Music

Cardi B joins old friend Pardison Fontaine in the flex-heavy video for their single “Backin’ It Up.” She credits Fontaine with helping form her voice as a rapper. In the video, Fontaine enters a pizza parlor only to immediately steal another man’s girl. But he states his case to the …

Willie Nelson was the musical performer and a guest on Wednesday night’s episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, where he sang “Summer Wind” from his new Frank Sinatra tribute album My Way. Nelson, who called Sinatra his “favorite singer” during an on-the-bus interview with Colbert, adds a gentle, …

Marion “Suge” Knight pleaded no contest Thursday to voluntary manslaughter in the hit-and-run death of Terry Carter in Compton in 2015, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. The 53-year-old Knight, who became famous helming the gangster rap institution Death Row Records, agreed to serve 28 years in …

Carrie Underwood, Cry Pretty The latest album from American Idol‘s first “country” winner is “the next step, a modern country album pivoting into pop and r&b without going full Taylor, while also showing the kind of character more mega-stars should aspire to,”writes Will Hermes. “The songcraft is grade-A mall soundtracking, …

For the first time in its eight-year history, the CMT Artists of the Year special will be dedicated entirely to honoring country music’s women of the past, present and future. Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, Kelsea Ballerini, Maren Morris, Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild and Kimberly Schlapman, and Lady Antebellum’s Hillary …

Nile Rodgers reaches back to New Jack Swing, the brittle fusion of hip-hop and R&B that ruled the second half of the Eighties, on the new single “Sober” with his group Chic. Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that: This is a disco pioneer playing New Jack Swing with …

In the fall of 2016, Mac Miller had a pleasant phone chat with Rolling Stone while he strolled around a shopping mall in South Africa, where he had a tour stop. He had just released a new album, The Divine Feminine,and was going strong with his then-girlfriend, Ariana Grande. We …

Leave it to Paul Simon to look back not with anger but with fussiness. Timed to coincide with his farewell tour, In the Blue Light finds Simon rifling through his back catalog and remaking ten cuts from his post-Garfunkel albums. Given how notoriously meticulous he’s always been, you’d think Simon …

Alt-J and Danny Brown explore how our governments perpetuate evil in their disturbing, computer-animated video for the Alchemist/Trooko version of “Deadcrush.” Brown stars in director Jeron Braxton’s warped clip, which draws on the aesthetic of Nineties video games. The piece is filled with demons, mutant dogs and government agents filtering …

Pop experimentalist Empress Of has her sophomore album on the way, and from the sounds of its first single, the effervescent “When I’m With Him,” it sounds like it will be her most straightforward effort to date. The song, which has the dusty, throwback appeal of a Dev Hynes production …