Music Features

Juice WRLD‘s “Lucid Dreams” was fraught and wounded, a stinging narrative of betrayal softened, slightly, by a sample of the actual Sting. Streamers gobbled it up — “Lucid Dreams” became the most-streamed single of 2018 not made by Drake — and commuters stuck in traffic enjoyed it too: “Lucid Dreams” …

Four days into the new year, Lizzo released the first great song of 2019. The Minneapolis singer-rapper-flautist specializes in propulsive self-empowerment anthems — feel-good songs about feeling good about yourself — and “Juice” may be her finest yet, a near-perfect retro-funk nugget that would have felt just right on a …

“Deep cut” isn’t a phrase most people associate with Taylor Swift — her impact is just about everywhere at all times when it comes to pop music. But real Swifties know that her albums are packed with gems that highlight her songwriting and musicianship, including some gems that often go …

For at least a decade now, rap beats have been getting fiercer every year. The biggest producers in the genre largely abandoned traditional acoustic instrumentation, instead embracing the abrasive potential of software. As Kanye West worked on his 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he kept a note on …

Taylor Swift might have been snubbed by the Grammys, but that doesn’t mean 2018 didn’t belong to her. Swift and her latest album, Reputation, were overlooked in every major category in the annual awards nominations that emerged last week. Yet just seven days beforehand, Billboard announced that Swift had broken …

Serial killers’ personal effects, morticians’ instruments, human and animal skulls, autopsy photos of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, an electric chair, gruesome crime scene images — L.A.’s Museum of Death houses it all. One particular gallery, dubbed the Suicide Hall, displays memorabilia related to the American cult groups the …

The deepest mysteries of Bob Dylan‘s monumental 1966 albumBlonde on Blondewill never be solved. It’s impossible to fully explain a song as mystically beautiful as “Visions of Johanna,” and why would you want to, anyway? But in a new book, That Thin Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville and the Making …

“I was in trouble,” singer-rapper Elbee Thrie says, recalling the day that his band — the Brooklyn progressive-R&B quintet Phony Ppl — was born in 2008. It was Thrie’s 16th birthday, and he was grounded, stuck at home. So Thrie invited over some teenage friends from his Crown Heights neighborhood …

Thomas Abban grew up in Wales and moved to Minneapolis when he was 12. Around that time, he began getting serious about guitar, which he’d already been playing for three or four years. He immersed himself in the blues — Blind Willie Johnson, who preached gospel on Texas street corners …

& #8220;I think of Aretha as Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows,” Jerry Wexler once said of Aretha Franklin. Wexler was the Atlantic Records producer who, in 1967, helped raise the singer to her sudden and incomparable soul heights. “Her eyes are incredible, luminous eyes covering inexplicable pain. Her depressions could …