Daniel Aaron pronounces "water" as "wooder" because he was born in Philadelphia. He is the former reviews editor at SPIN.
Danny Brown’s ears are like no one else’s — certainly not in rap. His catalog of albums released since 2011 fittingly reflect his sonic diversity. The wisecracking breakthrough XXX brought his devious cackle to worldwide attention in 2011; two years later, Old offered lookbacks on a dope-dealing past and gleefully irresponsible party anthems. He spread his wings on 2016’s Atrocity…
Editor's Note: This article was originally published in 2020 for the 40th anniversary of Back in Black and was updated in 2025 to reflect its 45th anniversary. Back In Black is not a perfect album, but it may be the perfect rock album. What does that say about rock? Probably something about its built-in sexism circa 1980, with the level…
This article was originally published in 2020 and has been updated to reflect this album’s 30th anniversary. You could call Dave Grohl rock's greatest survivor, and have an uncomfortable laugh, but that doesn’t make the question go away. Robert Christgau once put it even more darkly by referring to him in passing as "Nirvana’s most successful member." You'd be hard-pressed…
At 37, Margo Price hasn't just lived a few lives already. She’s lived a few country singers' lives already, famously pawning her wedding ring to make Midwest Farmer's Daughter, the 2016 album that caught Jack White's attention and then the world’s, with not just the Newport Folk Festival to follow but "SNL" and a GRAMMY nomination for Best New Artist. For…
It's hard to believe there was a time when R&B wasn't exactly described as "loose," which is a very subjective term. But if you can imagine, like most '80s music, R&B had become rather "tight," and became nearly claustrophobically so as New Jack Swing was introduced, with the likes of Janet Jackson and Bobby Brown riding steely new rhythms, vocalizing on beat,…
Problematic or not, the metaphor often used to describe impressive rappers' rapping is often that of a gun. Rat-tat-tat flows. Rapid-fire flows. Eminem is no exception, with his Uzi-like rhythm and velocity when he sputters bricks of word into the air, carefully tucking in extra syllables where needed, or slanted rhymes or chainsaw sound effects or personifying the vulnerable children of…
Lonnie "Common" Lynn has been putting out rap records for almost 30 years, but he spent almost all of the 1990s looking for his audience after an initial taste of fame with 1994's metaphorical "I Used to Love H.E.R." garnering buzz among backpackers. Immediately after, he found it: His fourth album Like Water For Chocolate, which just turned 20, boasted an incredible…
I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumors, but I think that Depeche Mode had an exit strategy for the 1980s. They saw a few tides turning; the synth-pop group's absolutely cutthroat string of charting European singles (and the occasional American hit, like "People Are People") became increasingly less bubblegum. Just trace the pattern from 1981's straight-up bouncy "Just Can’t…
Maybe your favorite artist of the last decade is Taylor Swift or Beyoncé or Drake. For me, it's Miranda Lambert, who, 17 years ago, was a runner-up on singing competition TV show "Nashville Star" during its debut season in 2003. Two years later, she exploded onto the country charts with the Stones-y "Kerosene," the title track off her 2005 debut album, followed…
Mark "Sisqó" Andrews was making sizable waves in his R&B group Dru Hill and on Will Smith's "Wild Wild West" in the late '90s when he stumbled into one of the most quotable, unforgettable hits of the millennium while crafting his solo debut, Unleash The Dragon, which just celebrated its 20th birthday. While the ballad "Incomplete" went number-one on the Hot 100, the tune…
When Dante Smith titled his solo debut Black On Both Sides two decades ago this week, he may not have been thinking about time. But those two sides might be "past" and "future," with who else but the man currently known as Yasiin Bey adjoining them. The Bed-Stuy polymath came to the world’s attention in 1998 with his fellow wordsmith Talib Kweli…
Ric Ocasek's introduction to the world was morse code: chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-CHUNK / chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-CHUNK-CHUNK. Those opening notes of the Cars' first single "Just What I Needed" were telegraphing something small and then something BIG! And then something small again, and then BIG! BIG! The instant rock-radio classic oscillated freely between the two modes, and so did its mastermind. Together with Blondie's iconic Debbie Harry, the…
Like Rhiannon Giddens or Jason Isbell, Sheer Mag are that rare thing: musical traditionalists with something new to say. They appropriate the onetime sleazy riffs of Kiss, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and singer Tina Halladay’s favorite band Thin Lizzy (she has a full-length tattoo of Phil Lynott on her thigh) for trenchant jams about slumlords ("Fan The Flames"), murdered maquiladora workers ("Can't…
Hootie & The Blowfish are a household name, possibly for the worse. Despite being four of the most regular guys to make one of the 20 best-selling albums of all-time with 1994's Cracked Rear View, which has shipped 21 million copies worldwide, their popularity is viewed as somewhat of a fad from the era between grunge and teen pop. It's…
The Black Keys are almost innovators in reverse; they redefine familiar rock phrases like "stripped-down" and “back to basics." Case in point: Their ninth album (and first since 2014) is titled Let’s Rock, which makes ZZ Top's Eliminator sound like a downright Zen koan. There isn't going to be a more on-the-nose title this year unless Lil Pump surfaces with Let's…
The 1990s, particularly the musical culture that defined the decade, was marked by a lot of things: irony, disaffectedness, angst. But "randomness" might be the most crucial component. '90s radio was a Wild West of jock jams, Pearl Jam and Nirvana imitators, ska, big band swing, the tail end of New Jack swing, the front end of Timbaland and people of all…
Listen—do you really think will.i.am thinks he's Kendrick Lamar? The first step to appreciating the Black Eyed Peas is recognizing that rap fans unfavorably comparing them to Nas or something would be like comparing KC and the Sunshine Band to Bob Dylan. Actually, let’s run with that KC thing for a moment, because that’s almost certainly the analogy. Those guys…
The truth is, punk has rarely gone pop. Sure, there’s popular punk. There’s punk bands whose iconic logos and contributions to fashion and established fan bases (with said logos emblazoned on their bodies) will never die. And there’s pop-punk, of course, which has more or less come to encompass just about any band whose music is catchy, fast, and played…
Moby is famous for two things: Making electronic music and not making electronic music. This contradiction has made for a strange career that opened electrifying raves with early floor anthems like “Go” as a DJ, before cycling through genres as disparate as ambient and punk rock not too many years later. It also serves as a fitting setup to his…
Annie Clark is one of those people so talented it seems besides the point to mention it. But why shouldn’t we? She's so demure; let’s embarrass her. Not one of her five albums as St. Vincent (nor her undervalued David Byrne collaboration) ever sounds less than in complete control of its vision. Not one ever comes off like her uncanny,…
