Deep dives into the sounds that define us.
Footwork did not ask to be discovered. It emerged from Chicago’s South Side in the late 1990s as an evolution of ghetto house, built for battle: two dancers...
There’s been a quiet but unmistakable shift happening in pop music. Call it the return of the low-key. After years of maximalism, hyperpop production, and the relentless sonic...
Reggae is sixty years old and it is still being misunderstood by the people who love it most. That is not a criticism. It is almost a tribute....
Post-punk is not a genre that has a clear origin point, a founding text, or an agreed-upon definition. It is, instead, a name applied after the fact to...
Afrobeats did not ask permission to become one of the dominant sounds of global popular music. It just became that, gradually and then all at once, and the...
Soul music has a problem with its own name. The word “soul” gets used to describe everything from sixties Atlantic Records gospel-influenced R&B to nineties neo-soul to whatever...
Pop-punk has been declared dead so many times that the declarations have become their own genre. Every five years or so, someone publishes a piece about how the...
New wave arrived without a proper announcement and left without a clear ending. That is part of why it is still so difficult to pin down even now,...
Grunge arrived in mainstream consciousness with the force of something that had been building underground for years before anyone in Los Angeles noticed. Seattle in the late 1980s...
Art pop is the genre that music critics reach for when they want to describe something that refuses to fit anywhere else. It is also genuinely one of...
Synth-pop arrived with the 1980s and never really left. It outlasted the decade it defined, shed several of its worst habits, kept the best ones, and quietly became...
Emo is one of those genres that people have been eulogizing since roughly the moment it became visible, which suggests either that it keeps dying or that it...
Into The Music