Evan Rytlewski is the music editor for Milwaukee's alternative weekly, Shepherd Express, and a contributor to the A.V. Club.
Unlike some of his Compton rap forefathers, Kendrick Lamar has rarely had to struggle for respect. He’s reached a level of acceptance and prestige almost unimaginable for any rapper a generation ago. Music publications and fans alike herald him as one of the most significant artists of his generation. The Grammys have…
There’s no easy way to summarize the year in music given how much of it took us by surprise. High-profile albums would be announced with little warning, arriving on streaming services in a flash, and dominate the cultural conversation until the next one came along. Similarly, some of the most innovative names in music…
Given that so many people contribute to our yearly best-of lists, it’s hard to get a glance at an individual’s favorites. But hey, that’s what ballots are for! After giving our top albums of 2016 a glance, dig into the individual lists our writers submitted. It includes their top 10 lists, honorable mentions, and…
2016 has been a big year for music, with the likes of Beyoncé, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Radiohead, Chance The Rapper, and Drake all releasing records that vary from pretty good to really, really great. Then there’s the emerging talents that have turned in career-defining works and earned high marks, like Blood…
“I don’t make music for free, I make music for freedom,” Chance The Rapper boasts on Coloring Book, his third mixtape (or fourth, depending on how you classify Surf, his outstanding album last year with Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment). From just about any other rapper, bragging about giving away music in 2016…
“I made a career off reminiscing,” Drake gloats in a typically meta lyric on Views, his marathon fourth album, though the assertion is debatable. If anything, he’s made his career out of over-sharing. It was “Marvins Room,” a remorseful airing of his sad sexual laundry, that kick-started Drake’s reinvention from Lil…
Every Friday, dozens of new records are released into the wild. Some make big splashes, and others sink almost immediately. For most music consumers, it’s almost too much information, and save for those precious few who spend their hours glued to reviews sites and release calendars, it’s hard to know what’s coming out…
The knock against A$AP Rocky from the start has been that he’s an empty Prada suit. You can listen to his albums straight through and never learn a thing about the guy. That’s never been a problem, though, with A$AP Ferg, the A$AP Mob rapper most likely to unseat Rocky as the crew’s flagship member. On his sophomore…
Every Friday, dozens of new records are released into the wild. Some make big splashes, and others sink almost immediately. For most music consumers, it’s almost too much information, and save for those precious few who spend their hours glued to reviews sites and release calendars, it’s hard to know what’s coming out…
The disturbing use of atomic power to end World War II had folks in the following decades pretty shaken up, leading to the “duck and cover” bomb-shelter era of the 1950s and beyond. Ira and Charlie Louvin—an Alabama gospel duo that helped popularize “close harmony” vocals—captured that feeling on their 1962 album …
After 1992’s Slanted And Enchanted, critics started writing about Pavement as the voice of the slacker generation, and on the 1994 followup Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, frontman Steven Malkmus seemed to take that tag seriously. Alongside “state of alt-rock” addresses like “Cut Your Hair” and “Fillmore Jive,” Malkmus…
Kendrick Lamar’s Untitled Unmastered is a master class in managing expectations. True to its title, each of the eight songs on Lamar’s surprise album is christened simply with a track number and a date, presumably (though not necessarily) signifying when they were recorded. Coupled with the no-frills packaging and…
Compact discs aren’t going to disappear overnight. They still make up a large portion of sales for music labels, and are the dominant format for music in a physical medium. But it’s also undeniable that digital music—along with more and more fans of physical formats turning to vinyl—ensures that the little plastic…
Every Friday, dozens of new records are released into the wild. Some make big splashes, and others sink almost immediately. For most music consumers, it’s almost too much information, and save for those precious few who spend their hours glued to reviews sites and release calendars, it’s hard to know what’s coming out…
Gay characters haven’t had a visibility problem in pop culture in years. But when it comes to minority representation, quality is more important than quantity, and there was a time when most gay male characters were portrayed as stereotypically effeminate nellies. If they weren’t obsessively coordinating weddings,…
Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…
Our list of the 15 best albums of 2015 wasn’t just a one-man decision. It’s a committee call. Each regular music writer and A.V. Club staff member gets a chance to list their top 10 records, with their No. 1 record getting 10 points, their No. 2 getting nine, and so on. From there, we do a little math, and the list is…
It might sound cliché at this point, but in 2015, the music industry bounced back. Maybe not all the way back to its mid-’90s peaks of excess, but relatively speaking in today’s terms. Taylor Swift made buckets of money touring her 1989 record, Adele broke long-held sales records with 25, and everyone with a radio and…
Spectre, the latest installment in the never-ending James Bond series, opens this Friday—and if cryptic and hostile interviews are to be believed, fourth time could be the final time that Daniel Craig slips into the black tux. The star’s potential departure from the franchise has led to a lot of speculation about who…
Welcome to the Music Roundtable, a blatant rip-off of TV Club’s TV Roundtable feature. Here, music writers and fans discuss recent reissues, hot new releases, or just records we like. For this installment, we’re talking about No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, which celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this month.
