What is not immediately obvious as you stroll into the open-plan, 17th-floor offices of Tommy Hilfiger, brightly lit by windows that stare down New York’s Hudson River, is whether you are entering the home of a fashion house or a music label. Sure there are racks of pick’n’mix clothes rolled across the aisles and a [...]

ALBUM: ACCELERATE
NEW YORK (Billboard) - R.E.M.’s first album in four years
shoehorns 11 tracks of jagged guitars, quick and dirty drums,
and Michael Stipe’s gruff keen into 34 minutes, rocking with a
blacker, blunter edge than “Document,” “Green” or “Monster.”
Armed with deadpan “wow’s” and “T-Rex moves” honed from 1996’s
“Wake-Up Bomb,” Stipe links politics, the media and [...]

I used to think that the C%26ocirc;te d’Azur was one long private beach where you had to wrestle with naked Germans for the right to lay your towel out on three square inches of pebbles. The sea, I imagined, was warm fish soup [...]