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Katy Perry's 'Geisha-Style' Performance Needs to Be Called Out
Her costume at the American Music Awards, and the reactions to it, show why conversations about cultural appropriation are still so important.
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The Real Reason Music's Gotten So Loud
iTunes' SoundCheck won't end the so-called "loudness wars." It'll just give listeners a way to counter some musicians' undying instinct to "turn it up to 11."
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What Are All These 'Karaoke Versions' Doing in My Spotify Search Results?
Recording solo-free covers of hit songs is a surprisingly lucrative business for some companies these days, and becoming their competitor is easier than you might think.
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AP When Country Music Goes to the Dark Side of Small-Town Life
Brandy Clark and Kacey Musgraves have defied country's tradition of celebrating the working class, and in doing so, they address the harsher realities of modern rural America.
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'Bound 2': More Evidence Kanye Just Wants to Make People Happy
His ridiculous video on Ellen confirms West's status as joybringer.
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AP Purple Snow: What Came Before Purple Rain
A new compilation chronicles the influential Minneapolis R&B sound of the 1970s and early 1980s—right before Prince shared his Dirty Mind with the world.
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GQ Kendrick Lamar Has a Right to Be Mad at GQ
The magazine praised the rapper, but it also endorsed the stereotypes he's trying to subvert.
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Can Pop Music Really Parody Itself?
As Lily Allen shows, it's hard to satirize modern music videos and be a hit without reproducing the very formula getting skewered.
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Reuters / Carlo Allegri and Brendan McDermid Maybe It's Time for Lady Gaga to Disappear
Today's pop stars live for the applause, but as Lou Reed, Banksy, and Pynchon have shown, shunning attention can be the best way to keep it.
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Is Lily Allen's New Music Video as Progressive as the Internet Says?
A chat about the singer's comeback single and its brutal, if imperfect, parody of the year's biggest pop songs
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The Hunger Games' Perfect/Terrible Tears for Fears Cover
Lorde vs. "Everybody Wants to Rule the World"
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What's Wrong With a 'Mashup of Studio 54 and Haitian Voodoo Music'?
Despite Arcade Fire’s deep, sincere relationship with Haiti, Reflektor's marketing campaign trucks in old stereotypes.
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The Immortal Soul of the Drum Machine
808s and MRK-2s aren't hollow replacements for live percussion—they're influential, boundary-pushing instruments of their own, as a new book documents.
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AP Anyone Else Bummed Out by Lady Gaga's Artpop?
The album collapses sex, music, and fashion into one noisy distraction from the sucking emptiness of existence.
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AP Every Celebrity Eminem Has Ever Dissed
With a new album comes plenty of new swipes at the stars.
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Track of the Day: San Fermin, 'Daedalus'
An exclusive premiere of the latest video from the Brooklyn band
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Reuters M.I.A.'s Delightful Middle Finger of an Album
The playful, defiant Matangi picks up where her Super Bowl stunt left off.
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Why Eminem Matters Right Now
On The Marshall Mathers LP 2, he offers what's been missing from hip hop lately: aggressive, commercially viable, virtuoso rapping.
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AP Images Lady Gaga's Artpop Is an Attention-Freak's Manifesto
First impressions of the superstar's third album
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Lou Reed Made Generation X
Reed's fondness for the cultural fringe and his ambivalence toward his own success shaped the views that defined the generation that came after him.
