My favorite moment of the documentary Family Jams – which follows Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Vetiver on their summer 2004 American tour – comes at an Amoeba Records meet-and-greet. While signing autographs and chatting with his growing legion of fans, Banhart meets Linda Perhacs, whose obscure 1970 album Parallelograms was beloved among the early 21st century Cali-folk cognoscenti over which Banhart had quickly assumed some kind of weird leadership. As he greeted Perhacs across the table, Banhart bashfully apologizes for the fact that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. “It’s okay, I’ve got mine on,” Perhacs replies with a laugh.

Every time the Beatles come up, there’s the inevitable danger of hyperbole. But at the same time, it’s sort of hard to be that hyperbolic considering the scope of the group’s impact. Pop music and pop culture as we know it incubated in the ’50s, and then really blossomed in the ’60s — and the Beatles were at the very top of a feverishly, rapidly changing medium in tumultuous, transformative times. All these decades later, they still influence up-and-coming artists; new generations are still falling for them (on TikTok, they’re worshipped as if they were a currently active band); and their songs can still surprise and disorient no matter how long they’ve been in the atmosphere. Nobody really thought pop music was supposed to have a 60-plus year shelf life back then. But the Beatles proved everyone wrong.

Phoebe Bridgers did not release an album in 2021. Nonetheless, she was everywhere. Over the course of the last 12 months, everyone, even Taylor Swift, seemed to want a Bridgers verse, harmony, or cover song. And Bridgers delivered.

In the almost 60 years since Bob Dylan released his debut album, countless words have been spilled on his singular legacy. There are books and movies and over half a century’s worth of music journalism trying to dissect the mystery and pin down the multitudes. College courses unpack his lyrics. A Presidential Medal Of Freedom and a Nobel Prize and who knows how many other honors mark Dylan’s towering, seismic presence as not just a musician but a cultural and literary icon of the American Century. All of which is to say: You and I both know about Bob Dylan, and there’s little I could say to celebrate his 80th birthday that hasn’t been said many times before.

Popular music always had eyes towards the full-length LP ever since the format was established. Initially the provenance of classical recordings, the idea of the album as the ideal musical format carried through to the postwar jazz era, the popularity of Broadway cast recordings, and any number of cocktail-party soundtracks where the hosts didn’t want to keep switching out 45s. The popularity of singles was largely parallel — ’50s and ’60s youths gravitated towards singles for reasons of portability and affordability, and even during the peak-album years from the ’70s through the ’90s, club culture and tastemaking DJs still kept the 12″ not only alive but vital. Still, the album’s continued to hold sway as The Important Format even well into the Spotify years.

The catch about Golden Eras is that we don’t always know when we’re living in one — we only know when it’s already over. The hip-hop Golden Era is generally recognized to have started in the late ’80s and runs through the mid ’90s, which covers the massive creative stretch where album-length ambitions, advances in sampling tech, and heated competition for mixtape and airplay positioning could be found in the majors, hip-hop imprints, and indies all at once.

It's one of the great disappearing acts in popular-music history. In 1985, Bill Withers, one of the greatest soul singers and songwriters of all time, got sick of the pressures and power struggles and demands of the pop-star career. He walked away from the music business completely, releasing no new music and playing no further live shows for decades. And yet Bill Withers never fully vanished from the culture at large.

When I saw the news this morning that Bill Withers had passed away, the first thing I did -- besides the new perverse ritual of finding out whether a recently deceased person had contracted COVID-19, to make some pointless calculation of exactly how upset I was and why -- was tell my wife. “Who’s Bill Withers?” she asked (don’t judge her, she’s a virologist with a PhD, and has things on her mind besides the album liner notes that fill my brain). So I proceeded to list off the songs that she could instantly recognize just by their title: “Lean On Me.” “Ain’t No Sunshine.” “Lovely Day.” “Just The Two Of Us.”

If Adam Schlesinger had only been in Fountains Of Wayne -- even if he'd only penned the title song from Tom Hanks' directorial debut That Thing You Do! -- his status as a power-pop master would've been secure. However, the musician, who died from complications of COVID-19 on Wednesday at the age of 52, was involved with a staggering number of additional projects throughout his life.

This week, Stereogum are media partners at Berlin's intimate psych-rock festival Synästhesie. To celebrate, we're looking back on a pivotal, deeply influential genre from Germany.

