Runaway" The New "Thriller"?

With Runaway, it seems like Kanye has made another entry on his application for biggest pop star of his generation.

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Is Justin Bieber The Future Of Hip-Hop

It looks like Justin Bieber's collaboration with Kanye West and Raekwon may have set the elfin singer on a new career course: rapping.

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Let's Stay Togther

Weezer has made a strong career out of an extended adolescence. Whether they were actually sexually frustrated youths, or just writing from that point of view, the band has never been abashed about their songs' teen bent.

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Playing the Race Card Again. And Again. And Again.

Das Racist (rhymes with "glass vases") takes rap literalism to its highest. That fake Jamaican accent? That's racist. Ignoring people of color? That's racist. Saying they look like Puerto Rican cousins? That's racist. Like Don Imus? That's racist. A line from "Nutmeg" sums up their somewhat quixotic project: "Play the race card again. And again. And again. Drinks at Bennigan's." 

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The Passion Of Lady Gaga

It would seem that Gaga, despite announcing a new album, overshadows her day job as musician with this side gig of being a 24/7 public performance.

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Presumed Innocent

“I’mma let you finish” are four and a half words that continue to carry some cultural cachet despite their flimsy significance. They came up again at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, as if the awards show were a pop culture Indian burial ground.

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Good As Gold

Pavement were the ultimate slacker rock band, suited perfectly to rep the 1990s zeitgeist. If that decade exemplified slacking, today's culture may be the opposite.

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#ITSAPROCESS

Back when Kanye still gave interviews, he told a reporter that “Yeah, a whole part about being a human is to be a hypocrite."

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Album Review: Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs"

There is an album in here, somewhere. But what got pressed onto vinyl/laser etched onto compact disk/encoded into mp3 is emphatically not an album. There are heavy makeout sessions, limbs striking walls and breathing like gasping, that are more of an album than The Suburbs. Clattering pans and chefs pratfalling on spilled olive oil may sound more like an album than The Suburbs. No, The Suburbs sounds like the lifeless reflections of a chastised middle schooler set to a funereal caricature of this band I heard about a few years ago.

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Album Review: Best Coast's "Crazy For You"

Is Bethany Cosentino high? (Hah, yes.) Every song on the album is at the same time a joy to listen to and aural torture. The sound of the album refers to gauzy 60s surf rock and slacker 90s alternative rock. In other words, the album’s bona fides check out. To people our age, Crazy For You is a very appealing record. Unfortunately, it suffers from being made for people our age.

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Dancing On My Own About Architecture

Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” is one of the greatest damn sad pop songs in history. There are five reasons.

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A Review of Will Leitch's Are We Winning?

It’s a definite “buy.” But I also yelled at the book. It quite sympathetically presents a problematic, unsupportable way of understanding life

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James Murphy, The Grandfather of New York Music?

The band worked by gut feel, a method learned by fits and starts being churned within the city's jammed, sweaty streets. LCD Soundsystem managed to release three albums, some of the decade's best, bowing out on top as New York's most beloved band. They also proved that the city has a short attention span.

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