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music

  • SOURCE: Tribune Magazine
    4/21/2021

    The Radical Politics of Nina Simone

    by Chardine Taylor-Stone

    "On the anniversary of her death, we can look at how the story of Simone’s political life is told, and who is telling it; at what they choose to include, and what they do in fact ‘erase’."

  • SOURCE: Black Perspectives
    4/13/2021

    Sounds of Freedom: The Music of Black Liberation

    Shana Redmond and Rickey Vincent discuss their research, which deals with the ways that musical expression has been integrated into the politics of Black freedom in different moments (and different musical styles, including the Black Panther Party's own funk band). 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    3/19/2021

    In ‘Genius: Aretha,’ Respecting the Mind, Not Just the Soul

    "The full scale of Franklin’s contributions to her own music has long been obscured. She was a gifted songwriter and a superb pianist. In the studio, she was a taskmaster, pushing herself and her collaborators until they captured the exact sound she heard in her head — not easy for a Black female musician of her time."

  • SOURCE: American Scholar
    3/13/2021

    The Baddest Man in Town

    by Eric McHenry

    Writer Eric McHenry recounts picking up the documentary trail (started in the 1970s by John Russell David) of the notorious "Stagger Lee" Shelton, whose reign of terror in early 20th century St. Louis became immortalized in song and legend.

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    3/15/2021

    How Black Women Musicians Defined What We Call Culture

    Daphne Brooks's new book "Liner Notes for the Revolution" examines the ways that Black women as creators, critics and consumers of popular music have advanced a political vision of transforming society. 

  • 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. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    3/5/2021

    Black Spirituals as Poetry and Resistance

    The author reflects on the experience of collecting oral history interviews from Black Brooklynites. The way her respondents understood death offers insight into the communal impacts of the COVID pandemic. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    3/3/2021

    He Was Born Into Slavery, but Achieved Musical Stardom

    Thomas Wiggins became a musical sensation in the pre-Civil War era, but never controlled his earnings or legacy. Today, preservationists are working to separate fact from legend and showcase his compositions. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    2/26/2021

    Fifty Years Later, ‘Tapestry’s’ Hope And Optimism Still Resonates

    by Tanya Pearson

    "Sincere, earnest and personal, 'Tapestry' embodied the emerging political argument ‘the personal is political.’ This phrase became a defining characteristic of second wave feminism at a time when women and others challenged the institutions of marriage, the nuclear family and its values and state control of women’s reproductive rights."

  • SOURCE: Folklife
    3/1/2021

    “Making a Living by the Sweat of Her Brow”: Hazel Dickens and a Life of Work

    by Emily Hilliard

    "Hazel’s song catalog is often divided into separate categories of personal songs, women’s songs, and labor songs. But in her view and experience, these issues all bled together; her songs address struggle against any form of domination and oppression, whether of women, workers, or herself."

  • 1/31/2021

    What J-Lo Sang

    by Mark F. Fernandez

    Jennifer Lopez's Inaugural performance showed that Woody Guthrie’s lyric, his notion of an inclusive America, still resonates today as Americans ponder questions of unity.

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    1/26/2021

    Rewinding Jimi Hendrix’s National Anthem

    "Jimi’s Woodstock anthem was both an expression of protest at the obscene violence of a wholly unnecessary war and an affirmation of aspects of the American experiment entirely worth fighting for."