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...
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...
R&B has spent the last decade being absorbed by everything around it and still managing to remain itself. That’s not a small achievement. The genre has been dissolved...
Emo spent about fifteen years being embarrassed about itself. Then it spent the next fifteen years being reclaimed, reexamined, and quietly vindicated. At this point the argument is...
Free jazz has always had an image problem. The phrase itself does most of the work: “free” implies difficult, difficult implies inaccessible, inaccessible implies not for you. For...
Latin Alternative has spent thirty years refusing to be defined, and that refusal is precisely what makes it worth paying attention to right now. It is not reggaeton,...
Electronic music is the only genre that has no instrument of its own that is not already borrowed from something else. It uses the synthesizer, which was invented...
New Wave is a genre that has always meant more than it should be able to. That is a feature, not a bug. Born out of punk’s energy...
Alternative rock has always been a strange category. It started as a genuine descriptor, music that existed outside the mainstream rock infrastructure, and became the mainstream so thoroughly...
Indie rock is one of those terms that long ago stopped describing a sound and started describing an attitude. When it emerged in the early 1980s, the word...
Into The Music