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We rely on readers to keep our website open to all. Help sustain a public space for collective reasoning and imagination—make a tax-deductible donation today.
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.
Invitations to danger and salvation that makes the blues the blues.
Rap poetry is full of cutting-edge linguistic innovations.
Despite being a prolific composer, Ernst Krenek is one of the least understood musical figures of the twentieth century.
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Just in time for the holidays, get any three print issues of Boston Review for just $35 – that’s 40% off the cover price!
Before December 9, mix and match any three issues for one low price using code 3FOR35.
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