It’s no great revelation that the American suburb, that realm of domesticity created by the white flight of the 1950s and 60s, can be a dehumanizing place filled with tedium and pain behind a facade of a happy middle-class lifestyle. In fact, the topic has been something of a pet point of reflection in pop culture for couple decades at least, from Mad Men to Revolutionary Road to The Ice Storm and American Beauty.
And so it’s inevitable that some commentators will scoff at The Arcade Fire’s third full-length album, The …

Being that hip hop originated not in the studio, but in a live party atmosphere, it’s sort of sad that most live hip hop sucks nowadays. With the exception of a few acts that have distinguished themselves over the years (Outkast, Kanye West, a cadre of underground acts that cut their teeth on the live show), most live rap shows amount to a terrible sounding and unjustly, yet mercifully, short experience simply not worth the time and/or the money. Yet in a fledgling music industry, where sales of albums simply …

This week, since there weren’t really any albums coming out I felt compelled to review (none I could stream, anyway), I figured I’d take a look back at the shows I saw weekend before last at the Pitchfork Music Festival here in my newly adopted home city of Chicago.
FRIDAY
The first set I saw on the sweltering first day of the festival, fresh from ditching work a couple hours early, was former Def Jux label head El-P, who started out a little rough — the first song, “Smithereens (Stop Crying)” was …

At the age of 26, Donald Glover’s résumé reads like that of a lifetime achievement award: former writer for NBC’s 30 Rock, ensemble cast-member of NBC’s surging Community, award-winning stand-up comedian, sketch comedy writer and performer with the internet sensation Derrick Comedy, and writer and star of the same group’s feature length theatrical release, Mystery Team. And yet, maybe his most impressive feat is the fact that amidst all these projects, Glover still found time to regularly make music under the alias Childish Gambino, releasing a series of underground mix …

I’m not gonna lie. It’s my professional opinion that OutKast has been the most important, influential and beautifully brilliant act in hip-hop, and maybe even all of music, for the past dozen years or so. It’s hard for me to overstate what Big Boi and Andre 3000 have contributed to American culture in that time.
Which is my roundabout way of saying that I expect a lot from them.
Their last proper album as a duo, 2006′s soundtrack to their movie Idlewild, was a pretty colossal disappointment. It’s got some gems (“Mighty …

Having never seen Degrassi, I don’t know much about Drake, a/k/a Aubrey Graham’s history in portraying Jimmy Brooks on the popular Canadian teenage drama. But there’s no question it represents a weird hip hop origin story. Even more unexpected wasn’t so much the fact that Drake had aspirations to be a rapper; it’s not like that was an unheard of phenomenon in the world of celebrities. The surprising result was that Drake was actually…well, he was really good. So good, he piqued the interest of Lil Wayne, signed a …

The Roots have never put out a bad album. Obviously, some are better than others — 1999′s Things Fall Apart is regarded as the standard-bearer and 2004′s The Tipping Point was something of a low point — but few hip-hop acts have managed The Roots’ longevity at all, let alone their stunning consistency.
Conversely, The Roots also haven’t managed to attain the crossover appeal other much less worthy hip-hop acts have managed with relative ease. How I Got Over, the band’s ninth full-length studio album, finally holds that potential in light …

If you’ve ever seen Jonathan Levine’s 2008 film The Wackness, it’s both comical and sorta sad how easy it is to create an aesthetic representative of the 1990s, at least in a hip hop sense. The coming of age story followed Luke, a marijuana dealer, as he spent the summer after graduating high school pursuing the girl of his dreams, dealing with his family’s financial troubles, and consulting with his psychiatrist/customer, Dr. Squires, about his growing depression and malaise towards his place in life.
Luke, like most NYC kids in those …

I don’t know what it is, but it seems like just about every time a band takes any sort of extended absence from studio work, there’s this weight hanging over their return album. Some burden of proof the band feels like it has to live up to. Some overwhelming need to prove relevance.
That seems to be especially true for Devo, a trailblazing band releasing its first album in 20 years. Unfortunately, Mark Mothersbaugh’s group seems to have mistaken a sad adherence to cliche and cultural reference from the last five …

I was a late comer to The Black Keys. I heard stuff for years and years about how The Rubber Factory was an amazing record or some show they played was so great. Hell, I even heard their stuff in all kinds of stuff I like (in particular the first episode of Eastbound and Down).
And boy, was I wrong not to listen to them. They really are a terrific band (a two-piece at that). But I was lucky enough to finally get into them with this record, the best of …