Get our latest essays, archival selections, reading lists, and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.
Articles tagged with music
Cruising extends the political value of the city as a space that brings us into contact with people who seem unlike us until we realize our shared desires.
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.
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.
Through online fan communities and digital platforms like TikTok, popular music is finding powerful new ways to shape everyday activism, protest, and resistance.
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.
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.
