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It sounds implausible now, but there was a time when soft jazz was almost radical. This brief moment should be credited largely to the English. In the early eighties, groups [...]

In 1972, a year after the release of his first album, 'Just As I Am,' Bill Withers performed a song on British television. 'Harlem,' the record's first single, had done [...]

The members of the British trio Massive Attack first came together in the Wild Bunch, a d.j. collective that sprang up in Bristol in the mid-eighties. The crew included the [...]

Last August, I saw a band from England called The xx (pronounced 'ex ex') at Pianos, a small venue on the Lower East Side. The stage is in a room [...]

There is a recurring aversion on the part of American labels to foreign singers, and it sometimes amounts to a mutual distrust. Kylie Minogue, the tiny Australian who has annexed [...]

In 1987, the singer David Yow and the bassist David Sims were at loose ends after their band, Scratch Acid, broke up. Based in Austin, Scratch Acid was a volcanic, [...]

In 2007, for Dirty Projectors' fifth full album, "Rise Above," the group's leader, David Longstreth, composed, from memory, a new version of "Damaged," Black Flag's 1981 album, radically altering both [...]

Weighing in early on what academics call "periodization" is a dicey proposition. If you try to locate the moment of a major paradigm shift, in the moment, perhaps by calling [...]

In 1988, a twenty-three-year-old Cleveland resident named Trent Reznor decided to record several demos of his songs. He'd been playing in local bands since 1984, and had learned a fair [...]

You are watching a documentary filmed mostly in Montreal during the winter of 1964. A man with thick black hair, wearing a white dress shirt under a leather jacket, steps […]

During the nineteen-eighties, there was a sort of competition among certain members of the American independent-rock scene to make the most hideous noise possible. Guitars were rebuilt to produce wild [...]

The first time I encountered the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, I was walking through the Times Square subway station toward the No. 1 train. It was hard to miss the sound [...]

Grizzly Bear, a four-piece band from Brooklyn, arranges its songs so carefully that they accrue intricate, hairline detail with no loss of momentum, but the group's most obvious gift is [...]

Dedicated fans of popular music have a certain conversation at least once a year. Call it The Question of Endurance. You and your friends are talking about music, and the [...]

One way to understand social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace is to consider that younger digital natives are not necessarily being exhibitionists when they post photographs of themselves and share [...]

In thirty-three years of existence, U2 has sold more than a hundred and forty million albums. Its 'Vertigo' tour made $389 million, second only to the Rolling Stones for a [...]

The title of Neko Case's new album, 'Middle Cyclone,' is a reference to 'mesocyclone,' the core rotational structure of a thunderstorm, which can produce a tornado. This was not my [...]

In February, the twenty-three-year-old English singer Lily Allen visited New York to promote her second album, 'It's Not Me, It's You.' Allen is an almost daily presence in the English [...]

Bruce Springsteen is the de-facto governor of New Jersey, and if America were Europe Aretha Franklin would have a duchy, so both obviously belonged at the joyous Obamathon. But what [...]

Kevin Barnes, of Of Montreal, has written, performed, and recorded many of its songs alone, but these days he is joined onstage by an increasing number of unpantsed musicians and [...]

Justin Vernon, a twenty-seven-year-old native of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, is six feet three, big but not heavy, bearded, and often seen in boots and a thick plaid shirt. In February, [...]

Steven Ellison is a tall, soft-spoken twenty-five-year-old who works under the name Flying Lotus. As part of a peer network, with outposts in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Glasgow, Ellison is [...]

'Funhouse,' the new album by Alecia Moore, who calls herself Pink, has already spawned an enormous hit--her first solo No. 1 in the U.S.--called 'So What,' an explosion of brattiness [...]

Taylor Swift, a slender, pale eighteen-year-old with curly blond hair that hangs in long tresses, is one of the biggest young stars in popular music. I recently caught her at [...]

At first, in the late eighties, he was DJ Timmy Tim--a kid named Timothy Mosley, from Virginia Beach, who liked creating beats in his bedroom. Then, in the nineties, he [...]

