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Charles Aaron

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Durham, North Carolina
As seen in: Medium, The New York Times, NPR, Inc., Rolling Stone, Flipboard, Vulture, SPIN, Indy Week, Rookie and
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Articles by Charles Aaron

HipHop: Die 200 besten Rap-Alben aller Zeiten

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By Charles Aaron , Mankaprr Conteh , Jon Dolan , Will Dukes , Dewayne Gage, Joe Gross, Kory Grow , Christian Hoard , Jeff Ihaza , Julyssa Lopez , Mosi Reeves, Yoh Phillips, Noah Shachtman , Rob Sheffield, Christopher R. Weingarten
| Flipboard
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Best Albums of 2022 So Far: Wet Leg, Harry Styles, Anitta, and More

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By Charles Aaron , Jonathan Bernstein , David Browne , Kat Bouza
| Rolling Stone
June 16, 2022 9:02AM ET From Rosalía to Harry Styles to Bad Bunny, here are our favorite albums of the year so far — unranked Sacha Lecca, 2; Lillie Eiger; Griffin Lotz; Renell Medrano This year we’ve already seen epic albums from the Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar, a legendary farewell from Daddy Yankee, breakout debuts from Fivio Foreign, Koffee, and Wet Leg, as well as new artistic peaks from FKA Twigs, Charli XCX, Angel Olsen, and others.
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The 200 Greatest Hip-Hop Albums of All Time

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By Charles Aaron , Mankaprr Conteh , Jon Dolan , Will Dukes 
| Rolling Stone
June 7, 2022 9:00AM ET These are the albums that have defined hip-hop history — from Run-DMC to Playboi Carti, from G-funk to drill, from the Bronx to Houston, and beyond Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers for Rolling Stone.
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Every Sex Pistols Song, Ranked Original

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By Charles Aaron 
| Rolling Stone
May 24, 2022 1:24PM ET Punk rock’s greatest swindle — from world-wrecking classics to puked out covers to “Who Killed Bambi?’ Photographs in illustration by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns/Getty Images, 2; Tom Hill/WireImage; Jorgen Angel/Redferns/Getty Images; Chris Morphet/Redferns/Getty Images For a young person now trying to fathom the Sex Pistols and the pre-Internet 1970s context that spat them up almost requires a college-level course of study.
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The 200 Greatest Hip-Hop Albums of All Time

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By Charles Aaron , Mankaprr Conteh , Jon Dolan , Will Dukes 
| Rolling Stone
June 7, 2022 9:00AM ET These are the albums that have defined hip-hip history — from Run-DMC to Playboi Carti, from G-funk to drill, from the Bronx to Houston, and beyond Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers for Rolling Stone.
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Anitta's 'Versions of Me' Is a Tirelessly Bewitching Global Dancefloor Experience

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By Charles Aaron 
| Rolling Stone
Are you a part of Anitta’s Algorithm Nation? On Versions of Me, a dazzling omnibus of pop digitalia, the 29-year-old Brazilian singer-MC-dancer goes door-to-door, trying to unite the people behind her surging campaign for Global Dancefloor Booty Inspector. Burning brightest when micromanaging every market-tested and quantized musical detail with blissfully canny zeal, Anitta pinches your cheek while monitoring her streaming numbers.
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The 40 Greatest Red Hot Chili Peppers Songs

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By Angie Martoccio , Jon Dolan , Charles Aaron , David Browne 
| Rolling Stone India
They’ve preserved their californicating essence through countless reinventions and funk-rap breakdowns for nearly four decades. Here are their finest moments By ANGIE MARTOCCIO & JON DOLAN & CHARLES AARON & DAVID BROWNE & SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON & HANK SHTEAMER & BRIAN HIATT & JOSEPH HUDAK & LISA TOZZI & KORY GROW & ANDY GREENE & ROB SHEFFIELD “I didn’t want to tell the same old story that we’ve been hearing for the last 50 years in rock music,” Anthony Kiedis reflected in a recent interview.
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The 40 Greatest Red Hot Chili Peppers Songs

