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Tag: Music

Browse our essays and reviews on music.

Thelonious Monk lost (and found) in Paris.

Robin D. G. Kelley

From street demonstrations to song, dance, film, and poetry, women are advancing a long legacy of struggle against authoritarianism in Iran.

Nojang Khatami

Robin D. G. Kelley and Bongani Madondo honor the writer's life, work, and legacy.

Bongani Madondo, Robin D. G. Kelley
The field is reckoning with a long legacy of racial exclusion, despite its universalist claims.
Douglas Shadle

Sixty years ago, a pathbreaking jazz album from Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Oscar Brown, Jr., fused politics and art in the fight for Black liberation. Black artists are taking similar strides today.

Michael Reagan
A Sun Ra tribute concert by a member of the pathbreaking pop group Labelle leads to reflections on how Black women artists and scientists have often been at the vanguard of their disciplines—though most are still awaiting due recognition.
Emily Lordi
The Sacred Black Masculine in My Life
Tyehimba Jess

Through online fan communities and digital platforms like TikTok, popular music is finding powerful new ways to shape everyday activism, protest, and resistance.

Byrd McDaniel
Robin D. G. Kelley talks with musician Vijay Iyer about systems of oppression, the responsibility of artists, and how jazz sells proximity to blackness to white people.
Vijay Iyer, Robin D. G. Kelley
Prosecutors use defendants’ rap lyrics to win cases despite the flimsiest evidence. Behind this rests a unique paranoia around hip hop and a long history of criminalizing black art. 
Andrea L. Dennis, Erik Nielson

Thirty years after the Wall fell, the story of Berlin's anarchist utopia.

Paul Hockenos

How the song emerged from Gaye’s struggles with faith, drug addiction, and childhood abuse.

David Ritz

Amazing Grace, the long-lost film of Franklin’s gospel album, offers a lesson in the deep connections between gospel and soul music.

Ed Pavlić

Kanye represents what happens when the liberties of artistic genius are confused for political insight.

Christopher Lebron

A personal essay on family, death, and the healing power of music.

Peter E. Gordon
What Afrofuturism can teach us about surviving Trump.
Christopher Lebron

Mentorship is how the humanities justify themselves.

Jo Guldi

On the feminist essayist, journalist, and music critic who championed women’s liberation.

Judith Levine

Overestimating the counterculture of the 1960s.

Hal Stucker

A new collection of Lead Belly's recordings.

Dave Byrne

After years of obscurity, the “5” Royales are finally getting their due.

Colin Fleming

Drake was an artist so out of step with his own time that he came to be in lockstep with things not bound by time.

Colin Fleming

The Making of an American Folk Song

Dave Byrne

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Use code DISSENT when you purchase a print BR membership.

Act fast: offer ends March 31!

Use code DISSENT when you purchase a print BR membership. Offer ends March 31.