Afeni Shakur spent the years after her son’s death in September 1996 as the primary guardian of his legacy — the person most responsible for deciding what was released and what was held, what was said publicly about Tupac Amaru Shakur and what remained in the private inventory of a mother’s knowledge of her child. … Read more
The wait is over — and Rush made every second worth it. On June 7, 2026, prog rock icons Rush roared back to the stage for their first full concert in 11 years, delivering an emotional and electrifying performance at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum. The sold-out crowd of 18,000 witnessed the opening night of the … Read more
The mythology of Keith Moon is built almost entirely on destruction. The hotel rooms. The television sets launched from upper-floor windows into swimming pools. The cars driven into swimming pools that were not bodies of water anyone had intended to receive a car. The explosions — literal explosions, pyrotechnic charges set off in places where … Read more
The conventional wisdom about Fleetwood Mac is that they survived because the music was bigger than the dysfunction. This is true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. Because the dysfunction in Fleetwood Mac was not a minor inconvenience — it was not the manageable friction of people with strong personalities … Read more
The Hendrix archive is one of the most discussed and most contested in popular music. He recorded constantly — the compulsive recording habit of someone who understood that ideas needed to be caught immediately or lost, who treated tape the way other people treat notebooks. The official releases represent a fraction of what exists. The … Read more
Few songs in rock history carry the weight and prestige of Rush’s iconic anthem “Tom Sawyer.” For drummers, the track represents one of the most challenging and recognizable performances ever recorded, thanks to the legendary Neil Peart’s intricate rhythms and explosive fills. That’s why fans at the Kia Forum erupted with excitement when acclaimed drummer … Read more
Pete Townshend has been making music and talking about music and theorizing about music and writing about music for sixty years with an intellectual energy that has produced, alongside the records, an enormous body of writing and spoken commentary on what music is for and what it does and why it matters. He is not … Read more
The official story of why the Beatles stopped touring in 1966 has been told so many times that it has achieved the status of settled history. The screaming. The impossibility of hearing themselves play. The specific absurdity of performing music of increasing sophistication to audiences who were not listening to the music — who were … Read more
The greatest trick Paul Simon ever pulled was convincing the world that what he was doing was simple. The melodies arrive with such naturalness — the lyrics land with such apparent ease — that the listener receives the songs as gifts that required no particular effort to make. As if Simon sat down, felt something, … Read more
The relationship between Bruce Springsteen and his father Douglas is one of the most documented father-son relationships in American music. Springsteen has written about it, spoken about it, built entire albums around the specific emotional landscape it produced in him — the complicated mixture of longing and resentment and love and the desire for approval … Read more