Hip-hop certainly has its fair share of rhyme slayers and sample-stacking beat conductors. That said, not everyone's a character of Busta Rhymes' caliber. Listen to his work from the past 15-plu …

Busta Rhymes was just 17 when he formed the highly influential Long Island group Leaders of the New School. With a sound that's much more old school (see the trunk-rattling boom-bap beats of "Wh …

Blessed with a 1,000-thread-count voice and the talent to drape it across ballads and finger-poppers with equal ease, Luther Vandross became the love man for a new generation. Pushing aside the boastin …

They were "America's Beatles." A quintet of former folkies who'd plugged in and let their hair grow, the Byrds quickly claimed top spots on the pop charts with the singles "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Tur …

Poet, philosopher, preacher, revolutionary, social critic - Bob Marley displayed more colors than a chameleon, but all of them were infused with a bedrock sense of humanity and spirituality. Not only w …

With the deliberate, feline tread of a lion stalking its prey, Marley's "One Drop" isn't so much a full-frontal assault on the system's injustice as it is a Trojan horse, its sleepy rhythm masking long …

First branded as Cherilyn Sarkesian, then as Cleo (the distaff half of a duo with Sonny, who went by Caesar then), and finally settling on the name we know her by today, Cher has been - for 45 years no …

While Cher first hit the bigs as half of a now-long-disbanded duo, pretty much everybody born after the Kennedy administration thinks of her solely as a solo artist. Well think again, and check out her …

A classic singer-songwriter who'd fit right in on a bill with his Blue Note labelmate Norah Jones, Amos Lee quit teaching after just two years so he could chase the music career he'd dreamed of since w …