I've always wanted to live facing the truth, taking the truth and turning it into something beautiful. | | | | Lil Baby painting the bigger picture during a livestream from Red Rocks, Morrison, Colo., Sept. 2, 2020.
(Rich Fury/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “I've always wanted to live facing the truth, taking the truth and turning it into something beautiful.”
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| | rantnrave:// Artist of the year? In this terrible year? It's all of them. Everyone who has contributed music in any way to a world badly in need of it. Everyone who has persevered through a year of unfathomable loss. Everyone who has found a way to keep working, in their living rooms, in their home studios, on their balconies, in their front yards, on stages in front of empty clubs and theaters, on stages in front of parking lots, on INSTAGRAM and TWITCH, in FORTNITE and ROBLOX. Everyone who, for any number of reasons, has not. We salute you all. Below, stories of artists who rose up to meet this dystopian moment in a variety of memorable ways, whether helping us understand it, or raging against it, or transcending it, or just making us want to dance at a time when the dancefloor seemed so far away and when, therefore, the dancefloor was everywhere. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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 | Vulture |
| “Nowadays, I try to remember who I was before all this started.” | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| Sault's latest and best album is a capital-B Black record that funnels rage and sorrow into contemplative streams of thought, over equally brooding music meant to slow your heart rate. | | |
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 | GQ |
| Inside the exuberant and empowering rise of Megan Thee Stallion—the irreverent and magnetic rap sensation who’s here to stay. | | |
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 | ELLE |
| She isn’t perfect, nor does she claim to be, but the rapper is learning, growing, and proving with her sophomore album that she and her powerful voice are here to stay. | | |
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 | Entertainment Weekly |
| The pop star, one of EW's 2020 Entertainers of the Year, delves deep into her surprise eighth album, Rebekah Harkness, and a Joe Biden presidency. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| The late rapper’s booming track is amplifying the voices of Black kids in his native Brooklyn and beyond. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| "The Bigger Picture" elevated Lil Baby from streaming champ to voice for a generation. But like everyone else, he just wants life to get back to normal. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| In a rare interview, the Nobel Prize winner discusses mortality, drawing inspiration from the past, and his new album: “Rough and Rowdy Ways.” | | |
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| Vulture |
| Metaphorically unmasking the DJ whose viral videos soundtracked this year. | | |
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 | Esquire |
| The biggest band in the world has ascended to the peak of pop, redefined fame, and challenged traditional masculinity. These are the twenty-somethings behind it all. And this is what they want now. | | |
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| Los Angeles Times |
| Instagram Live DJ sets from D-Nice have become sensations, with celebs from Michelle Obama to Drake joining tens of thousands of quarantined viewers. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| Timbaland and Swizz Beatz's Verzuz battle series has grown since its March debut from a needed quarantine-era distraction to a vital cultural phenomenon. | | |
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 | Bandcamp Daily |
| The ensemble, headed by spoken-word phenom Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), use their music to fight for community preservation in the face of disenfranchisement, gentrification, and systemic injustice. | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| One of the few Black artists on a major country label is having a breakout year with two brutally honest songs. | | |
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| NPR Music |
| The Kentuckian singer-songwriter wanted to be clear on the meaning of a surprise new song and album, explaining to his fans in a video that, among other things, "Black lives matter." | | |
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 | HipHopDX |
| From the block to Billboard's top spot. | | |
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| Los Angeles Times |
| Bad Bunny may be the ultimate 21st-century global superstar: a bilingual singer, rapper and style icon with progressive social views who releases songs whenever he wants. | | |
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| Esquire |
| Even as he enters a new phase of who 'The Weeknd' is, Abel Tesfaye remains the modern bard of our most f***ed-up times. | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| On the isolation, unrest, and confusion of 2020 and the song that captures it best. | | |
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 | Vogue |
| The men's bathing pond in London's Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music's legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation. | | |
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 | The New Yorker |
| Wallen has become a singer, a character, and, to the surprise of many Nashville professionals, an online sex symbol. | | |
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| Billboard |
| After years as an indie group, Run the Jewels has a label deal, a Grammy-worthy album and a heightened sense of purpose -- when the world needs its voice most. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | "Take off your badge / We all know it was murder." From "Untitled (Black Is)," released in June on Forever Living Originals. |
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