Music Features

Eddie Morales was 15 when he met Michael K. Williams, a few months after the future actor was slashed in a bar fight that turned into a vicious chase and left him scarred for life. Morales would go on to choreograph Missy Elliott‘s “Supa Dupa Fly” video and dance behind …

Today an unknown artist can post a snippet of a song on TikTok on a Friday and be famous 48 hours later. But in the 1990s, building that type of name recognition often took years. After a 60-date arena tour as a backup vocalist for Ginuwine and Aaliyah in 1997, …

For 85 years, Lee Perry was many things: raconteur, sonic wizard, rhythmic innovator, talent scout, shit-stirrer, ladies’ man, boaster-on-the-mic, and by most accounts, the greatest record producer in Jamaican history. His discography as producer and guest star includes such titans as Bob Marley and the Wailers, the Clash, Beastie Boys, …

Way back in pre-pandemic 2015, Jimmy Cliff was on tour in Japan and missing his family. After one show, he sat down at a piano backstage and quickly wrote a song, “Human Touch,” about longing for personal connections: “I like the way I can keep in touch when you’re far …

The style of music now widely known as drill first emerged on the south side of Chicago. It contains a brooding, sinister quality that separates it from other contemporary hip-hop subgenres. The songs aren’t overly complicated — they contain a quick hi-hat and a thick undulating bassline. The real draw …

It can be difficult to feel like a tourist in your own city. In booming metropolises like New York, the pace of transformation is often unnerving. That is, unless you’re the musician Mike, whose perceptive and patient raps seem unmoored from worldly concerns. The 22-year-old Brooklyn rapper and producer started …

Clinton Heylin has written eight books about Bob Dylan during the past 30 years, including the acclaimed 1991 biography Behind the Shades (which he updated in 2001 and 2011), making it seem unlikely he’d ever have anything new to say on the subject. But then the news hit in 2016 …

The statistics of Bandcamp Friday speak for themselves: In the year-plus since the launch of the campaign, during which the platform has waived its revenue share for music purchased on the first Friday of each month, fans have paid artists more than $50 million dollars. “Bandcamp is like my life …

M arianne Faithfull has lived several lifetimes in her 74 years. She was only 17 when the pop song “As Tears Go By” turned her into a star overnight in 1964, and she was in her early twenties when her relationship with Mick Jagger made her a tabloid lightning rod. …

R&B singer Yaya Bey has lived some lives. At 32, she’s dabbled in marriage, divorce, weed peddling, visual art, education for the houseless, and street medicine. She’s also been a songwriter since age nine, first crafting hooks for her father — an MC who’d seen moderate success in the Nineties …