For a corner of popular music that revolutionized multiple genres at once from the late 1960s onward, it really bears noting first and foremost that "krautrock" is a pretty lousy term. It's kind of unserious, and even if it's been used in affection -- avant-music advocate and legendary DJ John Peel is one of the people credited with popularizing it, and psych-culture musician/historian Julian Cope cemented it as a historical canon with his 1995 book Krautrocksampler -- the people who actually made the music itself tended to dislike it.

When this decade began, MP3s still reigned supreme. Now, at the end of it, a song is no longer even a file — it’s ephemera, on every streaming service and available to hear in myriad ways. For better and worse, the song (and the single) have become the norm for the general public’s music consumption. As culture continues to flatten out, songs can become iconic and inescapable overnight; it’s also become more difficult to get heard amidst all the noise. But the best way a song exists is still with the memories you make along with it: riding around in your car or heading out to a party with friends or sitting in your room alone, letting the music become part of the fabric of your life.

The 2010s saw horror experience a cultural renaissance. It started the decade recovering from the dismal state of PG-13 studio cash-ins, eventually welcoming in a new wave of prestige pictures with major studios, money, and (most importantly) audiences behind it. Horror has always been a playground for shifting ideas of “high” and “low” art, and this decade it led to obscure experimental artists like Jóhann Jóhannsson and Mica Levi growing into Oscar-nominated star composers, major musicians like Thom Yorke and Geoff Barrow moving into movies, plus unexpected surprises like an indie game composer finding even greater success at scaring us senseless. Elsewhere, veterans like Cliff Martinez and Michael Abels got in on the fun, adding horror movies to their long list of credits for the first time.

Disco Demolition Night, which happened 40 years ago today, is the day two genres were marked for death. Disco itself was one of them, of course: Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl, infuriated that his still-young shock-jock career was derailed when WDAI changed format from rock to disco and shitcanned him in the process, waged war on the genre. And his new station WLUP's publicity stunt to blow up a bunch of disco records in the middle of Comiskey Park during a baseball doubleheader was all the excuse an already anxious, recession-choked record industry needed to downsize their tulip-fever investment in a genre they didn't realize was just slightly more divisive, niche, and under-lucrative than they'd anticipated.

I honestly thought "glo-fi" was gonna stick, y'all.

I saw Roky Erickson perform exactly once in my life, at Øyafestivalen in Norway. This was 2007, a big year for the artist, who played Coachella and Lollapalooza and was the subject of a bittersweet documentary, You’re Gonna Miss Me, which explored his career and his struggles with mental illness. I didn’t know what to expect from Erickson onstage or from the Norwegians in the audience. Would anyone care that the definition of a cult figure was playing the festival’s midsize stage? And what would he sound like? Could he hold a show together?

There's a reason why all those Ramones songs start with "1-2-3-4!" -- and also a reason why Captain Beefheart raged against the "big mama heartbeat." For anyone growing up in America in the last century, 4/4 meter has been the core of popular music -- rock, pop, rap, blues, gospel, all the way back to their origins in West Africa. Ergo, lopping off a single beat from two bars of 4/4 is like a car with three and a half wheels: difficult to drive, full of uncomfortable bumps, a mix of the unexpected and the compelling. When a band plays in 7/4 or 7/8 (for non-nerds, just count out "1-2-3-4-5-6-7," or any mathematical combo like "1-2, 1-2, 1-2-3") -- it feels like a record needle stumbling over a piece of dust or ending a dance move with a rolled ankle.

When an artist like Mark Hollis dies, there are different kinds of ripple effects. We see this often now, a celebrated or iconic artist passes on, and the cycles of public grieving unfold -- friends and collaborators from decades past sharing anecdotes and condolences, a torrent of tributes like this one. Yet cases like this one are a bit different from when a legendary, famous innovator the likes of David Bowie or Prince dies; their presence is obviously felt in so many places over so many years, and the wave of grief feels universal.

Grind. Skronk. Pigfuck. Seemingly every word associated with noise rock sounds incredibly unflattering out of context, and even in context doesn't fare much better. Before noise rock had a name, rock critics such as Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau came up with their own suitably unpleasant ways of describing the tortured sounds of music oozing out of the American underground in the late '70s and early '80s. Out of the roots of hardcore and punk slithered something much nastier and much noisier. That vile beast is the sound we now know as noise rock.