Last December, a friend and I went to a release party for Mary J. Blige's 'Growing Pains' album. Near huge screens showing Blige videos, a d.j. was playing records on [...]

Why would you take on a stage name if your given name was the excellent and euphonious Lavell Crump? If, perhaps, you needed to suggest that your persona was not [...]

In a 2005 piece in the Times, Jon Pareles called the British rock group Coldplay 'the most insufferable band of the decade,' and he placed the blame on the band's [...]

Tourists black out reflective retinas in snapshots before printing them, and millions of people refer to strangers they've never spoken to as friends, because they've connected through a social-networking platform. [...]

Usher's 2004 album, 'Confessions,' may turn out to have been the last true blockbuster in pop music. Since 2000, only five albums have sold more copies--nine and a half million. [...]

At a time when radio has lost relevance, and many fans have settled on niches that are reinforced on the Web every twenty minutes with updates and free music, 'American [...]

In an interview with the London Observer several months ago, Geoff Barrow, the leader of the British trio Portishead, complained, 'They turned our songs into a fondue set.' 'They' could [...]

A few weeks ago, Dolly Parton appeared on 'American Idol,' coaching contestants through her songbook and performing a number from her latest CD, 'Backwoods Barbie.' Though the aspiring Idols were [...]

On a Monday evening in August of 1996, I went to see the Roots perform at the Knitting Factory, in downtown Manhattan. The band had come from Philadelphia for a [...]

Is there anything surprising about Amy Winehouse's being awarded five Grammys this month? A cynic might say that her ability to stay alive is startling, but Winehouse's worrying series of [...]

Bands like Fall Out Boy are comfortable wearing eyeliner, but who is man enough now to wear blue eyeshadow and a short-waisted jacket that looks like an enormous silver pompom? [...]

Mary J. Blige's eighth studio album, 'Growing Pains,' defies the conventional wisdom that aging works against female entertainers. Blige has a robust, dark voice, and she moves around melodies in [...]

In early 2006, Kate Nash, an eighteen-year-old London resident, fell down a flight of stairs at her home and broke her foot. Earlier that day, she had learned that she […]

Last Monday, in London, Led Zeppelin played its first full live set since 1980, at the O Arena--formerly the Millennium Dome--which seats twenty-two thousand and was built in 1999, during […]

The singer and songwriter Chan Marshall performs under an alias--Cat Power--with superhero connotations, but she sometimes struggles simply to get through a concert. She was born Charlyn Marie Marshall, in [...]

Popular music in Los Angeles has passed through several golden ages, each unlike the others. Perhaps the sounds most closely associated with the region are the sunny harmonies of the […]

Animal Collective, a four-man band based in New York City, has never seemed particularly interested in comfort or clarity. The group's new album, 'Strawberry Jam,' which was released last month, […]

In May, I went with a friend to see the Canadian indie-rock band Arcade Fire perform at the United Palace, a gilded rococo church in Washington Heights that seats more […]

Toward the end of a live show, weary musicians often appeal to the audience with a stock phrase intended to invigorate the proceedings: 'How is everyone feeling tonight?' 'I can't […]

Hip-hop fans have endured several years of griping about their genre: a lack of star-quality m.c.s, the rise in simplistic lyrics, and various Chicken Little prophecies of imminent extinction. Dude [...]

Dwayne Carter, the twenty-four-year-old rapper from New Orleans known as Lil Wayne, hasn't released an album or a single in months, though he has appeared as a guest on songs […]

It was a clear and cool Friday evening in Manchester, England, the streets still full of summer light at twenty minutes past seven. In front of me, in an orderly […]

In 2002, the R. & B. singer and songwriter R. Kelly was indicted on twenty-one counts of child pornography, after police in Chicago obtained a copy of a videotape showing […]

If you had completely forgotten that Andre 3000 of OutKast was a rapper, don't feel bad--for a while, he did, too. On the last two OutKast albums, Mr. 3000 spent […]

The Texas singer-songwriter Britt Daniel has recorded only two songs that are more than five minutes long. He hardly ever plays guitar solos, is a terse interview subject, and would […]