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Heavy Metal, Year One: The Inside Story of Black Sabbath's Groundbreaking Debut

A look back on the album that kick-started a worldwide movement, half a century since Ozzy Osbourne first bellowed, “What is this that stands before me?”

Why are Pop Songs Getting Sadder Than They Used to Be?

The most popular songs today are sadder than they were 50 years ago: can cultural evolution explain this negative turn?

Afloat with Static

Jenny Turner reviews "Face It" by Debbie Harry.
Photo of a large crowd at the Altamont Festival, 1969.

What Happened to Rock and Roll After Altamont?

On the Grateful Dead's “New Speedway Boogie,” and the true end of the Sixties.

The Songs of Canceled Men

A new book asks how music criticism can reckon with the lives of immoral artists.
Blind Willie Johnson animation

Drawn and Recorded: Blind Willie in Space

Dark was the night, cold was the ground, and brilliant is that song drifting through space.

How Isaac Hayes Changed Soul Music

The political rumblings beneath his 1969 album, "Hot Buttered Soul."

A Lifetime Of Labor: Maybelle Carter At Work

Maybelle Carter witnessed the dawn of the recording era and helped create country music as one of the genre's biggest acts.

An Ives Fourth

Nostalgia or nightmare?

William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll

From Bob Dylan to David Bowie to The Beatles, the legendary Beat writer’s influence reached beyond literature into music in surprising ways.
Still from a video game animation of a Black cowboy aiming a pistol at another.

‘Old Town Road’ and the History of Black Cowboys in America

A songwriter-historian weighs in on the controversy over Lil Nas X’s country-trap hit.

Oklahoma Was Never Really O.K.

A new production exposes the darkness that’s always been at the heart of the musical — and the American experiment.

Punjabi Convoy

A history of trucking in America, told through the music that has kept truckers company on the lonely road.

The Most Important Album of 1968 Wasn’t The White Album. It Was Beggars Banquet.

It saved the Rolling Stones, altered the trajectory of music history, and turns 50 this week.
Painting of the mouth of a cave.

Down in the Hole: Outlaw Country and Outlaw Culture

Country music has often stood, as it were, with one foot in and one foot out of the cave.

The Vietnam War: A History in Song

The ‘First Television War’ was also documented in over 5,000 songs.
Colorful illustration of Larry Norman, haloed by yellow.

The Unlikely Endurance of Christian Rock

The genre has been disdained by the church and mocked by secular culture. That just reassured practitioners that they were rebels on a righteous path.
Two posters of the "We Can Do It!" posters with Rosie the Riveter hang on a wall.

Rosie the Riveter Isn’t Who You Think She Is

While the female factory worker is a pop icon now, the “We Can Do It!” poster was unknown to the American public in the 1940s.
The cover of Behold, a Pale Horse by Milton William Cooper.

The Conspiracist Manual That Influenced a Generation of Rappers

How "Behold a Pale Horse" found its way to the Wu-Tang Clan, Mobb Deep’s Prodigy, Busta Rhymes, Tupac Shakur, NAS, and more.

Aretha Franklin Was the Defining Voice of the 20th Century

No one else sang as well as her, and no other singer changed popular music as much as her.

John Wesley Harding at Fifty: WWDD?

Bob Dylan's confessional album resisted the political radicalism and activism of 1967.

The Historical Roots of Blues Music

The blues is not "slave music," but the music of freed African Americans.

Agriculture Wars

On country music as a lens through which to trace the corporatization of American farming.

‘The Snake’: How Trump Appropriated a Radical Black Singer’s Lyrics

A former communist from Chicago wrote the song in the 1960s, decades before Trump turned it into an anti-immigrant fable.

Mourning John Perry Barlow, Bard of the Internet

Barlow was a poet, a cowboy, a philosopher, and the internet's staunchest ally.

Wouldn’t You Love to Love Her?

A biography of Stevie Nicks does little to dispel the magic.

The Music I Love Is a Racial Minefield

How I learned to fiddle my way through America's deeply troubling history.

No One Writes Great Christmas Songs Anymore

But maybe those midcentury classics weren't really Christmas songs at all.

Here's What Benjamin Franklin Scholars Think About Lin-Manuel Miranda's Ode to the Inventor

Fact-checking the lyrics of Miranda's new song.
family Thanksgiving meal

The Dark and Divisive History of America’s Thanksgiving Hymn

How a beloved song with origins in 16th-century Europe captures both a holiday's spirit of unity and a country's legacy of exclusion.

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