Rhythm and Blues (Music)
‘Renaissance’ Review: America Has a Problem and Beyoncé Ain’t It
It’s too much, this being alive. Too heavy, too uncertain, too chronically cataclysmic, too bellicose, too unwell, too freighted with a possibility of the perception of error. The word of the last few years — in American activist and academic circles, anyway — has been “precarity.” Which gets at ideas of endangerment, neglect, contingency, risk. […]
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Beyoncé Unveils ‘Renaissance,’ the First of Three New Projects
Since “Lemonade” (2016), her last solo studio LP and accompanying film, Beyoncé has tided fans over with a number of ambitious in-between projects. In 2018, she performed as one of the headliners at the Coachella festival, where her show paid tribute to the marching band tradition of historically Black colleges and universities, and was widely […]
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What Is Beyoncé’s Definitive Album?
Much is made of pop star “eras” these days, but the term is deployed as a tool of marketing, not meaning. Rare is the artist who can sustain multiple visions and repeatedly regenerate. But different cultural and social moments have demanded different Beyoncés, and she has consistently delivered. At times she has been a singles […]
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Lizzo Conquers Self-Doubt With an ’80s Jam, and 7 More New Songs
“2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)” — from Lizzo’s new album, “Special” — is a self-questioning self-help pop track with 1980s drum machines and synthesizers pumping syncopated octaves and handclaps over an aerobics-friendly beat, heading toward the upward key change of a classic pop single. As Lizzo sings about temptation and insecurity contending with the […]
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The 1975’s Chamber-Pop Confessions, and 8 More New Songs
Matty Healy, the proudly enigmatic singer-songwriter of the 1975, leads his group into chamber-pop with “Part of the Band,” the first song from an album due in October, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” He sings about “cringes and heroin binges,” about a “vaccinista tote-bag chic barista” and about literary-minded gay liaisons — “I was […]
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Cardi B’s All-Star Team-Up, and 9 More New Songs
An event record that sounds like an off-the-cuff late-night studio session, “Hot ____” is lean verging on spare, measured verging on reticent. Individually, everyone’s verse is frisky, but Cardi B’s the most so — she plays with pattern, and tosses off some sharp barbs (“I don’t know what’s longer, man, my block list or my […]
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Yeah Yeahs Yeahs’ Apocalyptic March, and 10 More New Songs
The first new Yeah Yeah Yeahs song in nine years isn’t a guitar blast. It’s a solemn, cavernous synthesizer march with late-arriving guitars and other, often elusive sounds flitting above a steadfast bass line. The lyrics hand off a damaged world to a next generation — “the kids” — who “never had no chance” but […]
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Dolly Parton Voted Into Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Despite a last-minute plea to “respectfully bow out” of consideration for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the country singer Dolly Parton made it in anyway, joining a musically diverse array of inductees for 2022 that also includes Eminem, Lionel Richie, Carly Simon, Eurythmics, Duran Duran and Pat Benatar. The honorees — voted on […]
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Sam Smith’s Ode to Self-Acceptance, and 10 More New Songs
“Every day I’m trying not to hate myself,” the pop crooner Sam Smith sings on a new single, “but lately it’s not hurting like it did before.” “Love Me More” is a simple but affecting ode to self-acceptance, and Smith delivers it with a breezy lightness that convincingly brings the message home. The arrangement keeps […]
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