The Grateful Dead are with us, always—in the past year, inescapably so. In our modern, retromaniacal culture, their benevolent aims and DIY apparatuses, from ticketing to merch to bootlegging, have long been a refuge for their fans. And 2015 peaked with the band’s latest, greatest, and allegedly last full…

For close to a decade, Kliph Nesteroff, a former stand-up comic from Vancouver, has been exploring the underbelly of showbiz, and especially comedy, history, mainly for WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, the New Jersey freeform radio station’s online home for longform ephemera. Though the writing was clearly unedited (and…

Don’t bore us, get to the chorus: John Seabrook’s The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory (Norton) is one of the most frustrating music books in memory. You will learn a lot from this book; unfortunately, a lot of what you’ll learn is inaccurate. And all too often, what’s not inaccurate is vitiated by Seabrook’s wan…

Thanks to the decision of a Los Angeles jury yesterday afternoon, pop-music fans have a fun, frightening new game to play: Who's Next? No, not named after the Who album—though maybe its infamous pissing-on-the-wall cover shot might now inspire a lawsuit from Andrew Loog Oldham, who as the Rolling Stones' manager…