You had your “Latin” numbers, your Hawaiian ones, your “Asian” songs - light ethnic pastiches laid out cheerily, like an international buffet that serves falafel one day and schnitzel the next, never too bothered about how accurate the recipes are. A nation that considered itself very space-age and worldly enjoyed quaint spins on sentimental Italian music (“That’s Amore” and its pizza pies) and Trinidadian calypso songs about hard, simple labor (“Day-O” and its bananas). Sometime in the 1950s, the mainstream saw its last great gasp of this habit. This was how we reckoned with our melting pot: crudely, obliviously, maybe with a nice tune and a beat you could dance to. And of course there were the minstrel shows, in which people with mocking, cork-painted faces sang what they pretended were the songs of Southern former slaves. Some were sung in a spirit of abuse others were written or performed by members of those groups themselves. Vaudeville acts, for instance, had tunes for just about every major immigrant group: the Italian number, the Yiddish number, the Irish one, the Chinese.

+ Spit Out the Bone Metallica Full TrackĪ strange thing you learn about American popular music, if you look back far enough, is that for a long time it didn’t much have “genres” - it had ethnicities.

24 Your Best American Girl Mitski Full Track.

19 Trolley Song Cécile McLorin Salvant Full Track.

17 Side to Side Ariana Grande Full Track.

15 Copper Canteen James McMurtry Full Track.

13 Hold My Mule Shirley Caesar Full Track.

11 Barok Main Mica Levi & Oliver Coates Full Track.

2 You Want It Darker Leonard Cohen Full Track.

Nas hate me now download