It’s easy to laugh, but let’s not forget: we’re really laughing at love. Abbey Road Studios could be the nearest thing this city has to a holy place, and for many coming here is not a day out, it’s a pilgrimage.

In 2012, this insult to users of public transportation has acquired Information Age immortality: it has become a meme. A summary of the article is making the rounds, parroting Gene Weingarten’s lament that we modern people “can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written.”

But there are already musicians in the subway. Damon C. Scott, for example, is a working musician who sings in the subway every day. He has spent years facing the same conditions of anonymity that a big shot like Joshua Bell couldn’t handle for an afternoon.

Her new role is perfect for an artist who’s always treated abstract ideas and visceral emotions as if they’re the same thing. All through Björk’s catalogue, you find her turning animals, nature, and science into vivid metaphors for human feelings. “Oceania,” the song she wrote for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, was sung from the point of view of the ocean itself, hugging the continents and watching humanity with motherly pride. On Biophilia, she sings about proteins, viruses, and the two tectonic plates yawning apart beneath Iceland—but every song’s clearly about love and family structure, the “equilibrium and harmony” between people who have tied themselves to one another.

Whitney Houston died Saturday at 48. As Salon wrote six years ago, it’s a tragedy too many people saw coming.

Back in the mid-’80s, Houston was defying a different set of cultural expectations — the ones applied to black girls — to a much different effect. She was presented to us as youthful feminine perfection: all sugar and spice and poofy dresses, a solid rearing in the church, a close family. Her unraveling “is not the same thing as a bad girl getting worse,” said Danyel Smith. “It’s a good girl seemingly tumbling to the bottom of a ravine. We have to watch, but it’s really not pretty, and not entertaining.”

Jay-Z plays Carnegie Hall, and New York’s elites.

More than anything, Decoded — and the way Carter promoted it with events like an interview at the New York Public Library, with the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker in the front row — seemed like an introduction: Jay-Z explains himself in the language of the cultural elite, and they officially welcome him into their social stratum, thereby relieving themselves of the need to enjoy Mos Def.

And that’s how I come to be nestled between Jeezy and his tall friends in the petite space. Someone reads out the elevator’s max weight capacity, and everyone starts joyfully tossing out their weight to tally if we’re over. I’m having a hard time imagining a worst-case scenario. I’m also having a hard time breathing. And then, seeing me trembling in fear, Jeezy’s crew reveal themselves to be good, solid people: They start comforting me.

[On Madonna Unauthorised by Christopher Andersen, from 1992.]

For anyone who wishes to become an adjective, Madonna is an inspiration. On stage, her little muscly body twists itself in a parody of sensuality: her mini-soutane rides hip-high, her voice wavers on and off-key; up and down she dips, over the supine body of a spreadeagled semi-man. It all happens too fast for words, and it repels or excites at too deep a level for any writer who has offered his services so far. Madonna is not a subject for easy writing. She is a commentary on something, but God knows on what.

On trying to like Philip Glass, again and again and again.

Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion? The debates that surround authenticity have no relationship to popular music as it’s been practiced for more than a century. Artists write material, alone or with assistance, revise it, and then present a final work created with the help of professionals who are trained for specific and relevant production tasks. This makes popular music similar to film, television, visual art, books, dance, and related areas like food and fashion. And yet no movie review begins, “Meryl Streep, despite not being a Prime Minister, is reasonably convincing in The Iron Lady. ”

How R.E.M.’s almost-utterances allowed listeners to find their own meaning.