I was born in San Francisco, CA to two Chicano musicians who connected over their complete obsession with playing and studying music. Once we were old enough to hold instruments, my sister and I expressed some reticence about performing with our parents, but due in part to the closeness of the Mexican family unit and the allure of high-paying, fun gigs, we caved and formed our family band, La Familia Peña-Govea. I was seven years old and learning to play traditional Mexican and Colombian music alongside my family, which opened my world to the diverse soundscapes of Latin America. Now, I work as a Latin Music Analyst for Pandora Radio, where my job is to listen to and classify genres of Latin pop.

It makes sense that we’re experiencing a horror renaissance. The genre took off during the Great Depression and has been there for us in difficult times to accentuate and provide some semblance of shelter from our biggest fears. Since the dawn of the medium, music has proven just as important to film as visuals are; film scores complete the illusion of movement and help to further remove us from reality. But more so than any other genre of film music, horror is distinct and modern.

One of the first things we hear Craig Finn snarl on his band's 2004 debut album is a simple declaration of intent: "We gotta start it off with a positive jam!" This -- and Finn's decade-by-decade American history barrage that precedes it -- is where the legend of the Hold Steady, America's premier bookish, beerish, don't-call-them-a-bar-band bar band, begins.

I had tickets to see Aretha Franklin at Radio City Music Hall once, a few years ago. The show was cancelled, and the make-up date was inconvenient, so I opted for a refund instead. Part of me has regretted that decision every day since.

You can choose all sorts of genesis points when you look back at a moment as era-defining and yet difficult to clarify as grunge. One route might be to focus on the movement's mainstream insurgence in the early '90s, to locate the true beginning of grunge as when it arrived and subsequently stormed the charts and popular consciousness with blockbusters like Pearl Jam's Ten or Nirvana's Nevermind. A completely different approach is to go back to its very roots, to the early and mid-'80s and the groups who were laying the foundation, in terms of character and aesthetic, for what grunge would become.

Twenty years ago this past weekend -- on July 8, 1998 -- something very predictable happened on the Billboard Hot 100: Mase's "Lookin' At Me" became the third consecutive single from his Grammy-nominated, multi-Platinum album Harlem World to break into the chart's top 10. Label boss Puff Daddy was in his opulent, shiny-suited prime, and Bad Boy was, for the moment, too big to fail. After the considerable waves Harlem World's funky "Feel So Good" and steamy "What You Want" made on the radio in late '97 into early '98, "Lookin' At Me" was a very safe bet for pop success.

Twenty-five years in, it's still hard to know how to talk about the Dave Matthews Band. Since the 1993 arrival of Remember Two Things, their independently released debut preceding the blockbuster Under The Table And Dreaming in 1994, Matthews and the band that bears his name have been building up one of those classic, strange paradoxes in music history. They are wildly popular, but with the staying power that comes with accruing countless true diehards in their fanbase; in some ways, they are an institution.

In the history of classic rock, few big names have had a career quite like Peter Gabriel's. After all, it's hard to even make sense of his arc: This is a guy who went from '70s prog to an art-rock tinged with '80s new wave and post-punk to experimental pop auteurism to becoming an elder statesman who goes a decade or more without releasing much in the way of new music. Along the way, he's existed as a paradox. His name is well-known, while a lot of his work is not. He's a few-hit wonder who's also a beloved legacy artist.

We talk about the ‘80s a lot. Nostalgia for that decade and its pop culture has both seemed to move in cycles and be ever-present for something like the last 15 years. It’s an interesting paradox: We often remember the decade and its pop music in fond, neon hues, the same decade that was shot through with apocalyptic darkness and in turn had a nostalgic bent towards the ‘50s. That was the decade they looked back on as their innocence, the same way we look back on the ‘80s as ours. Those are the years of proms in John Hughes films, and our own proms, and childhood, and all that shit. Those are the years where pop music sounded like the future, but also preceded the real arrival of the future in the true mainstream introduction of the internet era in the ‘90s, a turning point with complete and still-evolving societal ramifications. Sure, it is still tempting to look back on the ‘80s for more than those songs’ undying hooks, to look back and figure them as simpler times. They were, in some ways. But that same pop music was also the soundtrack of a new era of nuclear anxiety.