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By Angie Martoccio , Jon Dolan , Charles Aaron , David Browne 
| Rolling Stone
April 11, 2022 9:22AM ET They’ve preserved their californicating essence through countless reinventions and funk-rap breakdowns for nearly four decades. Here are their finest moments “I didn’t want to tell the same old story that we’ve been hearing for the last 50 years in rock music,” Anthony Kiedis reflected in a recent interview.
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Machine Gun Kelly's 'Mainstream Sellout' is a Self-Hating Celebrity Pop-Punk Purge

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By Charles Aaron 
| Rolling Stone
Released last summer to tease Machine Gun Kelly’s sixth album, the single “Papercuts,” with its strummy Cobain-pain guitar and brain-stewing power chords, was met with a mild shrug of support. According to the proverbial “people on the Internet,” it was seen as another lateral “rock” move from the ex-mixtape rapper signed by Diddy in 2011 as a much-belated retort to Dr. Dre’s Eminem gambit.
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Notorious B.I.G.: 50 Greatest Songs

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By Charles Aaron , Mosi Reeves, Will Dukes , Joe Gross
| Rolling Stone
When Christopher George Latore Wallace was fatally shot at a Los Angeles traffic light on March 9, 1997, he was 24 years old and had released one album. But his stature at the time was towering, due both to his peerless artistic gifts and the desperately competitive atmosphere within hip-hop, viewed either rightly or wrongly as one of the few career dreams for Black kids boxed in by poverty, mass incarceration, racist drug policy, and corrupt, violent policing.
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The 50 Best Weeknd Songs

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By Tomás Mier , Waiss Aramesh , Julyssa Lopez , Charles Aaron 
| Rolling Stone
February 14, 2022 2:10PM ET From dark alt-R&B jams to sleek summer hits to synth-pop revelations, and beyond Photographs in photo illustration by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images; Rich Fury/Getty Images; John Salangsang/Invision/AP If you had “Siouxsie and the Banshees fan from Canada remakes R&B in his own image” on your Pop Music in the 2010s bingo card, congratulations! Abel Tesfaye came out of Toronto in 2011 with a stunning series of spacey, sepulchral EPs that proved the start of a landmark...
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10 Best Music Books of 2015

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By Charles Aaron , Tobias Carroll , Richard Gehr, Andy Greene 
| Rolling Stone
The year's best music reads included open books on a roots-rocker, a dance icon, a punk poet and a rap pioneer; not to mention deep looks at everything from the Vietnam war to the current EDM explosion. Here are 10 of the best.
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The Ballad Of Billy Joe Shaver And Jerry Jeff Walker, Country Outlaws Original

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By Charles Aaron 
| NPR
Billy Joe Shaver, photographed onstage during Willie Nelson's 4th of July Concert at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater on July 4, 2008 in San Antonio, Texas. Gary Miller/FilmMagic hide caption toggle caption Gary Miller/FilmMagic Billy Joe Shaver, photographed onstage during Willie Nelson's 4th of July Concert at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater on July 4, 2008 in San Antonio, Texas.
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Rick James: 10 Essential Tracks

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By Charles Aaron 
| Rolling Stone
August 8, 2014 1:47PM ET The punk-funk king gets freaky on everything from a 1966 Neil Young collaboration to a groundbreaking 1988 rap duet During his five-decade career as a pop libertine, singer, producer and multi-instrumentalist, James Ambrose Johnson, Jr., a.k.a. Ricky Matthews or Rick James, was reportedly more of a superfreak than any very kinky girl he didn’t take home to mother.
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20 Best EDM and Electronic Albums of 2017

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By Christopher R. Weingarten, Charles Aaron , Andy Beta , Mike Rubin
| Rolling Stone
December 13, 2017 6:06PM ET Footwork frenzies, futuristic hip-hop, nostalgic lo-fi house and more EDM’s economic bubble continued to float on throughout 2017, as upper-crust artists jetted between festivals, casinos and meet-cutes with celebrity vocalists. The “global market” rose again to $7.4 billion in 2017, and Forbes is still aggrandizing superstar DJs. But this year, the artistic action was not about bigness.
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Why 'Okie From Muskogee' Was Merle Haggard's Contradictory Masterpiece

