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Roberta Bayley / Redferns / Getty Mary Weiss, the Flinty Voice of Heartbreak
The late lead singer of the Shangri-Las had an incomparable voice, which recently found a new life on TikTok.
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Emmie America The Band That’s Been Charting America’s Burnout for Decades
Green Day is still attracting controversy, and listeners, with its blend of politics and punk.
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Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic A Dark Omen for the Future of Music
Pitchfork challenged a generation of music listeners. Is there still a place for it?
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Kevin Mazur / Getty The Queerest Thing About Taylor Swift
She’s something different to everyone.
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Kevin Mazur / Getty Madonna Dances With Death
Her greatest-hits tour has the feeling of a memorial—a spectacular one.
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FilmPublicityArchive / United Archives / Getty The Last Time a Concert Documentary Saved the Movies
Before The Eras Tour and Renaissance, there was Woodstock.
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Charlotte Rutherford / Republic Records Nicki Minaj Faces Hip-Hop’s Middle-Age Conundrum
What happens when killer Barbie grows up?
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Steve Pyke / Getty A Spiritual Manifesto for the Dispossessed
The late Pogues singer Shane MacGowan understood the depths of human despair, a feeling he plumbed on his song “The Old Main Drag.”
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Parkwood Entertainment We’ve Never Seen Beyoncé Like This Before
The Renaissance concert movie is joyful but jumbled—and less about the star than about her audience.
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Lauren Dunn She Made the Pop Album of the Year. But Is She a Pop Star?
The 29-year-old singer-songwriter Amaarae is trying to bring wide-screen ambition back in the TikTok age.
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Gijsbert Hanekroot / Getty Hipsters Were Always Hypocrites. Ask Frank Zappa.
Of the late musician’s many records, Over-Nite Sensation best crystallized his cutting satire of our country’s blank-eyed habits.
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Epic Records What André 3000’s Flutes Album Is Trying to Tell Us
Listen close.
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Photo-illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Source: Bettmann / Getty. How the Negro Spiritual Changed American Popular Music—And America Itself
In 1871, the Fisk University singers embarked on a tour that introduced white Americans to a Black sound that would reshape the nation.
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Aidan Zamiri The Musicians Who Sound Like Machines
PinkPantheress, one of Gen Z’s most exciting new stars, harnesses the sound of intelligent artificiality on her new album.
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Courtesy of BIGHIT MUSIC Jungkook of BTS Is Chasing His Pop-Star Dream
“As I grew up, I came to terms with reality.”
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Christopher Polk / Getty Taylor Swift’s Tinder Masterpiece
Her album 1989 charmingly nailed a shared experience of dating as a marketplace.
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Fryderyk Gabowicz / Picture-Alliance / DPA / AP Britney Finally Tells Her Story. It’s Dark.
With her new memoir, the pop star tries to close a long and maddening chapter of her life. Will we finally let her?
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Guy Le Querrec / Magnum An Elegy for a Late, Great American Composer
The jazz composer Carla Bley, who died this week, was singularly versatile and playful across a decades-spanning career.
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John Shearer / Getty Taylor Swift Did What Hollywood Studios Could Not
Her record-breaking concert film brought viewers to the theater in droves during a tricky season for cinema.
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Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Theo Wargo / … Lizzo Was a New Kind of Diva. Now She’s in a New Kind of Scandal.
As a lawsuit against her reveals, our expectations of modern stars have changed.
