2022’s must-read features from NPR Music

Plus, our year-end staff picks [View this email online]( [NPR Music]( Dec. 24, 2022 by [Marissa Lorusso]( This week, we’re sharing the best reviews, interviews and reported pieces our team published this year. [A generation of contemporary artists are drawing on the lessons of the past to reimagine the classic bolero. Left to right: Olga Guillot, La Lupe, and Doris Anahí]( Victor Bizar Gomez for NPR In last week’s newsletter, Jacob Ganz, NPR Music’s senior editor, wrote a list about our year-end lists, and all the wonderful writing contained within them. I felt a similar awe this week as I looked through the reviews, conversations, reporting and series our team published this year to choose a selection of our best features. The list below includes just a snapshot of the incredibly varied stories we shared this year: from a profile of a jazz fusion icon to an examination of gender bias in top U.S. orchestras to a review of the latest release by Björk. If you’ve got some extra reading time as the year winds down, I hope you discover something you missed or revisit something you loved from within these stories. Plus: This week, we also published [a whole bunch of staff lists]( from across the team: the personal favorites we had on repeat all year, regardless of whether or not they landed among our lists of the [top 50 albums]( and [top 100 songs](. It’s always thrilling for me to see what rises to the top of our collective lists each year — but beyond all the compromise and consensus, it’s fun to be caught off guard by someone’s unexpected personal enthusiasm for a certain song or album. These lists are a great opportunity to dive deep into the astonishingly wide-reaching taste across our team. --------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter continues after sponsor message --------------------------------------------------------------- Our Must-Read Articles of 2022 [Listening to Burial at the end of the world]( Miguel Otárola, Feb. 2 Late last year, a historic wildfire ripped through Colorado’s Boulder County. As reporter Miguel Otárola of Colorado Public Radio was covering the destruction, he heard the latest release by the revered electronic artist Burial. He wrote about finding an odd comfort in that record, and how it helped him to make sense of the devastation he’d witnessed. [Her Voice Is In The Air]( Ann Powers, April 25 In the 1970s, the Brazilian singer Flora Purim helped create the sound of jazz fusion. This year, she released what she says will be her final album. Ahead of its release, our critic Ann Powers spoke to Purim about her impressive career — and argued that it's time to finally give Purim’s artistic legacy its due. [Leikeli47 wants you to look and listen deeper]( Sidney Madden, May 16 In an industry that places high premium on aesthetics, the rapper Leikeli47 has always challenged her listeners to go beyond surface level. When she released her latest record, Shape Up, she sat down with my colleague Sidney Madden to go deep, breaking down the record’s journey of learning to embody the confidence that Leikeli47 so often preaches onstage. [In Ethel Cain's music, hell is a place on Earth]( Meaghan Garvey, May 31 Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter is a harrowing dream-pop record about, as writer Meaghan Garvey puts it, “heaven and hell and America.” Garvey’s review dives deep into the gothic Americana at the heart of the record and ponders what grace is to be found there; her exploration remains one of my favorite reviews I read this year. [Revolutionary Fun: Why we can't stop talking about Beyoncé's 'Renaissance']( Ann Powers, Jason King, LaTesha Harris, Aug. 1 Our No. 1 record of the year was worthy of some serious conversation, right as soon as it came out. The moment Beyoncé’s Renaissance dropped this summer, some of my favorite critics — Ann Powers, Jason King and LaTesha Harris — convened for a long and brilliant discussion of the record’s roots, themes and references. [Reimagined for a new era, boleros become songs of gendered rebellion]( Isabelia Herrera, Aug. 3 In times of romantic strife, writer Isabelia Herrera turns to boleros, the classic Latin genre of romantic songs first made famous in the 1950s. Lately, she’s been noticing a new wave of artists who are reimagining the form and sharpening it as a feminist tool for a new generation. [Musicians are back on the road, but every day is a gamble]( Nastia Voynovskaya, Sept. 19 Like many people, I made a cautious reentry to spaces where I could hear music being played live this year. But as I bought tickets to see artists I had been hoping to see for years, I watched as tour after tour was canceled or postponed due to COVID. In September, reporter Nastia Voynovskaya from member station KQED spoke to a number of artists and music industry professionals about how costly and difficult it’s been for artists to navigate the ongoing pandemic on the road — and what’s at stake for live music if things don’t