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By Charles Aaron 
| Rolling Stone
It would be churlish, especially in the wake of his passing, to suggest Merle Haggard helped to envision and enable the combative, disaffected constituency that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign has so rudely exploited. But it wouldn’t be entirely untrue. However, Mr. Trump is no Merle Haggard and his message diverges severely — even at the working class poet’s Vietnam-era, hippie-baitin’, fightin’-side feistiest. Plus, Hag was a Hillary Clinton supporter, dating back to 2007.
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Ordinary People: The Breeders on the Bus and Back Home

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By Charles Aaron 
| SPIN
A blanket of cigarette smoke spreads across the claustrophobic back room of the Breeders’ 12-bunk, 15-person tour bus. The four band members slump in different corners—tired, a touch cranky, long since ready to get home for the holidays. And with little patience for overanalytical questions about the codependent inner child of today’s budding rock stars.
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Eminem’s ‘The Marshall Mathers LP’: Hear What Came Before and After

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By Charles Aaron , Aliza Aufrichtig 
| The New York Times
Eminem’s second major-label album was a compelling but lurid whodunit. “The Marshall Mathers LP” wasn’t a murder mystery, per se, though plenty of characters met their demise. It was a mystery of realness. This remained a hip-hop conundrum 20 years ago — especially after the still-unsolved deaths of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. Were rappers real or fake? If you claimed to be a product of the drug trade, had you actually moved weight?
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The Frustrations of Youth and Adulthood Combust in Archers of Loaf's Live Show

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By Charles Aaron 
| Indy Week
Archers of Loaf Friday, Feb. 21 Cat's Cradle, Carrboro Rock ‘n’ roll spews out a few big, beautiful emotions really well, and most of them are related to whether or not you’re having sex. In the indie-alternative cosmos of the 1990s, inchoate frustration was the rock emotion du jour.
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byNWR | Clower Power

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By Charles Aaron 
| bynwr.com
An agitated Southern white man is speaking "He taught us from birth, from the day we were born until the age we could keep listenin' to him, give everything a sportin' chance. Whatever you do, give it a sportin' chance." – Jerry Clower, "A Coon Huntin' Story” An agitated Southern white man is speaking.
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Power Chords of Memory

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By Charles Aaron 
| bynwr.com
“Stay off the fucking tongue!” Stay off the fucking tongue! This was the one inviolable rule at the August 21, 1976, festival-style show held annually on the historic Knebworth House grounds an hour north of London.
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Whistling Past the Graveyard with John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats

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By Charles Aaron 
| Indy Week
THE MOUNTAIN GOATS Friday, Dec. 6 & Saturday, Dec. 7, 8 p.m., $34+ Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw Strolling around Durham’s Maplewood Cemetery as the sun sets on a balmy Black Friday, John Darnielle and I are talking about life, not death. After The Mountain Goats singer-songwriter and his wife of twenty-one years, Lalitree, became parents (Roman is eight; Moses is four), she began running for exercise. He did not.
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Rage Against the Machine Strike Back: Our March 2000 Cover Story

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By Charles Aaron 
| SPIN
This cover story originally appeared in the March 2000 issue of SPIN. We’re republishing it as Rage Against the Machine reunites for shows in 2020. Nobody expected Mexico’s embattled presidente, Ernesto Zedillo, to bestow Rage Against the Machine with a sparkly key to the city. But as security is double-checked at Mexico City’s Sports Palace before the Los Angeles rap-rock agitators’ fall show, they receive an even testier greeting than anticipated.
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50 Country Albums Every Rock Fan Should Own

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By Charles Aaron , Jon Dolan , Chuck Eddy, Reed Fischer 
| Rolling Stone
Perhaps inspired or pissed off by the deification of his dad's historically haunted legacy, Hank Jr. took his enormous familial talent and rebelled against, well, being a reputable country star. Here he moves past half-assed Nashville nostalgia, roiling, simmering and integrating Southern rock's bluesy oomph (see the fierce Allman Brothers cover) with songwriting that makes you deeply feel how his thuggishness became so entrenched.
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Todd Terje on the Obscure Influences Behind His Electronic Summer Jams

