Quintessential downtown guitar futurists Sonic Youth have a new studio, and a new album -- their best of the nineties -- to show for it.

Righteous rocker Ani DiFranco, famous for doing it all herself, puts together her very first group -- and creates her best album yet.

D'Angelo will sing no line before its time. But after a five-year wait, "Voodoo" is still spontaneous, dynamic, and sometimes oddly unfinished.

These classes for seniors draw on a unique store of knowledge: the students.

City slackers get slicker -- for no good reason at all!

On his new album, Elliott Smith sounds like the man who came in from the home studio. And he's all the better tackling the world outside his navel.

The DMV sends forgetful New Yorkers back to learner's-permit hell.

TriBeCa's garbage-barge houseboat is up a legal creek. Will it be sold down the river?

They're not the kind of band to give up just like that -- oh, no. Seventeen years on, Blondie pick up where they left off: squabbling and, perhaps, hit-bound.

In a new novel, Bill Flanagan riffs on the music business -- a world he knows all too well.