Jon Caramanica

Let's Get All Internet-y on Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience

Oh, what's up JT? Nice of you to join us over here in the music world again. You abandoned us in 2006 after Future Sex/Love Sounds--quick note: that was seven years ago, and seven years is roughly the age of a first grader, so we are now a first grader's life away from the previous JT record--but th ... More >>

On Lil Wayne and Future and Hip-hop Authenticity

Rap game ouroboros

Advice For Aspiring Music Writers: Don't Quit, Just Don't Suck

The funny thing about Luke O'Neil's article earlier this week (titled "Advice For Aspiring Music Writers: Quit Now") is that "quit now" was the exact answer I gave when someone asked me last year what I would tell to a high school class of aspiring writers. My "quit now" was borne from a frustration ... More >>

The Ten Best Concerts in New York This Week, 1/28/13

Here are the ten best concerts to check out around the city this week, in no particular order.

Freddie Gibbs

Stephen Colbert Is A Bit Miffed That His Pop Conference Paper Got Rejected

Next weekend, various stripes of music nerds (critics, academics, people who just like to think a lot) will descend on New York for the EMP Pop Conference, an annual mind-meld of pro and amateur musicologists that's taking place in our fair city for the first time. The conference, sponsored by the S ... More >>

Drake and The Weeknd Wallow in their Misery

Riding the Bummer

Radio Hits One: Foster The People, Cage The Elephant Lead The Charge Of New "The" Bands

Back around 2001, a Transatlantic cabal of music critics led a media hype machine declaring that rock was "back." To further this thesis, it grouped together a disparate set of bands offering variations on the stripped-down "garage rock" template who were often cheekily referred to as the "The" Band ... More >>

Da Capo's Second-Best Music Writing 2011: 112 Of Last Year's Most Notable Music Stories

The 2011 edition of Da Capo's annual anthology Best Music Writing— which this year was guest edited by The New Yorker classical writer and The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross; Daphne Carr has been the series editor since 2006—contains 32 essays and is augmented by a a jumbo-sized "Other N ... More >>

Why You Can't Hate Kanye West and Love My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy At the Same Time

​Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy doesn't come out until next week, but the reviews are already in. (Summary: it's a masterpiece.) In these pages, Sean Fennessey wrote at some length about the way West's embattled public persona crashes, again and again, into the music on his new ... More >>

On Odd Future, Rape and Murder, And Why We Sometimes Like the Things That Repel Us

Odd Future and Mos Def in New York, circa two days ago. Photo by Brook Bobbins.​By now you've heard about Odd Future, the polarizing Los Angeles rap collective that got a lot of New York-based critics and labels pretty excited the other night in the basement of Webster Hall. And if you've list ... More >>

Is Kingmaking At CMJ A Real Thing Or An Act of Futility? Our Critics Discuss

Titus Andronicus play Webster Hall during last year's CMJ. Photo by Rebecca Smeyne​Ah, the first day of CMJ: a moment of optimism, possibility, and prophecy. Even now every website and publication with any kind of music-related bent is scrambling to post guides and predictions, links to MySpac ... More >>

Congrats To Raquel Cepeda And Greg Tate For Making Best Music Writing 2010

​Da Capo's annual Best Music Writing series is as close as rock scribes get to the Oscars; we are happy to report that this year's edition, out November 9, features two Voice pieces: Greg Tate's Michael Jackson eulogy "The Man in Our Mirror" and Raquel Cepeda's "Another Love TKO: Teens Grapple ... More >>

A User's Guide To Tonight's Drake Show at Radio City Music Hall

Is this you, perhaps? Photo by Rebecca Smeyne.​Last night, Drake played the first of two shows at Radio City Music Hall, alighting triumphantly on a New York stage after two horrifically abortive attempts earlier this year. But last night was uniformly dubbed a triumph, a coronation for the yo ... More >>

The Golden Age of Advice Rap Starts Now

"When you've run out of peaks," Jon Caramanica wrote in yesterday's Times, by way of reviewing Monday's ridiculous Jay-Z extravaganza, "all that's left are ridiculous, sublime stunts, new ways to climb old mountains." This is counterintuitive but true: a guy like Jay-Z has been a ... More >>

Press Clips, Day 8, Evening Edition: NYT Flack Fires Shots in WSJ Biz News Attack

Not Bob Christie, but close enough.​Two Press Clips in one day? Don't call it a comeback. To cap off the day, the New York Times is firing shots at the Wall Street Journal; Newsweek is bleeding staffers everywhere, still; and...I mean, does anything else matter today besides the latest shots i ... More >>

Who Does Rick Ross Think He Is, Exactly?

