On Feb. 6, 2012, Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter will headline the first ever hip-hop focused concert series at Carnegie Hall. The two-night event is the result of a partnership between his Shawn Carter Scholarship Foundation and United Way of New York City. The two organizations are hosting the performances as a...

Steve Jobs changed the way we consume media, which in this day and age, is equivalent to changing the very fabric of interpersonal communication. Many people probably read of his passing on an iPhone, Macbook, or iPad (or all three). Yet, it is one of Jobs' least tangible inventions that...

If Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born were Wilco's bold, mid-career thesis, Sky Blue Sky and Wilco a timid antithesis, then The Whole Love is a smart synthesis. It sounds as if the band gathered up all the territory they have covered since 2001 and deconstructed it. The...

When Zach Condon arrived in 2006 with his debut album Gulag Orkestar, he presented pretty much a fully formed musical vision, however left-field it was. At a time when indie music was beginning to fall to the proliferation of hyphenated sub-genres, Condon was offering perhaps the most bizarre of them...

Originally posted on Spinner

As the first half of 2011 wound to a close, WU LYF (World Unite/Lucifer Youth Foundation), seemed poised to become one of the year's most media-hyped bands. The press, British in particular, wove a quilt of intrigue around the young Manchester upstarts, veiling them...

Fleet Foxes debuted with such a spectacular grasp of Americana that the band seemed to hail from indeterminate time and space -- they could've come from the Great North Woods, the Mississippi Delta, the Blue Ridge Mountains -- when in fact they were from outside Seattle. Sure they garnered knee-jerk...

Panda Bear aka Noah Lennox acquired his nom-de-music by compiling mix tapes. "When I first started writing songs and making recordings of songs I would make little tapes," Lennox reveals personably. "On a couple of the early tapes that I made, I drew panda bears or took images of panda...

Record Store Day is a veritable holiday for audiophiles, record collectors and music lovers all around the world. Celebrated the third Saturday of every April for the last three years running, the musical fete teams up over 700 independent record stores with artists and labels from across the spectrums of...

The recording of Bob Dylan's 1963 performance at the Brandeis Folk Festival begins partway through the first song, "Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance," like somebody had forgotten to switch on the tape machine. This sort of cold open is fitting: the 21-year-old troubadour was a fresh face at...

One of the more affable bands to land in recent memory is Grouplove. Brought together by a series of events that frankly sounds too weird to be fabricated, the five-piece coalesces in a mix of punchy vocals, tight harmonies, and youthful abandon. They are an "LA band," but their story...

Sam Davis, the overconfident young author in "Ceremony," is not unlike his own children's book character, a deep-sea diver intent on winning Chloe the mermaid's heart. Davis, played by Michael Angarano, also shares more than a passing resemblance with Max Winkler, writer and director of "Ceremony" -- and a close...

Justin Bieber and his crew of pranksters decided to pull a fast one on tour mate Willow Smith. As the ten-year-old performed her chart-topping hit "Whip My Hair," Bieber's manager Scooter Braun and swagger coach Ryan Goode ambushed her on stage with brightly colored hair-extensions. Bieber followed moments later, parading...

The Silverlake Conservatory of Music is nestled in between Intellegentsia Coffee and Dean's Leather Accessories at the heart of Los Angeles' historic Sunset Junction. Every week the small, non-profit school hosts over 700 students, most of them children or teenagers, instructing them in a range of musical pursuits. The school...

Saturday evening The Strokes made their third ever SNL appearance; they played "Under Cover Of Darkness" and "Life Is Simple In The Moonlight" from their upcoming album Angles. This two song pairing, the straightforward boogie of the first and the oblique haze of the second recalled...

Over the course of February, Maya Angelou's Black History Month Special will be broadcast in cities across the nation. Her first-ever radio public program features special guests Chris Rock, Cornell West, Common and Lee Daniels. It is a great American patchwork, a quilt woven of parables, historical anecdotes, autobiography, song,...

Trent Reznor is one of the most innovative musical and technological personalities of the last 20 years. Recently he has been thrust into the Hollywood limelight for composing the score for 'The Social Network,' with writing partner Atticus Ross. Reznor is best known as the founder and primary member of...

After an extended hiatus, the White Stripes have officially broken up. Though, the two Whites have already gone through a divorce only to form a band, this time they are calling it quits for real. The garage rock duo released a statement on their website, which included the...

In The Bootleg Theater there is a troupe of kids milling about, their shadows cut out against a concrete wall by a projector's beam. The image is obscured against the stucco. The Silverlake venue is a converted warehouse space, a cavernous maze, built of steel and cinder blocks. A couple...

The Postelles and Free Energy have been on tour together since playing The Double Door in Chicago on January 19. This is the third in a series of posts covering the West Coast leg of their tour, which includes Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The Postelles are in an antique store 154 miles out of Los Angeles filling up their touring van's gas tank. There are two hot rods topping off at the neighboring pumps. The band has geared up on water, snacks, and fuel. Meanwhile In the neighboring vintage shop, drummer Billy Cadden...