Tag: black music

Stories of hip-hop’s genius, influence, struggle, and endurance.

Jessica Lynne remembers a long distance love affair that began in Miami and the Billie Holiday song that kept her company through the relationship’s transitions.

American music may be Black music, but it has now become the music of displacement.

Combining island sounds with stylish clothes and an unforgettable stage presence, one of New York City’s most original bands helped influence 1980s pop culture, and they never sacrificed their unclassifiable artistic vision.

Should white critics cover black culture? Only if they’re able to own their whiteness.

The genius guitarist’s autobiographical, multi-song fantasy album sat in his drummer’s apartment for twenty years. Now in the care of the Hendrix estate, will it ever see the light of day?

Hip-hop was a different kind of music that needed a different kind of writer to cover it. This is how Michael A. Gonzales came of age in a time when Black writers began breaking the white ceiling.

The singular singer released her groundbreaking album in 1963, the same year as the March on Washington, and used her art and appearance as weapons in the Civil Rights struggle.

The term “slow jam” became widely popular when a song performed by Midnight Star debuted in 1983.

Teddy Pendergrass was the R&B singer women wanted and who men wanted to be. And the one whose life-sized cardboard cutout stood in one family’s living room.

How cultural appropriation and erasure turned an African American spiritual into a white campfire sing-along.

Standard recording contracts screwed Bluesmen out of royalties in the early 1900s, and the system was no different when Columbia released “Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings in 1990.”

Rapper Robin Allen’s hit song bypassed the hip-hop boys club that held her debut solo album back.

With approximately 75 percent of golden age gospel music lost, the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project is trying to save what’s left.

On one summer day in 1998, XXL magazine gathered 177 hip-hop artists for one of the greatest musical photographs of all time: A Great Day in Hip-Hop.