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By Charles Aaron 
| Rolling Stone
During dance music’s recent epoch, it’s been a tale of two parties: The former, tagged EDM, farms millions from fields of filthy teens raving to ever-crescendoing melodic poofs of candy-floss pop; the latter, legitimized by Daft Punk‘s Grammy, is preoccupied with adult listening experiences and studied album-length projects. Both foster dubious definitions of the genre’s pleasure principle. So, takk Gud for Todd Terje’s spring of hope.
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1977: The Year Punk Exploded

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By Charles Aaron 
| SPIN
We weren’t innocent lambs by 1977. Even tuba-playing virgins who lived in half-finished, rural Georgia subdivisions knew the times they had a-changed. Television had shown us all about it. Several years before, every day after school, The Andy Griffith Show’s kindly Southern sheriff had blurred into the Watergate hearings’ kindly Southern Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr., who detailed the antics of our creepy, pitstained pit boss of a president.
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This Entrepreneur Is Helping Real America Into Co-Working for Just $250 a Year

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By Charles Aaron 
| Inc.
Sonny Caberwal is dressed sharply--including the navy-blue turban that evidences his Sikh faith--and perched in the industrial-rustic lobby of his Union Member House, a new kind of private club in the not particularly bustling downtown of Durham, North Carolina. Its eminently Instagrammable looks aside, it's not at all like the pricey members-only spaces with chic interiors and names like Spring Place, Radiant, and Huckletree that now dot the likes of New York City, Los Angeles, and London.
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Nas - 'Illmatic'

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By Charles Aaron 
| SPIN
Nas’s Illmatic was released on April 19, 1994. In honor of its 25th anniversary, we’ve digitized and republished our original review, which ran in the August 1994 issue of Spin.
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The Slim Shady LP at 20: Read Our 1999 Interview With Eminem

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By Charles Aaron 
| SPIN
Charles Aaron’s interview with Eminem first appeared in the May 1999 issue of Spin. Give this kid a magazine rack, because he’s got a lot of issues.
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Sam Smith and 11 Pop Stars Who Broke Via Dance Records

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By Charles Aaron 
| Rolling Stone
January 28, 2015 3:58PM ET Before they were stars, they were party starters From the 1970s disco explosion to today's EDM free-for-all, featured singers on dance tracks have become an increasingly frequent chart presence, with the guest spot often serving as an audition or promo for the singer's subsequent solo turn.
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How Whitney Houston's Voice Was Destined to Fight the Power

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By Charles Aaron 
| Medium
A child of her mother church, trained by mom Cissy Houston and a legendary extended family, the singer became America’s idol In April of 2018, at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, WA, I presented this essay to the Annual MoPOP Pop Conference. At that time, director Kevin Macdonald’s documentary film Whitney, with its revelations of childhood abuse, had not been released. In the film’s wake, I’m now posting this essay, edited slightly, as my contribution to the continuing discussion.
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Review: Tekashi 6ix9ine Takes Dodgy Stage Dive Into Fame on 'Day 69'

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By Charles Aaron 
| Rolling Stone
America's unhinged hormone warriors are never going to stop fighting for their right to party. Still, it's not too late to protest the viral contagion that has selected Tekashi 6ix9ine's Day 69 as the new soundtrack for that crucial rite of passage. Born Daniel Hernandez in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the 21-year-old rapper is the latest heat rock to skip across the ISPs of boundary-testing, (mostly male) adolescent music fans.
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Review: The Breeders Return to Dynamic Drama of Nineties Heyday on 'All Nerve'

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By Charles Aaron 
| Rolling Stone
On the fifth Breeders album, the songs are all cinematic movement – hiding, escaping, screaming in the meadow, running for the exit. Such is life as the Breeders' Kim Deal, a rock genius with a powderkeg of bittersweet melodies and fearless emotions forever ready to blow, but often without a band to light the fuse. (This has been her own doing, at times.) On 2010's Mountain Battles, Deal's cry was "I can feel it!" and you could sense her reaching for that baseline with a makeshift crew.
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Review: MGMT, 'Congratulations'

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By Charles Aaron 
| SPIN
The closing and title track of MGMT’s second album could be a career coda — a tender acoustic elegy with ornate keyboard sprinkles, and frontman Andrew VanWyngarden playing an arch dandy resigned to a life of half-assed guilt assuaged only by the ministrations of phonies and lackeys.
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Review: Migos Deliver An Epic, Hypnotic Inventory Dump on 'Culture II'

