Oscar Mardell: Brutal Cure

Many people have claimed that the art of the claque was purely manual: what a paradox! Might as well say that the art of war is only the art of making sword-thrusts...

In pandemic times I’m picturing Jason Fearn sat amongst his chaotic equipment, formulating a sinister and foreboding soundtrack...

Screenshot from “Scream” video, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Epic Records, 1994 by Francesco Tenaglia It only lasts for a moment. Not a glutinous efflorescence, or a spooky appearance fit to star in choreography from the good ol’ days. The sluggish shadow slippers from one...

Stormzy’s love of Magic is sincere and profound – and sometimes it cannot be contained. A year earlier, at the Mercury prize...

Holding down the fast forward button on your CD player, eventually the sound of a mysterious hidden track would rush by. An all-too-quick blur of noise. Then you'd have to skip back a bit to get to the start of the song.

On January 29, 2016, Prince summoned me to his home, Paisley Park, to tell me about a book he wanted to write. He was looking for a collaborator. Paisley Park is in Chanhassen

A month before Woodstock 50 was announced, the festival was already in deep trouble...

It was five hours before showtime and Lil Peep was in the back of his tour bus, getting high with two young fans...

Three years after David Bowie’s death, one of his last, cryptic videos leaves us wondering what his final message might mean for us...

The Monkees were about as famous as you could get, with their More of the Monkees album beating out even the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the number one U.S. slot in 1967.

Despite being a casual fan of EDM, I can't tell you literally what Steve Angello was doing on stage. Perhaps he was mixing tracks in the traditional sense, one after another...

The audience sat in front of a screen heard ssssssssssssssssss in the darkness. Light flashed. A train appeared on the screen. The train was coming, increasing in size.

No one would ever peg Betty Wright’s funky 1972 hit, “The Clean-Up Woman” as a heartbreaking ballad. From its first emphatic chords on an electric guitar, followed by Wright’s soulful delivery...

Released in 1998, Lauryn Hill’s first solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, was also a canonical intervention—to both the previously male-dominated sphere of hip-hop as well as the white-dominated upper echelons of the music industry and pop culture.

The MC5 were never a famous band, merely a legendary one. The Clash wrote a song about their lead guitarist and ideologue, Wayne Kramer, called Jail Guitar Doors.

Early in Stephen Davis’s workmanlike unauthorized biography of Stevie Nicks, we witness the circumstances of her most enduring creation’s birth.

Readers with a historical knowledge of 1980s punk will have little difficulty seeing the value of Dave Dictor’s memoir, MDC: Memoir from a Damaged Civilization: Stories of Punk, Fear, and Redemption

There is no reason to add to the already-extended online literature on the making of Grimes: she built a pop-persona: she “happened”...