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| - Sidney Madden on Yaya Bey’s coolly devastating Remember Your North Star, one of the year’s best R&B albums: “Like a finger tracing the scars of a gash left untended, the album glides across genres — reggae, jazz, blues, R&B — to deliver a dissertation about how often Black women are inadequately loved."
- In a feature essay about Bad Bunny, whose 2022 somehow topped his record-breaking 2020 and 2021, critic Isabelia Herrera nailed exactly what makes him the icon of the moment, at home in Puerto Rico and across the world: “This is who Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio is: both an irrepressible global pop star and political provocateur who collects streaming accolades with ease, but one who refuses to temper his idiosyncrasies or move to U.S. pop's center. His commitment to self-determination for the people of his island is strong; his unwillingness to sing in English is stronger.”
- In an essay published as part of a series of reflections on the year in jazz, our critic Nate Chinen, of Philadelphia partner station WRTI, described a January concert by Immanuel Wilkins as “among the first of its kind I'd experienced in the pandemic era: a crowded, swaying fellowship, wildly euphoric even from behind a KN95 mask.”
- “Friday Night,” from Beth Orton’s comeback album Weather Alive, was one of our 100 best songs of the year, and here’s Otis Hart summing it up perfectly: “Alongside the consoling shuffle of Tom Skinner's kit, Beth Orton (that voice!) details the devastation of lost love, the sort of sadness that keeps you inside and up late on a Friday night. Memory makes a merciless bedfellow.”
- Here’s Sheldon Pearce on Ice Spice’s “Munch (Feelin’ U),” another pick from our list of the year’s 100 best songs, which has been stuck in my head for months: “As drill beats go, this rumbling creation is nondescript, all itching hi-hats and growling 808s, … but the production’s city-leveling tremors clear out space that Ice Spice confidently promenades into. Her lyrics are snappy yet composed, but the magic is in that sneering hook, the piercing, eye-rolling disdain of its opening quip: ‘You thought I was feeling you?’ as if it’s an idea beyond human comprehension.”
- On our list of the year’s 50 best albums, Hazel Cills wrote that listening to Nilüfer Yanya’s album PAINLESS “sometimes makes me feel like I'm handling one of those self-defense trinkets designed for girls — a plastic comb that splits at the center to reveal a switchblade, a pretty, innocuous thing with grim intent.”
- Here's Grayson Haver Currin on S.G. Goodman’s Teeth Marks, also on our 50 best albums list: “[I]n these poignant tales of friends lost to alcoholism and opioid addiction, or her flinty excoriations of capitalism's hamster-wheel machinations, there is … an abiding love for … home, expressed through the implicit demand that such places and their people be lifted up rather than so routinely put down.”
To give NPR Music’s album of the year, Beyoncé’s glittering, house music-inspired opus RENAISSANCE, its due, we knew we had to go big. So Ann Powers got in touch with two more powerhouse critics, Danyel Smith and Daphne A. Brooks, and the three of them exchanged thoughts about the moments embedded within the album’s massive, overwhelming scale that sparkled so brightly. (Yes, I am technically cheating by counting these three quotes as a single entry, but what can I say? It was, as I have noted, a year of chaos and abundance.) - Here’s Ann: “With RENAISSANCE, Beyoncé has given us something beyond her personal story, or even the wide-opening interface between that story and Black history as shaped by migration, racism and resistance. She's created a detail-rich panorama inspired by the living history of that sacred space, the club. It's her Sistine Chapel, and it deserves to be discussed that way — as a star-filled imaginary sky, and an origin myth that comes to life through its brilliant brush strokes. To really appreciate it is to focus on its remarkable design, the way it sounds and feels different depending on one's perspective.”
- And Daphne: “'All Up in Your Mind' is giving such good Gary Numan 1979 'Cars' eighth-grade vibes for me. I remember how ‘Cars’ was the only 'rock' song that my fellow Black schoolmates in my fraught integrated junior high experience copped to as being their jam. … I have no desire to go back to the 1980s dawn of the Reagan disaster, but I do love love love how this track leans into its own form of Afrofuturism culled from this era.”
- And Danyel on the universe Beyoncé is building in the album: “The lines I want hourly are ‘Worldwide hoodie with a mask outside,’ and ‘In case you forgot how we act outside.’ That's it. That's culture right now. We are thugging it out in these (still pandemic) streets, but we will be free. We will see each other and we will have community. We will blast music in each other's actual company. We will help each other live.”
Here's to blasting music in each other’s company. |
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