For many years, most African music remained unavailable to Americans.

One of my first assignments was to review rapper Khia’s second album, Gangstress.

Case’s last album exemplified a singer/songwriter pushing her band forward in multiple directions. Now come 14 songs that often feel closer in, but with brave experiments.

“You’re making a fool of yourself, so get off the stage,” Morrissey sang in 1989, calling out aging rockers on their complacency and irrelevance.

U2 turned to old cohorts Eno and Lanois and practically made ’em auxiliary members.

The eponymous follow-up to Isbell’s brilliant Sirens of the Ditch is probably not what most people expected.

Bizzart’s fourth is his first with producer Innaspace, and I’m not quite sure whom to give more credit.

What would happen if you faced down an army of A-listers all mugging with the same game face?

In a dream-memory, in the surgery tent after Perryville, I take a long, bitter pull from the surgeon’s bottle and am given my belt as a champing bit.

Saul Williams’s 2006 book has now been set to music by composer Thomas Kessler and performed by the Arditti String Quartet, with vocals, of course, handled by the author.