The East Coast-West Coast hip hop rivalry of the mid-1990s is the most documented conflict in popular music history and the one whose consequences were the most permanent and the most irreversible. It ended with two people dead. It began, by most serious accounts, not as a genuine personal conflict between two artists who hated … Read more
The silence that settled over aisle three felt heavier than the shouting had. No one moved. The police officers slowly lowered their hands from their belts. The customers who had been recording with their phones quietly slipped them back into their pockets. Every person standing there realized they had been watching compassion and mistaking it … Read more
There is a paradox at the center of Bruce Springsteen’s career that has been noted by critics and by Springsteen himself and that has never been fully resolved because it is not the kind of paradox that resolves — it simply persists, productively and mysteriously, as one of the most interesting facts about how music … Read more
There are moments in music that exist only in the memory of the people who were present — that were never recorded, never filmed, never documented in any way that allows subsequent access, and that survive only as testimony from witnesses whose accounts converge with a consistency that makes the testimony credible even without the … Read more
The estate of legendary singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen has publicly condemned the unauthorized use of his iconic song “Hallelujah” at a Donald Trump rally, despite efforts to prevent the performance from taking place. On June 24, the official Instagram account of the Leonard Cohen Estate issued a statement revealing that it had learned Hallelujah was scheduled … Read more
Johnny Winter arrived in New York in 1968 from Beaumont, Texas with an albino appearance that made him impossible to ignore and a guitar technique that made everything else about him irrelevant once he started playing. He was 24 years old and had spent his adolescence and early twenties absorbing the Texas blues tradition with … Read more
Leonard Cohen published his first book of poetry in 1956. He began recording music in 1967, at the age of 32 — late, by the standards of popular music, which tends to reward youth and treat age as a liability rather than an asset. He spent the following fifty years making records that sold modestly … Read more
The 2003 Old Friends tour — the final Simon and Garfunkel reunion — was, by the commercial measurements that the music industry uses to assess such things, an enormous success. The tour grossed over a hundred million dollars. It sold out arenas across North America and Europe. The audiences that filled those arenas were not … Read more
Tom Waits occupies a position in American music that is almost impossible to map onto the conventional coordinates of the industry — not famous in the way that commercially successful musicians are famous, not obscure in the way that cult figures are obscure, but something in between that has no clean name. He has sold … Read more
In the mid-1950s, American popular music had two figures who were, simultaneously and independently, inventing something that did not yet have a name but that would shortly be called rock and roll. Chuck Berry was doing it from St. Louis with a guitar and a lyrical precision that documented teenage American life with the specificity … Read more