It’s been nearly nine years since the Robert Glasper Experiment released Black Radio II, the second, Grammy-winning installment of his mélange of contemporary jazz, beat-heavy hip-hop, and neo-soul melodies. Since then, Glasper disbanded the Experiment, embarked on soundtrack work such as the 2020 film The Photograph and the Bel-Air TV …
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Tierra Whack rhymes like she’s a Mensa member from around the way, with a knack for turning each bar into a veritable game of the dozens. No surprise, seeing that the 26-year-old, who went to an arts academy, made her bones battling on North Philly blocks. Her new EP, Rap? …
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Over the past decade, hip-hop’s R&B-leaning interlocutors have primarily trafficked in a kind of euphoric subterfuge. Where drugs once served as a source of sensory enhancement, they have been reconfigured in the genre as a pathway, or shortcut, to genuine connection. The result tends to be music with unintelligible emotional …
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When we all wake up, where do we go? Billie Eilish opened her eyes in 2019 to find herself the biggest sensation in pop music, when she was still just a kid on the edge of 17. Her blockbuster debut albumWhen We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?made her …
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In 1967, Van Morrison recorded 31 perverse one-minute ditties in order to fulfill his record contract. The off-the-cuff songs, brimming with contempt for just about everything in the young singer-songwriter’s orbit — the Sixties, rock & roll, scoring a surprise hit with “Brown Eyed Girl” — established a young Morrison …
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Two years ago, Todd Snider returned to his troubadour ways on Cash Cabin Sessions Vol. 3. It was his first album full of the type of sardonic Nashville hippie storytelling Snider’s best known for (and has long mastered) since 2012’s post-Occupy opus Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables. After a year …
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There is no regional music scene that has flourished the past two years like Michigan rap. And there is no bigger fan of Michigan rap than Lil Yachty. During this period, Yachty has spent a disproportionate amount of time hanging out in the recording studios and gas station parking lots …
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It’s not surprising that Liam Gallagher has struggled to find his own creative voice in the decade since Oasis’ messy breakup. His attempt to form a new band with ex-members of Oasis minus his brother Noel was laughable for the simple fact that it was Noel who wrote all their …
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For most of her career,North Carolina rapper Rapsody has been in quarantine. Neither individual virtuosity, nor cosigns from Jay-Z, Black Thought, and Kendrick Lamar, have ever brought her the reverence awarded to other avowed lyricists of her ilk. Signed to Roc Nationand 9th Wonder’s Jamla Records,Rapsody is not an underground …
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Young Thug’s often-imitated, never-duplicated mush-mouthed warble has become one of the most innovative and influential instrument to grace rap music in the last half-decade. Though Thug’s music has a track record of severe commercial underperformance, his stature in popular music has grown considerably in the last two years, as he’s …
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