Jeff Weiss

Pick the one that doesn’t belong: Chicago, Deep Purple, Cheap Trick, Steve Miller Band, N.W.A. Save for Steve Miller and Eazy-E’s shared affinity for midnight toking, it’s obvious that the Compton gangsta-rap pioneers are outliers in this year’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame class. Just contrast them with their......

In the near future, when we’re listening to music streams on implanted iMolars, we’ll remember 2015 as the year that we learned to listen to more jazz. After a half-century of false obituaries, the genre re-emerged with greater vitality than anyone could have predicted. Fueled by the artists on the......

Nostalgia is the easiest crutch. No matter your decade of birth, it’s scientifically proven that the best music coincided with your high school years. You might convincingly argue that the golden ages of hip-hop, funk, jazz and soul are behind us. But years like 2015 allow you to make the......

It’s rare to watch someone’s dreams unfold in real time. At his six-bedroom, seven-figure estate in the Tarzana hills, Logic reels from news he received earlier this morning. Projected sales for his sophomore album, The Incredible True Story, are 135,000 units, giving him his first No. 1 on the Billboard......

"I used be one of those people who would say, ‘Anything but country,’ when someone would ask, ‘What do you listen to?’” Sam Morrow says this sheepishly, wearing a denim jacket and old-style cowboy hat — guitar just a few feet away. It’s several hours before he plays the Honkytonk......

"You don’t ever talk to me like that!” a voice screams. “We’re supposed to be able to talk,” a quieter one counters. “Get the fuck out my house! Get the fuck out my car!” A door slams, the beat kicks in, and Versis starts telling his story. Recorded three years......

Los Angeles is to funk music what Berlin is to techno, what Switzerland is to chocolate, what South Beach is to steroids. We might not have invented the form, but it has flourished here. Among municipal transplants, it's second only to the palm tree. You're likely most familiar with the......

Hip-hop has always been rooted in competition. Jay Z boasted about being from the block where they argue who’s better, “B.I.G., Jay Z or Nas.” This generation has Kendrick Lamar’s “Control” verse, plus the occasional rivalry unfolding over social media, meme and Apple Music ad. With year-end lists imminent, the......

Cam and China were legends before they had driver’s licenses. While still stuck in P.E. class at Hamilton High, the Inglewood twins were two-fifths of Pink Dollaz, the best female rap group since Salt-N-Pepa. This was the 2008-09 apex of the jerkin’ era, when Pink Dollaz reigned as teen queens......

"This weather is perfect,” Letta says, greeting me at the gate of his Silver Lake apartment building. After a withering Indian summer, today’s the first ambush of fall: concrete skies and a slight breeze. But Southern California can’t cool enough to capture the deep freeze of Letta’s Testimony, the best......