Alan Lightauthor News Today

The first two parts of 'Jeen-Yuhs' (Act 1: Vision, now streaming, and Act 2: Purpose, out February 23) are a remarkable, possibly unprecedented chronicle of the making of a major artist; they should be of interest to anyone interested in the creative mind, whether you care about hip-hop or music or not.

This weekend’s two-night, four-hour documentary 'Janet Jackson.,' which aired on A&E and Lifetime, offered her the opportunity to address that infamous moment. Instead she revealed virtually nothing.

The narrative construction is impressive enough; the fact that it’s matched by a similar musical progression is downright masterful.

Dylan turns 80 years old today. I’m not so much shocked at his age—in some ways, he has always seemed old; this is a guy who sang “Fixin’ to Die” on his first album, recorded when he was just 20—but at my own, and at the fact that he has been there all this time, and that I keep going back to try to figure out just a little bit more about the puzzle he has created for six decades. Bob Dylan transformed the very possibilities of pop music. He introduced a sense of literary ambition t...

Jesse Frohman An amazing thing about listening to hip-hop in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the sense of infinite possibility. It seemed like every week, some new record came out that sounded like nothing you had ever heard before, and opened up some whole new territory you’d never even considered. The technology, the subject matter, and the audience were all shifting at warp speed; N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and De...

Throughout his career, Prince surrounded himself with other musicians that he supported, mentored, and studied. Early on, he was writing so much music that he recruited or assembled other acts to play his songs—The Time, Sheila E., Vanity 6. The “Minneapolis scene” of the ‘80s, his engineer Susan Rogers once said, was really “one guy who created his own competition in order to be a scene.” But after his superstardom was secured, Prince continued to reach out to young musicians and ...

Apple The first time I saw Billie Eilish, it was at the Governor’s Ball Festival in New York City in June 2018. She was sixteen years old. She played in the middle of the afternoon at one of the side stages. Her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? wouldn’t be out for another nine months, but it was very clear what was happening. The tent was packed, overflowing, but you could still see girls sprinting to push their way inside. They knew every word to the singles Eilish h...

Elaine Chung You’ve probably seen it as a meme, or on a t-shirt: “Ever since David Bowie died, shit’s been weird.” This week marks five years since Bowie left us, and it’s hard to dispute that it seemed to start a global decline. His passing on January 10, 2016 kicked off the year of Donald Trump’s election and the Brexit vote. In April Prince died suddenly and tragically. It felt like we were living in a world that no longer had room for this kind of visionary, ground-breaking art...

Elaine Chung In 1970, Paul McCartney was in crisis. The Beatles were falling apart. Who was he without his bandmates and what kind of music would he make? He banged out a bunch of songs in isolation, playing all the instruments himself and recording on basic equipment, and released the results under the title McCartney. In 1980, Paul McCartney was in crisis. He had just broken up his band, Wings, after he got busted in Japan for marijuana possession and spent nine days in jail. Now what was h...