Lost Notes: 1980

“I can’t even begin to express just how much I love the latest season of Lost Notes,” said Nicholas Quah in NYMag.com. Back for a third time, KCRW’s music documentary series has a new host, and a new focus. Poet, critic, and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib revisits the year 1980, when disco faced a growing backlash, the Sugarhill Gang ushered hip-hop into the mainstream, and the deaths of John Lennon and Joy Division’s Ian Curtis devastated fans. Of course, music never exists in a vacuum, said Steve Greene in IndieWire.com. Abdurraqib offers indepth looks at how Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” rallied support for the creation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and how exiled South African artists mounted a huge anti-apartheid concert in Lesotho, a tiny independent kingdom inside South Africa. Though forever alert to the way the industry amplifies musical trends, Abdurraqib “found an emotional core in this season”—again and again identifying artists who rebuilt after weathering enormous losses.