Joni Mitchell wore blackface on one of her '70s album covers, which was changed decades later, in 2024.

In the 2026 song "Kids, Wait Til You Hear This," the singer proudly claims that the vocals are all her own, though AI generates the background music. The dance track shows Minnelli venturing into the deep house genre, straying from her traditional pop and show tunes background. The song is part of an ElevenLabs album featuring other AI-generated tunes, and shares a title with her 2026 memoir.

In the mid-70s, Dylan assembled a ragtag group of musicians and poets—including Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and Allen Ginsberg—he called the Rolling Thunder Revue. Rather than playing stadiums in major markets, they played smaller venues in smaller cities for a more intimate experience. The tour yielded some of the most exuberant versions of Dylan songs, captured in this 1976 performance in Fort Collins, which originally aired on NBC as “Hard Rain.”

The enigmatic singer-songwriter plays atonal dirges that are haunting or horrible, depending on your taste. He has self-released over 120 albums but rarely performs live, preferring to conceal his true identity. In 2003, a Harvard radio station aired the "Jandek Orgy," which included his fans debating his identity, lyrics, and philosophy.

The Thin White Duke thought the iconic artist, known for his classic Americana, would be the perfect artist for his campy 1975 album, “Young Americans.” Bowie called the Rockwell residence and made the request, but was told that Rockwell would need around six months to complete the painting, which Bowie felt was too long.

The singer-songwriter released only two albums in her lifetime: 1971's self-titled and 1973's "Heart Food." Critics and contemporaries (including Graham Nash and David Crosby) praised both, though they were commercial flops. She died of a drug overdose in 1979 and had grown so obscure by then that no obituary was published. In the early 2000s, her recordings were reissued and found a new generation of fans.

In addition to her performances, Minnelli is known for her glitzy outfits and short black haircut. After starting out with a more conventional look, her style evolved into something more extravagant, mirroring the boldness of her performance and public persona.

Elton John, James Brown, Cher, Diana Ross, and many others all have famous photos seen multiple times on album covers, iconic images from events, and more. Rare is the unseen backstage photo of the greats, lounging or rocking out or, like Bo Diddley, frying up some chicken pre-show at the Garden. Peruse this incredible collection of candid shots of 1970s stars waiting in the wings to come on stage.

Growing older did not limit Abramović from continuing to work or stir controversy. Reenactments of her older performances continue to generate strong responses from viewers, especially in a cultural atmosphere that she views as increasingly hostile and regulated. (This resource contains some artistic nudity.)

Swift began her career as a country music artist, morphed into a pop singer, and from there experimented with everything from dance to anthemic pop-rock to a more indie singer-songwriter sound. Her introspective 2020 album “Folklore” offered melancholic tunes to accompany the uncertain times of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Featured on the song "Mama," Minnelli provided vocals for the emo rock group. The band's frontman explained that they wanted someone "motherly" and tough with a theatrical background.

As the performer became more tied to A-listers like Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, and James Franco, culture critics began to consider the commercialization of performance art and how audiences may have flocked to see the “brand” of Abramović more than her actual work.

Winehouse, who became popular in the 2000s, was known for her jazz style, which was indebted to the vocal technique Holiday had innovated decades earlier. In 2003, Winehouse paid homage to Holiday by covering "(There Is) No Greater Love," a standard that Holiday had recorded in 1947.

Bob Dylan is an unpredictable live artist willing to reinvent his classics as they age. This analysis by Steven Rings, a music professor, breaks down the evolution of the singing style in "A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall," which transformed in one 1994 performance and then continued growing.

The guitar hero played the song to ring in the new year during his 1969 New Year’s Eve concert at the Filmore East in New York. As you might expect from Hendrix, the standard gets pulled in some interesting directions.

In the song's earliest performances at Cafe Society in New York, one of a few truly integrated nightclubs in the society, the song was always performed last, after bar service had stopped, with a single spotlight on Holiday so audiences would pay close attention to the lyrics. Later, Holiday included her ability to perform the song in her concert contracts, allowing her to sing it even if venue owners were nervous about its protest message.

This interview, from the "Bernard Gabriel Views the Music Scene" program, features a candid conversation in which Graham discusses how her career did not take off until her 30s and how she learned to ignore criticism.

The prolific artist loved music, obsessing over David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, and numerous jazz figures. Many of his favorites appeared in his paintings, creating a body of work that also acts as a glossary of influences. Below is a 1984 portrait of Max Roach, the jazz drummer.

Few neighborhoods of the world stand out as more productive of a robust music scene than New York City's Greenwich Village, the bohemian launchpad of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and other folk artists of the 1960s and '70s. Expert David Browne discusses why it became so significant in this episode of "Sound Opinions."

Although Holiday is sometimes associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the Black cultural movement of the 1920s and '30s, scholar Whit Frazier Peterson argues that her real impact in poetry was on the Black Arts Movement, the more radical Black literary movement of the '60s and '70s that featured writers like Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni.

This piece examined an archive of Time magazine containing 3,389 issues ranging from 1923 to 2014, focusing on 327,322 faces from the archive. Read what the researchers learned.

Graham's choreography was as visual as it was physical, complemented by the modernist set design of Isamu Noguchi. That's on display in this collection of artful photos from classic productions of shows like "Night Journey" and "Appalachian Spring."

The 1957 CBS special, part of its series "The Seven Lively Arts," was a landmark broadcast that brought some of jazz's biggest names—including Holiday, Thelonious Monk, and Count Basie—to a national audience. Watch Holiday offer a stirring rendition of "Fine and Mellow" below.

Didion wrote a detailed account of living alongside hippies in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury area in the 1960s. Beyond their style and politics, Didion uncovered chaos, with one particularly shocking interview of a 5-year-old on LSD. Her stories challenged the movement's message of freedom and utopia in California.

Both Picasso and Basquiat are major figures of 20th-century art, with distinctive styles that flew in the face of the formalized standards of their respective times. Below is one of Basquiat's portraits of Picasso, who influenced the younger artist’s approach to form, from 1984.

The comic's act was based on a classic archetype: the fed-up mother who was going to tell it to you straight. She perfected her craft on the Chitlin Circuit, where she became a cultural icon in the Black community, and then had significant mainstream success starting in the 1960s.

The original American girl group, the Boswell Sisters, toyed with jazz standards by experimenting with challenging renditions. The group became a popular radio act during the 1920s and 1930s, with few of their fans aware that group leader Connee Boswell used a wheelchair.

For much of Western art history, the definition of “beauty” in art was dictated by academies rather than personal taste. Artists like Picasso challenged these standards with works considered “ugly” for discarding anatomical accuracy or linear perspective in favor of a feeling.