John Amar

When South by Southwest pulled the plug on its international festival last year, RodeoHouston's decision to do the same was inevitable. This writer was gearing up for Gwen Stefani’s pending date when the rotating stage galloped back to its storage...

“I'll be fully transparent: I honestly, I spend way too much time on social media.” Over the course of an hour-long, mile-a-minute Zoom call with the Houston Press, Garrett Brown, known to Houston and beyond as hip hop producer Trakksounds, drops ...

Reading the track list of John Allen Stephens’ Return to Form is to read a novel’s table of contents, glimpsing into the coming pages’ journey. Chapter Song titles like “Molotov,” “Motorcycle” and “Addiction,” point to autobiographical accounts of...

Summer 2020 may not have panned out the way we envisioned it. Scratch that. Most of 2020 hasn't gone according to plan. A running tab of offenses would include, but certainly wouldn't be limited to, scorching temperatures, social and political unr...

Pride month looks quite different from years past without its annual traditions of parades and festivities in the midst of a pandemic and ongoing social unrest. But cancelled celebrations and concerts haven't yielded lower visibility of Houston's ...

Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works, and Why it Matters By Nate Sloan & Charlie Harding 224 pp. $24.95 Oxford University Press Think back to Summer 2012. Gotye ached and crooned about somebody he used to know; LMFAO wiggled and party-rock...