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Our reporters spent the past week breaking down the issues at the heart of the Sean Combs case: Ben Sisario and Julia Jacobs explained https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/22/arts/music/sean-combs-diddy-freakoffs-sex-drugs.html — what prosecutors describe as [...]

Last November, Ben Sisario broke the news that https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/arts/music/sean-combs-diddy-cassie-rape-lawsuit.html, accusing the music mogul of physical abuse and rape. Combs denied the allegations, and the two settled in a day. Over [...]

Last week, we took you https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/08/07/arts/music/missy-elliott-out-of-this-world-tour-career.html as she prepared her first-ever headlining tour; this week, Jon Caramanica saw the show and https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/arts/music/missy-elliott-out-of-this-world-tour-review.html. “At times, it had the complexity and density [...]

More than a year ago, Wesley Morris and I started chatting about a Meshell Ndegeocello profile, and I’m so glad our moment finally arrived with “No More Water: The Gospel [...]

We had a few examples of how performing live can reshape an artist’s career this week. Tricia Romano looked at a unique situation for the https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/arts/music/chappell-roan-festivals-live-shows.html, who set up her [...]

On Friday, Cigarettes After Sex put out its third album, and a tour will soon bring the group to arenas around the world, including Madison Square Garden and the Kia [...]

The 15 songs that hit No. 1 this year (so far) 15 songs, 43 min 51 sec Dear listeners, It’s Caryn the editor https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/arts/music/amplifier-newsletter-independence-songs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/arts/music/amplifier-newsletter-rem-deep-cuts.html, seizing control of the playlist [...]

This week, Amanda Hess confirmed what I suspected it is like walking down a New York street with running commentary from one of the city’s most iconic exports, Cyndi Lauper: [...]

In the https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/25/arts/music/pop-music-superfans-stans.html era, pop fans are obsessed with numbers: Who has more No. 1 hits? Who earned the most Grammys? The biggest fans do what they can to boost [...]

Madonna’s hits-filled Celebration Tour, dissected 11 songs, 53 min 16 sec Dear listeners, Lindsay is desperately seeking some time off this week, so I am the first of your guest [...]

Kathleen Hanna has had an extremely rich artistic life as a dedicated creator of music and art out of pure drive, via independent channels, with friends and like-minded cohorts, driven [...]

Maximalism was the watchword of the week (thanks to Taylor Swift’s 31-song “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology”), and we certainly brought you all. Before we get to Swift, a [...]

The Beatles insider Peter Brown (name-checked in “The Ballad of John and Yoko”) is a polarizing figure in the band’s history, and a longtime keeper of its secrets. “The only [...]

Two major stories dueled for attention this week: the arrival of Beyoncé’s new album, “Cowboy Carter,” and raids on two of Sean Combs’s homes by federal officers. Ahead of the [...]

It was a bit of an interviewapalooza over here the past week, starting with two biggies from Jon Pareles, who spoke with https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/arts/music/shakira-las-mujeres-ya-no-lloran.html about the personal upheavals fueling her new [...]

In a week of big new releases, Jon Pareles reviewed one where an artist looked refreshingly inward (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/arts/music/kacey-musgraves-deeper-well-review.html a Critic’s Pick), and Lindsay Zoladz wrote about one where an artist [...]

Rock history is filled with bands of famously bickering brothers. One of them has reconciled and will release its first album in 15 years next week: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/arts/music/black-crowes-happiness-bastards.html. Craig Marks spent [...]

I have enjoyed Kim Gordon’s music and admired her as a person for so long, it was such a win to hit play on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ3i80B0qKg the first single from her [...]

Is the time of surprise album drops (mostly) over? Taylor Swift announced hers during the Grammys, and Beyoncé used another well-watched event, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/11/arts/music/beyonce-super-bowl-act-ii-country-album.html, to tease what seems to be her [...]

Sixty years ago, the Beatles took the world by storm, and Paul McCartney was snapping away. “I thought the photos were lost,” he said, but his archivist found 1,000 of [...]

The 66th annual Grammy Awards are in the books, and so is a new record for Taylor Swift, who now has the most album of the year wins in the [...]

The Grammys are Sunday! If you are realizing you don’t know who’s https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/arts/music/grammy-awards-nominees.html, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/02/arts/music/grammys-how-to-watch-live.html, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/arts/music/grammy-awards-taylor-swift-sza.html and https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/arts/music/grammy-awards-barbie-billie-eilish.html, we have you covered! Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli made some predictions on [...]

Brittany Howard returns with her second solo album, “What Now,” in early February, and https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/arts/music/brittany-howard-what-now.html is the cover of our Arts & Leisure section this weekend. “I was in the [...]

A pair of pieces Lindsay Zoladz wrote this week are especially poignant to me this morning. She reviewed the new album from Sleater-Kinney, a band we’ve both long loved, and [...]

I’m a huge fan of our Obituaries desk’s “Overlooked” series, which revisits subjects who didn’t receive Times reports at the time of their deaths. I saw the photo of Cordell [...]

