Curated category
Popular music
- Soul musicSoul music arrived in America during the late 1950s and early 1960s, born out of African-American communities across the United States.
- JazzIn a 1912 article in the Los Angeles Times, a minor league baseball pitcher described a pitch he called a 'jazz ball'. It wobbled, he said, and you simply…
- Rock musicIn 1951, a Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey named Alan Freed began spinning rhythm and blues records for a multi-racial audience, and he is credited with first…
- FunkJames Brown stood in front of his band and gave a single command: "On the one!" That instruction rewired American music.
- HyperpopIn 2013, A. G. Cook launched the record label and art collective known as PC Music in London. This small group of artists laid the groundwork for what would…
- Heavy metal musicHeavy metal began with three British bands founded in 1968: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple. Critics often derided them, even as wide audiences…
- Popular musicPopular music is the only art form in modern history built on the premise that anyone can enjoy it without training, without a score, without years of study.
- Rock and rollRock and roll arrived in the United States not as a sudden invention but as a slow-burning collision of sounds that had been building for decades.
- Music videoThe music video is one of those art forms so embedded in modern life that its origins feel almost invisible. Yet the story of how moving images came to…
- Tin Pan AlleyTin Pan Alley was a stretch of West 28th Street in Manhattan, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and for decades it was the beating heart of American popular…