Genres

Garage Rock Has Always Sounded Like It Has Something to Prove

Garage rock has always been the part of rock music that refuses to clean up after itself. It is loud on purpose, rough on purpose, deliberately uninterested in...

Latin Pop: The Genre That Crossed Over and Never Looked Back

Latin pop has a problem that most genres would love to have. It is too big, too varied, and too successful to be contained in a single story....

R&B Is Not a Genre. It Is a Tradition.

R&B is not a genre. It is a container that has held completely different things at different points in American music history, and calling it a genre is...

Hip-Hop: The Genre That Rewrote Everything Else

Hip-hop began on a block party turntable in the South Bronx in the summer of 1973 and became, over the following fifty years, the most globally dominant musical...

Heavy Metal: The Genre That Has Been Dying for Fifty Years and Has Never Once Stopped

Heavy metal is the genre that everyone has an opinion about and almost nobody can define precisely. Ask ten metal fans what counts as metal and you will...

Jazz Has Never Stopped. The Rest of Music Is Starting to Notice.

Jazz has a marketing problem that it has had for decades and mostly does not care about. The genre resists the simplifications that make things easy to explain...

Ska-Punk Never Actually Left, and the Sublime Return Proves It

Sublime just announced their first album in thirty years, and ska-punk is suddenly a topic again. Until the Sun Explodes comes out June 12 via Atlantic, with Jakob...

Electronic Music: The Genre That Won Without Asking

Reggae: The Music That Was Built to Survive Everything

Reggae is sixty years old and it is still being misunderstood by the people who love it most. That is not a criticism. It is almost a tribute....

Post-Punk: The Sound That Did Not Know What It Was Becoming

Post-punk is not a genre that has a clear origin point, a founding text, or an agreed-upon definition. It is, instead, a name applied after the fact to...