Tag: music

OutKast’s masterful 1998 album “Aquemini” defined a bold and Black South and predicted today’s pop music landscape.

In “Night Moves,” Jessica Hopper is 80% on her bike and 20% at a show, memorializing a young adulthood spent in just one of “a million Chicagos” — but one that shaped a wide network of artists and writers.

I believed that there was no music existing in the world with an unbroken connection to its original context. I was wrong.

When a young white musician gets invited to a house-party, the musicians he plays with show him a slice of blues culture many people assumed had died.

Joan Morgan’s “She Begat This” looks back at how Lauryn Hill crashed through hip-hop’s glass ceiling, while our critic looks at how the author and a cadre of black women writers did the same for hip-hop music journalism.

Nate Chinen may have been the last full-time jazz reviewer at any American newspaper. He says jazz hasn’t been in a better place since the ’60s — but the commercial infrastructure is broken.

How Canadian is Justin Bieber? His hometown’s “Steps to Stardom” exhibit provides some answers.

The story of Sadlack’s Heroes, the Raleigh dive bar that helped galvanize the alternative country scene in the 1990s.

The co-authors of ‘Country Music USA’ – a revised edition of the genre’s definitive history – talk about the music’s African-American tributaries, its unpredictable politics, country radio’s woman problem, and working on Ken Burns’ forthcoming doc.

She’s a rock star, and a mom, and a tomboy, and a wife, and a study in contradictions.

No one would have thought that Highland Ridge, Virginia was the center of anything. Then Jim McCoy’s honky-tonk came along.

German tennis player Andrea Petkovic meets the band.

The death of popular rapper XXXTentaction raises questions of ethical consumption.

How two exiled Sufi musicians returned to make traditional music in postwar Kabul, Afghanistan.

At Paisley Park, the most palpable feeling isn’t of Prince, it’s of loneliness.

Neko Case talks about collaboration, women warriors, women inventors, men with excellent falsettos, losing her home to a fire, and feeling lucky in ‘a great sea of loss.’

It has already, time and time again.

The singer’s latest performance helps expand the possibilities of what it looks like to be a black thinking person.

The appeal of Springsteen’s “Baby, we were born to run!”

The Pulitzer Prize-winner’s work always feels honest, as writers have found when they dive deep into his literary influences.

How the songwriter’s “Schoolhouse Rock!” taught an entire generation.

In the ’90s, discovering the music of Friends of Dean Martinez helped Aaron Gilbreath stop running and appreciate life in his native Arizona.

Composer Philip Glass was a plumber, a mover, a taxi driver — and as a child, a clerk in his father’s record store, where he learned a key lesson.

They were scheduled to play Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1959. So why did the gigs never happen?

Digitization has removed the humanity from the music business, from collaboration to mutual respect.

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in arts and culture writing.

The hip-hop artist sits down for a wide-ranging interview with NYT executive editor Dean Baquet.

Zandria F. Robinson narrates her coming of age Memphis while examining contemporary southernness.

Spotify’s corporate-branded playlists are not the solution to the music industry’s problems. They’re a new problem.

Understanding what the rapper means to her audience, beyond the flash of celebrity.