Melvin Van Peebles, the influential indie filmmaker who helped spawn the Blaxploitation genre with his 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song, has died at the age of 89. The director/actor/composer/novelist/playwright — among many other talents — died Wednesday night at his home with his family. The Criterion Collection, which will …

J. Cole has dropped the new video for his song “Heaven’s EP.” The track features beats from “Pipe Down” from Drake‘s Certified Lover Boy. The Simon Chasalow-directed clip follows the North Carolina rapper as he takes a ride on a private jet, hangs in Vegas at iconic landmarks, and chills in …

Meek Mill tapped Lil Uzi Vert for a dynamic joint performance of the rapper’s recent track “Blue Notes 2” on The Tonight Show.The pair unveiled the song on a smoke-covered stage, with clips from their music video playing in the background. “Blue Notes 2” will appear on Meek Mill’s upcoming …

Olivia Rodrigo performed her “first show” ever with a daytime set Saturday at Las Vegas’ iHeartRadio Festival, a 20-minute gig showcasing five songs off the singer’s Number One album Sour. “This is a really special day for me because this is sort of like my first show,” Rodrigo told fans …

How does a 45-year old heavy metal band with fewer than 10 million monthly Spotify listeners manage to break intothe best-performing albums of 2021? The answer is, true to the band’s style, rather old-fashioned: By throwing vinyl LPs and CDs into Targets and Wal-Marts. Over the past week, while Kanye …

While still contending with the pandemic, Americans are crafting their new normal to meet their new needs: more flexibility, greater happiness and less stress. Less stress is the operative phrase here. Americans are stressed and experiencing an elevated risk of pandemic-fueled PTSD, according to the Mental Health Index: U.S. Worker …

DJ and producer Joel Corry has released a new remix of Nina Simone’s rendition of “Feeling Good,” set to appear on the upcoming Simone collection, Feeling Good: Her Greatest Hits and Remixes, out October 29th via Verve Records. Corry puts a decisively contemporary spin on the track, draping all the …

Dawn Richard has released a new music video for her Second Line centerpiece, “Mornin/Streetlight.” The video — which features Richard performing the track while moving through intricate choreography with a pair of backup dancers — was filmed at City Park in the musician’s hometown of New Orleans. Along with the …

The title of B.J. Novak’s new FX on Hulu series, The Premise, feels like an ironic one, because exactly what the show is about, and why, proves so elusive. FX’s press notes describe it as a “curated collection of character-driven episodes [that] challenges our shared morality tales, choosing art over …

Ty Segall has released a new video for “Harmonizer,” the title track from his most recent album. “Harmonizer” pairs Segall’s signature scuzz-bomb guitar riffs with the simple, but heavy clatter of drum machine percussion. Segall and his wife/collaborator Denée Segall directed the video for the song, which depicts a series …