Earworm looks at the political fight over rock and roll lyrics that eventually gave birth to the Parental Advisory Explicit Content sticker that appears on many musical albums. Estelle Caswell looks at the creation of the PMRC and how it became a force against profanity and was involved in the satanic panic over music.

Earworm examines how disco music changed the face of pop music. Before disco the seven inch single ruled pop music resulting in radio-friendly songs that were about three and a half minutes in length. Dance and disco DJs preferred longer music resulting in the popularization of the longer twelve inch single.

Stevie Wonder is one of the most widely celebrated artists in history. His music is infectious, melodic, and thoughtfully inspired by the jazz musicians who came before him. In his legendary song "Sir Duke," Stevie paid homage to the late Duke Ellington and his other predecessors. Jacob Collier is a rising star in his own right and is Stevie Wonder's self-proclaimed greatest fan. Here, he breaks down the jazz influences and syncopations Stevie uses to create the magic that is "Sir Duke."

House has become one of the most popular forms of electronic music since its inception in the late 80’s. It began in Chicago, when local DJ’s and music producers experimented with remixing disco vocals over hard hitting drum machines. They would soon play a huge role in popularizing the sound and distinguishing house music as a global music genre. Chicago gospel singer, Loleatta Halloway, is one of the most widely sampled artists in house music history. Her song “Love Sensation” has been sampled nearly 300 times, including on Black Box’s “Ride on Time”, the notorious hit that became the best selling single in the U.K in 1989.

It’s nearly impossible to turn on the radio and not hear a male artist singing really high. Likely he’s a tenor, and more often than not, he’ll sing in falsetto. Think Justin Bieber, the Weeknd, Bruno Mars, Drake, Charlie Puth, Shawn Mendes, Adam Levine, Sam Smith ... the list goes on and on and on. This isn’t a trend — it has been the status quo for decades. Falsetto, which comes from the Italian word for false voice, has been around for a very long time. However, there have been few attempts to track its popularity in pop music. We teamed up with the Pudding to change that. We analyzed 20,000 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 using vocal data sourced from Pandora’s Music Genome Project to figure out just how popular falsetto singing actually is. ThIs video reveals the biggest trends in men singing high, from the chart-topping falsettos of ’70s disco to the belting high notes of ’80s hard rock.

“Sicko Mode” by Travis Scott was an unexpected chart topper. It sounds more like three songs than one. Its disjointed otherworldly effects, echos, and song structure are a far cry from the pop songs we’re used to, but it’s in these off-kilter moments that we get glimpses of a musical culture built on sonic experimentation that has had a massive impact on nearly every genre for the past 50 years: Jamaican dub.