30 Must-Read (Or Must-Revisit) NPR Music Articles From 2017

Jazz vocalist John Boutté feels he can no longer afford to live in his hometown of New Orleans. He's not alone. Rising housing costs are pushing many musicians and service workers — the backbone of New Orleans' tourism economy — further and further outside the city limits.

To cite one overly invoked example, Bob Dylan singing "Only a Pawn in their Game" with Joan Baez at the 1963 March on Washington was era-defining for many who witnessed it; but the Freedom Singers standing next to him, activists who had often been arrested after singing their songs during Southern protests, provided the example he followed. Dylan simply made it accessible, through his charisma, his whiteness, his channeling voice. Pop stars do this: Almost always, they're not cultural leaders but distillers, making the mood of a historical moment legible to a larger audience.

President Trump's executive order on immigration restricting travel to the U.S. for travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries led to a firestorm of criticism, lawsuits and injunctions by five federal judges staying the order. But questions remain about who can and can't come to this country. Among those caught in the confusion are a number of prominent musicians, whose personal lives — and livelihoods — have been put on hold.

"You can't really be indie any more. Everyone knows they will have to sell at least a small part of their ass at some point."Lekman's price, for now, is kitchen duty. He keeps a small basement room in a co-operative hippie workspace in Kviberg, an industrial area to the north east of Gothenburg, in exchange for low rent and cleaning the communal area.

Like many of the cleverest lyricists, Merritt's a songwriter first and singer second, but on "'98 Lovers' Lies," he excels at being both. One of his most laconic lullabies, it sits right in the grave spot of his register that effortlessly sighs. His beloved alliteration creeps along as though moving in slow motion, as if his compulsive falsifier has him hypnotized.

For better or worse, the Saga of the Musical Clitoris has been unleashed on the jazz world. I'm glad it has. Much feminist work in jazz has focused on the noble goals of celebrating the genre's marginalized women musicians and advocating towards equal representation for them on today's bandstands. As necessary as representation may be, this scandal reveals that the issue of women in jazz goes deeper, into a gendered construction of the music itself. We need an intelligent public discussion about gendered notions of jazz, and this hot mess might as well be the impetus for that discussion. As one female industry veteran said online, "it can take a bomb like this to reset course."

Satlof's journey began when he was a student at Columbia University in the 1980s. "A friend of mine had the album and we listened to it late at night in the common room, he recalls. "I listened to it over and over again, watching the record spin but also looking out the window at this panoramic view of New York City — Harlem from Morningside Heights, and east of us was Lexington and 125th Street" — the location of the drug deal in the lyrics of "Waiting for My Man."

"Death is real / Someone's there and then they're not / And it's not for singing about / It's not for making into art," begins the result, A Crow Looked At Me. So much of Elverum's mythos — a series of natural-themed metaphors mingling with self-revelations both minor and colossal — has been not just about death, but the beyond. Now Elverum reminds us, reminds himself, in plain language that warps back to reality with somber precision: Death is real.

The SXSW music festival certainly is restless and, for three years now, we've filmed some of our favorite artists performing quieter songs — you could call them lullabies — on hotel beds, off balconies, in art installations and wherever else we could rest and take a minute, to breathe and to listen. Below are nine South X Lullaby performances featuring Phoebe Bridgers, L.A. Salami, Lydia Ainsworth, Valerie June, Let's Eat Grandma, Jealous Of The Birds, Nick Hakim, DakhaBrakha and a duet between Nina Diaz & Y La Bamba's Luz Elena Mendoza.

I hear someone singing "If I Were a Carpenter," which reminds me Seger did a surprisingly heavy version of that song on Smokin' O.P.'s, which I haven't heard for a while. I reach for my copy, only to find that it's gone. This is bothersome, but correctable, I imagine. I am a gainfully employed adult, living in a city with multiple wonderful used record stores, plus there's an entire Internet at my fingertips. I decide to go on a spree, replacing not just the missing album, but finally adding the several I never purchased to my collection.But I discover something odd: Bob Seger's old albums are not only missing from my shelves. They seem to be missing from the world.

A few weeks before he died, Prince and I talked on the phone for an hour, because he unexpectedly wanted to discuss a piece I'd just written for NPR Music. He was funny, feisty, charming and kind. He was also eloquent, articulate and highly intelligent. It was a real conversation about music, the industry, social issues and life in general. He even gave me romantic advice. He should not have died alone.

The fact remains that music by female composers is out there. It's just not being programmed – or programmed very much.I will gently point out that sometimes when people think they have programmed women composers, they are looking at an Excel spreadsheet. And then they're looking at who are the living women composers – like Kaija Saariaho and Unsuk Chin, for instance. And then you say, "If I've programmed Saariaho for one season, then I've done my job." But you're not solving the root of the problem.

"Hymns have always sounded like sung spells to me. I never felt included in the magic of the God songs I heard growing up — I knew I was going to hell before anyone ever told me that I was. People found comfort in this all-knowing source, but I felt frightened and found out. I developed some weird and very dramatic complexes. It took me a long time to not think of the universe as a judgmental debit-credit system."

Keith's performance came shortly after the relaxation of a longstanding law in the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia (KSA). For over a quarter century, and up until just a few months ago, the government banned public music performances in Riyadh, the culturally hyper-conservative capital of the country.

