Ranging Across Time and Scale, V. Shayne Frederick Holds Office Hours at Uncle Bobbie’s
MusiQ Department Artist Vince Anthony Debuts “Hurricane” Music Video
MusiQology Rx Fundraiser for One Art Community Center
Beyoncé’s Homecoming Film Preserves and Reveres Black History
Why Country Music is So Scared of Black People
DaMaris B. Hill’s New Book is a Powerful, Wondrous Thing
(FREE SHOW) Dr. Guy Performs with Ursula Rucker this Thursday, March 14, at World Café
Hide/Melt/Ghost’s Harlem Debut is a Major Moment for Black Music Scholarship & Performance
The Time Stevie Wonder Taught White Surfers how to Dance
Music Lives with MusiQology Events in Virginia and Philadelphia
The 2019 GRAMMYs: Streaks Broken, Questions Unanswered
The 2019 MusiQology GRAMMYs Preview
Ursula Rucker Talks Womanhood and Courage in Art
I Remember Roy: Remembering Roy Hargrove
Save the Date!: Dr. Guy brings Hide/Melt/Ghost to Harlem Stage on March 9!
Happy Holidays from MusiQology!
The Encouraging 2019 GRAMMY Nominations are Just One Step in a Long Process
Set within the milieu of the HBCU experience, Knowles’s latest masterwork captures the complexity of contemporary blackness through film, a medium that has always crystallized black representational possibility for better or worse. About halfway through Homecoming, Beyoncé Knowles’s triumphant new Netflix...
The debate over whether or not Atlanta rapper Lil Nas X’s viral hit “Old Town Road” is a “country song” is actually not a new story: It’s yet another instance of white fear about black musical encroachment into a protected music industry center. Combining slow-picked banjo sounds with the trademark...
Video from two “Beach Party” films from the 1960s feature a teen-aged Stevie Wonder, long before he became the music industry’s “blind seer apocalyptically exposing America’s injustices.” We analyze these videos, which suggest that Wonder’s appearance was part of the films’ problematic...
With the dust settled and the hot takes cooled, we wanted to reflect on the surprising results of the 2019 GRAMMY Awards, which upset some longstanding patterns and pathways and doubled down on others. From the moment surprise guest Michelle Obama took the stage with hostess Alicia Keys, Jada Pinkett...
MusiQology’s Shakira King reflects on the deep roots of optimism that set Smino’s trap apart. “Smino’s music is anti-first impressions,” my friend and culture commentator Tirhakah Love said in a recent tweet. It’s trap music, but not like the kind that has taken over the radio and the culture...
As we begin our holiday/winter break, we wanted to take a second wish our readership and larger MusiQology community for a year full of engagement and support of our little corner of the Internet. It’s been a year of firsts and debuts for the MusiQology team, and we are so grateful to have an online...
In January of this year, Nielsen announced that, for the first time, R&B/hip-hop had become the most-consumed genre of music among U.S. consumers, evidence to back up what the radio, the club, and the blogosphere had been telling us for quite some time: Hip-hop was not outsider music on the music...
From Izzy Lopez, a Penn undergraduate student, comes this new and thoughtful look at Cardi B, the woman who has taken over the music industry and popular culture zeitgeist in tandem. Lopez asks why media narratives of Cardi’s rise wind up feeling so formulaic–arguing that a broader discomfort...
We thought we’d use our platform to signal-boost a wonderfully thoughtful piece of writing on Jay Z, Tidal, and capitalism by Kitanya Harrison. Harrison’s piece, originally published on Medium, explores the news of false streaming data from Tidal. The music industry has a sordid history...
Writer Gay Talese set out to interview Frank Sinatra for Esquire in 1965, during a period in the singer’s career that Billboard was calling “the peak of his eminence.” Dogged by media and tired of publicity, Sinatra refused to sit for an interview with Talese at least in part due to another, seemingly...
