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A pall has been hanging over hip-hop this year: the ongoing criminalization of being a rapper looms large. The genre has faced over-policing and sensationalism before, dating back to the NYPD's rap intelligence unit in 1999, but the scope of the crusade has expanded: lyrics continue to be treated like transcripts by the law, rappers are painted as crime lords and their imprints are characterized as mob outfits. There has […]

YoungBoy Never Broke Again (aka NBA YoungBoy) is among a handful of rappers who achieved massive streaming numbers in 2022 while remaining nearly invisible to the pop establishment. Simone Noronha for NPR If you can't find the emergent rap stars in 2022, you might be looking in the wrong place. A recent Billboard feature about hip-hop's status as a market leader suggested that a generation of rap stars is aging […]

The cover of SZA's latest album SOS. Daniel Sannwald/TDE/RCA Records It's been five years since the artist SZA released her debut album Ctrl. Her new album SOS is home to 23 tracks that seamlessly blends pop, R&B, hip-hop, and dips into rock and pop-punk along the way. It features appearances by Travis Scott, Phoebe Bridgers, Don Toliver, and the late Ol' Dirty Bastard. Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit […]

Alicia Keys. Courtesy of the artist The title of Alicia Keys' new, and first, holiday album – it's kind of hard to believe she hadn't released one already – is called Santa Baby, after the double-entendre-heavy Eartha Kitt single that was somewhat scandalous at the time of its release in 1953. Keys opens the new record with a cover of it, which she tells Morning Edition is one of her […]

Julius Rodriguez, whose album Let Sound Tell All was a through line this year for journalist and author Marcus J. Moore. Erik Barden/Courtesy of the artist In June, the pianist/drummer Julius Rodriguez released his debut album, Let Sound Tell All, a project so dynamic that even the umbrella of jazz couldn't quite contain its essence. Though the genre was surely present, the songs "All I Do" and "In Heaven" showed […]