Arts & Culture

The 62nd Grammy Awards nominations are here, and it appears to be Lizzo's year to lose.

The singer, songwriter, flutist and rapper was nominated across five of the night's top categories, including Song of the Year, Record of the Year, Best New Artist, Best Pop Solo Performance and Best R&B Performance.

Lil Nas X was nominated for Best New Artist, Album of the Year (for his debut record, 7), and Record of the Year, where his Gen Z opus "Old Town Road" is up against Post Malone, Bon Iver, Swae Lee, H.E.R., Ariana Grande, Lizzo and Billie Eilish.

It's amazing how one band can shape an entire scene's reputation. In the '90s, Milwaukee spawned one of Midwest emo's most celebrated bands, The Promise Ring, whose 1997 classic Nothing Feels Good landed at No. 3 in Rolling Stone's recent ranking of the 40 Greatest Emo Albums of All Time. But despite the outsize impact of one influential act, Milwaukee was never particularly an emo hotbed.

"I'm a wonder boy / I can't do nothing," the late avant-pop artist Arthur Russell laments on "Wonder Boy," amid stop-and-go piano and plonky vibraphone. "The poster was nailed to a tree and somebody tore it down / Bits of paper nailed to a tree — that's all I found." In part because his legacy was never fully in his own control, the image — taken from the first song of a new album — lives on as an inwardly critical fantasy, rather than the self-fulfilling prophecy it nearly became.

Just six years after the Disney film Frozen unleashed upon an unsuspecting populace the soaring power ballad "Let It Go" — a song that proved no mere harmless earworm, but instead a devastatingly memetic musico-epidemiological event, a tuneful tapeworm that proceeded to infect the world's theater auditions, cabaret acts, drag repertoires and (especially) car rides to and from your kids' swim lessons — its sequel Frozen II now lies in wait, gestating in its bowels another song of similar belty pandemic virulence that, this coming weekend, will secure itself a billion or so

Step into one of the nation's top art museums, and most of the works you'll see were made by men.

The Baltimore Museum of Art has decided to make a bold step to correct that imbalance: next year, the museum will only purchase works made by female-identifying artists.

Debutante balls have been a thing for more than 400 years. Queen Elizabeth I first introduced the practice as a way to present her ladies-in-waiting as ready for marriage.

Former national security adviser and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice isn’t done talking about President Trump. And it seems President Trump isn’t done talking about her.

In 2006, as Russia was preparing to host the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, its parliament passed a law legalizing extrajudicial killings of accused "extremists" abroad.

"It was an extraordinary moment," BuzzFeed News journalist Heidi Blake says. "Even as Western leaders were sitting around the table with Putin in St. Petersburg, at that very moment, laws were being passed ... that enabled enemies of the Russian state to be murdered by Russian state agents on foreign soil with absolute impunity."

Hosting an interview show means you don't want to ask silly questions. But sometimes, a silly or lighthearted question is a great way to learn something about a band, and that's what happened with Matty Gervais, Charity Rose Thielen and Jon Russell of The Head and the Heart when they visited for an audience session at World Cafe.

This story is part of American Anthem, a yearlong series on songs that rouse, unite, celebrate and call to action. Find more at NPR.org/Anthem.