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By Charles Aaron , David B, Why He.
| Rolling Stone
For the first 40 minutes of Migos' Culture II, the Atlanta trap-rap trio's combative, aspirational mantras of jet-set consumption achieve such a stark, staccato groove that the music almost becomes meditative – the kind of stupefyingly decadent reverie that gets you "lost in the sauce," to paraphrase trap forefather Gucci Mane. But, then, something startling happens. On the album's eleventh track "Gang Gang" (there are 24, and you'll feel all of them afterwards), the eerily glittering fog lifts.
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Guided by Laila’s Wisdom, Rapsody Goes Toe to Toe Against Hip-Hop’s Biggest Names at The Grammys | Music Feature | Indy Week

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By Charles Aaron 
| Indy Week
Drum-majoring her crew from the driver's seat of a tricked-out droptop, Raleigh rap icon Rapsody practically incandesces in the video for her 2017 track "Sassy," fluidly directed by Chad Tennies and Mac Grant, the Atlanta team behind paradigmatic clips for Migos feat. Lil Uzi Vert's "Bad and Boujee" and Dram feat. Lil Yachty's "Broccoli." Shifting from her more supremely composed persona as a precise rhymer, she plays a party-startin' Big Sis in a bright "Black By Popular Demand" hoodie.
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Review: The Cranberries - To the Faithful Departed

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By Charles Aaron 
| SPIN
This review of ‘To the Faithful Departed’ originally appeared in the June 1996 issue of Spin. In light of Dolores O’Riordan’s passing, we are republishing it now. It’s a voice that fairly wails “pop star” — so willful that charges of innocence or self-delusion are meaningless. Dolores O’Riordan’s brogueish lilts, Sinéad-ish moans, and Bono-ish whoas bespeak a confidence that comes from a childhood spent inducing crusty old Irishmen to boo-hoo in their pints of Guinness down at the local pub.
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20 great songs and albums that 2017's best-of lists forgot

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By Charles Aaron 
| citypages.com
P.S. Yeah, yeah, I understand, but no, I will not confirm that "2018 is going to be our year." Face it, we're stuck here with our reproving ghosts and there's no easy fix. Everything will stay the same in 2018, or get worse. All of it—money, men, music. Taxes, fake allies, those stupid double entendres hooted over deadening digital presets that sound like a 747 full of infants with full diapers? All day, every day. What can we do? Organize our dumb asses, I guess.
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Eminem: 50 Greatest Songs

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By Christopher R. Weingarten, Elias Leight , Brittany Spanos, Charles Aaron 
| Rolling Stone
Though he’s been a multiplatinum, Grammy-winning star for over 20 years, Eminem is not an unequivocally triumphant figure, either within pop music or within his own mind. Just listen to the vulnerability and self-doubt on his recent single “Walk on Water.” The Detroit rapper continues to make art about how people are driven crazy by weakness and lack. It’s just now he’s finding it harder to joke about the darkness that has always fueled his best work.
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Skrillex Premieres Mind-Blowing New Video

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By Charles Aaron 
| SPIN
It’s one thing to empathize with at-risk kids, or to speak up for them generally, but Skrillex takes it a step further — and then further still — in this stunning new video for the track “First of the Year (Equinox).” On his More Monsters and Sprites EP, “First of the Year” begins with a fairly amiable, reggae-tinged stroll and squeakily pitched vocal, then shifts into a sprightly electro-house keyboard melody before a dubstep code-red breakdown explodes.
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Review: R.E.M. - 'Automatic For the People'

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By Charles Aaron 
| SPIN
Pop culture can turn on you, and R.E.M. doesn’t want us kids to forget it. “Drive,” the first single from Automatic For the People, with its majestically fingered acoustic guitar, comes on like a cautionary ballad reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s foreboding “wit.” “Hey kids, rock’n’roll, nobody tells you where to go … Maybe I ride, Maybe you walk, maybe I drive to get off, declares Michael Stipe, never murmuring.
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Kim Deal: The Breeders Leader Gets Pissed

