People think about 1994 now because Kurt Cobain died then, which causes one to squint through the year, misremembering the end of that era as encompassing all of it. It has always struck me that 1994 ought to be one …

Simon Reynolds is a music critic whose seventh book, Retromania, was published in 2011. Reynolds’s first book, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock (1990), celebrated late-Eighties underground rock and neo-psychedelia. He has since co-authored a book about rock music and gender …

They had found their affinity in art, in a love for what art promised and a hatred for where those promises stopped, for the separate and privileged realm society reserved for beautiful, impotent dreams—but even the beauty, they thought, had …

When I wake up at the hotel in Reno, my memories are a messy pastiche. I reach for an image to encapsulate my experience of Burning Man, but everything I grasp feels like a cliché. Dancing beside a fluorescent art …

What rap needs more than a glossary is a case for its intellectual importance as something neither alien nor off-limits to unhip white people, something whose rewards can be approached and discussed on whatever terms, and in whatever language, best suit us.