Deep dives into the sounds that define us.
Jazz fusion is the genre that got away with everything. It took jazz’s harmonic language, rock’s volume and rhythmic aggression, funk’s groove, and in some iterations, electronic music’s...
Arlo Parks made a dance record. More precisely, she made an album soaked in UK garage, 2-step, and house music, and it sounds like a completely natural evolution....
Political rap has existed as long as rap has existed, and the question of what makes it work versus what makes it a slogan set to a beat...
Jungle music emerged in the early 1990s from London and Bristol, a product of rave culture mixing reggae sound system culture with the faster tempos of hardcore techno...
New wave emerged in the late 1970s as a commercial refinement of punk, taking the energy and the anti-establishment attitude and making it more melodic, more produced, and...
Appalachian music doesn’t get discussed as a genre in the same way that, say, outlaw country or alternative country does, partly because it predates the genre taxonomy that...
Country music has always had a complicated relationship with its women. The commercial structure of Nashville radio has historically favored male artists in ways that are documented and...
Pop-punk is a genre name that has meant different things in different decades, which is either a sign of its vitality or its incoherence, depending on your relationship...
Synth-pop is the music of the instrument that changed everything: the synthesizer, which arrived in mainstream pop in the 1970s and rewired the relationship between technology and music...
Hard rock and heavy metal share a boundary that’s always been porous, and the distinction matters less to most listeners than it does to the critics and historians...
Funk is the genre that built half of modern music and gets thanked for it about a quarter of the time. Sample a James Brown break and you...
Folk-pop as a commercial category arrived with a particular moment: the early 2000s, when artists like Norah Jones, Damien Rice, and the Iron and Wine of the early...
Into The Music