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....
Reggae is one of the few genres that managed to export an entire worldview alongside its music. Other styles travel in sound. Reggae traveled in sound, philosophy, spirituality,...
Neo-soul came into the world with a borrowed name and ended up building one of the most influential sounds of the last thirty years. The term was coined...
Metal has a gatekeeping problem that it refuses to solve, and that refusal is actually part of what makes the genre interesting. No other style of music argues...
UK garage arrived in the mid-1990s without permission and refused to leave. It borrowed the skeleton of American house and R&B, rebuilt it with British swing, compressed it...
Dream pop does not announce itself. It arrives the way that certain feelings do, as an ambient pressure, a gradual shift in light rather than a sudden intrusion....
Jazz is one of the few genres in popular music that has successfully convinced people it requires a special kind of listening. That reputation has done it both...
House music was born in a specific time and place, Chicago in the early 1980s, in the clubs that formed after disco’s commercial collapse left a hole in...
Country music has been having an identity crisis for so long that the crisis has become the identity. The debates about what qualifies as country, who belongs in...
Soul music does not need a definition. It needs a listen. Put on Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You” from 1967, or...
Hip-hop is fifty years old and still being described as a genre rather than a culture, which tells you everything about how persistent the misreading is. What started...
Into The Music