review Jul 31
Tyla's A*POP Makes the Case for African Pop Without Borders
The South African star uses her second album to make global scale feel like an extension of home rather than an exit from it.
Editorial
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News, conversations, local scenes, new voices, and releases worth spending time with.
feature Jul 30
Asake's M$NEY Film Turns a Release Cycle Into a Live Archive
A London stage, a 40-piece orchestra, and five unheard songs show how a concert film can deepen an album instead of merely advertising it.
spotlight Jul 28
Nairobi's Greasy Tunes Turns Listening Data Into a Meeting Place
Spotify built a two-week program around how young Nairobi listens. The revealing part is what happened when the playlist left the screen.
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feature Nov 25
The Truth About Claude Kelly’s “In Case You Didn’t Know” Demo
A leaked songwriter vocal has often been mistaken for a lost solo track, but the documented song belongs to a 2011 Olly Murs album and three credited writers.
feature Oct 17
Jay Sean’s Two Crossovers: From British Asian R&B to America’s No. 1
Before “Down” conquered America, Jay Sean had already reshaped British Asian pop. His career reveals both the possibilities and costs of crossing markets.
feature Apr 21
Jeremy Greene’s Wild Route From MySpace R&B to a Second Act in Tech
“Rain” made Jeremy Greene a social-network sensation, but label upheaval and blog-era ambiguity complicated a career that later moved beyond music.
spotlight Apr 18
Nicki Minaj’s “I Get Crazy” Was Official Mixtape History—Not an Unreleased “Original Mix”
The Lil Wayne collaboration arrived on *Beam Me Up Scotty* in 2009, became Minaj’s first charting track and finally received a fully licensed streaming release in 2021. No authoritative evidence supports the old backlink’s claim of a separate unreleased original mix.
spotlight Jun 10
How Lil Wayne Turned *Tha Carter III* Into an Event
Leaks threatened his long-awaited sixth album. Instead, Lil Wayne converted years of mixtape experimentation into rap’s defining blockbuster of 2008.
spotlight Aug 26
Shon Penn, the Making the Band Finalist Who Kept Writing After Television
Known on MTV as Dyshon, the Philadelphia-bred singer survived reality TV’s final cut and built a scattered but traceable independent R&B catalog.
spotlight Dec 16
Leona Lewis Beyond “Bleeding Love”: The Voice, the Breakthrough and the Fight for Control
Her X Factor victory produced a global phenomenon, but Leona Lewis’s fuller story runs from self-financed demos to label conflict, reinvention and Broadway.
spotlight Feb 28
Ne-Yo’s Double Life: The Songwriter Who Became the Star
How Shaffer Smith moved from writing other singers’ hits to reshaping 21st-century R&B under a sharply tailored stage name.
spotlight Dec 7
How “Let Me Love You” Gave Mario His Turning Point
Mario Barrett’s signature hit joined a young singer, a rising songwriter and an ascendant producer in one of the defining R&B records of the 2000s.
feature Jun 22
JoJo’s Extraordinary Journey From Teen Prodigy to Independent R&B Artist
Joanna Levesque’s story encompasses teenage stardom, a decade of label limbo, radical re-recordings and hard-won creative control.
feature Mar 4
Before Streaming, Mobile Music Was a Menu of Tones, Tracks and Trade-Offs
A surviving WAP link opens a window onto the fragmented categories—and frequent legal hazards—of music on early mobile phones.
feature Feb 24
RoadPizza and the Tiny Architecture of a Mobile Media App
A 2003 Nokia forum post preserves the metadata of a vanished 23KB Java game—and a revealing snapshot of how mobile software worked before app stores.
feature Feb 15
Inside Wap.jams.to, a Portal from the Pre-App Mobile Web
Old forum traces reveal that Wap.jams.to was less a streaming service than a handset-download directory from the awkward, inventive age of WAP and Java phones.
feature Apr 23
RL Was More Than Next’s Frontman—He Helped Write an R&B Era
Robert “RL” Huggar’s solo career, soundtrack turns and quietly extensive songbook reveal the architecture behind one of ’90s R&B’s defining voices.
spotlight Sep 17
How Keith Sweat and Athena Cage Made “Nobody” a Defining ’90s Duet
The 1996 slow jam turned a possessive question-and-answer hook into Keith Sweat’s biggest crossover duet—and made Athena Cage indispensable to its drama.
feature Jun 12
Mariah Carey Was Always More Than the Voice
Her 1990 debut introduced a spectacular range, but the deeper story is a songwriter-producer who repeatedly changed pop’s vocabulary.
feature Nov 17
How “Part of Your World” Became Disney’s Definitive Song of Longing
Nearly cut from The Little Mermaid, Ariel’s quietly radical “I want” song survived to inspire official covers, a live-action revival and generations of outsiders.
feature Mar 29
Jazzy Jeff & Fresh Prince Made Pop-Rap History Without Abandoning the DJ
Before Will Smith became a screen star, his partnership with Jeffrey Townes expanded rap’s mainstream reach—and fought for the genre’s place on television.
feature Jun 12
The Tournament Music Cue Is a Tiny Engine of Suspense
From Olympic fanfares to a vanished pop-forum embed, tournament cues show how a short piece of music can establish rules, urgency and collective memory.
spotlight Jan 1
Finding the Real “Encuéntrame” in Santos Colón’s Fania Catalogue
A common Spanish title leads to many unrelated songs. The best-documented early recording is a poised bolero from Santos Colón’s solo ascent.