Santa Claus is a proudly blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth kind of guy who never leaves the house…
Christmas Can Break Your Heart
It’s that time of year again when shop windows fill with red-and-green dioramas, city sidewalks…
The Kracker Barrel: The Conquest of the Country-Rap-Rock Crossover
The borders around whatever constitutes country music were awfully loosey-goosey long before hick-hop was a…
Sylvester’s Mighty Realness
This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at…
Revolution, With Bongos: The Indie Disco Explosion
This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at…
The Foreigner Strut: Mick Jones and Lou Gramm’s Sweet Science of Swagger
There’s something uniquely satisfying and majestically meta about a hard rock classic whose core subject…
The Influence of The Lizard King: Great Artists Who Loved the Doors Madly
Of all the many artists and songwriters who cited the Doors’ mercurial frontman as an…
Brian Eno, The Art-Rock Freakazoid
Despite his later reputation as rock’s preeminent egghead, Brian Eno clearly delighted in his showman…
Brian Eno’s Best Production Work
What can you say? Brian Eno is a people person. Even before his tenure with…
How MGMT Predicted Everything
Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser weren’t so obviously ahead of the curve when the duo’s…
The Death of Boogie and Birth of House: Disco’s ’80s Mutations
This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at…
The Year of Cerebral R&B
Moses Sumney had a certain feeling he wanted to capture when he recorded Aromanticism, 2017’s…
Disco’s Golden Years
This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at…
What Makes Fever Ray So Freaky
What with all the costumes, masks, and other visage-obscuring efforts that have contributed to the…
Into the Nite: Synth-Funk Fantasias
As music scholar Tim Lawrence brilliantly makes the case in his recent book, Life and…
Tom Petty Remembered
For the past three years, I’ve been impressing people—hell, impressing myself—with the fact that I’ve…
The Four Faces of Brian Eno
In his various roles as a producer, collaborator, theorist, or composer himself over the past…
The National Family Tree
When bands adopt an air of world-weary resignation, it can feel like such a pose.…
The Songs That Influenced LCD Soundsystem’s American Dream
As LCD Soundsystem release their fourth studio album American Dream, fans owe more than a…
Going Rogue on the Dancefloor: Star Wars’ Funky Universe
George Lucas has never explained quite how the bulbous-headed musicians of Mos Eisley got hip…
Alt-Country Women You Need to Know
Over the past two years, there’s been such a remarkable abundance of great music by…
The Best Synth-Rock Soundtracks
All of us have our own personal soundtracks, the streams and playlists that run through…
How Guns N’ Roses Fed Its Appetite for Destruction
The band has always displayed such an appetite for its own self-destruction, it’s incredible that…
Sufjan Stevens’ Biggest Big Ideas
The notion of writing a concept album about the contents of the Milky Way is…
HAIM’s Favorite Songs
Is it weird that the Haim sisters seem to all love the same songs? Anyone…
Where My Girls At: The Best ‘90s R&B Girl Groups
So how come the greatest R&B girl groups of the 1990s are—to crib the line…