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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 to an adolescent form, forever changing what a song could aspire to achieve and what a singing voice ...
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 La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising all radically changed the direction of music, and they all came...