Last month music school grad student and YouTuber Adam Neely released a video he titled “Is Music Theory Racist?” Quickly renamed “Music Theory and White Supremacy,” Neely’s video followed some controversy within the insular world of music schools after a symposium talk by Philip Ewell, an associate professor of music…

Joan Osborne burst onto the scene 25 years ago singing “One of Us,” a song penned by The Hooters’ Eric Bazilian. The song’s theological speculation about God’s smelly bus ride transubstantiated itself into a chart-topping hit and a bunch of Grammys as the first single from Osborne’s debut album,…

Charles Darwin rarely used the term “evolution,” even as he popularized the concept that species change over successive generations. Instead, Darwin preferred the phrase “descent with modification.” His groundbreaking idea was that organisms randomly mutate over generations, and that the mutations that helped the creature survive would be passed…

Toots Hibbert, Courtesy Highrise PR. Frederick Nathaniel “Toots” Hibbert died in Jamaica on Friday evening. While no cause of death has been given, the singer was recently reported to be hospitalized for COVID-19 and had been in a medically induced coma and on a ventilator at the University Hospital…

In 2013, a fan who was having a little too much fun at a concert struck then-71-year-old Frederick Nathaniel “Toots” Hibbert, lead singer of Toots and the Maytals, in the head with a bottle of vodka. The incident caused Hibbert to suspend touring, and instead to hunker down in…

With all of his many side projects, John Dwyer has become a fairly complex geometric shape. The Osees frontman is dropping no fewer than three albums this summer. Bent Arcana is Dwyer’s latest supergroup, and its self-titled debut album is a cosmic slop of funky influences performed by a…

Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short story “The Killers” is an understated, subtle and tense tale of two hitmen in a diner. Most of the story’s simmering emotion is buried in lines of clipped dialog coming from men with unreadable faces. Imploding the Mirage, the new album from The Killers, is…

Over the last 75 years, the role of music producer has evolved from a cigar-chomping session boss who corralled musicians, wrote arrangements and ran the soundboard to a musician who often uses the recording studio—often with little more than a laptop—as a musical instrument, creating whole songs and albums…

The raspy voice of Richard Butler, the lead singer of The Psychedelic Furs, gave voice to Duckie’s sandpapered heart in the 1986 film “Pretty in Pink.” In fact, Butler’s voice and the band’s synthesized swagger provided the soundtrack of the ’80s for the drama undergone by hairspray-addled teens moping about…

It’s long been noted that British folks with very thick speaking accents often sound very American when singing. In 1983, a British sociolinguist named Peter Trudgill studied the phenomenon and concluded the disparity in inflection probably owed to the fact that the British singers were so deeply influenced by…