Tag Archives: music-features

“I’m not a sad sack,” says John Lydon. “The more problems you give me, the better I look.” The Public Image Ltd. frontman and former “Mr. Johnny Rotten” has been reflecting lately on the last four decades of his career, the time in which he separated himself from the Sex …

Given thatMusic From Big Pinkcame out in the turbulent summer of 1968, it’s tempting to frame the album as a set of soothing sounds for troubled times. Don’t believe it. TheBand‘s debut LP was quietly radical. In a period when the musical landscape was overrun with psychedelic whimsy, their synthesis …

“I was going to write an autobiography once,” Jeff Beck says with a laugh. “I started writing it, and then I thought, ‘No, let them dig around when I’m dead.’” It’s a late-April day, and the guitarist, 73, is reclining comfortably in a black chair in his Tribeca hotel suite. …

“I can kind of be a chameleon,” says Sasha Spielberg. At 27, Spielberg has been making music for nearly a decade – first in Wardell, an indie-folk act with her brother Theo, and then in Just Friends, an electro-pop collaboration with her friend, producer Nicolas Jaar. Yet she’s a woman …

Emerging from the Black Power era of the late Sixties and early Seventies, experimenting with street poetry and percussive sound, the music of Harlem’s Last Poets helped lay the groundwork for hip-hop. The intense Black Nationalist fare of their 1970 self-titled debut was not only politically explosive – it’s most …

Despite all the hosannas he’s garnered up to this point – being hailed as a primary architect of a West Coast jazz revival, featured in the Whitney Museum’s prestigious Biennial and playing to thousands at Coachella – Kamasi Washington, 37, doesn’t see himself as the guy. Sure, he was an …

Last year,Albert Hammond Jr. learned some revelatory news about his childhood. It related to his twin brother, Francis, who died in 1979 after his mother prematurely gave birth to him six month before Albert was born. Hammond had known about that tragedy his entire life, but he didn’t know, as …

The kids outside Chicago’s Metro have been waiting for hours to see Archy Marshall, the 23-year-old London singer known as King Krule. But Marshall, who has a cold, is having a hard time getting excited about the sold-out show. “I love playing music,” he says. “But especially on days like …

In 2013, Mississippi rapper Big K.R.I.T. was one of the most celebrated rapper/producers on Earth: signed to Def Jam, shouted out as Kendrick Lamar’s competition on his “Control” verse and regarded as the future-minded heir to the bass-heavy “country rap” pioneered by UGK. His second album, the following year’s Cadillactica, …