Music

Browse our essays and reviews on music.

What’s Next for Music Criticism?

Pitchfork is dead, but good reviewing doesn’t have to die with it.

  • Eli Zeger

Reversing the Silence

Thelonious Monk lost (and found) in Paris.

  • Robin D. G. Kelley

The Invisible Hand of Greg Tate

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

  • Robin D. G. Kelley
  • Bongani Madondo

Classical Music and the Color Line

The field is reckoning with a long legacy of racial exclusion, despite its universalist claims.

  • Douglas Shadle

Coltrane. Monk. Aretha.

A Black music reading list.

The Sounds of Struggle

The pathbreaking jazz album from Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Oscar Brown, Jr., that fused politics and art in the fight for Black liberation.

  • Michael Reagan

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Women Who Fly: Nona Hendryx and Afrofuturist Histories

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

Ancestral Wealth

The Sacred Black Masculine in My Life

  • Tyehimba Jess

A New Age of Protest Music

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

Ally: From Noun to Verb

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.

  • Robin D. G. Kelley
  • Vijay Iyer

Rap on Trial

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. 

  • Erik Nielson
  • Andrea L. Dennis

Zero Hour: The First Days of New Berlin

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

  • Paul Hockenos

The Origins of Sexual Healing

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

  • David Ritz

Aretha Franklin’s Soul

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

What Happened to Kanye West?

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

  • Christopher Lebron

Lenny Boy

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

  • Peter E. Gordon

Janelle Monáe for President

What Afrofuturism can teach us about surviving Trump

  • Christopher Lebron

Leaving Behind the Yellow Submarine

Mentorship is how the humanities justify themselves.

  • Jo Guldi

The Passion of Ellen Willis

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

  • Judith Levine

Hashpipe of the Vanities

Overestimating the counterculture of the 1960s.

  • Hal Stucker

A Good, Bad, Hard, Easy Life

A new collection of Lead Belly’s recordings.

  • Dave Byrne

Dedicated to the Kings of Rhythm and Blues

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

  • Colin Fleming

I Am Nick Drake Now

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

Ground Down to Molasses

The making of an American folk song.

  • Dave Byrne
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