Disco defined American life and culture during the latter half of the 1970s, emerging from the underground dance clubs of New York City to become a mainstream phenomenon that fundamentally reshaped popular music, dance, fashion and style.

“Obsession” perfectly captures the zeitgeist of mid-Eighties pop. Animotion’s signature hit marries sinister human emotion and ominous state-of-the-art production to generate synth-pop soap opera precision-made for the ascendent MTV. KSID::Z245a228c026464

Southern rock superstars Lynyrd Skynyrd embraced gothic noir for “Saturday Night Special,” their lurid and unflinchingly direct critique of gun violence in America. KSID::F2Ua2T0F30215

Nelly Furtado ascended into the popular consciousness with the soulful folk-pop anthem “I’m Like a Bird,” winner of the 2001 Juno Award for Single of the Year in the singer’s native Canada as well as a chart smash in the U.S. and overseas. KSID::d55b5Bd52Q

Rising pop superstars Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello exploited fevered speculation about the nature of their relationship to fuel the frenzy behind their blockbuster 2019 duet “Señorita,” a number one single across a record-setting 40 countries worldwide. KSID::303Aa38Aa40157

When Rosanne Cash covered “Tennessee Flat Top Box” for her 1987 album King’s Record Shop, she assumed the venerable country hit was in the public domain. But the song was in fact written by someone she knew intimately: her father, the one and only Johnny Cash, who re-recorded “Tennessee Flat Top Box” for his new […]

The infectious “Somebody Told Me” introduced American audiences to the Killers, the guyliner-rock foursome that grew to become one of the most successful bands of the early 21st century. KSID::2016b1Bb16a3

There’s nothing extreme at all about Extreme’s “More Than Words” — which is precisely the point. The funk-metal band ignored the objections of label executives to release the anachronistic acoustic ballad as a single, and its instincts were proven correct when “More Than Words” reached the top of the Billboard pop charts in mid-1991. KSID::4032b332b313B

“You’re not alone if you think you’ve been hearing a new Alanis Morissette song on the radio,” begins the Los Angeles Times profile from June 1997. “Meredith Brooks’ hit single, ‘Bitch,’ sounds exactly as if it could have been lifted from Morissette’s Grammy-winning 1995 album, Jagged Little Pill.” The Los Angeles Times wasn’t alone, either: […]