New American Songbook

The 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta incorporated ‘designated protest zones’--later more commonly known as ‘free speech zones’--as a way to control and limit the impact that protests might have on the convention. A parcel of land near, but not too close or visible to the event center, was cordoned off, making protests and demonstrations a curious sideshow. Listening to the new album from the so-called supergroup ‘Prophets of Rage’ feels a lot like listening to a free speech zone:

Just over twenty years ago, in 1996, 300 mostly African men, women and children occupied churches in Paris to protest deportations. These people, who became known as Sans-Papiers, meaning ‘without papers’, would eventually form autonomous international collectives throughout Europe, demanding full recognition of human rights from the various governments they lived under. Hip hop is both an international music, and also internationalist, insofar as its primary themes have always found solidarity

Many people familiar with public radio will also be familiar with NPR’s series of Tiny Desk Concerts.

The rapper Prodigy, best known for his work as half of the classic duo Mobb Deep, died in June of this year. Mobb Deep was a breakthrough project, perfecting the art of noir rap during the nineties, one of the most productive and diverse periods of hip hop history. Their grim reporting from the borough of Queens inspired years of lesser imitators who reproduced the violent imagery of Mobb Deep’s lyrics without the context, history or community that made those lyrics really impactful. The

The album “Break Stuff,” released in 2015 by pianist Vijay Iyer, is a complex and challenging performance. At the heart of the music is the concept of the break, an idea with deep roots in hip hop music and culture.

When 24-year old Chance the Rapper accepted the 2017 BET Humanitarian Award, his brief speech touched on a lot of big ideas: school reform, police brutality and black empowerment.

Let’s start with an easy question: How does language work? Okay, maybe not so easy, but over in one corner of this question is a field of thought called semiotics, and we’ll need a couple of its basic concepts in about one minute. Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and how they are used. It’s a nightmare for undergrads, but we only need two key terms today: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is what you call something (the word "tree" for tree), whereas the signified is the

The value of a hard day’s work is one of those mostly uncontroversial shared beliefs in American society: it’s good, period. Even across economic classes, work is seen as a necessary part of life, though opinions on what work is worth might vary. Most of our ideas about work come from people who have been successful at work, which seems reasonable if you don’t think too hard about the vested interest those successful people have in maintaining a status quo that has worked so well for them. Folk

Back before the internet, finding new music was often a matter of finding new friends.

In hip hop, it’s not unusual for strong personalities to go up against one another—we call it beef. But the song “You Are Not a Riot” by the Oakland-based outfit called The Coup puts an interesting spin on beef with its subject, described in the subtitle as “An RSVP from David Siquieros to Andy Warhol”.

When Los Angeles erupted in violence in 1992, I was thirteen and in eighth-grade in Wichita. I don’t remember teachers talking much about it, but other students did.

I didn’t grow up with hip hop—I came to it late from punk rock, when punk had turned bubblegum and hip hop was in yet another of its golden ages in the mid-90’s.

In the early 1900s, an Irish immigrant named Mary Mallon worked as a personal cook for several wealthy families. Her tenure also coincided with several outbreaks of typhoid, a bacterial infection that--in its most severe cases--can be fatal. It was eventually determined that Mary was a carrier of the disease and for the next few years she alternated between quarantine and a kind of life on the run as she continued to insist on working as a cook, which inevitably led to more typhoid outbreaks.

Spring is finally here, and along with it comes one of my favorite activities: playing music really loud in my car.

The 2016 album “Telefone” from Chicago emcee Noname opens with a song centered on her grandmother. As Noname struggles with growing fame and its attendant problems, memories of her grandmother enter the verse, grounding her in a reality that is also grounded in reality. Here, a line like "don’t grow up too soon, don’t blow the candles out, don’t let them cops get you," is encompassing in a way that nostalgia often isn’t—it’s complex and sad, wistful and heartbroken. I first heard Noname on a