Five songs that show the evolution of rap from 2000 to 2025

As with my post about rap songs from 1986 to 2000, this is not a complete or systematic survey. Instead, it’s a selection of songs that I love from different styles and eras, that are musically and lyrically interesting, and that point to larger trends.

Missy Elliott – “Work It” (2002)

I recommend the hilariously filthy album version. It sounds so futuristic all these years later. The backwards part in the chorus is “put my thang down flip it and reverse it”, reversed. My students agree that not only has this track aged well, it still sounds like it comes from the future. Continue reading “Five songs that show the evolution of rap from 2000 to 2025”

Five songs that show the evolution of rap from 1986 to 2000

My Advanced Pop Transcription class has started our rap unit, where the students have to pick a verse and transcribe eight bars of it into notation. In preparation for that project, we are listening to and analyzing tracks from various styles and eras, and also talking about the larger social and political context of the music. I won’t be getting into any of that context here, but if you do want to read about it, you might enjoy this paper I wrote about the weirdest white rap cover ever.

Anyway, I chose these five songs because they represent some big trends in the music in the 80s and 90s, and because I like them. I’ll talk about more recent developments in hip-hop in a future post. Continue reading “Five songs that show the evolution of rap from 1986 to 2000”

We should be counting most pop music in 8/4

Almost all Anglo-American pop music is in 4/4, aside from occasional 6/8 ballads. However, dancers tend to count off “five, six, seven, eight.” Why are they counting like this? Is it because they are thinking in 8/4 or 8/8? If so, they are right to do so. I think everybody should be counting pop music in 8. The history of Anglo-American popular music over the past hundred years is a steady progression through slower tempos and finer subdivisions. We already made the transition from counting in 2 to counting in 4, and counting in 8 would be the next logical step.

Let’s go back 120 years and consider Scott Joplin.

Continue reading “We should be counting most pop music in 8/4”

D’Angelo tribute on MusicRadar

For my most recent column, I analyzed “Brown Sugar”, “The Root”, “Playa Playa” and “Really Love”, looking at their peculiar groove, harmony and form. I’m proud of this one.

I think the annotated audio waveform screencap is going to become a more regular feature of these things, because you need to be able to see the exact offbeat placement of those snare hits!

Advanced Pop Transcription at mid-semester

I have been teaching at NYU for eleven years. For most of that time, I taught music tech and pop songwriting to music education majors. Recently, the music theory program did a hard pivot from the traditional Eurocentric sequence I went through as a grad student, and they started offering a diverse range of classes on pop and non-Western music. This change was driven by the chair, Sarah Louden, who put a heroic amount of work into it. It meant that I was suddenly qualified to teach music theory. At the same time, the music ed program entered a crisis that it hasn’t yet recovered from, so now I’m finding myself mostly teaching theory and aural skills.

I have taught theory before and am confident about it, but I had some imposter syndrome going into aural skills teaching because I had a terrible time with those classes myself and am generally not a strong music reader. However, the pop classes are more about aural analysis of recordings and improvisation, and those are areas where I am rock solid. I even started working on a pop aural skills textbook with my colleague Samantha Bassler, and our proposal is currently working its way through the review process, so, fingers crossed.

Continue reading “Advanced Pop Transcription at mid-semester”

Introducing my first podcast guest, my daughter

Since Bernadetta is the world’s biggest David Byrne fan, I invited her onto the pod to give her review of his current tour.

AI slop and musical creativity

Next week, my NYU graduate seminar on technology in music education is supposed to start talking about AI: large language models, prompt-based generators, stem separation and so on. I am not feeling much enthusiasm for this unit, for a couple of reasons. First of all, we are currently talking about YouTube, which is a richly complicated and important music topic for music ed, and for music generally. I decided that we should definitely push AI a week to spend more time on YouTube. But then I was thinking, maybe we could just give AI a miss entirely? Or is it irresponsible of me to deprive the grad students just because I don’t enjoy thinking about it?

As I was working all this through, I wanted to put my distaste into words. I wrote a free-associative BlueSky thread and then figured it deserved expansion into a proper essay. So here we go. First, to set the stage, let’s contemplate this image of Shrimp Jesus, sourced from Wikipedia’s AI Slop article.

Continue reading “AI slop and musical creativity”

A couple of media hits

I’m quoted in an Associated Press article talking about why pop music in 2025 is so bleak and in MusicRadar talking about Radiohead’s “Let Down”, the template for every Coldplay song and an expression of Jonny Greenwood’s love of Steve Reich. MusicRadar wanted an explainer on “Let Down” because it’s currently red hot on Tiktok. I suspect that these things are related. The vibes are terrible right now!

Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd on MusicRader

Big week for publication for me! I’m back on MusicRadar with articles about two 1970s rock classics, “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath and “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. Both songs are so familiar, and built from such unremarkable musical components, that I didn’t realize how weird they both are until I got in there and started analyzing. 

Yet another podcast update

Apparently some people listen to podcasts on YouTube. So, if you are one of these people, now you can listen to mine there (though some episodes might be unavailable due to copyright strikes; I’m working on that.)