Two (Small) Steps for Beyoncé

I’m wondering whether the biggest barrier to Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold Em” getting the country radio play it deserves is that it’s blatantly a dance song — a sub-genre I get the idea country radio has mostly avoided the past few years, and a subgenre (not coincidentally) dominated, as far as I can tell, by female…

40 Best Country Singles of 2023

The conversations I saw online this year about country music generally revolved around either white male Southern small-town lost-cause grudge-keeping (Jason Aldean, Oliver Anthony, and Maren Morris’s backlash to the same) or alternate viral routes to popularity (Zach Bryan, Tyler Childers, Oliver Anthony again, Bailey Zimmerman and Jelly Roll maybe, and I suppose Warren Zeiders…

Reggae Tings an’ NY Times

First there’s the question of spelling. The New York Times initially couldn’t decide whether the genre was “reggae” or “reggay,” the latter of which, as is explained below, was the notation the Maytals used in 1966, on what is said to be the genre’s first legit record ever. If the newspaper’s stylebook ever codified the…

150 Best Albums of 2015

To hear some critics keeping tabs at the time tell it, 2015 was the year albums started acting like albums again. And I bet you didn’t even know they’d stopped! Me either. But Carl Wilson in Slate, for instance, detected “something especially significant about the immersive long-form record this year, about ‘muchness’” — an attribute…

Memory of the Dance

I feel there must be some cosmic significance in the fact that this lovely medieval-woodcut-looking graphic novel about Strasbourg’s dancing plague of 1518 (“Was this a mania, an illness, a case of divine judgement, food poisoning, a plant-induced hallucination, willful heresy, or a deliberate civic rebellion?”) was written by someone named GARETH BROOKES, but I…

Scooter review, 2008