Music Features

It took less than 15 months for TikTok to commandeer the attention of the music industry. The platform combines a giant and still-growing user base with a vaunted algorithm that repeatedly discovers and elevates new music; it has already earned comparisons to YouTube, the world’s biggest streaming service. Major labels …

Fleetwood Mac‘s 12th album is both demented and debonair, familiar and foreign — a sprawling double LP that, like the Beatles’ White Album before it, reveled in its own messiness, jumbling together the work of three distinct songwriters. Singer Stevie Nicks and keyboardist Christine McVie carried the commercial weight on …

Dove Cameron knows people have never been sure what to make of her. The 23-year-old got her start on Disney, starring in the sitcom Liv and Maddie before helming the musical film franchise Descendants, in which she played Maleficent’s daughter. While she thrived on the platform, her life and celebrity …

Listen to audio version of this story below: In October 1969, the writer Raymond Robinson took to the pages of the New York Amsterdam News, the city’s leading black newspaper, to pose a question. That previous summer, Harlem’s Mount Morris Park had hosted a series of free Sunday afternoon concerts, …

Baron Wolman was beginning his career as a photojournalist in San Francisco when he got a call from Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner in 1967. “He said, ‘We’re starting this magazine,’” recalls Wolman. “‘We’re going to need a photographer. Do you want to be the photographer?’ I had no idea …

In the two days that veteran photographer David McClister spent with Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real in Nashville, the band headlined Nashville’s legendary Ryman Auditorium for the first time, and opened for the Who at the much larger Bridgestone Arena just down the street. “It was one of …

“I’ve been trying to un-fall apart,” the country trio Runaway June sang on their 2018 breakthrough single “Buy My Own Drinks,” an ode tobroken-heart dive-bar hopping.“and I’ve been thinking that some neon lights would be a real good start.” One year later, the group flips the script on “I Know …

“RealLife Rock Top Ten” is a monthly column by cultural critic and RS contributing editorGreil Marcus. 1. Overheard at “The World of Bob Dylan” symposium, University of Tulsa (May 30-June 2): “I’m 71 years old. When will excruciatingly boring fat men cease trying to hit on me?” 2. Erin Durant, …

There’s an aspirational thread throughout all of Katy Perry‘s best songs: the candy-coated nostalgia of “Teenage Dream,” the fizzy, life-affirming “Firework,” the empowering “Roar.” During the 2017 Witness album cycle, that playful, hopeful energy was shrouded by Perry’s fixation on personal maturity, as she traded her signature soaring vocals and …

There’s a great moment in the Billie Eilish video for “Bad Guy” where you can behold everything that makes her the new pop queen for our moment. She steps into the club and gets carded — bad news, since as anyone on Earth knows by now, she’s just 17. The …