Articles
Long-form editorial pieces on music genres. Entries without an English version yet show a translation-pending stub linking to the Japanese original.
Published July 5, 2026
Norwegian Black Metal: The Myth Outlived the Crime
The crime of 1993, and the thirty years after
Arson, murder, and suicide. The music — and the ideology of the country that made it — got rewritten into its opposite somewhere else. Thirty years on, what the world still sells is the myth of the crime. The work always sold for less than the legend.
Published June 28, 2026
What Jazz Fusion Cost
Miles Davis, Bitches Brew (1970), and the audience that walked out
Fusion did not split jazz from rock so much as split jazz from its own previous audience. Blasphemy to the purists, liberation to the young.
Published June 21, 2026
Shoegaze, Asleep for Thirty Years
From My Bloody Valentine in 1991 to a TikTok bedroom in 2024
How a small British scene swallowed by grunge came back as the default texture of Gen Z indie.
Published June 14, 2026
Funk Carioca: A Portrait of Rio in Four Generations
From the records DJ Marlboro hauled back from Miami to Anitta's Grammy nomination
Thirty years separate the bass-heavy dance records DJ Marlboro spun in 1989 and Anitta's 2022 Grammy nomination, and every step in between took place inside Rio de Janeiro's favelas.
Published June 7, 2026
Grime's Second Wind and the Birth of UK Drill
How East London exported a sound, watched it stall, and exported a different one
From Dizzee Rascal in 2003 to Pop Smoke in 2019, the music of East London rewrote what street rap could sound like — twice.
Published May 31, 2026
From Plugg to Rage: The Atlanta Dream Pipeline
How a $40 SoundCloud beat tag became the sound of Whole Lotta Red
The bright, dreaming synth palette Playboi Carti perfected on Whole Lotta Red was already finished in the SoundCloud underground six years before he found it.
Published May 24, 2026
The Indie Folk Revival and Its Literary Climate
What Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, and Mumford & Sons were trying to preserve
Between the 2008 crash and the smartphone's full takeover, a transatlantic group of songwriters reached for acoustic instruments and harmony singing — and for a more literary register of lyric.
Published May 17, 2026
Jersey Club and the Two-Minute Song
How a Newark dance scene built the perfect format for the short-video feed
Jersey Club's tempo and runtime were calibrated for SoundCloud teenagers long before TikTok turned them into the default shape of a pop hit.
Published May 10, 2026
The Long Night Between Afrobeat and Afrobeats
What Fela Kuti left, and what Wizkid's generation declined to inherit
Afrobeat, singular, was Nigerian protest music born in the late 1960s. Afrobeats, plural, is a Lagos and Accra pop export of the 2010s. They share an ancestor and almost nothing else.
Published May 3, 2026
Why Techno Had to Come From Detroit
Three suburban high school kids, an abandoned auto town, and the music that imagined a different future
Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson met at Belleville High School outside Detroit in the late 1970s. The genre they invented was the sound of a Black middle class refusing to accept the city it had inherited.
Published April 26, 2026
Fifty Years of Jamaica's Exported Beat
From Bob Marley's one drop to Bad Bunny's dembow, Jamaica keeps inventing the rhythm the world dances to
Reggae in 1970, digital dancehall in 1985, reggaeton in the 1990s. Three Caribbean genres span half a century, all from one small island that keeps inventing the rhythmic ideas the global charts can't stop using.
Published April 19, 2026
K-Pop's Fourth Generation and the Economy of Reference
NewJeans, IVE and LE SSERAFIM stopped building worlds and started citing their sources
The Korean pop industry has marked its eras in roughly five-year cycles since H.O.T. debuted in 1996. The fourth wave's defining move is that it treats the concept not as a private universe but as a citation.
Published April 12, 2026
How Vocaloid Cracked Open Japan's Utaite Culture
Fifteen years after Hatsune Miku, the question of who sings for whom has been rewritten
Yamaha's Vocaloid was conceived as scaffolding for songwriters. After Crypton Future Media bolted a turquoise-haired character onto it in 2007, the scaffolding turned out to be the building itself — and it reshaped what J-Pop sounds like.
Published April 5, 2026
Why Vaporwave Outlived the Joke
From a 2011 Bandcamp upload to the default soundtrack of online melancholy
When Macintosh Plus uploaded Floral Shoppe to Bandcamp in 2011, most people called it a prank. A decade later the genre had been retrofitted as something close to a critique of late capitalism — with not a single note of the source audio changed.
Published March 29, 2026
Amapiano: Five Years From a Johannesburg Township to the Global Dancefloor
How a slow, piano-driven take on house music out of South Africa became the fastest-travelling regional sound of the 2020s
Amapiano is Zulu for 'the pianos' — plural. A township-scene curiosity at home, it took roughly five years to cross borders and become a global default. Few regional dance musics have ever travelled that fast.
Published March 22, 2026
How Hyperpop Got Its Name
A decade of intentional excess, from a London label to a Spotify tag to brat becoming the album of the summer
Hyperpop was not a movement that named itself. The word began as a Spotify metadata tag and became a playlist title in 2019, retrofitted onto a London scene that had been making the same kind of sugar-overloaded, metallic pop since 2013. Six years later, that aesthetic was topping the charts.
Published March 15, 2026
Seven Years That Rewired Rap: How Chicago Drill Went Global
From a 16-year-old in Englewood to London and Brooklyn and beyond, in less time than most genres take to spread beyond their own city
In 2012 a teenager from the South Side of Chicago put a song called I Don't Like on YouTube. Within seven years the sound he and his producer Young Chop built was the sound every city started speaking, from London to Brooklyn and beyond.
Published March 8, 2026
Why Jazz Had to Be Born in New Orleans
A Creole port city, a Sunday square, and the century's most widely exported sound
Every American history textbook says Jazz was born in New Orleans. The harder question is why that one Gulf-coast city, and not Memphis or St. Louis. The answer sits in the street map of the 1890s.