Rosé is the cheapest route to faux-luxury, the costume jewelry, the clip-on earrings of wine that nevertheless looks pretty, sips sweetly and engineers a soft buzz which spurs absentminded reaching towards Spanish cocktail nuts (as long they're free). If shandies are too tart and negronis too bitter, rosé is your best friend in the summer heat. A bottle should cost no more than a cocktail with a silly name.

"I wanted to be part of that group. I wanted to be in this life. I wanted to see what they were seeing, in the way they were seeing it. It didn't necessarily mean I wanted to be the singer, the guitarist, or the center of attention. I just wanted to know where that came from, where that power came from, where that passion came from.

Spotify's denial, stating that it never created "fake" artists, leaves open a neat, semantic loophole — what is the definition of a "fake artist"? If there is a name and a song a person can play, is it fake? If that song is wholly generated by artificial intelligence, is it real?

With step-by-step instructions and wry observations like, "If you are already a musician, stop playing your instrument. Even better, sell the junk," and "No records are bought in vast quantities because the lyrics are intellectually clever," The Manual was an ironic sendup of the previous decade's vacuous pop-industrial-complex, a fact that would have been obvious to anyone — unless you happened to live somewhere not exactly famous for either irony or humor. Like Austria, for example.

Because the notion that women "be" still influences the way we think about female artists, they've mostly been canonized as personalities or essences, not makers of things. The concept of "women in music" operates in the mainstream as a celebration of the ineffable feminine, endlessly redefined yet somehow still clichéd. It's an endless replay of that trick David Crosby devised for Joni Mitchell, of her just appearing, like magic. The problem is, magical beings can't achieve a solid footing in the real world.

Hip-hop has always contained multitudes but, suddenly, mainstream rap's acceptable range of emotions is broadening. From the inherent paradox of black boy joy to Lil Uzi Vert's melancholy rage, it may be the most rebellious uprising since gangsta rap pillaged the pop charts.

Activist, hero, rebel, icon; those are just of the few of the adjectives often used in front of Dolores Huerta's name. They are well-deserved — for her part as a co-founder of a '60s labor movement, standing up for the rights of farm workers in this country, Dolores Huerta was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in May of 2012.

This spring, Hynes invited Glass to his apartment where they sat at a piano, compared chords and traded stories. Ninety minutes later, their wide ranging conversation had touched on the pulse of New York City, the pains of striking out on your own as a musician, what role the arts play in society today and Hamilton. Plus about a hundred other ideas.

This year, I returned to the fray as a visual reporter. It's been a year fraught with controversy; it's no secret that the music industry has been, and remains, male-dominated, leading to some devastating growing pains as the Tour tries to open its doors to a more diverse cast of fans and musicians.

Robin Hilton, Stephen Thompson and I picked out some classic songs, and a few more recent tunes, to debate longevity and overstayed welcomes in modern music history. Should "American Pie" be put out to pasture? Has John Lennon's "Imagine" been imagined one too many times? Does Pharrell's "Happy" still make us happy, or should we, as Stephen Thompson suggests, cryogenically freeze it so we never have to hear it again in our lifetimes?

Her father encouraged her towards a music career and she took to it eagerly. He arranged sessions for her — professional sessions with professional session players. They taught her the craft. "Since I didn't go to high school I truly view that time as my education, and they were my teachers," she says. It would be a full-time job, her producer had told her. As a young teen isolated from kids her age, she agreed, not quite understanding what that meant. She recorded an album and released it, and a live album, too. They went to Nashville to track another as her family struggled financially. Her father was putting what money he could towards her musical career. She felt the pressure.

Working-class political speech hasn't always been recognized as political at all; it's just as likely to be dismissed as class resentment. As Nadine Hubbs wrote in Rednecks, Queers and Country Music, it's expressed "not in the language of politics or activism, but in the stories of ordinary individual lives, and with an emphasis on feeling."

When we last spoke over the summer, Saba was still staying at his grandparents' house, but he told me he was looking to move into a new apartment with his girlfriend. He wanted two bedrooms – one for sleeping and one for a studio — in a decent neighborhood. "I don't want to talk too much about it and jinx it, but we're waiting to hear back from one right now," he said.

Utilizing what I learned from Richard Avedon while working on his seminal book, In the American West, for two years, I stood on the eastern end of Bleecker Street, where it empties into what was the most famous street for the downtrodden, disenfranchised and destitute — the Bowery. CBGB's was the perfect place for young outcasts, free thinkers and activists to gather under one roof — it was there that I intercepted patrons on their way to congregate and participate in a weekly ritual: the venue's all-ages, hardcore punk matinee. Dozens upon dozens of people, mostly teenagers, were photographed against a white piece of seamless paper.

Ten years ago, I thought the effect of widespread, immediate access to so much of the history of recorded music would be that the past would come to merge with the present. It would simply become another room in the house. I liked that idea, and I imagine Mary Beard would too. But it seems, instead, that the more likely use of the past, and the more profitable one, is as a weird or uncanny diversion. It delivers you a punch in the neck and then retreats back into a flat, non-hierarchical landscape.

This is an album that requires much of faithful listeners. It suggests even more about his relationship with his audience, and the ways in which he envisions himself as a prophet more than a pop star. Like a lot of fans, I've found myself meditating over DAMN.'s verses like scripture, dissecting the text forward and backward in search of holy discernment. Lord knows I'm no biblical scholar. Hell, I can't remember the last time I set foot inside a church. (Trust, my mother reminds me of this often.) But Lamar's magnanimous LP has me wrestling with the nature of my supposed cursed existence as a black man in the bowels of Babylon — and the ways in which I may be complicit in it.