Spencer Kornhaber

Over the decades, as it evolved from a slur into a term of tribal pride, the word queer was converted by academics into a verb. To queer a text is to look for hidden, un-straight meaning—to theorize that sexual repression shapes Holden Caulfield’s bad attitude and Nick Carraway’s unreliable narration. Typically, readers queer a work through their interpretation. What the author really meant is, in many cases, unknowable; the text and its effect are what matters most.

When the hip-hop legend André 3000 confused the world by releasing an album of experimental flute music earlier this year, he offered a simple explanation for why he’s stopped rapping: “I’m 48 years old,” he told GQ. He gave examples of personal concerns that he found lyrically unusable: “I got to go get a colonoscopy’ … ‘My eyesight is going bad.

Confession: The Beyoncé concert I attended this past summer was pretty good but not, as Oprah described it, “the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen.” Naturally, the expectations are high for any show by the most spectacular artist of my lifetime. Beyoncé’s previous solo arena tour, in 2016, made for a peak concertgoing experience: Even from the nosebleeds, she seemed huge, and impossibly important.

Taylor Swift’s 1989 reminds me of 2014, the year of its release, which is to say that it reminds me of Tinder. That’s when the dating app, founded two years earlier, settled into ultra-popularity: It was logging 1 billion “swipes” a day as singles smudged their thumbs over pictures of strangers, judging and being judged. Tinder turned the classic, nervous thrill of the dating experience into a game, one that millions of people could play at once.

Before she decided to sue Lizzo for sexual harassment, assault, and a number of other offenses earlier this year, the backup dancer Arianna Davis wondered if she was blowing her concerns with her work environment out of proportion. Touring with the widely beloved rapper and singer, she had witnessed some bizarre things: The lawsuit she filed with two other dancers includes the words “bananas protruding from the performers’ vaginas.

We’ve just lived through what Vulture has labeled “Silly Song Summer,” during which onomatopoeias (Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam”), farcical film ballads (Barbie’s “I’m Just Ken,” The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s “Peaches”), and a Eurodance satire (Kyle Gordon a.k.a. D.J. Crazy Times’s “Planet of the Bass”) went viral.

Have you ever loved a song without knowing what it means? That rarely happens when I listen to Olivia Rodrigo. The 20-year-old pop star has conquered the world by singing about unruly emotions with the precision of a court reporter. The songs on her new album, Guts, offer tidy thesis statements about the nature of heartbreak, declaring, “Love’s embarrassing” (on “Love Is Embarrassing”) or “Love is never logical” (on “Logical”).

Smash Mouth has long been, as its guitarist, Greg Camp, once said, “a band that you can make fun of.” The pop-rock group’s signature hit, 1999’s “All Star,” combines the sounds of DJ scratches, glockenspiel, and a white dude rapping that he “ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.” Fashionwise, the band tended to dress for a funky night at the bowling alley.

During the years when the social-media platform MySpace ruled the internet—roughly 2005 to 2008—it fueled a cultural phenomenon known as the “Scene.” The term encompassed young people who liked to flat iron and dye their hair until their bangs resembled sheafs of carbon fiber. They wore skinny jeans and vampiric eyeshadow; they listened to energetic rock possessed with strident vulnerability (signature bands: Fall Out Boy, Dashboard Confessional, Panic! at the Disco).

One of the most uncompromising artists of the 21st century, Anohni Hegarty makes gorgeous music to warn humankind of its demise. Whether with gentle orchestration on the classic 2005 album I Am a Bird Now or with electronic beats on the 2016 release Hopelessness, her quavering voice has prophesied the death of herself, our species, and our planet with haunting, almost paralyzing, clarity.

For the past year or so, artists have marketed delirious new music by talking about the doldrums of lockdown. The signature example is Beyoncé’s Renaissance, a whirligig tour through gay, Black dance history that features the type-A superstar performing her wackiest vocals ever. Renaissance, Beyoncé wrote on Instagram, was born from dreaming of freedom at “a time when little else was moving.

Killer Mike is a man of contradictions. He has campaigned for Bernie Sanders and rapped about celebrating Ronald Reagan’s death; he also supports gun ownership and speaks warmly about Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Years ago, he renounced the Christian faith he was raised with, but his first solo album in a decade, Michael—whose cover is a childhood photo of Mike, adorned with devil horns and a halo—is laden with gospel choirs and biblical references.

Both slang for “super fan” and the title of a terrifying Eminem song, the term stan refers to a distinctly modern phenomenon depicted in the controversial new Amazon Prime series Swarm. In the horror-comedy created by Atlanta’s Donald Glover and Janine Nabers, a young woman takes lethal revenge on people who talk poorly about her favorite pop star.

Updated at 11:24 a.m. ET on March 19, 2023 Breaking: Taylor Swift is not simply a voice in our ears or an abstract concept to argue over at parties, but a flesh-and-blood being with a taste for sparkling pajamas and the stamina of a ram. All concerts are conjurings, turning the audience’s idea of a performer into a real thing, but last night’s kickoff of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in Glendale, Arizona, heightened the amazement with Houdini-escapes-handcuffs physicality.

