This week’s question comes from A.V. Club assistant editor Gwen Ihnat:

Welcome back to AVC Sessions, our new series where we bring in an artist, band, musician, singer, rapper, etc. to perform three of their own tracks. For the inaugural Session, NPR Tiny Desk Contest winners Tank And The Bangas brought their style and New Orleans charm to the A.V. Club studio. In the final video from…

On Tuesday, the rapper Prodigy died at the age of 42. A lot of rappers who released their best work in the ’90s trailed off in the ’00s, but Prodigy stayed prolific and rangy. In 2013, he released the head-turning Alchemist collaboration Albert Einstein, which contained one of his best, grouchiest, old-man-iest…

Welcome back to AVC Sessions, our new series where we bring in an artist, band, musician, singer, rapper, etc. to perform three of their own tracks. For the inaugural Session, NPR Tiny Desk Contest winners Tank And The Bangas brought their style and New Orleans charm to the A.V. Club studio. In the latest video from…

Here at The A.V. Club, we love it when artists come perform for us in our studio, so we’re going to make it a regular thing with the launch of our new series, AVC Sessions. The premise is dead simple: For each Session, we’ll bring in an artist, band, musician, singer, rapper, etc. to perform three of their own tracks.…

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, the jaded consoled themselves with a familiar bromide: Yeah, but imagine how much great art will come out of this. And sure, the idea that oppression, injustice, and the proud anti-intellectualism that Trump represents is the big, ugly crucible in which a million Guernicas and…

Welcome back to Mailbag, a series about the sometimes weird, sometimes fun stuff we get in the mail.Today, assistant editor Gwen Ihnat brings in Complicated Fun, a new oral history of the birth and growth of the Minneapolis punk scene. Written by Cyn Collins, the book examines how Minneapolis grew from a town with no…

I’m met at the San Diego airport by Erin, who works for Zimmerman Group. It’s the PR company behind a weekend-long journey I’m taking to the Hard Rock Hotel San Diego. Ask the average A.V. Club reader what kind of person stays in a Hard Rock Hotel, and the answer would probably be “a dork.” Still, both Erin and her…

One of those guys who clings stubbornly to outdated technology, Henrik Stelzer’s musical project Metro Riders joins the ranks of artists making sounds on synths and computers produced long ago, a defiant middle finger to the idea of such tools having a sell-by date. His new album, Europe By Night, claims inspiration…

It’s been six years since Fleet Foxes’ last record, and in the meantime, frontman Robin Pecknold has been up to plenty. First he marched straight into the world of academia, enrolling at Columbia University before taking a step back, trading college for cabins. He took a 12-week woodworking course. He practiced both…

For a while there, it seemed like SZA would never release Ctrl. The singer-songwriter (and sole R&B act on TDE, which also houses Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q, and Isaiah Rashad) had released three brief but rich records: 2012’s See.SZA.Run, 2013’s S, and 2014’s Z. These were gauzy, atmospheric affairs, snapping to…

Barring any additional posthumous releases, the last song on the last album that Chuck Berry ever recorded will be “Eyes Of Man,” a midtempo blues number with a vocal performance more spoken than sung. It clocks in at just a little over two minutes—at the end of a 10-track LP that doesn’t quite reach a total running…

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This summer marks the 50th anniversary of the release of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds passed that milestone last year. The debate over which of these classic albums is superior has raged ever since they were released, and there is no easy victor on either side, even…

Iggy Pop has seen a lot of death in his time—the recent deaths of friends, collaborators, and contemporaries like David Bowie, Ron Asheton, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, and on and on, leaving the guy who was once synonymous with drug-ravaged excess an unlikely last wild man standing. Still, while Pop has long since…

Welcome back to Mailbag, a series about the sometimes weird, sometimes fun stuff we get in the mail. Today, DMX is back but in a really uninspiring way. Dog Eats Rabbit is a new “collaborative” album between rapper DMX and L.A. dubstep duo Blackburner. But, as Editorial Director Josh Modell points out, the album is…

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the invention of the bicycle, and The A.V. Club decided to ride around the city of Chicago, paying tribute to the coolest use of a bicycle in recent memory: the “tiny planet effect” from the video for Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble.”

Hell hath no fury like a pop star backlash. Because mega-selling artists of Katy Perry’s caliber are put on impossibly high pedestals, they’re also held to higher standards of scrutiny. Mortal sins for pop stars include (but aren’t limited to) overexposure, changes in music styles, trying too hard, not trying hard…

Flatforms and chokers may be coming back in style, but there’s one ‘90s essential that never left: Singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco, who’s been putting out fiery feminist folk anthems on her Righteous Babe label since 1990. Binary, DiFranco’s 20th(!) studio album, is out today, and to celebrate we’re giving away a…

Phoenix has never been a straight guitar-pop band, but its sixth album, Ti Amo, is the first that puts those important six-stringed instruments fully in the backseat. Given the late-’70s/early-’80s vibe, maybe the guitars are even in the way-back of some wood-paneled station wagon. They’re replaced by believable,…