Music Features

“What’s happening, man?” a spry-sounding George Clinton asks when he picks up the phone. The Parliament–Funkadelic mastermind is turning 78 in July, but says he still feels like he did when he was just starting out in the Fifties and Sixties. Despite this, he’s announced that his upcoming run of …

When someone going about their life in America is apprehended by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, the appropriate response is generally concern and support. When 21 Savage was arrested by ICE this weekend, though, a lot of people’s wires got crossed. A collection of fans, celebrities and journalists were …

Ten years ago, Def Leppard teamed up with a teenage Taylor Swift for an episode of CMT’s Crossroads. With the band set for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March (Swift will be eligible in 2031, if you’re keeping track), Elliott recently looked back on his …

30 years later, 1988 still stands as rap’s greatest year. The lyrical molotovs of Nation of Millions and Straight Outta Compton, the post-modern (and pre-lawsuit) free-for-all of sampling, the national spotlight of a new show called Yo! MTV Raps and much more. To celebrate 30 years, Rolling Stone’s Best of …

In January 1990, a couple of months shy of his 41st birthday, Nick Lowe welcomed a BBC film crew into his suburban London row house for an interview. Lowe had a new album to promote, Party of One, but he’d been in the music business for two decades, first in …

Not many artists get to experience as many pop lives as Teddy Geiger. She was a teen idol by 16, with a mushy soft-rock hit, “For You I Will (Confidence),” on her hands. At 19, she starred as the romantic lead opposite future Oscar winner Emma Stone in the comedy …

Dominant just a few years ago, the electronic pop genre known as EDM has faded from the commercial mainstream — just two producers associated with it are in the Top 50 this week. So artists in this space have been forced to come up with creative ways to maintain a …

A lot of movie critics didn’t love the new Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, aside from Rami Malek‘s eerily accurate Freddie Mercury – just as many ’70s music critics never warmed to Queen. But it didn’t matter:Bohemian Rhapsody had a huge opening weekend, overcoming a rocky production process that included the …

These days, when Ray Davies listens to his band’s masterstroke, 1968’s The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, it’s with “a bit of misery.” The frustration he was feeling at age 23, when he wrote it, is still fresh: The Kinks were banned from playing in the U.S. following …

Elvis Costello would like you to know that Look Now, his first album in five years, is not “a little-box-with-people-going-mad-in-it kind of rock and roll record,” the kind where you“put the red light on play and hope to get the magical take.” It is, instead, what he calls an “uptown …