Barely 24 hours before this year's Grammy Awards ceremony began, Whitney Houston, a woman who'd once seemed like a cyborg engineered to win as many Grammys as possible, was found dead in a Los…   Read Story »

When M.I.A. held up her middle finger during Madonna's Super Bowl Halftime Show last weekend, she dominated blog chatter for a few days and incited a few minor cable-TV debates. She could have to pay…   Read Story »

Portlandia is a show by, for, and about indie rock types, so it's no surprise that indie big dogs show up in sketches every so often. This past weekend's episode featured two. St. Vincent's Annie…   Read Story »

On the heels of Jack White's new album announcement as well as the unveiling of Blunderbuss's first single "Love Interruption," we thought it was time to revisit the hits -- not the literal ones,…   Read Story »

Infamously cantankerous studio rat/national treasure Steve Albini doesn't like to be called a record producer. He prefers the term "recording engineer." That's a dry, clinical term for what Albini…   Read Story »

Self-titled albums are one thing. But when a band names one of its songs after itself -- or, alternately, when a band names itself after one of its songs -- it's a pretty big deal. The song itself…   Read Story »

Every year, venerated New York weekly newspaper The Village Voice tallies up votes from hundreds upon hundreds of music critics for its Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll and comes up with a…   Read Story »

The Hype Machine, the highly valuable MP3-blog aggregator, has given us the latest 2011 best-of list, and it's an uncommonly democratic one. To put this particular thing together, the site canvassed…   Read Story »

It's a new year, and every Thursday, we're going to be publishing a new list in this space. You guys like lists, right? Good! For our first one, we got to talking about Guided By Voices, who just…   Read Story »

One billion comments! We did it! OK, we did not get a billion comments this year, but we did log more than twice as many this month as we did last December. And that's all thanks to your intelligent…   Read Story »