I was not familiar with Clones of the Queen prior to this show, and unfortunately didn’t have time to preview their work in recent weeks, so had no idea what to expect. In short, the Honolulu band was amazing. Really love their sound and they rock it live. The funny thing is that their singer, Ara, at one point deep into their set remarked that she was nervous. Honestly, I thought they really belonged up on that big stage and never would have known had she not talked about her experience while performing at the Arena.

Hahaha: Someone did Clones of the Queen a big favor by adding an opening act to the show. No disrespect to the local talent, as they’re certainly on their way to bigger things and it was a big night for them — but The Cure needed no help to fill a venue the size of Blaisdell Arena, or to give Hawaii an unforgettable milestone event.

Though he’s set up with a great foil in the form of the de rigeur vocoders that start the song, there’s something marvelously catchy and effective about Panda Bear’s halftime cadence on top of the mix. His words are chopped into single phonemes and doled out with a telegraphic dot-dash staggering that lines up strictly with the kick drum, as if someone had inserted a period after each phoneme: “ If. You. Lose. Your. Way. To. Night. That’s. How. You. Know. The. Ma. Gic’s. Right." Sorry to slobber here, but the layering of this oddly stilted utterance over the latticework of faster vocoded voices is a stroke of genius, and it’s the kind of trick that makes you listen to this song over and over, singing it to yourself while folding laundry, humming it en route to the corner store, slapping it onto mixtapes.

It's easy to be a little crushed or even consumed by the idea of the next right move and a traditional career trajectory that forever ascends. But very rarely is that the case.

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.

"Part of our mission is to offer opportunities for change," she says as we walk back out into the visiting area near the facility's front gate. "We figure at least 90 percent of our offender population is going to be getting out. Someday, one of these guys will be your neighbor." She smiles. "It's our responsibility to make sure that is a better person leaving here than it was coming in."

I endured repeated listens of a record I could not understand or stand because I had nothing else to do but work out why it mattered to someone I worshiped and not to me. That will never happen again, not the way we’re set up. You will click away the second a song loses you, and you’ll never learn anything about yourself. I mean it: you will never unlock or awaken new neural paths in your brain if you continue to gravitate toward music that satisfies your expectations. That is Easy Listening.

Rap Genius is the newest example in a long tradition of black music explained for whites, now with a neoliberal twist.

as a listener, and as a fan of music, i feel like my experience is also being fucked up by the way the industry is right now.

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

But when we are talking about a marginalized group that isn’t even offered the same legal rights as the rest of the population in America and is still discriminated against in psychologically and physically horrible ways worldwide, there’s me who will absolutely moralize against the use of the word “faggot” the way Tyler, the Creator uses it. That’s when.

Here is what you need to meditate on before we deal with the rest of the issues: Standing up for your interests is going to destabilize your band status quo, but you cannot let the potential fallout or confrontations deter your course of action.

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

The blurred messages Thicke, Cyrus and others are now sending fit a time when people think of themselves as products, more than ever before.

Great advice here.

On the occasion of Kanye West's sixth album, released the day before Juneteenth, 2013, Anno Domini, we are gathered here due to the dearth of Yeezus pieces written by women, which is a significant oversight since a) much of this album, and West's catalog, is about us; and b) it's 2013, call the freaking doctor. So we've amassed an all-star panel that includes frequent SPIN contributors Puja Patel, Jessica Hopper, and Maura Johnston, Stereogum's Claire Lobenfeld, Toronto-based uber-freelancer Anupa Mistry, and SiriusXM's Sway in the Morning on-air personality and pop-culture writer Tracy Garraud.

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.

Where Durst was wearing black basketball shorts and a white Limp Bizkit hoodie, Borland was seriously dressed like a fucking orc, his entire body painted black with a giant black wig on his head and a light-up opera mask obscuring his face. He kept spitting water his water out instead of swallowing it, which seemed kinda weird but probably symbolized nothing.

Yes, she’s correct: The web offers an opportunity to fall into the open arms of fans, in ways that weren’t available before. Here’s the catch: The web also makes it near-impossible to fall into the arms of just one’s fans. Each time you dive into the crowd, some portion of the audience before you consists of observers with no interest in catching you. And you are still asking them to, because another thing the web has done is erode the ability to put something into the world that is directed only at interested parties. Its content isn’t like a newsletter mailed discreetly to private homes; it’s like a magazine on a newsstand, asking to be purchased. Telling the world all about your life can look generous to fans and like a barrage of narcissism to everyone else.

Again, if you simply prefer the music of the early ’90′s, or more likely, that just happens to be the period in which you had a moment self of discovery (musical and otherwise) before real world circumstances beat it out of you, no problem. But blogs in general (or Pitchfork in particular) are a pretty convenient boogeyman compared to the public’s rotten taste and/or lazy music fans who’ve just fucking given up.

Paul is the perfect artist for a time when breathlessly reporting every step of a promotional campaign is prioritised over - or conflated with - actually assessing the art. Sure, most sites technically keep their news and reviews sections separate - but in the grand scheme of promo, this matters not a jot. The Paris Hiltonesque maxim that all that matters is that people are talking about you, not what they're actually saying, holds true across the board: in a crowded musical marketplace, repeated neutral mentions of an artist from a trusted source may not be an explicit recommendation, but they're more valuable than an averagely complimentary three-star review.

The entirety of our conversation has been extracted from what essentially was Shaking the Habitual's PR campaign. The Knife talked about how thoroughly political the new album was, and a bunch of smart people patiently waited to see how those ideas were manifested. This is understandable, because The Knife seem like earnest people with important and indisputably unique perspectives. But it seems we've let Karin and Olof's rhetoric blend over into what we're hearing. There's nothing wrong with context, but we can't let the creative forces frame an album for our consumption.

Along with Pink Floyd, Thorgerson and Hipgnosis were central figures in the transition from 60s psychedelia to the expansive, million-selling radio rock that defined most of the 70s. More than any single figure, he established intricately composed, surrealist photographic techniques, collages, and pictorial reappropriations as key ingredients of mainstream album art.

Smart takes.

Where is your Kanye limit, the temperature level at which fascination boils over into exasperation? That’s an issue with any Kanye West album, but...

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.

Looking expectantly at the rest of the world to validate your interests, hobbies or art is a set-up to feel bad, to brood and be jaded that you are not understood. You need to reprogram your relationship with money as a creative person, because the one you have is like a hex. You need to grow-up your success dream and stop this focus on how it'll make you feel better.

I’m done with being passive about any kind of status quo that allows anyone to suffer or to be disrespected.

In an exclusive in ELLE's May issue, Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon talks candidly about her next chapter, and what really happened between her and Thurston Moore.

Detective work regarding the mysterious Bandcamp-released ‘Jai Paul’. To me, it sounds like a collection of demos, the majority unreleased. The record was rumoured to be called Rayners Lane, which wouldn’t fit in with the self-titling of this album. It doesn’t sound like a huge budget XL album release, and would appear to be a mixtape, rather than a fully formed album. Despite Paul’s unusual way of approaching promotion, it would be very unlike XL to allow any artist to put out a record in such a colossally understated manner.The bitrates are hugely variable, particularly on the skits of which many seem to cut short (track 8), which wouldn’t fit with it being a proper album release.