The expansion of San Francisco's Girls from wall-of-lo-fi studio duo to actual rock band on their second album can be taken as a loss, at first:... More >>
Like fellow Footlights alum Eric Idle, John Oliver has a benign mania in his wide eyes that goes beyond deadpan, with a voice that contains all... More >>
You can tell from previous years' festival titles ("A Hmong Us," "Dreaming in Hmong," "No Word for Art"—a reference to the fact that there's... More >>
Janet Jackson's first Twin Cities show in 10 years is a homecoming of sorts for one of the bestselling pop artists of all time: Though born in... More >>
Of all Madonna's children, Katy Perry is the fastest addiction: The first artist to not leave the Top 10 for a full year, she's all stadium-bright... More >>
The raspy-voiced second son of Bob Marley sang with the Melody Makers from childhood onward, but made his deepest mark as a producer bringing hip... More >>
Gil Scott-Heron covered Smog's "I'm New Here" for what turned out to be his final album, giving that release the same title, and you can tell what... More >>
A band conceived entirely for an NBC television series debuting in 1966, the Monkees lived down and broke away from their cynical "prefab four"... More >>
Don't be put off by the grabby yet familiar surface details of this amazing Texas band's dance-noise-pop amalgam--so Anglophilic, they titled... More >>
With a voice like a buzzing neon light, Rihanna shows that a hard woman is good to find on pop radio, where dance-floor instruments become morning... More >>
After James Brown, the funkiest outfit on this planet (or any other) has to be George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic collective, one of whose... More >>
The surprisingly charming and female-empathetic infidelity ode "O.P.P." was only the first in a string of great '90s rap singles from New Jersey's... More >>
Nothing about the Go-Go's' "Our Lips Are Sealed" seems to have aged in 30 years, its oddly complacent beauty and conspiratorial sisterly aura as... More >>
She's the bestselling digital artist of all time not only because middle-schoolers buy that way but because her hold on that group is total: Has... More >>
Part of the charm of the Soviettes' no-frills, good-time punk democracy in the mid-'00s was that they expressed rather than mythologized or sold... More >>
In pop music, there's no missing Bruno Mars, the cleanly soulful crooner who co-wrote K'naan's "Wavin' Flag" and Cee Lo Green's "Fuck You!," had... More >>
With a vice so central to his catalog that giving it up would nearly empty his set list, Houston's Devin the Dude fools hards into thinking he's... More >>
With his Spanish-y guitar, childlike flow, and gawky but gentle rock 'n' roll vibrato, Jonathan Richman is the kind of willful romantic optimist... More >>
