Paul Thompson

Taken as a whole, Nas’s catalog plays something like a Möbius strip. When he was barely out of his teens, he was rapping with a convincing weariness about the things he’d seen, lived, weathered; now, closing in on 50, his music is dotted with…

The new, self-titled album from Vince Staples is so slight it barely exists. It’s about as long as a network sitcom episode once you strip out the commercials; it’s almost precisely the same length as his 2016 project Prima Donna, which was marketed…

There is a scene early in Cruella’s third act in which Emma Stone, as the titular antihero, stands in front of a fountain her late mother once promised to take her to, which Cruella has treated in the years since her death as a surrogate gravesite.…

From the earliest songs under his current stage name — not the knotty, nasally demos he uploaded to a Canibus message board as a teenager, though those are informative in their own way — J. Cole’s has been a project about canonizing himself in real…