"PBR&B" spread because lots of people were talking about these particular artists, but the artists themselves were left out of such conversations. That's how it usually happens: Their work is left to be sorted like cereal boxes, independent of their own agency. Artists are sometimes asked by fans and inexperienced journalists to describe the "type of music" they make, and they’re often rightfully itchy about making these distinctions themselves. It’s not so much that there’s a right or wrong to genres, but it’s more the case that genres are power moves, able to define music far beyond any artist’s own wishes.

I need to make writing something besides a daily referendum on my worth as a human

In real life, people don't talk the way they do in movies or television or (especially) books. Real locations aren't styled, lit, or shot the way they are on screen. The basic conceits of point of view in literature actually make no sense and are in no way "realistic." Realism isn't verisimilitude. It's a set of stylistic conventions that evolve over time, are socially agreed upon, and are hotly contested. The presence of these conventions is not a sign of quality. Departure from them is not a sign of quality's absence.

Love is a dog from hell, as it's said, and real emotion is ugly and uncomfortable, and it’s why some people giggle when they see a man keening or screaming or crying -- but Drake knows that all this has to be tempered and digestible to be disseminated and reach as many people as possible.

I’m saying the current model for sharing and more importantly for publicizing music is detrimental. Here’s what happens: young musicians make okay records that show they’ve got something but haven’t yet figured out what. The music industry then sells the shit out of it while the music press hypes it equally to death.

I’d like to think that, once we mentally calm ourselves and remember that reading a lot about an artist for a couple months is not a very big deal, we can imagine and try to foster a music world where a teenager can make a small splash with an interesting new sound and then, perhaps, grow and develop across his or her career until that first record is the footnote or rarity that only hardcore fans seek out. Today’s climate doesn’t foster that sort of thing very well, but I don’t think the answer is for everyone to woodshed longer. The answer might be to place a lot less importance on the marketing cycle around a record’s release, and keep in mind how unimportant it might look a few years down the line. Given enough time, the narrative of the musician is always larger than whatever people said for a month about a single release.

Sometimes it's about a song. But sometimes it's about just that one part of a song, the moment when it all breaks down, when the chorus snaps in, when the solo erupts, when the singer hits the note or screams out that line. A lot of life can be captured in these moments-- these snapshots-- of songs. We asked our staff to write about parts of songs that have made an impact on them in some way over the years, and here's what they came up with.

Excellent interview with author Amy Hempel.

There's something taunting and mean about the soul samples on Yeezus; they are like nightmare versions of West’s earliest work.

Author Devon Powers on how Village Voice writers Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau helped create rock journalism, and the evolving role of music critics.

Rap music clearly has a serious misogyny problem. Admitting that won't lead to the elimination of the music altogether and it doesn't mean that all other social issues have to take a backseat. But once the problem has been acknowledged, let's don't just leave the self-evident truth sitting there. Actually continue to think about this stuff. Too often, rap's misogyny has been treated as a given. And that's just as dangerous.

Bustillos hopes that a nonjudgmental dialogue with Hoinsky will help us discover an ethical form of seduction. I doubt it. If a woman must be seduced, either (a) the desire is not mutual and she is in fact being coerced (he is waiting until she is weary enough, drunk enough, or feels guilty enough for leading him on), or (b) the desire is mutual but she can’t express it, for any number of sexist social reasons.

Smart takes.

A lot of people writing seem to think that trainspotting, being able to identify sample sources and lyrical allusions, is the essence of criticism, and to me that kind of identification in and of itself is not very interesting unless it goes into these other realms, of thinking more deeply how the music works and (especially) articulating how it feels from the perspective of the listener.

To listen to this LP on headphones is to be air-dropped into a teeming megacity in 2017: industrial runoff, overgrown wild vegetation, human multitudes, handheld devices, improvised survival technologies, strange weather; bodies and machines in a necessary, dignified symbiosis.

But as much as he was teaching me about movies, Roger Ebert was also showing me how to write-- I became a student of clean and concise sentences that emphasized clarity and the right balance of humor, thoughtfulness, and accessibility, as well as how to shape my raw impressions into well-rounded opinions that cohered on the page into narratives. The idea that the most interesting part of a movie happens after you see it-- during the post-mortems you have with others and with yourself in your own head-- was something that carried over easily to the songs and albums I was discovering at the time.

