News
Playlists of Protest Music and Endangered Languages on New Smithsonian Folkways Site
Online visitors can now access and navigate decades of folk recordings from around the world more easily.
Music
Music
The Intentional Fallacy Is Evil: Festival Anthems, Fifty Shades Darker, Workout Motivation, 35 Hits from the ‘70s & ‘80s
With any number of noncanonical, shelf-filling compilations released on the market every day, the failure to review them makes sense, as they're rarely any good — but rarely doesn’t mean never.
Art
A Symphony Scored from a School District’s 1,000 Broken Instruments
When Robert Blackson learned about the broken instruments in Philadelphia's public schools, he turned them into a creative opportunity: the Symphony for a Broken Orchestra.
Music
Rappers Talk Dirty: Future, Migos, Kodak Black, Cupcakke
2017 is shaping up to be a terrific year for hip-hop — better than 2016, I hope.
Music
Drake Improves Despite Himself
Moody guys excel at mood music.
Music
A Female Pioneer of Electronic Music Retakes the Stage
Suzanne Ciani, a pioneer of electronic music in the 1970s and ’80s, played her Buchla 200e in a rare improvised performance at a small Philadelphia theater, and it was completely packed.
Art
Setting the Puzzling Language of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake to Music
Over 100 contributors to the project Waywords and Meansigns are setting James Joyce's experimental 1930s book Finnegans Wake to music.
Music
Syd’s Pleasure Principle
Syd’s murmurs, exclamations, coos, and exhalations are layered with care and irrepressible delight — all so quietly you could blink and miss it all.
Music
Jens Lekman Cheers Up
All sad singer-songwriters are alike, but Jens Lekman is an exception.
Music
Solemnly Dinky High-Camp Bleepy: Chiptune Radio’s ‘Undertale’
Gliding and burbling, ringing and spattering and glitching, a lyrical escapism animates an album whose loveliness and silliness are inextricable.
Music
Reestablished Forms: King, M.I.A., Young Thug, Sheer Mag
Erotic sagas are always political. This applies to the four albums reviewed below, several political despite themselves, each of which messes with established forms while representing desire.
Music
Critical Distance: Car Seat Headrest, Solange, Danny Brown, Christine and the Queens
As most adolescents across the nation sit in their bedrooms and agonize over the eternal question, what do boys/girls like, some of us have more unfortunate and inconsequential concerns: what do critics like?