Breaking: Taylor Swift is not simply a voice in our ears or an abstract concept to argue over at parties, but a flesh-and-blood being with a taste for sparkling pajamas and the stamina of a ram. All concerts are conjurings, turning the audience’s idea of a performer into a real thing, but last night’s kickoff of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in Glendale, Arizona, heightened the amazement with Houdini-escapes-handcuffs physicality.

One of the most popular songs in the world right now presents a musical riddle: Are you supposed to dance or nap? PinkPantheress’s “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2,” featuring the rapper Ice Spice, sounds both fast and sluggish, new and old. It’s undeniably catchy and yet feels as fleeting as a mild dream. Another vexing fact: Liar is pronounced, in the chorus, “lee-yah.”Really, the No.

If you’d told any music connoisseur living in the year 1994 that one of the hottest albums of the year 2023 would sound like Pure Moods, the relaxing compilation CD then being sold on TV commercials for $17.99 (plus shipping and handling), that person might have laughed. But if you’d told me the same thing in 1994, I’d have said that the future sounded cool. I was 7 years old.

Red and white—conveying fire and blankness—were such perfect colors for Rihanna to strobe at us tonight. Over 18 years in the spotlight, the singer has left no doubt that she’s a woman of depth and range, with wild fascinations and gut-held convictions and a rich personal life. But by now, we should understand that she’s never going to show us all of that—because no artist ever could, and because she’s not going to bullshit us otherwise.

Sam Smith’s music defines the word inoffensive—so why does the singer inspire so many arguments? For more than a decade, Smith’s distinctive voice has soaked through the collective consciousness like the syrup in a rum cake. But that success has also triggered annoyance from across the cultural spectrum. As a nonbinary person, Smith has been treated as a punch line by right-wing media.

Were the meaning of life to be divined from any artifact produced in the year 2022, that artifact would be a Negroni Sbagliato. Or rather, it would be the sight of the actors Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke, in a now-famous promotional video for HBO’s House of the Dragon, discussing their favorite cocktails. In the dishy tone of someone describing a sex dream, D’Arcy endorses the Negroni Sbagliato, which is like a negroni but, D’Arcy purrs, “with prosecco in it.

Happy holidays—the final great pop album of the year is all about loathing and misery! “Everything disgusting, conversation is so boring,” SZA sings on her long-awaited second album. She later adds, “I hate everybody, I hate everyone.”SZA’s music is often described as R&B, a style in which anger and sadness tend to flow from heartbreak. But the 33-year-old star doesn’t seem comfortable admitting she has a heart at all.

What was your line with Kanye West? If you never listened to what he had to say in the first place, you don’t get a medal: The rapper now known as Ye really did, at one time, merit attention for making some of the most forward-thinking art of this century. (Plus he was funny, in an actually-trying-to-be way.

This story contains major spoilers for Tár.As someone who writes about art and artists for a living, I confess that I find no question more exhausting than “Can we separate the art from the artist?” The only good answer is a frustrating one: “It depends.” So I went into Tár, Todd Field’s acclaimed movie starring Cate Blanchett, with some dread.

Make no mistake: Ticketmaster deserves the scorn that it is currently receiving from Taylor Swift’s listenership, a population of such size and power that it probably merits a spot in the United Nations. Earlier this week, the company’s just-for-fans presale of tickets to Swift’s 2023 concert tour was ridden with bugs and delays.

Rain noises for sleeping, chill beats for studying, spacey melodies for getting stoned: The ecosystem of sounds known as ambient music excels at blocking out the world. But Brian Eno, the man who named the genre, has spent a life recording songs that reflect the reality around him. In the 1970s, the drab bustle of an airport terminal and the ruckus of New York City helped inspire him to use then-novel synthesizer technology to paint pastoral soundscapes: the yin to the yang of modern life.

One of the ironies of recent music history is that Migos, the band of Atlanta rappers who reshaped hip-hop in the mid-2010s, is known for something called the “triplet flow.” The term is musicological, describing the convulsive vocal cadence that took over pop thanks to them. But the term is also apt given that Migos were a trio related by blood.

The loud hype that preceded Rihanna’s rather quiet new song offers a lesson in the power of expectations—especially expectations defied. At age 16, in 2005, the Barbados native Robyn Rihanna Fenty signed a record deal and embarked on one of hottest streaks in hitmaking history.

It’s her; she’s the problem, Taylor Swift confesses on her new hit “Anti-Hero.” Yet listeners who have issues with her tenth original studio album, Midnights, are blaming someone else: Jack Antonoff, who co-wrote 12 of its 13 songs and co-produced all of them.

These days on the internet, the term theory refers to something between a rumor and a prayer: a wish so commonly expressed that it starts to seem true. And a very particular wish fueled all the theorizing about Taylor Swift’s 10th original studio album, Midnights. Fans who speculated that she was about to come out as pansexual, or make a Rumours-level masterpiece of soft rock, or finally manage to quiet down Kanye West for good all wanted the same thing: a breakthrough.

Beyoncé herself might admit that her seventh solo album, Renaissance, is a mess. Conventional songwriting rules, polite-taste paradigms, and the best practices for headache avoidance were clearly not priorities here. The songs clatter, wobble, and lurch into one another while Beyoncé wavers between singing and doing silly voices, in multitrack. Listening to her past albums felt like being whisked in a luxury sedan through a landscape of mountains, valleys, and meadows.