Our picks for the best music of 2012.
by Saidah Blount & Eleanor Kagan
It was a great year for videos that referenced high fashion, personal style, beautiful cinematography and a wide variety of clothing — from monks' robes to colorful suits — perfect for dancing.
by Ann Powers
Ann Powers picks her favorite chart-topping, radio-dominating songs of 2012.
Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Frannie Kelley
The cohosts of NPR Music's Microphone Check got together to remember the year in hip-hop — the albums they had to have, the ones they loved with reservations and the performance they can't stop talking about.
©2013 NPR
The albums that sum up our year span genres and borders. From Astro to Wadada Leo Smith, Fiona Apple to Frank Ocean, here are 50 albums that made 2012 great.
This is what 2012 sounded like to us. These are the songs that made us smile, cried with us, put our hands in the air and brought us back down to earth.
by NPR Staff
On subjects familiar (Beethoven's Fifth) and obscure (notoriously tight-lipped cult artists), our favorite writing about music dove deep and showed us new ways to love the sounds in our lives.
It's hard to keep track of new artists these days. So we asked our colleagues around the country to recommend recent discoveries from their communities. Download 10 songs that helped put these musicians on the map in 2012.
by Banning Eyre
This year, a youthful strain of techno-Afropop musicians stepped into the spotlight.
by Bob Boilen
When you see 462 concerts in a single year, there's a lot to choose from. The ones that stuck with Bob Boilen in 2012 all featured the element of surprise.
by Kim Ruehl & Linda Fahey
FolkAlleyThe best folk and roots music of the year, from quiet acoustic solo records to stomping shout-alongs, focused on community, elements of ancestry and stories that unite us.
