Music Features

This piece originally appeared as part of Rolling Stone’s annual Hot List, in the July/August issue of the magazine. When Jaden Hossler, the TikTok heartthrob now recording moody rock songs as Jxdn, was born, the future founder of his record label was busy making Take Off Your Pants and Jacket. …

The rapper 454 talks with a respectful cool, like the zenned-out busdriver Otto from The Simpsons. On a recent Zoom call, he punctuates sentences with an enthusiastic “Yeah, man.” But while the New York-by-way-of Florida MC makes the kind of lush, atmospheric music a stoner like Otto might appreciate, there’s …

In the early Nineties, few pop stars were as visually and vocally striking as Sinéad O’Connor. With her shaved head, piercing gaze, and voice that could be tender or steely, the Irish-born O’Connorhad gone mainstream with her 1990 album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got and its omnipresent …

Two years ago, Maggie Lindemann was in the middle of performing at a club in Kuala Lumpur when three Malaysian police officers pulled her off the stage and arrested her. The American singer, who was there to play the first show of a headlining tour that June, had landed in …

Even if you don’t recognize her name, you may know Maia Sharp’s music. Over the last quarter-century, the songwriter and performer has released a bunch of solid albums that navigated the middle ground between country, pop, and Americana. But her songs have also been rendered by other artists: Back when …

During one particularly striking moment in New Jersey musician Topaz Jones’s stunning short film Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma, Jones’s grandmother, Emma Janice Jones, reveals the riches that evaded their family. Jones’s great great grandfather, Marshall Jones, was a cotton farmer who saw an entire season’s yield destroyed by the …

As genres meld and music travels online, regional signifiers say less about an artist’s output than they once did. Atlanta, for example, is a hip-hop keystone known as the home of trap music, but new waves of talent, as disparate as J.I.D and Playboi Carti, are experimenting with mood and …

1971 represented an inflection point in Stevie Wonder‘s career. The prodigious singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist had already put out more than a dozen albums and scored nearly as many Top 10 hits. But he had been part of the famously regimented Motown system for the entirety of his career. …

DMX was a larger-than-life force in rap music at the turn of the millennium. The Yonkers, New York, rapper, who died April 9th at age 50 after being hospitalized with a heart attack days earlier, burst onto the scene in the Nineties with one of the most distinctive voices on …

Decades before Harry Styles angered conservatives by wearing a dress on the cover of Vogue, Kurt Cobain regularly dipped his toes in gender fluidity — donning dresses and makeup onstage, in photo shoots, or just hanging at friend’s houses. One memorable moment is when the late Nirvana frontman performed an …