pop music 
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/22/2023
Critical (In)attention to Bad Bunny Headlining Coachella Latest Example of Dismissal of "Latin" Music Artists
by Petra Rivera-Rideau and Vanessa Díaz
At the fashionable California festival, the Puerto Rican artist took fans through a history of Latin American musical styles; the American press has too often ignored such history to portray performers as exotic, hypersexual, and foreign, instead of as part of a hemisphere-wide process of cultural creation and mixture.
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SOURCE: Nursing Clio
3/29/2023
Lizzo's Duet With History (and Madison's Crystal Flute)
by Grace B. McGowan and Ravynn K. Stringfield
Performing with the treasured national relic of a slaveholding President forced Americans to ask who owns antiquities, and has the right to tell their story. The controversy over the event shows that these are still contested questions.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
2/2/2023
The Case for Blondie as the Sound of the 70s
by Kevin Dettmar
While the decade's pop scene was undeniably eclectic, there's an argument to be made that the New York group was at the center of the most lasting trends of the 1970s.
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SOURCE: New York Times
10/27/2022
Stevie Wonder's "Talking Book" at 50
Musical collaborators and artists later influenced by Stevie Wonder's declaration of musical independence explain the album's creation and impact.
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SOURCE: The Bulwark
10/4/2022
What Lizzo Can Teach the Right about History
Commentator Mona Charen writes that Lizzo's embrace of an artifact of the founding generation should be welcomed by conservatives, who claim to stand for a history shared by all Americans without regard for identity.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
2/10/2021
The Beatles Ignited a Culture War and Changed the World
by Randall J. Stephens
While Peter Jackson's "Get Back" documentary focuses on the last phases of the band's work together, it's important to think about how the group's emergence changed American culture, especially around sex and gender.
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10/3/2021
At 82, Dion Offers a Rock and Roll Light in the Darkness
by Richard Aquila
Dion's new recording isn't just a work of Baby Boomer nostalgia; it reaches to the past to understand the present, says a historian of rock in American culture.
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SOURCE: New York Times
3/14/2021
The Culture Warped Pop Music – For Good
Partly due to the way streaming service users listen, the structures of pop music songs have changed in recent years; although today's hits are built differently than those of the 1960s, it's part of a long pattern of change in pop.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
2/11/2021
The Lady Gaga Anthem That Previewed a Decade of Culture Wars
Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" was embraced as an anthem by some LGBTQ fans, but immediately raised questions about identity and cultural authority that are at the center of online culture wars today.
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SOURCE: NPR
7/28/2020
A New Book Traces The History Of Boy Bands, The Pop Phenomenon 'Larger Than Life'
For reasons that she explores in her new book, "Larger Than Life: A History Of Boy Bands From NKOTB To BTS", Maria Sherman says boy bands don't get the same respect as other music acts, especially their rock peers.
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11-18-13
Review of Linda Ronstadt's "Simple Dreams"
by Jim Cullen
A musical memoir with a few too many silent notes.
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SOURCE: The Root
3-10-13
Tamara Palmer: How the 'Billie Jean' Video Changed MTV
Tamara Palmer is a San Francisco-based freelance writer and the author of Country Fried Soul: Adventures in Dirty South Hip-Hop. Follow her on Twitter. (The Root) -- "Billie Jean," who was not Michael Jackson's lover, is turning 30 -- or at least her video is, and it's an important anniversary in the evolution of both black music's visual expression and America's iconic music network. On March 10, 1983, MTV played "Billie Jean" for the first time and forever changed the course of its music programming in the process.