In 1991, Adam “MCA” Yauch was just four years removed from the Budweiser-slinging, go-go-cage-dancing, hydraulic-penis salad days of the Beastie Boys’ first major tour. So he did what any self-respecting young person of means did in the early 1990s: He hit the slopes in search of fresh powder.…

On Vince Staples’ debut mixtape, in a calm tone that suggested he had seen some shit, he rapped, “You want some positivity go listen to some Common.” Eight years later, he continues to live up to those words. In Vince’s Long Beach, California-centered world, it’s summer year-round, and while the…

By bouncing among eras and albums, this enormous box set of sessions and broadcasts offers an elliptical, revisionist portrait of a band whose legacy is largely undecided. Nearly a decade after they broke up, R.E.M. still elude final judgments. Weird but refined, popular yet coy, they confounded the…

In the final moments of Universal Beings —at the end of a radiant hour and a half of polymorphic pulse and atmospheric shimmer—Makaya McCraven breaks a blissful silence with a practical question. “You guys got all that?” he asks, presumably addressing the mobile recording crew set up in a garage…