One minute he was a hip-hop sensation starting a viral dance craze, the Shmoney Dance, and rhyming about guns and drugs and murder. The next he was locked up, indicted on a slew of charges involving… guns and drugs and murder. The government’s case against Bobby Shmurda, now heading to trial, raises all kinds of nagging questions, but none more troubling than this: Does the justice system fundamentally misunderstand the world of rap?

As with many famous samples, this coo has a storied history in pop music. The same baby has crawled its way onto several songs, from the Rascals’ “Look Around” (1969), to Prince’s “Delirious” (1982), to TNGHT’s “Bugg’n” (2012). It’s like the Wilhelm Scream of baby samples, and it even mirrors the cadence of that famed cinematic sound effect. But even the identity of the Wilhelm Screamer is known (it’s actor Sheb Wooley). Who made this baby coo? Where is this person now?

The mastering engineers I spoke to for this story kept using the same phrase when describing their job: “to make the song competitive in the marketplace.” That is, making the music sound better in audio quality—clearer, louder, more vibrant—than anything else out there. Traditionally, the “marketplace” has been radio, where a well-mastered song hits that sweet spot where you feel immersed in the music but not battered by it. If your song is poorly mastered, the logic goes, people won’t want to buy your album. Worse yet, they might switch stations. And now, the marketplace also includes online streaming, which has raised the popularity of listening to music on headphones or portable devices with lousy speakers—platforms that require their own kind of mastering.

The secret Nu Shooz cool test is, if they come up and sing the bassline, they're cool. If they sing the barking seal, they're less cool.

Jackson toured the facility. "He didn't moonwalk," Hector said. "He was walking around on crutches and he was apologetic about that -- he said 'I'm really sorry' and all that. But he didn't have to apologize. We were just happy to have him." Then, as Hector tells it, one of the Sonic 3 developers asked whether Jackson would like to write the music for the new game. What happened next is still in dispute.

Move from (Spotify, Rdio, Google Music, Deezer, YouTube, Apple Music) to Apple Music, Spotify or Google Music!

A portable animation and sound kit. With the touch of a finger create melodies charged with moving shapes.

“One day, Phil was playing the drums and I had the reverse talkback on because he was speaking, and then he started playing the drums. The most unbelievable sound came out because of the heavy compressor. I said, ‘My God, this is the most amazing sound! Steve, listen to this.’”

For years, saying you liked Enya was enough to get you laughed out of town. Recently, though, her implicit presence has been everywhere (whether intentional or not). A recent example would be Julia Holter's 'Horns Surrounding Me', a kissing cousin to Watermark's 'Cursum Perfico'. Or how about early Laurel Halo, Julianna Barwick, Grouper; even new Burial track 'Rival Dealer' has an Enya passage, as if his night bus had got lost up a country lane. She's surely ripe for a reappraisal.

Immersing yourself in Art Angels is like being inside a vibrantly hued video game — a joyride down Rainbow Road. But for every moment that Boucher let us into her world, there’s another when she’s receding from view, lost in a private reverie, humming to amuse nobody but herself. And thank God, because this is the strange charm I was scared her music might lose as it sought and found a larger audience. “If you’re looking for a dream girl,” she sings with a hard-won assertiveness on the final track, “I’ll never be your dream girl.” Grimes still makes superhero music for introverts, fight songs for people who did not realize they were strong until the perfect song came along and told them so.

Garden of Delete is unlike anything that Daniel Lopatin has done, in terms of technique, mood, or scope. It is denser than his previous albums, by several orders of magnitude. It is more varied, and it is funnier—scarier, too. The album carries with it a risk of whiplash that's as potent on the 15th listen as on the first.

One of the most notable and striking differences between Art Angels and its Top 40 kin is that these are not love songs. The album is an epic holiday buffet of tendentious feminist fuck-off, with second helpings for anonymous commenters and music industry blood-suckers. Her conflicted, vertiginous relationship with the fast fame that followed Visions seems to have led her to a place of DGAF liberation.

People like to talk about how Dilla had the best "ear" in hip hop, and they're totally right. Listen to full beat again and listen to just the bass part: it's a legitimate, brand-new bassline that wasn't in the original song. Listen to that transition between guit_lo and string_bass_1: there's a syncopated bass note right at the end of guit_lo and then bam, it segues right into that higher note (maybe a fifth interval? I suck at music theory). And you can't get that just by chopping things up randomly, even if you select good samples.

Critic Noah Berlatsky examines what Quentin Tarantino's use and imagining of Johnny Cash's music means.

In this edition of his monthly column, the premier writer on new, emergent, underground music addresses how the framing of music can radically redefine it. I love vaporwave and ‘internet music’, I really do. At its best it’s a provocative, complex and highly modern statement—but can you imagine it getting stupider, then more commonplace, then sticking around for more or less a decade? And towards the end of the decade, a well-meaning ebook gets published called Internet Music: The Weird and Wonderful World of Online Sounds, its title all spelled out in unicode characters and a naked 3D virtual woman floating above a blue watery backdrop on the cover? Wouldn’t you want a more exciting decade?

