In late 1967, the music journalist Stanley Booth was on assignment to write about the Memphis soul sound for The Saturday Evening Post when he watched Otis Redding and the guitarist and producer Steve Cropper sit on folding chairs at Stax Records in Memphis as they composed “(Sittin’ on) The …
The concert stage-to-Hollywood highway has been wide and inviting for decades. Everyone from Elvis and the Beatles to Madonna and Taylor Swift has journeyed down that road. But there’s something unique about Bob Dylan’s big-screen presence. He is Dylan the troubadour, Dylan the documentary subject, Dylan the car commercial star, …
The megahits of 2024 were inseparable from their back stories. And that was exhausting. Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which racked up hundreds of millions of streams and helped propel him to the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show, was the ferocious culmination of his battle, via quickly released singles, with …