How Black women reclaimed country and Americana music in 2021
Black women leveraged the power of streaming platforms and social media to bridge the chasms previously carved by labels, publishers and radio.
Music Features
Stonecoldboldness: A many-sided memorial to the writing of Greg Tate
A critic whose writing was nearly music itself, Greg Tate — who died this week at 64 — influenced generations of writers. His colleagues, peers and followers offer a guide to his essential works.
Michael Nesmith — considerably more than a Monkee — dies at 78
Nesmith rose to fame as one of the Pre-Fab Four — but he had a long and influential career after the Monkees. He helped invent the format that became MTV, and produced the cult film Repo Man.
The 25 Best Hip-Hop Albums of 2021
This year's best hip-hop — including Westside Gunn, Mach-Hommy and Moor Mother — comes from death and defiance, erotic power and provocation, Black joy and pain — and that's just the shortlist.
Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding crack open the old world in new opera
The pair took a close look at the subtexts of Euripides' sad, epic tale of Iphigenia — agency, testosterone, violence, faith — and, through a suite of new music, hold them up to the light.
The Best R&B Albums of 2021
From Dijon and Figmore to Mereba and Cleo Sol, the best R&B albums of the year were born out of reshaped perspectives in the face of the post-pandemic facade we're now calling reality.
20 Years After The End Of The World
At the turn of the millennium, Radiohead turned creeping melancholy and desolation into two albums that changed the band's career. Two decades later, maybe we've caught up to their prophetic vision.
These NYC kids have written the history of an overlooked Black female composer
A group of sixth, seventh and eighth grade students realized there was no children's book about the composer Florence Price. So they wrote, illustrated and published their own.
When Making Music Breaks Your Body
An arthritis diagnosis means the latest album by the Bay Area band The Dodos is likely its last. It is a striking reminder of the oft-overlooked physical strains of music careers.
Strata-East at 50: How a revolutionary record label put control in artists' hands
To celebrate their 50-year anniversary, we trace the history and legacy of the independent jazz record label Strata-East founded by trumpeter Charles Tolliver and the late pianist Stanley Cowell.