There is a very specific dividing line in Weezer's career, a BC and an AD. Countless bands start strong and dwindle over the years, but few have a story as severe as Weezer's. After releasing Pinkerton in 1996 to negative backlash from listeners and critics alike, the band faded away for a while, not reemerging until the 21st century, with an attempted return to their self-titled debut with their new, now-green-colored self-titled third album in 2001. It makes for an unusual split. Weezer plugged away and released two classic albums in the mid-'90s, the kind of records that — in hindsight, once the perception of Pinkerton underwent a hard 180 — define the decade. But it's been in the past 16 years that they've released most of their music, sometimes at a furious album-a-year clip uncommon for a big rock band these days. Some of their most famous songs come from this era, the post-Pinkerton revival. Some of their most reviled songs come from this era, too.

In September 1996, Weezer released their sophomore album, Pinkerton. It was, in many ways, the turning point in Weezer's story. Following up an acclaimed debut with some already decade-defining songs to their name, Weezer were approaching their sophomore album as so many big-name bands have in the past. There was a lot riding on this. And the initial reaction wasn't good. Pinkerton is one of those infamous examples from rock history, an album that was disliked and derided upon its release, only to find a cultish following in subsequent years, only to eventually be (usually) considered Weezer's finest work and one of the greatest albums of the '90s. The turnaround in perception of Pinkerton didn't really matter, though, aside from the album claiming its rightful place in its decade's hierarchy. The damage it did to Weezer was permanent.

On October 30, 1997 -- 20 years ago today -- Bill Berry left R.E.M. And on September 21, 2011, R.E.M. announced they were "calling it a day as a band." During the 14 years between Berry leaving R.E.M. and everybody else leaving R.E.M., the band released five albums, more than 20 singles and videos, and countless B-sides, one-offs, covers, and live cuts. Too often this period is dismissed by all but the most hardcore fans, yet this segment of their catalog remains ripe for rediscovery and reassessment. Below are nine of the best R.E.M. songs from the late '90s to now, which together form a playlist for new fans just discovering the band and old fans giving them a second chance.

I once got busted trying to steal a magazine from my hometown library. The 8/8/91 issue of Rolling Stone apparently had one of those sensors on the last page and it beeped from my backpack on the way out. I was gonna bring it back. I just wanted to take it home to read the Tom Petty cover feature and you're not allowed to take periodicals home. It wasn't even a new issue.

Although it's identified with Los Angeles, the Paisley Underground has roots that extend about 400 miles to the north. Specifically, to Davis, California, a small college town near Sacramento. Even more specifically, to the UC Davis student radio station. That's where Steve Wynn met Kendra Smith, shortly before they formed the Suspects and later the Dream Syndicate. That's where Russ Tolman spun records before he joined the Suspects and later True West. Scott Miller of Game Theory spun records at KDVS, as did Guy Kyser of art punks Thin White Rope. It's not unusual for college radio stations to attract music nerds, misfits, and budding musicians, but in the late 1970s nearly every DJ at UC Davis was a cult legend in the making.

"Shoegaze" was not initially meant as a compliment. Like "impressionists" (used dismissively by an art critic in 1874), "Krautrock," or more recently "deplorable(s)," the phrase began life as a fairly derogatory signifier for an emerging cultural movement. According to legend (and The Quietus), a reviewer used the term in describing an early performance by the band Moose, probably in 1989 or 1990.

The biggest difference between the heavy metal of today and heavy metal during the glory days of the 1980s is that today it is rife with division. Mainstream versus underground. “Extreme” versus “traditional.” Rigid versus experimental. Cartoonishly vulgar versus socially conscious. Those who like screamed vocals versus those who don’t understand why bands don’t sing anymore. Thirty-five years ago, it was a lot simpler. Venom, Celtic Frost, and Bathory were metal. Metallica, Slayer, and Mercyful Fate were metal. Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Ozzy Osbourne were metal. And Def Leppard, Ratt, and Mötley Crüe were metal.

The earliest iteration of Odd Future was formed in 2007 although the collective didn't release their first mixtape, The Odd Future Tape, until 2008. Ten years later, several members have grown from rebellious, defiant misfits with a penchant for fuckery into legitimate artists to be reckoned with. The Internet frontfigure Syd's solo album, Fin, recently dropped, and it's the second of six solo releases from all the members of her Grammy-nominated band.