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 May 17, 2026
Jersey Club and the 90-Second Song
How a Newark dance scene built the perfect format for the feed
Jersey Club's tempo and runtime were calibrated for SoundCloud teenagers long before TikTok turned them into a global default.
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 a Nigerian protest music invented in 1968. Afrobeats, plural, is a Lagos and Accra pop export of the 2010s. They share an ancestor but not a job description.
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 been handed.
Published April 26, 2026
Fifty Years on a Single Jamaican Downbeat
From Bob Marley's one drop to Bad Bunny's dembow, the same rhythmic decision keeps winning
Reggae in 1970, dancehall in 1985, reggaeton in 1995. Three Caribbean genres, three decades, one stubborn rhythmic idea exported out of Jamaica that has refused to leave the global charts.
Published April 19, 2026
K-Pop's Fourth Generation and the Economy of the Reference
NewJeans, IVE and LE SSERAFIM stopped building worlds and started quoting them
The Korean pop industry has marked its eras in roughly five-year tides since H.O.T. debuted in 1996. The fourth wave's defining trick is that it treats 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 became the building — and 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, the consensus was that it was barely music. A decade later the genre had been retrofitted as something close to a critique of late capitalism. The records did not change. The audience did.
Published March 29, 2026
Amapiano: Five Years From a Johannesburg Township to the Global Dancefloor
How a slow-tempo piano-house hybrid out of South Africa became the fastest-travelling regional sound of the 2020s
Amapiano is Zulu for the pianos. The genre was a township-scene curiosity in 2017 and a TikTok soundtrack by 2021. Few regional dance musics have ever gone from a city's outskirts to global default in so few years.
Published March 22, 2026
How Hyperpop Got Its Name
A decade of intentional excess, from a London label to a Spotify playlist to Charli XCX at number one
Hyperpop was not a movement that named itself. It was a Spotify playlist title from 2019, retrofitted onto a London scene that had been making the same kind of sugar-overloaded, metallic Pop since 2013. Six years later, the aesthetic was the chart.
Published March 15, 2026
Four Years That Rewired Rap: How Chicago Drill Went Global
From a 17-year-old in Englewood to Brooklyn, London and beyond, in less time than a presidential term
In 2012 a teenager from the South Side of Chicago put a song called I Don't Like on YouTube. By 2018, the sound he and his producer Young Chop had stumbled into was the default language of street rap from London to Brooklyn to Paris. Almost no genre has travelled that fast.
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 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, Charleston, or St. Louis. The answer sits in the street map of the 1890s.