With his fifth album Swimming, Mac Miller has finally abandoned his frat-rap reputation for good. Sonically, it’s a continuation of 2016’s The Divine Feminine, with a silky, deep vibe redolent of the L.A. alternative soul scene. But while that album tried to create a romantic vibe and mostly ended up …
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Every Nas album since the turn of the century has closely orbited a major theme. At his most overt (he called an album Hip Hop Is Dead in 2006and tried to call anotherNigger two years later), the iconic Queens rapper will trace one idea from a dozen different angles, writing …
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Before I ever heard Liz Phair, I heard about Liz Phair. The Midwestern indie-rock gossip train had made the trip from Chicago, her hometown, to the Minneapolis record store where I worked in high school weeks before an advance copy of her 1993 debut, Exile in Guyville, did. Listening to …
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When Sharon Jones died of pancreatic cancer last year, the world lost its greatest exponent of vintage soul; that she’d first hit her stride in the ’00s with the revivalist, detail-obsessed Daptone label, made the accomplishment all the more striking. Recorded over her last two years with longtime sidemen, genre-masters …
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