lee ranaldo

Among all the music that the ‘90s brought us, there’s one common denominator—kick-ass women vocalists. From the emergence of grunge to the golden age of hip-hop settling in its place, the ‘90s proved to be a decade where artists expressed the exasperations of womanhood with all of their might. As women lead singers began to […]

Lester Bangs, the greatest rock journalist ever, felt eternal Lower East Side musical royals the Velvet Underground were “our Beatles and Bob Dylan combined” and that “modern music begins” with them. He wasn’t wrong. They existed only for a handful of years—1965 to 1970. But five years was enough for them to create virtually everything […]

When it initially blasted into the world from New York’s Lower East Side almost concurrently with punk in 1977, it was dubbed no wave. Village Voice critic Robert Christgau referred to it as “skronk,” an onomatopoeia based around the general guitar sound. He uncharitably dubbed its ’80s practitioners “pigfucker” bands. This writer’s personal name for […]

As the longest-running animated television show in history, The Simpsons has been around for the rise and fall of grunge, the emergence of pop punk and countless other shifts in the music world. Throughout the past 31 years, The Simpsons has landed some of music’s most successful artists as guest stars. While the fan-proclaimed “golden […]

These 10 albums represent SST Records’ greatest achievements. Greg Ginn began Solid State Tuners at age 12 as a mail-order electronics business still thriving in his early adulthood. In 1978, when pioneering California indie label Bomp! Records dragged its heels releasing Nervous Breakdown, the debut EP from his punk band Black Flag, Ginn figured he […]