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...
Alternative rock is a category that described a commercial position before it described a sound, and the confusion between those two definitions runs through every argument about what...
Indie rock is not a sound. It never was. The term described a distribution model before it described a genre, and the confusion between those two definitions has...
Brian Eno coined the term ambient music in 1978 with Ambient 1: Music for Airports, but the idea had been building for decades. Erik Satie had written furniture...
Bossa nova arrived fully formed in 1958 with Joao Gilberto’s recording of Chega de Saudade, and it has spent the decades since being studied, imitated, and borrowed from...
Emo did not have a clean origin story and it never developed one. That is one of the reasons it persisted when it should have been a footnote,...
Progressive rock has always had an image problem, and it has always been the wrong one. The caricature is musicians in capes playing twenty-minute songs about wizards and...
Afrobeats did not ask for permission to go global. It just went. Over the past decade, the music coming out of Lagos and Accra and London’s Nigerian diaspora...
Grunge was always an uncomfortable genre even for the people who made it. The musicians most associated with it largely rejected the label, hated the word, and watched...
Drum and bass did not ask for permission to exist. It did not arrive with a theory or a manifesto. It emerged out of London’s rave underground in...
Disco has been easy to dismiss since before it ended. The Disco Demolition Night in Chicago in 1979, when a crate of disco records was blown up on...
Into The Music