Tal Rosenberg, Reader digital content editor
Isaac Hayes, Hot Buttered Soul Robert Christgau called this 1969 soul masterpiece “a baroque, luscious production job over the non-singing of one half of Sam & Dave’s production-songwriting team,” then gave it a “C” grade. The album has spent the past 44 years proving him unbelievably wrong.
Jonathan Bogart, free-floating pop critic
African pop music Africa is so huge that it’s impossible for me to really have a grasp on the breadth of its musical output. In practice, I’m mostly listening to Nigerian, Ghanaian, and Angolan pop songs as they crop up in my YouTube subscriptions and recommendations. Goldie Harvey, who died earlier this year at age 29, was in a position to become the Nigerian Nicki Minaj, but comparisons to U.S. pop stars never tell the whole story. See Angola’s Titica, a transgender woman who’s a genuine star in her home country, with banging kuduro and swaying kizomba songs alike.
Anything and everything by LIZ I’ve listened to everything LIZ has released, and there are no bad songs. I never thought I’d feel nostalgic for my early teens, but LIZ’s music (especially “Horoscope“) brings back vivid memories of those years: school dances, glitter makeup, low-rise jeans, Mandy Moore listening sessions. Its perfect blend of pop and R&B evokes that early-aughts pop-star sound—these are the kind of songs you listen to with the windows open, trying to get in trouble with “cool” boys, without a real care in the world. It’s crazy to think that I’m old enough to recognize that we’re no longer in that “age” of music, that pop has progressed to something else.