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By Nina Schlutz, Charles Aaron 
| SPIN
She’s lying flat on her tummy on the carpeted floor of a wood-paneled TV room, legs scissoring playfully, elbows propped up, notebooks and legal pads full of scribbling scattered all around. Sports drones from the 20-inch set, but her hands are clapped tight over a Walkman’s headphones, guitars blaring audibly. It’s the reverie of an American girl, raised on rock’s broken promises and suburbia’s lame spoils, and Kim Deal has wallowed in it more than most.
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The R.E.M. Method and Other Rites of Passage

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By Charles Aaron , Astephanie Chernikowski
| SPIN
Athens, Georgia, 1985. The acid had lost its come-hither bouquet and the speed had snapped everyone’s nerves like twigs. The run-down Victorians weren’t such a steal anymore and the days of buying an armful of thrift-store dresses for a quarter were long gone. Two years before, People magazine had run a photo of a group of obscure local musicians gathered around a Confederate memorial downtown to illustrate an article about America’s so-called rock renaissance.
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The 30 Best Instrumental Songs, a SPIN Playlist

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By Charles Aaron , Catherine Davis, Kevin O’Donnell 
| SPIN
In the latest issue of SPIN, we caught up with Explosions in the Sky, the Texas-based band who’ve taken wordless music to unexpected heights. But they’re hardly the first to rock with their traps shut. Since the 1950s, pop, rock, jazz, metal, and no-wave have produced tons of classic tracks sans frontperson. Below, a brief history of the best instrumental songs, and what made them memorable. Plus, stream a selection of the picks in our player. Have your own favorites?
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The Death Strobe of EDM, or Daft Punk at Coachella for Dummies | Hazlitt

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By Charles Aaron 
| Hazlitt
In early May, Billboard announced—citing an excerpt from a Los Angeles Times profile—that brofessional multi-hyphenates Vin Diesel and Steve Aoki had collaborated on a “monster” dance track, featuring Diesel’s vocals. Aoki and Diesel declined to play the track for the reporter, or even reveal its name.
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Before and After 'OK Computer' (Published 2017)

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By Charles Aaron 
| The New York Times
The Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke impishly said of " OK Computer," his band's critically enshrined 1997 multiplatinum album, that he wanted "to make a record that you could sit down and eat to in a nice restaurant, a record that would be cool and be part of the furniture." In a way, Radiohead succeeded, despite itself.
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Hits And Misses: Lil Yachty’s ‘Bring It Back,’ Plus Paramore, Haim, And More

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By Meredith Graves, Darcie Wilder, Simon Vozick-Levinson , Charles Aaron 
| mtv.com
When the stars and planets align, MTV’s writers and critics assemble to weigh in on new hotness, chart trash, and glimmers of hope in the pop-music landscape. Welcome to Hits and Misses. Meredith Graves: All right, hear me out: Yachty releases the video for “Bring It Back” on Karl Marx’s birthday, right? At first it seems like an innocent throwback to prom scenes in John Hughes movies, or a moving comment on the social-justice-pink cover for Teenage Emotions.
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News - Entertainment, Music, Movies, Celebrity

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By Jamil Smith , Charles Aaron , Inkoo Kang , Marcus Patrick Ellsworth
| mtv.com
Politics A new film by Roger Guenveur Smith and Spike Lee illuminates the King we never knew
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The Rodney King We Never Knew

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By Charles Aaron 
| mtv.com
Twenty-five years after Los Angeles rose up, how far have we come as a nation? Ten stories about the L.A. riots and the world they made. From the first time he bobbed up in the media’s white-water churn, the victim known as Rodney King was a grainy, distorted representation. He symbolized the racial profiling and militarized policing of African-American communities and the urgent need for civil-rights reform of those practices.
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Run The Jewels: Rap's Radical BFFs

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By Charles Aaron 
| mtv.com
But first, he passes me a joint. Graciously. “Smoke it like a cigarette,” the Atlanta MC, currently touring the world as one half of Run the Jewels, counsels. He’s sitting in a small booth to my left in the back of the group’s tour bus, which is parked behind the Ritz, a 2,000-capacity room that looks like a flashy, oversize storage facility amid Raleigh, North Carolina’s industrial tundra. To my right, Mike’s brother in rhyme and RTJ production visionary El-P awaits, affable but fidgeting.
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