20 Music Videos That Made Waves in 2020

Featuring Cardi and Meg, Bad Bunny, Perfume Genius, Christine and the Queens, and more While the pandemic forced us all inside this year, some of our favorite artists kept us distracted and lifted our spirits by breaking new ground with…

A Year in Music on TikTok

A strange remix shot up the Billboard Hot 100, after creators on TikTok started dancing and posing to it. It was “Roses” by the Guyanese-American rapper SAINt JHN, which a Kazakh teenager named Imanbek had pitched and sped up, adding…

Ttgfred A Living American Street Dream

  Acknowledging your vulnerabilities and insecurities enables an individual to heal, inspire, and champion insurmountable demons.  Music is therapy and heals wounds the world can’tsee on a person’s body.  Certain types of pain never end and fuels a person’s mission…

The Best and Worst of Everything Else

So, Pat Corcoran, better known as Pat the Manager, sued his former client, Chance the Rapper. What makes this lawsuit so good for me is that I lived through it, and it’s extremely validating. Like, we covered Chance extremely closely…

The Year Live Music Stopped

Aside from Taiwan, the clearest vision of live music’s post-COVID future might be New Zealand, which has so far managed to stamp out the coronavirus. Government benefits supported the creative community during two tough lockdowns, and now live shows are…

The 20 Best Music Videos of 2020

While the pandemic forced us all inside this year, some of our favorite artists kept us distracted and lifted our spirits by breaking new ground with their visuals. Whether tiptoeing into Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s candy-colored sexual funhouse,…

Our 15 Favorite Music Books of 2020

Being able to easily cue up a song just as you’re reading about it is a small, modern joy, and it’s one we took full advantage of in 2020. In a year largely bereft of live music or even social…

The 22 Best Songs by Latinx Artists in 2020

Latin American and U.S. Latinx music is constantly evolving through migration, displacement, and globalization, and in 2020, it was clear that a catch-all term for genre and identity could never capture that multiplicity. The year gifted us Natanael Cano’s experiments…

The 35 Best Rock Albums of 2020

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal Merge H.C. McEntire: Eno Axis The second album of soulful Americana from North Carolina songwriter H.C. McEntire begins with an early morning prayer and ends with a slow-burn…

The 36 Best Rap Songs of 2020

When the world stopped, rap kept going. Nothing—not the pandemic, not state-imposed curfews, not widespread malaise or massive social upheavals— could slow down its lightspeed evolution, from Flint to Oakland to Buffalo to Bradford, England. The most resonant rap songs…