-
Scrolling through the end of year “best of” lists is a great reminder of how much music I don’t listen to--the lists could just as easily be titled “music…
-
Those close to me know that I am not a fan of the sequel or, even worse, the series, and that I consider the contemporary franchising of narrative a…
-
Many people familiar with public radio will also be familiar with NPR’s series of Tiny Desk Concerts.The basic premise is that a band plays a short set in…
-
The rapper Prodigy, best known for his work as half of the classic duo Mobb Deep, died in June of this year. Mobb Deep was a breakthrough project,…
-
The album “Break Stuff,” released in 2015 by pianist Vijay Iyer, is a complex and challenging performance. At the heart of the music is the concept of the…
-
When 24-year old Chance the Rapper accepted the 2017 BET Humanitarian Award, his brief speech touched on a lot of big ideas: school reform, police…
-
Let’s start with an easy question: How does language work? Okay, maybe not so easy, but over in one corner of this question is a field of thought called…
-
The value of a hard day’s work is one of those mostly uncontroversial shared beliefs in American society: it’s good, period. Even across economic classes,…
-
Back before the internet, finding new music was often a matter of finding new friends. Everyone seemed to come with their own unique catalog of albums,…
-
In hip hop, it’s not unusual for strong personalities to go up against one another—we call it beef. But the song “You Are Not a Riot” by the Oakland-based…
-
When Los Angeles erupted in violence in 1992, I was thirteen and in eighth-grade in Wichita. I don’t remember teachers talking much about it, but other…
-
I didn’t grow up with hip hop—I came to it late from punk rock, when punk had turned bubblegum and hip hop was in yet another of its golden ages in the…