Tag: pop music

Although music often involves emotional expression, pop star Carly Rae Jepsen has built a career and a persona out of big, unguarded emotions, a range that could be called “too muchness,” which is just right for some of us.

‘The music went away slowly and then all at once. So what if it never comes back? “I haven’t allowed myself to go there yet,” Huey says, worry in his voice.’

For one brown, queer Filipino-American, Karen Carpenters’ music anchored her to her musical family’s past while helping chart her path in their adopted Southern California.

My best friend and the New Kids on the Block, 30 years later.

How a band seemingly out of step with its times outlasted so many of its indulgent, in-step contemporaries.

When the pop singer went avant garde, he traded narrative meaning for emotional truth to explore those things that lay beyond language.

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

The singer of “It’s My Life” left us a brilliant solo album, then chose to be a family man.

How the songwriter’s abandoned third album became two albums.

Rachel Syme profiles Lady Gaga and dives deep into the mystique and mythology of “A Star is Born.”

Cultural critic Simon Reynolds looks at 20 years of Auto-Tune.

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

For the Undefeated, music writer and essayist Bruce Britt offers a compelling history of soul band Maze.

What can the endurance of the messy, campy canon of James Bond theme songs tell us about contemporary popular music?

If you don’t take Swift seriously, you don’t take contemporary music seriously. With the (arguable) exceptions of Kanye West and Beyoncé Knowles, she is the most significant pop artist of the modern age. The scale of her commercial supremacy defies parallel—she’s sold 1 million albums in a week three times, during an era when most […]

In the newest issue of The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh wrote about Grimes, real name Claire Boucher, whose history in underground experimental music led her to making homemade electronic bedroom pop. Last year, Pitchfork named her song “Oblivion” the best song of the decade to date, and as she’s preparing to release her second proper album, […]

What it means to be a vocal coach.

The Bee Gees’ dominance of the charts in the disco era was above and beyond Chic, Giorgio Moroder, even Donna Summer. Their sound track to Saturday Night Fever sold thirty million copies. They were responsible for writing and producing eight of 1978’s number ones, something only Lennon and McCartney in 1963/64 could rival—and John and […]

I’m not here to defend “We Built This City,” though I hardly think it’s the worst song of all time. Instead, I’m here to urge every music fan to dig deeper and interrogate his or her own definition of what makes a song terrible. I feel like we pile on “We Built This City” because […]