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Browse our essays and reviews on music.
Pitchfork is dead, but good reviewing doesn’t have to die with it.
Robin D. G. Kelley and Bongani Madondo honor the writer's life, work, and legacy.
The field is reckoning with a long legacy of racial exclusion, despite its universalist claims.
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.
Thirty years after the Wall fell, the story of Berlin's anarchist utopia.
How the song emerged from Gaye’s struggles with faith, drug addiction, and childhood abuse.
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.
What Afrofuturism can teach us about surviving Trump.
On the feminist essayist, journalist, and music critic who championed women’s liberation.
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.
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This is a perilous moment for independent media. As a small nonprofit—with no sponsor or endowment—we rely on the generosity of readers to support our work.
Will you please consider making a tax-deductible donation today?
Every contribution helps pay our writers and sustain our website—always free to read for everyone, since you can’t build a more just world behind paywalls.
