Jason King

We were all here before. Rising up out of the subway onto 125^th Street, it strikes me that I should come uptown to Harlem more often. The Popeye's on 125^th and St. Nicholas Avenue is still there, offering the same crispy bird parts and sodium-heavy buttermilk biscuits; it's still the ...

The inimitable Rick James' birthday was Feb. 1. We're celebrating with a limited edition takeover of "I'll Take You There," the 24/7 R&B and soul channel from NPR Music. Curated and hosted by Jason King of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University, the playlist runs ...

For the past week two durable R&B icons have been chasing each other around the arenas of the Northeast. Tonight Stevie Wonder plays Chicago; Usher will take the same stage there on Monday. This quirk of routing allowed me to catch them on consecutive nights in ...

At 19 years old, Northtown Las Vegas native Shamir smirkily identifies on his Twitter page as a "musician, comedian, singer, rapper, twerker, chef, writer, filmmaker, tumblr, skinny fat ass." A Muslim-raised punk aficionado and electronic music experimentalist, Shamir has been awash in hipster buzz since former Pitchfork-staffer Nick ...

It still surprises me that a few of my colleagues who regularly attend music festivals like Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and Budweiser Made in America still haven't heard of, or don't seem to know much about, the annual Essence Festival, held every July 4^th weekend in ...

Arguably the pre-eminent male soul singer of the 20^th century, Arkansas-born Al Green shot to fame in the 1970s on a string of deeply Southern, arch-soulful hits in collaboration with Memphis producer Willie Mitchell like "Let's Stay Together" and "I'm Glad You're Mine." When the hits dried up, he become ...

Especially given the juggernaut success of Justin Timberlake's 20/20 Experience albums, 2013 was a big commercial year for all things R&B and soul music. But you can't exactly call it a banner year artistically. 2013's biggest records were blue-eyed soul artists strategically looking in the rearview mirror: besides JT's MJ ...

Singer-songwriter Alina Simone and NYU professor Jason King discuss the entrepreneurial pressure faced by independent musicians. 

With double-digit declines in album sales and darkening clouds on the fiscal horizon, the music business might seem a bad place to start a career. Yet a recent poll in the UK revealed that one-fifth of Brits would swap their jobs for one in the music industry. In another Soundcheck ...