change. [A composer's meditation on the moment, blown up to immersive proportions]( Nate Chinen, Sept. 27 Earlier this year, Tyshawn Sorey debuted his work Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) at the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Then, this fall, the composer relaunched the deep, deliberative piece on a monumental new scale in a limited run at New York's Park Avenue Armory. WRTI’s Nate Chinen spoke to Sorey and his collaborators — theater director Peter Sellars, visual artist Julie Mehretu and choreographer Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray — about how the complex, riveting piece came together. Check out the amazing photos by ​​Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, too. [La segunda vida de Interpol]( Vita Dadoo, Sept. 29 Interpol was central to the rock scene that sprung up in downtown New York City in the early 2000s. But the band’s fanbase in the States is nothing compared to the feverish intensity of its supporters in Mexico. Writer Vita Dadoo knows this firsthand — she’s a big Interpol fan who grew up in Mexico City, and she wanted to find out why Mexico has embraced this band so fervently. [Love Songs of a Dirtbag]( Ann Powers, Oct. 14 Matty Healy, lead singer of The 1975, just can’t help himself. On Being Funny in a Foreign Language, the band’s latest album, Healy muses about romance, loneliness and — most interestingly — what it means to be a man. He’s earnest but ironic; self-involved but self-deprecating — the latest, Ann Powers argues, in a long line of iconic dirtbags. Ann’s deep dive into Healy’s psyche (at least, the version he presents in his songs) and the role such love-to-hate-them figures have played in the pop culture landscape was one of the funniest and most insightful pieces I read all year. [Our biggest orchestras are finally playing more music by women. What took so long?]( Tom Huizenga, Oct. 17 In 2018, my colleague Tom Huizenga looked at the upcoming seasons from top U.S. orchestras to figure out how many were presenting work by women composers. The numbers were, to put it mildly, not impressive: two from the New York Philharmonic; one from the Cleveland Orchestra; zero (!) from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra. So this fall, Tom reappraised the situation: “There's still work to be done,” he wrote, “but the tide seems to be turning.” (If you’re looking to spend more time with the work of great women composers, Tom published some incredible interviews this year with [Jessie Montgomery]( [Kaija Saariaho]( [Julia Wolfe]( and [Tania León]( [When the creek does rise, can music survive?]( Stephanie Wolf, Nov. 12 In July of this year, historic floods swept through Central Appalachia, ravaging eastern Kentucky. The floods wrecked venues and music schools and damaged rare instruments and archives. Months later, the floods receded from the headlines — but recovery was still very much underway. Stephanie Wolf of member station WFPL spoke to musicians, educators and artisans in the region about how their music community was impacted by the floods and what it will mean to rebuild. [The Woman Who Fell to Earth]( Sasha Geffen, Nov. 21 In the 1990s, Björk’s unique, unclassifiable voice made her a star. “Like an ice pick,” Bono described it, “such a pure sound.” But over the past few decades, Björk has begun to use her voice less as a tool of singular expression — instead, you might describe it as something closer to an ecosystem. Critic Sasha Geffen charted these changes in Björk's remarkable body of work in a stunning, brilliant review of her newest album, Fossora. [The Spark: 6 socially conscious musicians on the women who inspire them]( Marissa Lorusso, Nov. 22 This year, staring down the uncertain future of reproductive rights, turbulent midterm elections, continued climate catastrophe and the ongoing pandemic (and I could go on…), my colleagues and I talked a lot about our gratitude for music that confronts political and social issues head-on. So as part of Turning the Tables, NPR Music's project about the history of popular music, we set out to ask a handful of musicians a question: Who taught you that music could be a vehicle for social change? Each of the featured artists in this video series told us about a pivotal musician who inspired them, and, in turn, they reminded us about music’s enduring power to help us work towards justice. [Daddy Yankee led reggaeton's global rise. As he bows out, the genre enters a new era]( Isabella Gomez Sarmiento, Dec. 3 Reggaeton icon Daddy Yankee took a genre from working-class neighborhoods and turned it into a commercial powerhouse. This year, he embarked on La Última Vuelta — his final tour. But as the trailblazing musician retires, NPR’s Isabella Gomez Sarmiento writes, the genre he pioneered is meeting a new moment for rebellion and experimentation. --------------------------------------------------------------- Listen to your local NPR station. 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