Music
Story Stream
The Role of Music in Civic Life November 03, 2025
Most of us would readily admit that music plays a significant role in our personal lives; after all, we spend countless hours listening to music in our cars or through our earbuds. But how often do we consider the role it plays in our social and comm...
We All Live in a Village Now November 03, 2025
Over the past month, my mind has kept going back to one of the most trivial, and perhaps also one of the most profound, internet scandals of recent times.You remember the scene: A camera at a Coldplay concert is showing audience members enjoying the ...
I Will Find a City November 03, 2025
CBGB, the legendarily seedy club in the Bowery neighbourhood of New York City that became the home of US punk rock and new wave in the mid-1970s, fascinated me from an early age. At high school, I would skip gym class to hide in the library devouring...
Arvo Pärt’s Popularity Exposes A Hunger For Beauty October 13, 2025
Music is a balance of tension and resolution. A mentor once told me that the greatest composers are those who demonstrate mastery of this basic tenet. Dissonance, one form of musical tension, empowers harmony and resolution when used well. However, w...
The Real Ozzy October 13, 2025
Ozzy Osbourne, who became famous as the lead singer of the band Black Sabbath and then went on to a lengthy solo career, died in July at the age of 76. His notoriety was such that all the mainstream media sources noted his passing. But they did so in...
My Parents’ Marriage October 09, 2025
I was the model for a group of mischievous, neglected, wise-before-their-time prepubescent girls who did everything from getting lost to nabbing the nuts put out for cocktails, and my mother was my father’s one-woman university for the study of women...
The ‘Life of a Showgirl’ Exit Survey October 06, 2025
Taylor Swift’s 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, is here—and it’s a dramatic departure in length (just 12 songs!) and production (welcome back, Max Martin!) from 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department, and Midnights and Folklore and Evermore before t...
The 100 Best Rap Albums of All Time October 01, 2025
If you’re within a certain age bracket, you’ll remember the news being delivered with grave certainty: The iPod is going to end the album as we know it. Yet for as many 99-cent songs as were purchased in the 2000s, anyone who spent time on that era’s...
The Cars’ Deep Influence on the Future of Music October 01, 2025
It was a moment like so many others in the history of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. A rock star in his 30s was onstage saying nice things about a band whose members were now in their 60s and 70s. As is custom, the guy onstage wore a sparkly jacket, a...
The Last Wave of British Bravado September 23, 2025
When I was younger, back in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the future didn’t feel so bleak. I don't think this is merely nostalgia for youth. It may have been naïve, but the world that I lived in, in the UK, felt like it was on a good trajectory...
Cardi B Gets the Best Revenge September 23, 2025
Cardi B released an album promo clip last week that highlighted the precarious business of a second Cardi B album: She boards the subway in sweatpants, adopting the script of a down-on-her-luck mother of three selling CDs to get by like the enterpris...
Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rican Homecoming September 16, 2025
In 2016, a sinuous remix of a track called “Diles” began pulsing its way through streaming services and night clubs. It featured a handful of Puerto Rican performers, but the main one was an emerging hitmaker with a silly name and a serious voice: Ba...
What I've Learned: Reba McEntire September 16, 2025
Often called the Queen of Country Music, Reba McEntire has sold 75 million albums and won three Grammys over her five-decade musical career. She also stars in the sitcom Happy’s Place and returns this fall to The Voice, both on NBC....
When the Music’s Over September 12, 2025
With the advent of “synthetic music” generated by artificial intelligence, humanity is approaching the ultimate democratization of art and the obsolescence of human talent....
Scattered Thoughts on the State of Book Reviews September 11, 2025
Last week, I wrote about “Criticism in the Age of AI” and tried to end on an optimistic note about arts criticism in general and book coverage specifically. This week, the discourse on that topic has been doom and gloom. Not because of anything AI-re...
Do Media Organizations Even Want Cultural Criticism? September 09, 2025
It has been a tough summer for cultural critics. The Associated Press said it would end its weekly book reviews, citing “a thorough review of AP’s story offerings and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers ar...
Addison Rae at the End of Pop History September 05, 2025
Stardom is a cycle. After years in the firmament, they sometimes burn too bright and explode. Newer, more industrious entities must make meaning from the resultant debris – and it’s the same in Hollywood as it is in space. When the star system collap...
The Bygone Eras Tour September 01, 2025
My fellow Americans, have you noticed something different in the air this week? A fresh jolt of electricity charging the atmosphere? A certain swagger surge? An energizing influence from a foreign source? That, friends, is Oasis returning to our shor...
Sabrina Carpenter Shows Us a Good Time September 01, 2025
Taylor Swift will, one day, not be the most famous woman in the world. Pop music will enter a post-Swift twilight. In the darker sky, three new lights will begin to define themselves. Heartbroken Olivia Rodrigo is more like a moon. Genius Chappell Ro...
James Baldwin’s Life and Loves in France August 26, 2025
A monumental new biography of James Baldwin was published this summer, in coordination with the centennial of his birth. Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin: A Love Story traces Baldwin’s prolific career and extraordinary life through his romantic relationships...
The Tragedy Of “Stomp Clap Hey” August 26, 2025
In 1971, the great rock critic Lester Bangs tried to imagine a time when the music of the recent past would seem alien. Projecting himself into the old age he would never reach, he pictured his future grandkids asking him about the music of the ’60s:...
The Normal Life of Earl Sweatshirt August 25, 2025
He demonstrated his happy face, arranging his mouth into a wide grin. A second passed and his expression, behind rimless oval glasses, remained fixed like a mask. This was happiness, with a current of anxiety and stress at the corners of his wide eye...
All These Moments Lost in Time August 25, 2025
In my lifetime, the music and fashion of the 1980s has undergone a near-total revaluation. Derided as deeply uncool and somehow fake and inauthentic for years, the distinctive style and in particular the sonic qualities of 1980s music gained new appr...
The Redemption of Chance the Rapper August 22, 2025
When Chance the Rapper declared “I met Kanye West, I’m never going to fail” on “Ultralight Beam,” the opener from West’s 2016 album, “The Life of Pablo,” the sentiment seemed self-evident. West was at the height of his cultural influence and had hand...
Welcome to the Era of Astroturf Fandom August 21, 2025
brat summer was fake. That’s been my stance for a long while, and I’ve been encouraged recently to learn that I’m not alone in this belief - the belief that the whole Charli XCX “brat” phenomenon of 2024 was AstroTurf, a top-down media phenomenon dri...