Shaking the Habitual is, inarguably, an achievement. It is the Knife's most political, ambitious, accomplished album, but in a strange way it also feels like its most personal: It provides a glimpse into the desires, intellectual enthusiasms and (unsurprisingly dense) reading list guiding one of music's most shadowy duos. At its most mesmerizing, its conceptual rigor and occasional inscrutability are overpowered by a disarming earnestness: It is a musical manifesto advocating for a better, fairer, weirder world. Shaking the Habitual feels not post-human but profoundly humanist, fueled by an unfashionable but profoundly refreshing faith in music's ability to hypnotize, to agitate, and to liberate.

It begins and ends with "Ball and Biscuit," and by "it," I mean "Western civilization." The 21st century's most astounding, most wryly pornographic, most brain-meltingly electrifying blues song. Did the electric guitar even exist prior to "Ball and Biscuit"? Did distortion? Did hype? Did critical praise? Did the colors red and white? Did outlandishly oversize declarations of virility? Has there been a single memorable guitar solo performed anywhere, by anyone, in the decade since its release?

What endures more, for me at least, is the pleasure of thinking about a work of art, arguing with myself over it, getting frustrated while going nowhere and then coming out of that mess with a slightly clearer sense of what I believe. Or maybe it’s a better context to put the work in. Or it could be as minor as solving the problem of striking the right tone to end a review in a way that captures exactly what I think with a bit of flair. The privilege of calling that your job is, to steal a phrase from Hamlet, devoutly to be wished.

the statement “it’s clearly satire” is never true, and can never be true. If satire depends on context, audience, intention, and reception—and I put it to you that it does—then it’s impossible to say, of a tweet like the infamous Onion tweet last week, that it’s “clearly satire.” If you don’t take it as satire, it isn’t. Satire is like shooting an apple off someone’s head. If you do it right, it’s pretty cool and no harm done; if you do it wrong, telling people what you meant to do is beside the point, and no one will care. It either works or it doesn’t. And if you hurt someone while doing it, claiming that it was really satire is just special pleading, demanding that your speech-act doesn’t have to abide by the normal rules.

At his worst, he’s an immature egomaniac whose insufferableness comes from being too aware of his own faults. For a guy who was tempered in internet culture, whose personality was always reflected in some digital form or another, it’s an understandable tack to take. Thankfully he’s done a fine job of making the journey to the center of his id a curious and engaging one.

On P2P sites, most things that seemed too good to be true actually were: SEO-baiting, fantasy-football remixes ("Big Pimpin' Remix [ft. Eminem, Dr. Dre, DMX, Nas, Biggie and Tupac"), "covers" that were actually just the original song ("You Really Got Me" by the Who turned out to just be the Kinks’ version), or painfully obvious amateurs uploading their demos and calling it, say, "Beastie Boys-- Intergalactic ALBUM VERSION."

Robert Christgau reflects on the art of writing well about music.

Suggests 'Countdown to Ecstasy'.

As if matching bitter, poetic cynicism with freewheeling jazz-rock wasn’t enough, with 'Gaucho', Fagen and Becker approached anti-music in the same way that plastic surgery approaches being anti-human: somehow, shreds of the same ideals are in tact, but they’re pushed to queasy extremes.

Record reviews are now brief, upbeat and simple: download these songs, they’re good. Beyond that service, writers don’t provide much real value. They are unlikely to establish a strong connection with their readers, as no sense of prejudices and predilections can emerge from four sentences (at least one of which is going to be strictly informational). And you can’t even blame space. They are simply kowtowing to the preferences of those readers who care the least.

In 2012, attempts to stay ahead of readers' innate desires resulted in a collective throwing up of hands. Think pieces and reviews still existed, but they were accompanied by other attempts to lure readers: Trifles like album titles and track listings treated as news items worthy of their own "stories" (to maximize the possibility of people tripping over their fingers and into a unique view); artists out of the public spotlight for more than six months unearthed as if they were creatures from another dimension; Tweets and other public statements by artists taken out of context and drained of their tone so as to stoke "WTF" headlines; superlative-laden lists not even aimed at expressing an opinion in count-downable form; posts with factual errors seen as hits to institutional credibility and opportunities to wring double the traffic out of one story.

Classic and useful.

Ocean is a storyteller at heart, and Orange is so compelling in large part because it’s never entirely clear from what perspective his stories are coming, or where they’re leading. Like all great writers, Ocean’s narratives are wholly fictional and half-true — autobiographies on their way to becoming lies