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The enlightening point of comparison for Los Angeles's Dum Dum Girls isn't the Shop Assistants or Bratmobile—the girl-garage pantheon from which they take their echoing...
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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: Augmented by strings, organ,...
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The Tennessee openers (pictured) for this free, all-ages show at the Weisman Art Museum are one of the great new sounds of the year: wobbly cowpunk-garage guitar, girl-group...
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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 the drama of Eddie Argos's...
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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 no word for "art" in Hmong)...
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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 Gary, Indiana, and raised in Los...
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Ohio-Brooklyn sing-rapper Kid Cudi might be the artiest hip-hop figure yet to headline the Target Center, having gone from the solitary-space-station-jogger hypnosis of his...
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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 hooks with a disco bounce...
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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 hop into the fold of his...
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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 the late genius must have...
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A band conceived entirely for an NBC television series debuting in 1966, the Monkees lived down and broke away from their cynical "prefab four" origins just a couple of years...
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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 their recent second album Colour...
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Neo-soul in a world gone pop, Philadelphia's Musiq Soulchild steps up the tempo and hooks a bit on his new, sixth album, MusiqInTheMagiq, but not too ostentatiously. His feel...
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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 coffee of the subconscious....
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After James Brown, the funkiest outfit on this planet (or any other) has to be George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic collective, one of whose leading funkateers is bassist,...
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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 Naughty by Nature, each one...
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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 shimmering as...
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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 there been a point of...
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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 themselves: three albums in...
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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 romantic number-ones in both...
