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When Frank Ocean addressed speculation about his sexuality last week, the declaration on his Tumblr page felt lyrical. “Time would glide,” the R&B singer wrote, eloquently transporting us a few summers back to when he met his first love — a man.

Axl Rose, who turned 50 on Monday, clung to his bombastic, outmoded brand of rock and felt no need to modernize it on Friday night at the Roseland Ballroom.

Many of the songs performed on Friday at the first night of Bjork’s six-show residency at the New York Hall of Science are not the best music she’s made, but the ideas are beautiful.

As press briefings go, it rocked. On Thursday night, Van Halen took to the stage of the venerable Cafe Wha? on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, capacity 250. “Last time I stood on a stage this low, we had to have the car back by midnight,” said the singer David Lee Roth. The objective was to prove Van Halen is alive and amicable for an arena tour that starts Feb. 18 in Louisville, Ky.,after the Feb. 7 release of a new album, “A Different Kind of Truth.” It’s to be Van Halen’s first full album with Mr. Roth as lead singer since the band fired him in 1985, although they have done previous reunion tours.

''Like smoke, I stick around,'' Winehouse purrs on "Lioness: Hidden Treasures." It's a strange thing to hear the late songstress promise: Sticking around was never really her thing. For her, anything not meant to last -- the golden years of Motown, doomed romance -- was always worth loving more fiercely.

The sixth studio album from Rihanna, the most consistent pop star of the last five years, places her squarely at the center of that genre: making dance music of R&B and pop.

The thorough and memorable concert let Metallica lord over its past as it headlined a seven-hour show with Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer.

Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill and other hip-hop stars reprised albums at the Rock the Bells festival on Governors Island.

The pop star put her quick-changing voice to good use in a headlining show at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night.

Perhaps perfectly scheduled to shatter the calm that follows Memorial Day weekend, shock rocker Marilyn Manson returns to stores today with his seventh album The High End of Low. As Rolling Stone’s Jody Rosen writes in his two-and-a-half star review of Manson’s new LP, in an age where extreme sex and ultra-violence are Googleable 24/7 ...