We weren’t the first female rappers – Angie Stone’s group, the Sequence, came before us – but we were the first to go platinum around the world. Pep and I were in college together. We were big time screw-ups. We never went to class. We’d just hang around in the lunch room playing cards, and we formed this amazing friendship. Because we were polar opposites, we fascinated each other. We formed the group when we were part-time telephone operators along with my boyfriend, Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor. At first we called ourselves Supernature, but when we sang, “We go together like salt and pepper”, the n

JEFF NELSON with reporting by Sarah Michaud and Jordan Runtagh For nearly 20 years Chester Bennington fronted the alt-rock act Linkin Park, singing of darkness and despair on the band’s early hits “In the End” and “Numb.” On July 20 he succumbed to a battle with his own demons. That morning Bennington, 41, was found in his bedroom; the L.A. county coroner later confirmed his cause of death to be suicide by hanging. (Bennington’s longtime friend Chris Cornell, who similarly died by suicide in May, would have turned 53 the same day.) Born March 20, 1976, in Phoenix, Bennington suffered childhoo

The inspiration for “Four Cypresses,” off Grizzly Bear’s spindly and hypnotic new album Painted Ruins, came one night when the singer Daniel Rossen returned to a Los Angeles apartment he’d been renting to find a man sleeping in his driveway. The next morning, he looked out the window and considered the thought of the man looking at the same thing as him: four cypresses in the neighbor’s yard. “The basis of the lyric, that’s where it came from—the idea of displacement, and homelessness, really,” Rossen told the podcast Song Exploder. “Trying to connect with someone else’s experience, trying to