​The rapper Rick Ross, born William Leonard Roberts II, is currently being sued by the living, breathing drug boss--"Freeway" Ricky Ross--from whom he stole his stage name. On his new Teflon Don--another nickname borrowed, without consent, from John Gotti--Ross has a song called "MC Hammer," o ... More >>

The Best #p4kfestpickuplines So Far

Love u Chris... Pitchfork is having a good week. Yesterday, our pal Jon Caramanica wrote a piece in the New York Times suggesting the website had pretty much fully arrived as a "hegemon of taste," in the words of one super-fan. This weekend, the publication will host its annual music festival out ... More >>

KISSY, KISSY, KISSY

Do you remember your first time?

Stew Vs. The New York Times: "You Review AMERICAN IDOL Shit For A Living (???) And Yer Calling OUR SHIT Verging On Trite?"

Nicholas SuttleStew's on the left; Caramanica photo N/A​Nothing like a good bad-review-based artist/critic slapfight. Here we have Stew -- the acidic folk troubadour behind the Negro Problem and dearly departed rock-musical Passing Strange -- expressing his extreme displeasure with

Please Welcome the Backlash to the Taylor Swift Backlash

​Her multitudes await, says Jon Caramanica. There's a contrarian streak in culture, where it's a lot easier to share an animosity towards a figure, whether it's the government or a pop star, says Maura Johnston. Also, you try holding onto four Grammy Awards without dropping at least one. (Robo ... More >>

Hey, Gucci Mane's The State Vs. Radric Davis Is #10 in the Country!

​He's no Susan Boyle (#1 for the third straight world beating week, for a grand old-people-still-buy-records total of 1.8 million copies of I Dreamed a Dream sold), but Gucci Mane does have his first top ten record. He sold 90,000--not quite Jadakiss numbers, but better than being the Clipse, ... More >>

Hug a Rock Critic II: Vibe Has Folded

Vibe magazine, 1993-2009. As with Blender's demise (just with more history), this puts a ton of talented folks either out of work (occasional Voice contributor Sean Fennessey springs immediately to mind) or in an even worse bind from a freelancer's perspective. In happier times, Vibe supplied my fa ... More >>

When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong: Clipse Edition

Malice, of the Clipse, started a blog last week, kicking things off with an entertaining video in which he sent up his own lifestyle: the camera's opening shot, of Pyrex and baking soda, turns out to be the beginnings of a delicious waffle batter; later, the rapper runs through some of his tougher ... More >>

Nikka Costa Tonight at the Bowery Ballroom

Jimmy Buffett & the Coral Reefer Band Tonight at MSG

Kidz in the Hall Tonight at S.O.B.'s

Black Kids and Cut Copy at Studio B Tonight

Thursday | 5.15

Tonight: Sara Bareilles at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza

Wednesday

Tonight: Ex-American Idol Bo Bice at B.B. King Blues Club

Tonight: Beach House at the Bowery Ballroom

Tonight: Cormega at the Knitting Factory

Wednesday

American Idol Week Two: Sucking Slightly Less

Rick Ross Buries the All-Star Remix

Maybe We Shouldn't Do This Anymore

The perils and absurdities of rock criticism as a career in 2008

Thursday 8/10

I'm My Favorite Game

Proof that no matter how hard we pretend to be, we're all fragile

The Personals

Falling in love for different reasons

Crimson, No Clover

Harvard revisited: outsiders, 'parlor liberals,' snobs, econ majors, and resisters

The End of Eminem

Can Marshall come out and play? On his new album, Em just wants to be unremarkable.

Music

Letters

Letters

Music

100 Hottest Hotties

Sex Drive Outpaces Death Drive as the Biz Goes Down the Toilet

On Da Corner Worldwide

Hip-Hop, R&B, Dancehall, Crunk, Grime, er, Music by Black People

NY Mirror