In the late 1980's and early 1990's, I worked for Kmart behind the service desk and the store played specific pre-recorded cassettes issued by corporate. This was background music, or perhaps you could call it elevator music. Anyways, I saved these tapes from the trash during this period and this video shows you my extensive, odd collection. The older tapes contain canned elevator music with instrumental renditions of songs. Then, the songs became completely mainstream around 1991. All of them have advertisements every few songs. The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's because they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each month.

“I’m trying to put on those Phil Collins melodies,” West told Miss Info, naming the most elusive and least-explored influence on 808s. He was talking about Collins’ synth-like, proto-Auto-Tuned voice, but there’s also a sonic kinship between the hard, sharp, and dry drums that Collins popularized on his earliest solo records and the uncanny explosions in dead space that make up 808s’ beats. Collins first came upon this “gated reverb” drum sound while working on Peter Gabriel’s 1980 track “Intruder”, when the song’s engineer, Hugh Padgham, used a microphone normally used for in-studio communication—something closer to an intercom—and then trapped and snuffed out any overtones with a signal processor called a noise gate. It made the drum hits both vivid and lifeless, loud sounds that confused our sense of how loud sounds travel. The technique was famously employed on Collins’ signature hit “In the Air Tonight”, which Kanye has covered live.

Pamplamoose's much-publicized "failure" isn't about money, but what happens when a band is bad at managing their own expectations, argues Old Man Gloom drummer Santos Montano.

Fetty Wap has transcended his initial audience and is now a burgeoning pop star, but that doesn't make his song about cooking cocaine with his girlfriend fair game. The power of the song is in already its juxtapositions—it's a love song steeped in culling a hard option from dire circumstances; it’s a manifestation of street level feminism replete with his and her Lamborghinis and coed trips to the strip club. Subjecting it to full-press hipster racism doesn't make any new observations. In fact, it takes away from them. When young George Dalton sings about making pies with his baby, he's talking about actual pies, not cooking crack, which is a huge poetic step backward. One has to ask: Where are the parents here? But that's how white supremacy functions: If this were a Black child, it would ring as an indictment on the decaying structure of the Black family. But, because Dalton is white, it's "cute".

The notion that the best way to introduce a streaming music service to women is to present it as an emotional dildo is confounding.

Rihanna won’t let us feel better about ourselves through her story, and she won’t even say sorry.

Confident black men are constantly held under by society, frequently told to not say much and accept what society (i.e. the whims of white men in power) gives us. This is a tactic to hold us “in place,” to make sure we don’t “overstep our boundaries” (i.e. gain a level of influence as to overthrow the people in power, which, again, are a bunch of white dudes). We as black men are treated as secondary, even though our efforts have created some of the greatest art forms our society has been given. And when we hold onto our dignity by believing in ourselves, we are conditioned to hold it at a distance so as not to upset those nebulous powers that be.

Bands who don’t license their music, like Pearl Jam and R.E.M., have zero songs on this list of timeless music. What was a choice driven by integrity at the time couldn’t possibly have anticipated how much we now allow our media consumption to drive our music preferences. Some of the most important bands in music history will be lost in favor of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”, which is the most timeless song of the 1980s at this point, because a high school kid on an MTV reality show wanted Journey to be playing when he met his girlfriend.

While Kanye's not an activist in the traditional sense, his entire career makes clear he is motivated by resistance.

Welcome to the land of musical serendipity, where you can get from Nazis to an album of Kurt Vonnegut reading Slaughterhouse-Five in a few clicks.

In the same way that Twitter asking me "what’s happening?" compels me to fill that box with something, a non-annotated line on Genius just feels…empty, in need of being explained, in some way. It’s Frere-Jones’ job, in part, to come up with some way of adding value to music that doesn’t lend itself toward lyrical exegesis.

What these two moves share is the underlying view that some kinds of affective labor and digital interactivity are good–the kinds that Swift can both control and extract the most surplus value from–and some kinds of interactivity are bad–the kinds that Swift doesn’t control and extract enough surplus value from. The bad kinds feminize Swift–they put her in the position of feminized laborer, of wife. We can think of Swift’s two moves this week as attempts to Lean In, that is, pull herself out of structural/economic feminization.

Part of maturing, I think, is realizing that charges of acting in bad faith are often themselves made in bad faith, an attempt to explain away gaps in understanding between two people rather than trying to bridge them, or even make peace with them. That's as true in politics and in relationships as it is in music, but in music—arguably the strangest and most subjective art form there is—the best option often is "make peace." Not everything is for you, even you of eclectic tastes and voracious listening appetite. That doesn't mean others are lying about their enjoyment.

I have nothing against Kanye West. Help me with this—I’m not dissing him—this is about how people talk about him. With the last album he did, he got all the best beatmakers on the planet at the time to make beats for him. A lot of the time, he wasn’t even there. Yet no one would question his authorship for a second.

Andy Beta scours New York—from a museum to a summer camp upstate—trying to locate the essence of classic dancefloors via memory, imagination, and bass.