The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame celebrated a quarter century as the self-appointed, oft-suspect gatekeeper for canonical artists in the rock world (no Guided By Voices, no Replacements, no etcs. -- no vote of confidence, RRHOF dudes) with a pair of concerts at Madison Square Garden this past Thursday and Friday. Never mind that the Hall is tech...

Sonic Youth's 16th (quite satisfying) album The Eternal opens with the Yves Klein/Noise Nomads-referencing "Sacred Trickster," a track you may have seen performed live to Letterman. It's the briefest song on the album, a mix of art-rock elegance and feedback splutters, i.e. a good use of nods to French painters and Western Mass noisemakers. The ...

The White Stripes' Meg White and Fred Smith, son of Patti Smith and the late MC5 guitarist with whom he shared a name, are set to get married later this month.

Patti Smith, The Roots, Moby and Yoko Ono are among the acts set to play shows for the Meltdown gig series, set to take place at London's Southbank Centre in June.

If you love R.E.M. and weren't at Carnegie Hall last night, you should probably do a better job at loving R.E.M. The evening was billed as a tribute to the Athenian eye-smilers, which meant career-spanning covers by everyone from Kyp Malone with Jolie Holland, to Elf Power, to Hootie (the Blowfish were initially an R.E.M. cover band, you'll reme...