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Browse our essays and reviews on music.
From street demonstrations to song, dance, film, and poetry, women are advancing a long legacy of struggle against authoritarianism in Iran.
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.
Through online fan communities and digital platforms like TikTok, popular music is finding powerful new ways to shape everyday activism, protest, and resistance.
30 years after the Wall, the story of Berlin's anarchist utopia.
‘Amazing Grace,’ the long-lost film of Franklin’s gospel album, offers a lesson in the deep connections between gospel and soul music.
Kanye represents what happens when the liberties of artistic genius are confused for political insight.
Mentorship is how the humanities justify themselves.
On the feminist essayist, journalist, and music critic.
After years of obscurity, the “5” Royales are finally getting their due.
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.
The novel House of Earth shows Woody Guthrie in a different light, exiled from the Dust Bowl but dreaming of it still.
Michael Zapruder discusses converting poetry into music.
In the 1930s and ’40s, American dance was about working men and women, not dying swans.
Rap poetry is full of cutting-edge linguistic innovations.
From the Winter 1975 issue of Boston Review: Glenn Gould argues that despite being a prolific composer, Ernst Krenek is one of the least understood musical figures of the twentieth century.
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That’s why there are no paywalls on our website, but we can’t do it without the support of our readers. Please make a tax-deductible donation to help us create a more inclusive and egalitarian public sphere—open to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.
That’s what sociologist Alondra Nelson says of Boston Review. Independent and nonprofit, we believe in the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world.
That’s why there are no paywalls on our website, but we can’t do it without the support of our readers. Please make a tax-deductible donation to help us create a more inclusive and egalitarian public sphere—open to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.