In our critics’ last words on 2023, Jon Pareles looked at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/29/arts/music/taylor-swift-beatles-replacements-past-recordings.html, which both the Beatles and Taylor Swift did this year, noting, “an update isn’t necessarily an improvement. It [...]

Who is https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/arts/music/andrew-watt.html, and why did three knights — Mick Jagger, Elton John and Paul McCartney — jump on the phone with Alex Pappademas to talk about him? The 33-year-old [...]

Sorry for the slightly belated Louder, I spent this morning on multiple text chains unpacking last night’s Liz Phair show, which celebrated 30 years of her remarkable debut, “Exile in [...]

In a whirlwind 24 hours in music news this week, on Thursday Ben Sisario broke the news that the singer https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/arts/music/sean-combs-diddy-cassie-rape-lawsuit.html accusing Sean Combs, her former boyfriend and label boss [...]

Barbra Streisand’s memoir is 970 pages. “The bigness of it makes literal the career it contains,” writes Wesley Morris, who shared dessert (apparently a bigger deal than I realized!) with [...]

I was not willing to miss a Missy Elliott performance (or a https://twitter.com/mehpatrol/status/1720592932661551295), so I attended the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction at Barclays Center in Brooklyn last [...]

It was a big week for Taylor Swift (when is it not these days?). Her four-year-old song “Cruel Summer,” a fan favorite from “Lover” that has seen new life during [...]

Britney Spears spent 13 years in a conservatorship controlling her life and career (which The Times’s Serge F. Kovaleski and Joe Coscarelli https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/arts/music/is-britney-spears-ready-to-stand-on-her-own.html). During that time, the pop star was [...]

As Jon Pareles writes in this weekend’s Arts & Leisure, “Devo envisioned American culture evolving in the wrong directions, or devolving.” The band, celebrating its 50th anniversary with a 50-song [...]

Some people were certain they knew what happened the night Tupac Shakur was shot in 1996; some thought they’d never know. With last week’s https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/arts/music/tupac-shakur-murder-charge-arrest.html, a former Compton gang leader [...]

Fifty years after Gram Parsons’s death, when most people talk about the country-rock pioneer, they’re talking about his death. Lindsay Zoladz wants to put the sordid details of his last [...]

A lot of rap music today sounds woozy and impressionistic, free form and slippery, and there’s a reason for it: A lot of rap music today is made by rappers [...]

The Rolling Stones are returning with their first album of original songs in 18 years next month, and https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/14/arts/music/rolling-stones-hackney-diamonds.html with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood about returning to [...]

“Stop Making Sense” — refurbished, restored, refreshed! — is returning to theaters this month, and its accompanying live album is being rereleased with additional tracks. The director Jonathan Demme’s concert [...]

Nobody wants to say goodbye to their favorite band. And farewell tours often prove to be fibs. But there is something unique about the Dead, which has risen again … [...]

Make it a weekend of Wham! Wesley Morris named a new documentary about the duo of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley a https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/05/movies/wham-review-documentary.html, and in an interview with Erik Piepenburg, [...]

“Vampire,” the excellent first single from Olivia Rodrigo’s second album, “Guts,” has arrived, and though it starts like it ballad, it swells into a mini rock opera with a few [...]

I am not afraid to admit that every time I got an email about a new release in Dolby Atmos, I was like … OK, but remind me what that [...]

A week ago, Lindsay Zoladz was making her way to George, Wash., to see Joni Mitchell play her first announced concert in more than two decades. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/11/arts/music/joni-mitchell-gorge-concert.html. Lindsay highlighted some [...]

“I had a bunch of hit records when I was a kid, but I’m not for everybody,” John Mellencamp told Rob Tannenbaum. Their https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/arts/music/john-mellencamp-orpheus-descending.html Q. and A. (on the occasion [...]

More unearthed Coltrane? Yes! This time it’s a series of recordings from the Village Gate in 1961. “The big attraction,” Giovanni Russonello writes, is that the visionary multi-reedist Eric Dolphy [...]

“What do songwriters do when they feel death approaching?” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/arts/music/paul-simon-seven-psalms-review.html. “As time runs out, some choose to spend it by determinedly creating music to outlive them.” In 2016, David Bowie’s [...]

“Heart on My Sleeve,” a track that claimed to use A.I. versions of Drake and the Weeknd’s voices, had a short life on streaming services this past week, but its [...]

We have a lot of music to hear this weekend, so diving right in: Two Critic’s Picks reviews, for https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/arts/music/boygenius-the-record-review.html and https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/27/arts/music/lana-del-rey-did-you-know-that-theres-a-tunnel-under-ocean-blvd-review.html; nine new songs on https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/arts/music/playlist-chloe-future-tyler-the-creator.html; an album inspired [...]

For two months, we’ve been hearing stories about disappointed fans who couldn’t secure tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour after her https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/arts/music/taylor-swift-tickets-ticketmaster.html under the weight of demand and bots. But [...]