From Public Books, how should we understand rock and roll’s reverence for earlier African American musical forms in relation to a history of racial brutality? Jack Hamilton on his book Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. The whitest music ever: James Parker reviews The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock by David Weigel (and more and more). Michael Iafrate (Toronto): Punk Rock and/as Liberation. Margaret Thatcher’s briefing on punk for a 1987 interview is pure gold. Andy Segedi writes in defense of hair metal. M Selim Yavuz (Leeds Beckett): “Delightfully Depressing”: Death/Doom Metal Music World and the Emotional Responses of the Fan.
Patrick William Osborne (Florida State): Constructing the Antichrist as Superstar: Marilyn Manson and the Mechanics of Eschatological Narrative. Was grunge good? The death of Chris Cornell and the 25th anniversary of the movie “Singles” bring a musical era into focus. The life and death of the indie-rock heyday: Twenty years ago marked the beginning of the end of Peak Indie. The last moment of the last great rock band: The inside story of how the Strokes — and the early-aughts New York rock boom — went bust, told by the people who lived it. Clover Hope on the making and unmaking of Iggy Azalea. Why do so many musicians end up being one-hit wonders?
What is the millennial “Stairway to Heaven”? A battle royale. A report finds hip-hop/R&B is the dominant genre in the U.S. for the first time. Nitsuh Abebe on 25 songs that tell us where music is going.
