Music Reviews & Criticism

Music listeners today can effortlessly flip from K-pop to Ravi Shankar to Amadou & Mariam with a few quick clicks of a mouse. While contemporar...

Although Theodor W. Adorno is best known for his association with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, he began his career as a composer and su...

Trip-hop described some of the 1990s best music, and it was one of the decades most revealing bad ideas. This book chronicles the music and its lea...

Celebrity has long been tied to political aspirations in American history. Decades before the United States had a president from the realm of real...

In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR's acclaimed music critic examines how popular music shapes fundamental American...

'Delightfully overwhelming in the amount of music to investigate . . . a late-night voice if I ever heard one'. Gideon Coe, Late Night Book Club, B...

The Cure's story is a fantastical pop fable, but their trajectory has not been one of unbroken success. Along the way, their uneven, uneasy pop ody...

Butchering the classics through avant-garde amateurism: the Portsmouth Sinfonia embodied the joyous collectivism of 1970s British counterculture I...

The concept behind Ruth and Martins Album Club is simple: make people listen to a classic album theyve never heard, then ask them to review it. Com...

Recorded in 1949, Foggy Mountain Breakdown changed the face of American music. Earl Scruggs's instrumental essentially transformed the folk culture...

Re-release of the first book ever published in America about the legendary Motown Record Company, with a new foreword by legendary music journalist...

Frank Zappa was an unremitting musical innovator and experimenter, always looking for ways to exploit the latest advances in technology. His workin...

On Saturday, June 28, 1986, George Michael picked up his tasselled leather jacket, walked out of Londons Wembley Stadium and cheerfully tore up fiv...

Moon Pix was conceived during a hallucinatory waking nightmare in the South Carolina home of Chan Marshall one fateful day in 1997. Spirits violent...

When all else fails, when our compass is broken, there is one thing some of us have come to rely on: music really can give us a sense of something ...

Part memoir, part reportage, Louder Than Bombs is a story of music from the front lines. Ed Vulliamy, a decorated war correspondent and journalist,...

Now in its sixth decade, country music studies is a thriving field of inquiry involving scholars working in the fields of American history, folklor...