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Interviews with musicians and scholars of music about their new books.
Amongst the many achievements of the Castilian court of King Alfonso X (1221-184) is the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of 429 songs preserved …
In What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To (U Minnesota Press, 2025) an iconic rock DJ of the Twin Cities tells her harrowing st…
Nicholas Tochka analyzes the role of rock music in the life of Charles Manson, the Family, and the August 1969 Tate-LaBianca killings, which also give…
The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Deirdre Loughridge & Dr. Thomas Patteson is a guided tour through centuries of ins…
Histories of Black-Jewish cultural interaction often focus on how Jews adopted and adapted Black vernacular music—ragtime, jazz, swing, R&B, blues—as …
U2 is a band from the north side of Dublin that became a global phenomenon-and while its four members have traveled the world over for almost fifty ye…
In the years immediately following the Second World War, the Barton Brothers, an anarchic Catskill comedy duo, began recording humorous macaronic (tha…
Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince (Duke UP, 2026) is the first critical anthology dedicated to exp…
Most people hate and fear uncertainty. It causes such stress and anxiety that we often choose certain surrender over doubt, becoming passive, dependen…
Who makes a living from the music industry? In Music Technology Panic Narratives Beyond Piracy: From Taping to Napster to TikTok (Anthem Press, 2026) …
Rolling Stone's first decade was truly rock and roll: chaotic, wild, and unpredictable. Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine (U Cal…
Over the last seven decades, some of rock 'n' roll's most celebrated figureheads have flirted with the imagery and theater of the Third Reich. From Ke…
Marty Friedman is a multi-platinum recording artist and government-appointed Ambassador to Japan Heritage. He has written three books in Japanese and …
Melissa Auf der Maur's new memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A '90s Rock Memoir(DaCapo, 2026) is a remarkably open-hearted, clear-eyed memoir of t…
Caryn Rose's Three Chords and Blessed Noise (2026) is an ode to the lost art of the tour diary. In November of 2025, Patti Smith and her band embarked…
Around 1830, opera houses stopped using castrati, and Rome and the Vatican became home to their glorious singing, engineered by surgery and intensive …
Sourced from over a hundred hours of interviews with musicians, producers, booking agents, label owners, writers, fans, employees, volunteers, friends…
With his fake beard, putty nose, and thick Yiddish accent, the “stage Jew” was once a common character in vaudeville, part of a genre that mocked immi…
This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On October 10, 2025, NYU’s Journalism Institute hosted a day-lo…
For fans of Dilla Time and The Chronicles of DOOM, a culturally connected celebration of the groundbreaking hip-hop group De La Soul, and how they cha…