Powerofpop.com

Getty Image For as long as I have been listening to rock ‘n’ roll, people have been telling me that the music I love is dead. When I was a grade-schooler in the late ’80s, people told me rock was dead because of the preponderance of hair-metal bands...

Music critics these days love to argue about "rockism," the unexamined prejudices we bring to our musical judgements, and "poptimism," an effort to celebrate commercial stuff that some think goes way too far. My book, Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams...

A YEAR OR TWO AGO, the Seattle rapper Macklemore had a huge hit with “Thrift Shop.” Billboard named it the number one R&B/hip-hop song in the country, but also noted a strange wrinkle: R&B radio stations weren’t playing it. Part of the issue...

Kanye West, Lollapalooza, Chile, 2011 (via Rodrigo Ferrari’s Flickrstream) As the Village Voice’s 41st Pazz & Jop Critics Poll makes clear, Kanye West is the most gifted popular musician of our time. This may sound like empty, generalized...

Marcus Mumford may not seem like the kind of guy who'd start a bar fight. This apple-cheeked ministers' son, whose weapon of choice is a steel-strung Martin guitar and whose delirious happiness at inheriting the wooly mantle of folk-rock has endeared...