Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth and the genesis of a break-up album.

Music writer Mark Fisher (who died this week) on the decline of Michael Jackson.

The writer recalls collaborating on an abandoned musical with David Bowie featuring aliens, (fake) lost Bob Dylan songs, and a mariachi band.

Tokyo’s reverent “black music” fandom.

All of the books about all of the David Bowies:

There are more and more books like this these days: rock histories and encyclopedias, stuffed with information, compendiums of every last detail from this or that year, era, genre, artist – time pinned down, with absolutely no anxiety of influence. And while it would be churlish to deny there is often a huge amount of valuable stuff in them, I do think we need to question how seriously we want to take certain lives and kinds of art – and how we take them seriously without self-referencing the life out of them, without deadening the very things that constitute their once bright, now frazzled eros and ethos.

Rae Sremmurd, who held the #1 spot for the last 3 weeks for their song Black Beatles, on the precipice of fame.

The second richest musician in the world, behind Paul McCartney, is James Dolan, owner of the Knicks and Madison Square Garden, whose band JD & The Straight Shot toured opening for Jewel behind an album that sold 113 copies.

Tropicália was a movement that lasted just short of a year, spanning from Hélio Oiticica’s 1967 art installation of the same name, wherein viewers walked along a tropical sand path only to come face-to-face with a television set, to the debut of a TV show, wherein its constituents buried the movement on-air. But Tropicália’s influence was vast.

An interview with the elusive Frank Ocean.

Leonard Cohen’s 2 A.M. set at the disastrous Isle of Wight festival, 1970.

An artist at the end of his life.

On the road with Billy Bob Thornton and his band The Boxmasters. Twenty years after Sling Blade all he wants to do is direct but “but none of those Hollywood assclowns will give him the keys anymore.”

How an obsessive New Age hustler brought the sound of the ocean to millions of home stereos.

How Atlanta-born Davido, the son of a wealthy Nigerian businessman, hopes to break the international market with his brand of Nigerian pop.

Two years after she sued producer Dr. Luke, saying he had drugged, raped, and emotionally abused her, Kesha is still bound to her original recording contract. She owes $100,000 (conservatively) per month on legal bills and can’t release any new music.

A sociologist embeds with a gang in Chicago.

“Miles Davis was a deeply competitive artist, and the idea that he was losing audiences to white rock musicians with inferior skills—and, worse, had to open for them at concerts—inspired him to beat them at their own game. But he did so very much on his own terms.”

A profile of Hank Williams III.

A profile of the piano prodigy.

"Los Angeles is a weird, complicated town for him. It's where all the record labels are, for one thing. And Chancelor Bennett, as he was born, is unsigned. Won't sign. It's maybe the most interesting, improbable music-industry story going right now—a young, obviously gifted rapper, universally hailed as the heir to Kanye and leader of a new generation of Internet-savvy kids who think of Jay Z as a failed tech entrepreneur, now on his fourth year of refusing to sign with a label."

Brazilian businessman Zero Freitas has amassed the world’s largest collection of records, the majority of which have never been digitized.

The rise and fall of Lou Pearlman; blimp impresario, packager of boy bands like Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, molester, fraudster, and ultimately fugitive from justice.

The 32-year-old Atlanta rapper released three No. 1 albums in seven months.

On codeine syrup and Sprite

The Piano Man of Yarmouk fled the ruins of Damascus to a life of criss-crossing Germany playing songs about his old neighborhood to huge crowds. Because of refugee law, he is paid nothing.