The title piqued my interest. Well, I figured, he’s going ahead and making it explicit: “grown and sexy,� that restrained-allure masterwork of recent phrasemaking, and the title of the 2005 album by Babyface (to whom we’ll return), would be the outright theme of Ne-Yo’s third album. I figu...

I contributed a few blurbs to Spin's October feature “Strange Bedfellows,â€� which detailed the odd nexus where rock music and politics convene. One entry was about the first copyright-snubbing cut-up artist Dickie Goodman and his 1973 assemblage “Soul President Number One.â€� In it, the first â...

As Idolator vets may remember, my mother has been a hardcore R&B fanatic through every format change, from the days of worn Philly International vinyl to the CD-Rs of mod urban radio hits that she now forces me to provide like a soul-slinging street dealer. At heart she's a classicist, but she's als...

I was never much of a Star Wars fan, so the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that accompanied the forever-awaited release of The Phantom Menace passed by me at the time. But when I finally sat down with Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy—a long-awaited follow-up to a cultural moment tha...

When it's a rough year, some people instinctively reach for the serotonin-spike of all-smiles pop. Though I did play the hell out of that Alphabeat song, I'm generally one of those listeners who'd rather wallow in my funk. Give me hard times and I want a wrist-scarring playlist to match. And to go b...

After many a false start (and a few traffic-related delays), R. Kelly's trial for child pornography finally got under way this past spring, some six years after he was arrested for allegedly doing the dirty with a 14-year-old and videotaping the whole sordid affair. What followed was a courtroom cir...

Remixes have been a constant since the late '70s. Artists have been holding remix contests since at least 1983, when Tommy Boy advertised for a prize to the chancer(s) who best recast G.L.O.B.E. & Whiz Kid's "Play That Beat, Mr. DJ" and inadvertently birthed unto the world Double Dee & Steinski, the...

The never-ending slough both the people who deal with music directly (making it, releasing it, booking it) and those of us who cover it for a living have been dealing with is made even worse by the simple fact no one likes admitting: we've seen this coming. For years. And those of us who are startin...

Let's face it: Wonky Pop has not exactly moved mountains in the past year. America has not yet gone down to its collective river to pray to the shiny Nordic purveyors of high quality throwback pop, and at this point it appears as if this country likely never will be saved by scary-good Scandinavian ...

Oh, sure, the phenomenon of "rickrolling"—in which an unsuspecting Web browser is led to an online rip of Rick Astley's Stock/Aitken/Waterman-penned hit "Never Gonna Give You Up," for the sole purpose of bringing lulz—originated in 2007. But it wasn't until 2008 that shocking people with...