Tame Impala makes music about learning to adapt to life’s changes. In a decade, the psychedelic rock torchbearer and musical flagship of Perth, Australia, polymath Kevin Parker blossomed from renown at home and among indie-rock fans in the know to its current status as one of the Western world’s must-see festival closers, adored by hip-hop […]
El-P, our resident rap doomsayer, warned us that everything was going to shit long before it got there. As a solo artist, a producer, a member of the rap groups Company Flow and now Run the Jewels, and the former head of the venerable hip-hop label Def Jux, El-P, born Jaime Meline, built a sturdy […]
Fiona Apple FaceTimes me on a recent Friday afternoon from a bright-pink futon inside her Venice Beach home, her hair in a long braid, wearing giant headphones, a cozy green sweatshirt, and no makeup. The first thing she says is that she’s nervous. “I’m like, Oh, shit,” she says, laughing. Her nerves are understandable. Apple, […]
Many of the notable hip-hop, soul, jazz, and funk records of the last decade and a half share a common fingerprint. The nexus joining the intricate grooves of Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. and To Pimp a Butterfly, Kamasi Washington’s Heaven and Earth and The Epic, Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah diptych, Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, and records […]
In a certain world, you could sum up the mid-’90s with Stephen Malkmus, crying while drinking a martini, singing Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh. Malkmus’s group, Pavement, is still one of the great examples of what was thought possible with guitars and irony at the dawn of the internet. Decades later, we caught up with the joke, and […]
When Zoë Kravitz got involved with the Hulu adaptation of High Fidelity and decided to play the role of romantically challenged record shop owner Rob, she reached out to the man who invented him: Nick Hornby. Kravitz and the show’s creators and showrunners, Veronica West and Sarah Kucserka, were already in the midst of developing […]